technonaturalist

Stuff is ramping up.

I’ve been mostly working on photobooks trying to get them done in time for printing and shipping back to the island in the vain hopes it might not get there too late. I’ve also been working on my dice system (it has undergone two major overhauls in about as many days) and roleplaying notes (gained a bit of extra time as the kids didn’t feel like playing the weekend just gone, I brought the stuff over anyway just in case I actually needed it but got to just hang with my friend the entire time).

I should probably start going to bed earlier as I’m constantly tired and staying up late trying to cram more work in doesn’t seem to be working. But I keep doing it because I feel bad about not getting a lot done. It’s a vicious perpetual cycle.

I’m also feeling bad because it was my last day at work today, I’ve just found out someone else at the centre is dropping because of the vaccine mandate. I don’t know what’s going to happen with their program, they were the only one running it. There’s been interesting conversations and sometimes I’m wondering if the people claiming “I get it, I really do!” after I’ve explained my reasoning to them do actually “get it” (in fairness some really do even if they made a different decision, and others are really, really struggling with the fact that after considering essentially the same information, how other people could possibly have come to the “wrong” decision). Work is also now severely understaffed and my boss is stressing which is making me stress because I like my boss and there isn’t a right thing to do.

September was States month and it felt unusually close to Regionals because it was (we had the slightly awkward situation of that we needed to put people forward for states before we had the results from regionals to make sure they’d actually qualified, and to add chaos to the confusion, because it had been another unprecedented year, people were allowed to apply for states if they hadn’t done regionals (there were a number of people that missed out due to being sick or having to quarantine).

I’m apparently that good at not being too obvious about railroading (unless I make it obvious like when I want to end a session, like I did on the weekend and had my players playfully accusing me of railroading when after a while I was like “YOU’RE GOING BACK TO THE FREEHOLD.”) that I can’t even railroad myself when I need to.

Weekend was busy again with gym events so once more not a lot got done. I worked a bit more on the dice system, and some notes, yesterday I got started on Gundry.

Mild content warning: occasional swearing and mild adult themes

We had a slight derailment right at the outset as S was unable to make the session. I only do character driven stories so players not being able to make sessions can make things fall apart, so normally we would just skip (I had previously tried to encourage the kids to make Redcaps that we could use in a casual drop-in/out filler game as a Redcap gang lends itself well to that, plus they could get any murderhobo/random dickishness/silly out, but the older boys had decided “Changeling is cringe”). However in this case seeing as it was early on, I managed to restructure stuff in my head (and later on in my notes) enough to postpone S to the next session.

I have done literally nothing on either project since the last progblog.

This time I got distracted choreographing a “fight” scene for the big boys. And because I’m a bit extra it’s easier to visualise, I 3d’d it.

It’s mostly just positioning I’m visualising as I’m just going to tell the children my ideas, though I’ve casually expanded to seeing if I can still animate flips (the answer is yes and I really should have started parenting to empties a lot earlier, I went through an overly long period of time where I was going out of my way to avoid adding extra things into the scene in a bid to make things less cluttered and confusing, but it’s a lot easier to snap an empty to a surface and I find it a lot easier to just use the root bone when there’s drastic position changes such as inverting).

System: World of Darkness (edition uncertain as the sourcebooks are all over the joint and also I fudge and homebrew a lot)

All players except S were in Modern 1. T reprised his character, the others wanted to try something else. They decided on being a mercenary group comprised of ex-military buddies, except that for some reason which I don’t think even they can explain, they all decided that they were going to be from different countries and not emigrate to one so that they could easily be army buddies -- (the character party is comprised of one Australian, one Greek, one British who seems to have retconned to Irish, and two Russians) I had done individual preludes with each player so we could all get a feel for the character, and decided to use a group prelude to bring them all together as well as give them the shared history and for them to figure out how they would work together as a team so they would have an easier time fitting together as a team (rather than having to work it out) in the actual game. The group prelude ended up turning into a 2-session mini-campaign because sometimes things like that just happen when I get ideas, so this prelude post is really, really long (I didn’t split it). Future writeups should (hopefully) be less long ^^;

There are many and some of them are just things I’ve decided to add on because I’m not very smart like that.

After WoDMod1 finished I started hacking on a dice system I’d written for AER two decades ago x_x when I was roleplaying a lot more. It mostly worked out fine when I was playtesting it with the friends I roleplayed with frequently back then because it was a fork of World of Darkness with a lot of my fudges and homebrew built in (it’s actually more or less the system I run now when we’re playing World of Darkness, just closer to the original than my fork so the children reading the sourcebooks know what’s going on).

I actually had them for the delay for once, and that was going out for birthday churros (not mine, but someone’s).

After that I was trying to render out some super quick and dirty walk cycles (which are literally just hands and feet approximating walking motions, no refinements or personality injected whatsoever, which partially accounts for the jerkiness and the other part is only vaguely remembering how to do looping gifs and animated gifs in general and couldn’t get the timing right when making the gif, I haven’t done one for game engines yet and I don’t use them at all for animations) and my computer crashed three times while rendering the first one (I’m a bit extra so I did three different views because of course I did).

Late progblog is late again but that’s nothing new. This time was an interesting combination of I had to go in to work early and completely forgot to start (I’ll usually make a start on writing in the morning, pick at it throughout the day and then finish up at night when I get back from work and do super basic if any edits) and then because I’m really close, figured I’ll just get a render done to use as a cover image because I’ve been doing my usual doing a lot but nothing to show for it thing.