Vectron Bless Us, Every One!

I'm going to keep this short, as I have a lot more Christmas stuff to do, but here are the links to the Bookmarked versions of Books 1.6 and 2.2. Mad props to my editor and bookmarker, Lilicia. I give her all credit for the fixes, and take all blame for not noticing anything that still needs to be fixed. Bookmarking is a huge task because any time you need to make a change to the files the PDFs need to be recompiled and the bookmarks are undone. I wish you all Happy Holidays and I hope to have some more stuff to share soon.

Book 1.6 - Bookmarked
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?vf8yb6hxtz0dcst

Book 2.2 - Bookmarked
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?67z5c3x2qllxlfu

APOCALYPSE WOW!

You know it's the end of the world when I actually get around to posting DtD updates.

Newest Core Book:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?6rqfsuhbrud8ut3

Newest Book 2:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?emwo4jdm34xvuyu

Once again, I forgot to go and make a full changelog. However, you're going to want to look at Resilience (which has fixed a lot of problems with size), weapon proficiencies have been largely reworked, missing feats and abilities have been repaired, things that did nothing now do something, Specializations are more balanced, and some classes have been changed around.

I wish everyone a merry apocalypse, and remember that it's not my fault. Definitely not my fault.

NaNoWriMo Halfway Point

    This is just a quick update to let everyone know I'm alive. I've been very busy with work and writing - nothing hones a writer's skill more than just writing. I didn't want to spam people with updates this year, but here's a link to the file itself. As per OpenOffice I'm just past 32k words (Word rates it a bit lower), and we're about halfway through the book and ramping up towards a climax.
    Also, people get stabbed.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/i7vl2merxagexod/NNWM2012a.odt

EDIT: Fixed link, I think.

National Novel Writing Month, Again

Hey, everyone. It's that time of year again. Something different this year - kind of an urban fantasy thing to see how that goes. I probably won't post this every day, but I'll try to generally keep it all here. Still not sure on the names I've chosen. Might change them later. But let me know what you think so far!

Also, no title yet. God damn I'm bad at titles. Story starts after the break.

Hurricane Special Rant

For the last few rambling bits on game design I've posted, I've basically been justifying decisions I'd already made regarding design. For this next bit, I'm going to work on something I haven't touched yet - integrating pilots and mecha. And I'm going to keep a kind of stream of consciousness log as I do it. It should be interesting.

Sanity and Guns

Sanity systems have featured in a lot of games. The easiest example is of course Call of Cthulhu, where you're much more likely to go completely insane than actually die of anything. In Call of Cthulhu, beasies and terrible things can strip away your sanity points. It essentially treats sanity as hit points for the mind, save that it's much harder to recover from.

RPG Design Ramble #2

So, as I mentioned on the last installment of "Lawfulnice Rambles On Forever", we've mostly got character creation finished (at least the outline - details like a list of skills, statting out the abilities and so forth are still to come). But that's only a small part of the game - we've still got to figure out combat.

Combat is generally one of the most important systems in a game, if not the most important. Even when combat isn't the focus of the game, whenever you end up with guns drawn on each other, it's instantly a matter of life and death. A lot of games get flak for having huge, detailed combat rules but almost nothing for social situations. But it's the life-and-death nature of combat that makes it needed, trying to put numbers to everything. Munchkins, minmaxers, they try to get every edge in combat, and having solid answers to "what happens if I hide behind cover" and "what happens if I run on ice" speeds things up in a tense situation and heads off a lot of arguments.