Topic: Daily Drip
It's Saturday & time once again for the Weekly Grounds.
There's one word that sums things up: BACKLOG
Earlier this week, I finally started tackling one massive stack of submissions when another massive stack came in the mail. At the moment, I'm looking at 4 weeks here, taking roughly 3 hours a day to view submissions & still squeezing in roughly 30 minutes of portable gaming before bed... assuming my backlog doesn't get worse. Pretty much I have one international player & one national player that socked me for about 100+ submissions each
It's not that I haven't been socked with a large number of submissions before, but just tends to be a drag as it tends to seriously cut into my gaming time. HOWEVER, if I didn't have such a passion for Ludology at the street level... I wouldn't have taken the job back then. This is just one of those unfortunate hazards of the job that I have to deal with. The only new twist is that these submissions aren't long enough for me to do some multi-tasking & seriously tackle my tape queue at double-speed. It's not like I COULDN'T try, but I'd probably be hitting pause & rewind the video to catch stuff that I need to note, but missed.
If there's one thing that I like to do when possible is multi-task since I can be more productive juggling two tasks than doing just one thing. While I will admit that I do have some limits to my multi-tasking abilities (typically 2-3 active items & 2 lesser items), I try to work within my abilities to prevent loss of productivity. If I can verify a video while doing some writing, I'll do it. When I'm online, except for major gaming, I'm multitasking a lot. Keeping track of tweets, IM's, listening to music (when not loading / watching a video), keeping tabs on e-mails & weather in addition to web surfing... where I have multiple tabs going in my browser. Pratically everything listed in the previous sentence is considered minor/lesser items. E-mail & weather checks are on auto-pilot thanks to add-ons, so the 2 lesser items are Tweets/IM's (combined as one task, since I check them together with Pidgin) & streaming music.
Enough about my personal life... onward to more site stuff.
There's essentially a stand-still mostly due to the partial crushing that life is giving me. The only thing I've toying on the D&D stuff is the ideal of a "Moral / Judgement" scale to use in place of the standard alignment scale in Edition 3.5 (as 4th Edition is a bit too simplistic for such ideas). In short, instead of giving a hard alignment, the scale gives you more of a gradient on both axis. It also allows the DM & players to "grow" into their ideal alignment.
Each alignment axis (Good / Evil & Law / Chaos) run on 200-point scale (+100 to -100) so you have an idea where your character lies. If you moral score is in positive territory, you have good tendencies (as negative = evil). If your judgement score is in positive territory, you tend to live a bit more lawfully (as negative = more chaotic). However, there would be a "neutral zone" on both scales in order to maintain the 3-type system. The ideal zone would be +33 to -33, but it could be somewhere around that mark... so +35 to -35 as well as +30 to -30 would work just as well.
For new characters, the starting points would be +50 for Good & Lawful alignments, -50 for Evil & Chaotic alignments, with neutral perfectly at 0. Then as players progress through quests & campaigns, the DM could give or take moral or judgement points based on the actions of the players.
- Take out an evil demon? +20 Moral
- Give to the poor? +2 Moral, +2 Judgement
- Kill a Villager with a high-level spell? -30 Moral, -10 Judgement
- Steal from a bystandard? -5 Moral, -1 Judgement
- Have sex in the throne room, in front of the King? -5 Moral, -50 Judgement
- Kill the royal nanny & turn her dead body into jerky? -65 Moral
While these are theoretical happenings (especially that last two), there's types of actions that a DM could encourage or discourage such actions with a character... depending on the quest / campaign. If a player wants to stay in the neutral range, they'll have to play the balancing act while those on an extreme wouldn't necessarily have to worry as much.
This system could also be used to polarizing spells like the "Protection from ..." where the moral / judgement score could place a character on one side or the other for the effect. For example, if a "Protection from Evil" was cast on something, anybody with a negative moral score would be consider evil this spell even if they're in the neutral range. However, anybody with a moral / judgement score that's EXACTLY at 0 would still be considered neutral & would not be affected by any bonuses or penalties that would come with such spells UNTIL that score changes in either direction.
While it's not a perfect system, it does give you a bit more leadway with moral & judgement dilemmas & allow you to award players with good decisions or thoughts & vice versa.
That's all I have for this week... It's not some great, but it's at least something.
