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As soon as I say "I'll work on this to have it ready by...", something comes up to prevent that. In this case, it's a paper, an exam, and a work deadline, which will be consuming my time until Monday.
I'll get to the government write-up as soon as I can.
Why didn't anybody tell me that I'd forgotten to say anything about the government that took over after the Federal government disappeared?
Okay, this weekend, look for a post on the current government of Frontier, and the relatively bloodless revolution that put it in place. (And the minor border war that happened when a few hundred colonists decided that they wanted to be a separate state...)
Also: I don't know if this is LiveJournal or TypePad's syndication screwing up, but posts don't seem to be appearing on LJ for several hours after they're posted here - I've timed one post as having an eight-hour delay.
Is anybody reading this on a non-LJ feed? How quickly do the posts show up on your trackers?
EDIT: Okay, I've just checked the RDF file, and it doesn't have either of today's posts yet, including this one. So it may be a combination of factors.
One of the reasons I took History and Politics courses this semester was so that I'd have a more firm background in, well, history and politics, to lend verisimilitude to the worlds I built - especially Frontier. But now I'm running into some odd problems. To wit: we've just covered the American Revolution in both courses (American History to 1865 and American Political Thought), and now I can't stop thinking about making the colonists' takeover from the Federales a revolutionary war instead of a social takeover. In any event, I'm going to have to think about that point in history a little more than I have been.
I haven't updated in a few weeks, so I thought I'd drop a note and let the five of you know that I haven't given up - I've just been swallowed by school. I'm still thinking a lot about Frontier, I just, y'know, haven't been posting.
I know that fade is working on a post, too, so you'll have some content that isn't inane in a few minutes!
I have combat systems on the mind.
Over the last week, I've played through combat scenes in the same setting (In Nomine) with two different systems: GURPS, and the original In Nomine rules. The former's combat system is often criticized for being too complex and detailed, the latter for being clumsy and too slow. In both cases I was playing a character who specialized in combat, against someone else of the sort. The fights played out very differently, mechanically; in GURPS I was choosing options on All-Out Attacks or deciding what to parry or dodge, while in In Nomine it was mostly a matter of attack, dodge, attack, dodge.
And both were marvelous fun.
It wasn't just GM style, though credit for an entertaining fight certainly went to the GM in both cases; the two GMs had radically different styles for dealing with combat. (In GURPS, I would declare my general course of action, roll for it, and then the GM described the results after checking on the NPC's response. Over with In Nomine, the GM told me if I was succeeding or not after the roll, and then had me describe what my PC did.) It was having entertaining characters, and keeping things lively, and feeling like the fights mattered.
...which of course makes me wonder about combat systems. How much fun in a game's combat comes from the system, and how much from the situation? It can't entirely be situation, because I know there are combat systems I find deathly dull, both on the so-easy-it's-fast and s0-complex-it's-slow sides of things. It can't entirely be mechanics, or I wouldn't find such different mechanics satisfying.
All of this is a verbose way of saying I'm re-examining the combat rules in my long-languishing game system with a new eye to what actually makes them fun. I find it elegant to make the social and physical and mental combat rules precisely parallel, but will this be satisfying or make them all feel the same? I prefer abstracted combat results that the players can then detail as they like, but will this frustrate people who want the game results to suggest complexities on their own? Do the rules for regenerating social points give people more room to strategize, or only clutter things up?
Or maybe I'm making it all too complex, and I ought to go back to something...simple.
GM: *rolls* "You're under attack! Roll your Not Losing Fights skill!"
Player: *rolls* "Okay, I want to attack back, too."
GM: "Fine, roll your Winning Fights skill." *rolls NPC's Not Losing Fights skill*
Player: *rolls* "Woo! I won!"
GM: "Good, good. Now, let's keep moving, we have a conversation to get through, and I'm using the Advanced Conversation rules this time, so you can't just keep using your old taunt-apologize tactics."
I want to work on Frontier, but what's coming to mind is writing out characters! Sadly, I don't have a full system yet.
Should I work on the system, and get it at least to the point where I can make a basic character? Or should I keep working on the setting, and write out characters in prose in preparation for statting them up?