Many things happening

I've got so much stuff I could talk about lately, and some stuff going on that I can't talk about yet, that I've really avoided blogging for awhile. A bit of a "I have too much to talk about and not enough time to talk about it all" thing, I think. Plus what I really want to talk about is the stuff I can't talk about yet.

The disappointed social organizer

The Wichita Roleplayers had their second Game Day. I was pretty disappointed at the turnout. I even had a no-show GM. Between that and the social meetings not being able to pick up any momentum in nearly two years, and I'm about ready to give up on actively coordinating events of any kind. I'd leave all the web resources in place, but I'm just not getting what I want out of the whole deal. (And that's to network gamers so we can find like-minded gamers to hook up with more easily.) So I've been kind of bummed out over that.

My whole family has been sick during the past week. I missed the first WRP social meeting after Game Day. But that's not such a big deal… there were only two other people who showed up. Unfortunately, they were the two I wanted to talk about Game Day with.

The struggling writer

The other thing I'm struggling with is trying to turn an 8000-word mini-setting magazine article into a 32-page (19,000 word) core book. It's proving harder than I expected… I'm almost tempted to start writing the whole thing from scratch. The need for being concise (keep it under 8000 words) really influenced much of how the article was written… now when I'm trying to get close to 2.5-times that, it's not as easy as just writing more stuff.

I think the big thing is that the article assumes a lot of things about the GM… the GM has to do a lot of work of his own to use the setting. In a setting book, the GM is going to expect a lot more of the work to be done for him.

I think that's where I went wrong… I had this setting I wanted to expand into a bigger book, but I didn't know what that book should look like.

It took me awhile to realize that the article doesn't address creating characters for the setting, or give stats for anything in the setting, and so on. I think I've got a clearer picture of what it is I'm trying to accomplish… to break the Fudge fandom mold and stop leaving all these gaps that expect the GM to be a game designer in order to run a game in the world.

That's probably enough for now. I got to get to work on the "can't-talk-about-it" project so I can get it along far enough that I can talk start talking about it.