Moments of reflection

[kumakami]

SO while trudging chin deep in my current project's spell list, I began to think of the time while making I thought......WOW I can't believe I came up with that! Through the good and Bad of game writing, we face moments of reflection. At some point you'll realize the Muses are NOT Infallible. What moment have you had both good and bad....

for me.....

Good: in my current project, I realize just how well I made "near total random character creation"

Bad: Once I had to scrap more then 1 whole chapter in a game due to a really! convoluted game mechanic

[Kinslayer]

Good is easy. I have had some lucky runs where the thoughts flow onto the keyboard as though by magic. Some of the mini-essays in the Death: The Pale Horse supplement for Midian have been completely unchanged from the first draft. There were no typos, no dodgy grammar, no having to stop in the middle to search the dictionary for the right word, and later reviewing doesn't show even a single comma that could be placed better. I started writing when the inspiration hit, and when I looked back up it was all finished. It's not pride or vanity when I say that it survived intact from initial typing to the print run; I employed an assistant to edit that book.

Bad... ugh. I have also had my share of some truly atrocious failures at game design. Thank God for the DELETE key. I have a tendency to get hyper-focused on some projects. This is coupled with being easily distracted. It's when I get hyper-focused on the distraction that I run into real problems. In one of the more recent examples I initially was going to write up three to five paragraphs or so of mapping advice. A dozen hours later (no exaggeration--it really was from 9:20 to 21:25) I had written a score of pages, and had only touched upon where to place cities and major roads. I hadn't yet started on the underlying terrain, or how to do smaller roads or towns, or anything else really.

Then there are the times when my sometimes convoluted grammar really comes back to haunt me. It's most notable with random notes that are only two or three words, but sometimes entire sentences are cryptic. I shouldn't get lost in the middle of a paragraph because I can't decipher a sentence that I wrote! I used to use the 'non-native English speaker' excuse, but then I read Palin's resignation speech...

[Rob Lang]

Good
Being a self-afacing Brit, this is difficult. Probably version 4 of Icar will be good as I will be getting back to what makes it fun and bringing every element together in a single book. I think Icar has the best equipment index of any free RPG.

Bad
Space combat in Icar is dreadful. As is hacking. They both rely heavily on one person rolling dice. Not very roleplay like. I also hate the fact I rendered all the graphics at 72 DPI for the last version. Stupid stupid stupid. The layout needs to be more interesting too. And it should have been facing pages properly. Yes, quite a lot of things I don't like!