Complications Abounding

Well it's taking some time to finish the Player registration form on the Elthos Web Application. Why? Because it's kinda complicated. Let me explain, briefly. You can logon and have no account, so you'll want to register. When you do you create a User. You'll then be sent to the Player Info screen where you can add information such as whatever contact info you like and so on. This is to allow other players and the GM to go to the website and see how you prefer to be contacted. Now you want to select a Gamesmaster in whose world you'll have your character(s). Now you're a Player who is a member of a Gamesmaster's World, and you can do a couple of things on the site. You can Roll a Character for yourself and purchase your items and select your Skills and Mystic Powers, and describe your character and such. You can also go to the Reports page and print out your character. That's it for Players. However, now lets say you created a character in 'Joe's Amazing World' and you decide, Heck man I want to be a GM, too. So you go to the Player's page and pick "Is Gamesmaster" and sign up to be a Gamesmaster. Now you can create your own World and add Players. These would be your friendly neighborhood gaming friends who want to play in your World. So you add them to your World using the Player Info page. You can send them an email with their user names and passwords and now they can logon as Players (or they could go to the site and Register themselves). They can now roll their Characters, or you can roll Characters for them. So your Players can edit their contact info. You can edit their contact info too. Or they can choose to become Gamesmasters, but then I need for them to still be able to edit their Characters in your World. They can also decide, after having been a Gamesmaster, that they would prefer to go back to being a Player, and now I need the form to switch them back to being a Player, and going back to letting them edit only their own Characters in your World. But what if they want to play in three Gamesmaster's Worlds? AND be a Gamesmaster too? Woah. In programming terms there are numerous complex States to manage, and so the Player Info page that manages all this is necessarily complicated. A wee bit more than I thought at first glance. And so it's taking some time to figure out and complete. Such is the life of a programmer. That said, when it is done, I will be ready to load the completed version of Phase II online and get things going for the beta testers, which will make me mundo-happy. So, back to the salt mines.

Advanced System Advancement

Slow, but steady progress is being made. This morning I uploaded the Elthos Tarot Deck (v1.0) to the website's Members Area. Jason's done an outstanding job on this deck, and I couldn't be more thrilled to have it. In the background I'm also working now on polishing the final version of the Phase II features of the Elthos ODS RPG Web Application. I'll be ready to open for Closed Beta Testing pretty soon now, as the last piece for that is the finalization of the data for the default worlds. So far so good. Last weekend I made some changes to the Elthos ODS Core Rules Book (pdf) that clarifies and slightly modifies (hopefully for the better) the Mystic System so far as Ranged Attacks are concerned. And I'm about to start working on Chapter VIII of the Elthos Book, "Revenge of the Weasel King" which will take quite a bit more work to sling together, but is coming along nicely, thanks to lots of excellent work by Jarod. And last but not least I got the EULA from the lawyer and will put that on the website. And so, least anyone thought I was loafing... I'm not. But this is a big project to be doing by one's lonesome and so it takes a long time. It'll happen though. Soon enough. :)

Inching forward

Well, things are coming along, slowly as usual. While waiting for the lawyers to (finally) do their thing with the website EULA and Trademark search I have been busy adding Phase II features to the Elthos ODS Web Application. Here's the quickie bullet list of enhancements:

1) The Experience Gains System has been added. This allows the GM to track how much experience they granted to Player Characters and for what actions during the course of the game. It also does the calculations of experience gains for both combat and the use of skills.

2) The Alignment System has been added and integrated in with Experience Gains System.

3) The World Objects Trading System has been expanded and enhanced to include all world-specific objects including places.

4) Character Descriptions information has been enhanced and improved with Elkron determined birth-date and alignment assignments.

5) The Reports page has been rationalized and streamlined (but I'm not finished working on this yet).

6) Various subtle bugs have been squashed.

All in all I'm pleased with the progress. I am hoping to finish up and have the new version loaded soon.

Further hints of progress

Well I finally got through to a lawyer! Yes! I know, it's incredible. You probably don't believe me. But nevertheless, yes, I finally got through to a laywer. The old lawyer went rogue on me. He then vanished, only to reappear to say he was sorry and to offer to give me the work he did for me in January on the house for my troubles. I said "sure!" but then he vanished without a trace again. Wow. So after waiting way to long I found another lawyer. Starting over from scratch is a drag. Believe it.

But anyway, that's good. Other news: The Elthos Tarot deck draft 1 is finished. I am reviewing the cards with some friends and then will go through a last round with the artist and finish up. Awesome. I mean they LOOK awesome!

Also the Elthos story is coming along nicely. That one will also take a long time to complete, I can see. It's an arduous process. A lot of back and forthing and whatnot with the writer. He's really great, but it's a lot of work! I should have expected that, of course. But it is coming along very nicely just the same. So that's good.

On another front, since I could not get in touch with the lawyer I spent a lot of time going over the Web Application and adding the Phase II features. It now includes an Experience Point Calculator, and Experience Gains form which lets the GM add the reasons for each experience gains within the Adventure if they want to keep track of stuff. It also features a nifty Alignment point calculator as well. Quite pleased with that as it ties into the Tarot Card system and the Elthos Elkron (Cosmic Powers). It's pretty cool I think.

Ok well that's it for the moment. Whew.

The Brutal Reviews

Well, I finally posted Draft 1.26 of the Elthos ODS Rules on the LRPGSW Yahoo Group. This was at the request of one particular member whose been kind of badgering me for quite some time to actually "Do Something!", and so I figured it was better to get this out of the way earlier rather than later. You see he's a member of the Indie Game circle, and has consistantly expressed a certain amount of distain for traditionalist games, of which mine is one. So I really had no expectation that he would like my game system, and I mentioned that on several occassions. I was expecting him to pan it, and he did. In spades. And so did his girlfriend who posted a very similar review along side his. They lambasted the hell of of the poor little draft of the ODS. In fact so much so that it alarmed my fellow members at the LRPGSW and one of them actually dropped out of the group with this comment:

"I just wanted to let you know I took myself off the LRPGSW list. I'm really happy to have met the people I have through it and am happy to have the gaming group and will continue to come to any Cobblestone meetings that I can, but I just pretty much had enough of dealing with Tim and his bullshit. His and his girlfriend's bitchy, rude, nasty, and condescending reviews of a game they didn't even bother to play were more or less the last straw. I didn't read their entire reviews, but the few scattered sentences - all negative, all nasty, all condescending - were enough. Don't listen to them and keep working on your game.

...

I may come back to the LRPGSW when I get a chance, but really, I have no interest in fighting this war against pigheaded morons. I just want to talk about games, and it is unfortunately very difficult to do this on the LRPGSW right now."

So the LRPGSW has taken a hit in the process. I tried to get the member to understand that we Traditionalists can't just retreat from the field, but he's not up for that, and frankly, I don't blame him. It's just that now the LRPGSW is being crippled by the excesses of a rampant propagandist and it's hard for the members to deal with it. In fact, the result is simply that the LRPGSW may wind up disolved, which is something that would hand Tim's faction something of a gloat-worthy victory. I'm not happy about that, but there's also not much I can do to stop it either. Not by myself at any rate. It would require that the other members pony up and save the group. And if not, then it will have to go the way of other savaged groups that litter the internet.

Anyway, the axe fell squarely and without equivocation on my Elthos ODS Rules. It was bound to happen. If not now then the day I released it to the public. And so I think it was good to get it out of the way. And who knows what will happen anyway. The future is not ours to see.

On the other hand, I found, inbetween the missile fire and bomblastic denunciations, a few points which I will go back and consider again for the next revision, after discussing them with The New York Group. I have a feeling that one or more of them will find their way into the next version of the rules. For one thing I think I will drop the phrase "Ultra-Light-Weight" as that is a concept which was merely my impression, but apparently is not as "Ultra-Light-Weight" as some other systems out there that I hadn't seen. Good point, good point. I think I will refer to mine instead as a "Medium-Light-Weight" system. And a few other points of that sort that will probably prove quite helpful in the end.

Anyway, I'm not dismayed. I thought, actually the reviews were hilarious for their over-the-top, and yet scantily clad, assaults. This is the sort of thing that if you wrote a book and had that in it, people would say, "Um... no I don't buy it... no one would actually write something that ... aweful". Well, yes, they would, I'm afraid. Yes, they would.

Elthos RPG ODS Rules - 1st Draft Release

Today is the big day! I released the 1st Draft of the Elthos RPG ODS Rules to the Literary Role Playing Game Society of Westchester for their review. Very exciting! I already got some neato feedback, with a very keen observation about how experience is calculated. Looks like I may just need to fiddle with a couple of numbers or a formula on that. :)

I'm very pleased that Tim kicked me in the pants to get the ODS Rules out there. Otherwise who knows how much longer I might have dallied in the Valley of Unsuredness? There comes a time when a man must leap into the fray! And now is that time for Elthos ODS!

:)

Much Ado About Something

Things are moving along with OTHER aspects of the project than the website, since I am STILL waiting to hear back from my Lawyer... this is taking far longer than I expected, and my only hope is that it won't be far more expensive than I expected as well.

In any case, I'm working on other aspects of the project in the meantime. Most recently I've recieved Chapter 3 of the Elthos Story, Work-In-Progress title "Revenge of the Weasel King". It's coming along but this is a rewrite of an existing story and so it's rather trecherous work. I've hired a good friend of mine to do that work, and it's coming along very well... but it's difficult.

The Elthos Tarot Deck is very near completion now. I'm very excited about this. While some of the cards still need some polishing it really is almost there. So that's great news.

The Elthos ODS Web Application is stable. I am, however, adding functionality that is based on the Elthos Prime Client Application. That is coming along, albeit in fits and starts as I review and analyse exactly what needs to be done. That will include database as well as interface changes to the Web Application. Fortunately the current application is designed for expansion so it's not too difficult.

And finally, I'm also continuing to work out the details of the Seeds Of Destiny system. That's making good progress and will coordinate with the Elthos Tarot Deck rather nicely.

All in all, progress is being made, though you might not know it by looking at the website.