the_rck

I’m making slow but steady progress on the game scenario for UCon. I think I have one character completely done but for a few formatting decisions. I think the remaining characters will need about half an hour each to be completed. Right at the moment, I’m fiddling with the order in which I present the character information. I’m not sure there’s a good way to do this. The character I’m working on has a large, fairly indigestible lump of information about their powers. I want that information easily found because the player will need to refer to it during play, but if I put it first, the player may not actually reach the information about the character’s backstory and interactions with other characters.

Right now, I’m thinking to put character name and stats first then follow that with character backstory and such. I’ll either put the powers information at the end or make it a separate document. I may do it differently for different characters. I don’t know. Some characters won’t require nearly as much explanation for what they can do. This character has spells, many of them, and each of those needs to be explained in terms of effect and requirements for casting. (Spells in the game books are scattered. There’s a single section in the first book and then four sections, each attached to a specific npc, in the second book.)

I ended up buying the PDFs of the two game books. They were $12 each, but working from those is a heck of a lot easier in this case than going back and forth between the hard copies and documents on my laptop.

I spent a while walking around and playing Ingress yesterday after my visit to UHS. I shouldn’t have because it made my foot hurt a good bit, but I really needed to do something mindless, and it was pleasant to be outside in the cool air. A few people gave me strange looks for wandering around without a jacket, but I wasn’t cold. I managed to capture some new to me portals and to hack a very few new to me portals as well. I created a bunch of tiny fields (any field created is worth a tad more than 1200 points, so small fields are not terrible things). I used a lot of level one resonators because they were what I had the most of. I knew I wouldn’t actually be able to hold those portals for more than a few hours, tops, and I get the same number of points for placing a level one resonator as I do for placing anything more powerful.

Scott’s mother called while I was out. She just wanted to check to see how I was doing, healthwise. I doubt that it occurred to her that anyone at all could be upset about the election. Of course, she was also utterly convinced that last Monday was Halloween, so who knows? Maybe she didn’t vote at all.

I’m trying to figure out a good way to get my morning caffeine while we’re at the convention. I can take teabags and stevia, but I’ll only be able to use those when I’ve got about half an hour to spare, and I really can’t carry my mug with me as I wander around the convention or put it in my backpack in case I need it later. Usually, we’d just buy a bunch of small bottles of some caffeinated soda pop, but I’m not supposed to have anything like that unless I add massive amounts of psyllium husks which isn’t really doable when drinking from a bottle. I’m also not sure how the psyllium husks would interact with something carbonated; they’re really extraordinarily nasty in hot beverages but okay in cold orange juice as long as I drink it in under five minutes. Taking longer produces sludge that often can’t be poured.

And extra psyllium is just what I need right now after weeks of diarrhea, right?

At the physician’s assistant’s recommendation, I took immodium last night, and that seems to have stopped everything dead. I am not altogether convinced that that is better than the situation before. I certainly don’t feel very comfortable. I will probably keep taking the immodium over the weekend simply because I won’t have easy access to be visiting the bathroom every fifteen minutes, especially not when I’m running my Amber game.

Okay, I need to either write more characters or to start packing. Packing may win just because it’s less mentally exhausting and still needs doing before the same deadline as the game. I really, really don’t want to stay up late tonight because Scott and I signed up for a game that starts at 10 a.m. tomorrow. We’ll need time to load the car, drive to the convention, and then get our preregistration stuff. We’ll come home around the time Cordelia gets off of school to pick her up and get anything that we didn’t pack earlier.

Of course, given that I was up late last night, what I really, really want right now is a nap.