{"id":326,"date":"2013-09-21T17:56:58","date_gmt":"2013-09-22T01:56:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/?p=326"},"modified":"2013-09-21T17:56:58","modified_gmt":"2013-09-22T01:56:58","slug":"tangents-and-time-sinks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/?p=326","title":{"rendered":"Tangents and time sinks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ok.\u00c2\u00a0 I was on a roll with new posts talking about my system.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m still enthusiastic to do so, but the last post was a month ago.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not holding out on anyone, there’s been no legit progress on the system since that last post.\u00c2\u00a0 And yet I’m still enthused.\u00c2\u00a0 So what happened?<\/p>\n

I fell into one of my usual traps.\u00c2\u00a0 I hit a tangent and spent so much time on it that I ignored the core focus of what I’m doing.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What happened?\u00c2\u00a0 Well, I’m trying to improve my resume.\u00c2\u00a0 I wanted to learn Ruby on Rails.\u00c2\u00a0 I was struggling to come up with a coding project for it until I had the brilliant idea of combining my projects.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d make a character sheet generator.\u00c2\u00a0 That project should be trivial, but enough to get my feet wet with RoR.<\/p>\n

But No Dice isn’t set in stone.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d hate to spend all my evenings coding and then decide to add a fifth stat or that specialties could have their own scores or something.\u00c2\u00a0 I had to make this thing generic enough that I as soon as I made those decisions I could just reconfigure the character sheet instead of writing new code.\u00c2\u00a0 Essentially I was starting to make a generic character sheet for any system.<\/p>\n

That was not a getting your feet wet project.\u00c2\u00a0 It hasn’t gone anywhere and I’m not sure it ever will.<\/p>\n

So why am I mentioning it here instead of on a coding blog?\u00c2\u00a0 Well, this is something I’ve done on many occasions as GM.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not something I’ve done as game designer before, but I haven’t done that as much.<\/p>\n

Here are some other examples of things I’ve spent tons of time on.\u00c2\u00a0 Time that could have been spent prepping content instead:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Maps.\u00c2\u00a0 These are the worst offender in terms of investment returns.\u00c2\u00a0 I can spend ten hours painting a map that the players will look at for less than a minute.<\/li>\n
  2. Minis. Hey look, it’s painting again.<\/li>\n
  3. Music. My towns don’t need unique theme songs. My game does not benefit from me taking a break from GMing to queue up the next town’s song.<\/li>\n
  4. Cardboard cutout terrain.<\/li>\n
  5. Construx terrain<\/a>. Actually a huge improvement over the cardboard stuff. The danger with Construx was that I used them for all the fights. They should be reserved for fights where 3d terrain really matters.<\/li>\n
  6. Two flavors of syntax highlighting<\/a> for game text. In my defense, I did this at work.<\/li>\n
  7. CharBuilder PDF margin fixer.<\/a> Hey look, it’s coding again.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Actually that’s not as much as I was expecting, but I’m probably forgetting a few.\u00c2\u00a0 The point remains.\u00c2\u00a0 These are things I put a lot of time into and added very little to the actual game.\u00c2\u00a0 But an online character sheet builder for a system I haven’t finished writing and will probably never finish trumps them all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Ok.\u00c2\u00a0 I was on a roll with new posts talking about my system.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m still enthusiastic to do so, but the last post was a month ago.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not holding out on anyone, there’s been no legit progress on the system since that last post.\u00c2\u00a0 And yet I’m still enthused.\u00c2\u00a0 So what happened? I fell […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links-and-articles","category-nodice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":327,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions\/327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}