Of late, I have been endeavoring to work on Vegas After Midnight and mostly been succeeding. I visited Mick for three days and we hashed out a bunch of stuff for the alpha testing. At least some initial stuff. We have a looong way to go, and getting time to write up what we talked about is taking more time than I expected.

I rediscovered music lately as well. As a result, I have not kept up on the podcasts that I listen to, and my iPod doesn’t even fit them all. So I am going through them and listening now, and trying to catch up to the ones I want, and dumping the ones I know I won’t listen to. A few I am saving to listen to later, not important enough to listen to now, and not on my dump list.

We hope to get some initial documents out to the playtesters in the next week or so, so keep those fingers crossed, and blow on the dice.

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Well, things haven’t been going as well as hoped for in this new year of 2008. I have been thinking a good deal about Vegas After Midnight, but work, yeah mostly work, has prevented me from feeling creative enough to actually write much.

I write when I can on it, but I feel that the thoughts I put down are disjointed and fragmentary. Nothing really solid or worthy of going into the game. I write them though, because if I don’t the good stuff won’t work itself to the surface.

Like yesterday, I finally got to talk with Mick on the phone for a while, and he and I came up with some cool ideas that might make it into the game. They are very Story Game-esque in their feel, but I think that the ideas add to the feel and flavor of the game. That didn’t come out quite right, so let me back up. I like immersion in my gaming, the kind where you become the character as much as you can in a tabletop game. Story Gaming breaks that for me, but it trades that for a movie or book style immersion, where you watch the characters and enjoy the story.

The two styles are not mutually exclusive in my mind, but they will take some finesse to get them to work. Ok, so what we came up with was a way for people playing VAM to not only play their characters, and for the GM to craft adventures for them, but to also have the players (GM included) have a say in how the overall story goes. With the players on the Hope side, and the GM on the Despair side, each side ends up playing poker for the fate of the story. Depending how the game is set up at the beginning of the campaign (since we want it to be run in several sessions at least, not just a one shot), the game could last a predetermined number of hands, or it could end when one side goes all in, and loses. Each hand would determine how ultimate outcome of the last set of games went, and it will flavor the next set of games until the next hand is played.

There is still a great deal to work out, and depending on how it fits with the rest of the feel of VAM, it may or may not even make the final cut. I’m not cutting it until we’ve tested it a bit though.

I got a little off track from where I started, but that just seems to be the way this year is going. I am hoping that I have some control over where it is headed, and I intend to try my darndest to get it going where I want it to go.

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I am not sure if it is post Gen Con funk, or just too much work, but I am feeling really burned out and just want to walk away from everything for a while. With family, work, The Game Master Show, Vegas After Midnight, my weekly game, The Signal, and everything else that fits into my week that I cram in there, I feel a bit overwhelmed. Which is funny, since I actually have less to do now than I did before Gen Con.

I may have to just take a step back from some of my non-work, non-family things for a little while and just take a breath or two. Our GM is gone for the next two weeks, and rather than run a game like I offered, maybe I will just chill. I may also be cutting down on some of the other gaming that I have been doing, so I can get more writing in.

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Ok, Mick and I are still very very early in our design process, but I am impatient type of person and I want to start playing/playtesting NOW.

My questions to the faceless void are: Is this too early to playtest? Will we get any useful information out of it? Is playtesting this early really just playing for my own amusement? Is that even a problem?

If you even read this, let me know.

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