Monday, October 29, 2007

Bitten off more than I can chew

Saturday is "Worldwide D&D Gameday", which is an entirely made up holiday invented by Wizards of the Coast as a bid to introduce new gamers to the hobby. The idea being that stores would run events, usually in the form of a DM running a game for some players. It's all very exciting.

Anyway, last year, WotC managed to botch the running of the event rather spectacularly. The pre-generated adventure packs were sent out late, so that a lot of stores didn't get them in time. Worse, the pregenerated characters for the event were utterly useless (the trapfinder character's Search skill gave him a 0% chance of finding the one and only trap in the adventure!). It was just bad.

So, over on one of the D&D messageboards I frequent, a bunch of us thought, "We should do our own adventure and characters for next year!" Which seemed like a great idea. We batted around a few ideas, and some people, myself included, knocked out first drafts of adventures. So far, so good.

At that point, the project went on the back-burner. There were eleven and a half months to go, and all that needed done was a redraft, some maps, some characters, and some polish, which was a couple of days' work at best. So, I put it aside, fully intending to come back to it closer to the time.

You can see where this is going, can't you?

About two weeks ago, I did actually think, "Oh, must get that adventure finished off." It's not that I totally forgot about it, you see. There was plenty of time to do the required work in order to make the adventure available well in time for this weekend. Yep, plenty of time...

Then, suddenly, I was going to France, which knocked the plan sideways. Still, I had a whole weekend to go, which would be plenty. And, last Friday I finished off the design work, and just had to transfer everything to the PC, so people could actually use it. Provided there would be no distractions, that was plenty of time...

On Friday, Andrew phoned and asked if I could help him move house on Saturday. Ah.

Well, priorities being what they are, that removed most of Saturday from use. And that means that the job is now about 98% done. But that's all for nought if I can't complete those last 2% in the next day or two. Even so, that would be plenty of time, except for the pesky distration that is work, and then being at band tonight, and busy tomorrow night also.

I think perhaps I might not get it finished in time.

But the story gets even better than that: it seems someone at WotC actually paid attention to all of the feedback (complaints) from last year. This year, the adventure packs have gone out to most if not all of the participating stores. Also, the pregenerated characters are actually well-done, without a repeat of last year's fiasco. So, it would really appear this whole exercise is rather pointless.

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