Rolling With Advantage

For starters, I think it is fair to say that I'm treating this blog as a Dev Diary rather than anything that I want or hope anyone would read. Although, other creative types might find my ramblings here useful — if only as a sort of mirror or gauge in which to measure their own successes and failures in their creative journeys. 

Second, a bit of full disclosure and honesty. Back in October of last year I was laid off from my video game dev job (among many others) to join the seemingly countless unemployed workers in the field. This hit particularly hard for me because I put damned nearly everything I had into the job, and it still failed — my team I and were not able to ship the project we'd been working on for five years. I will talk more about that later, and more likely on a platform that will have a greater likelihood to reach the video game dev community — https://bsky.app/profile/doktorwarlok.bsky.social. That said, one of the main take-aways from that future missive will serve as a good segue into the topic for today: Rolling With Advantage, aka Self-Care.

After I was laid off, I took a lot of time to decompress - a process in which I'm still working through. I was attempting to recharge through devoting more of my time to my true interests, TTRPGs. During the last five years of stressful video game development (at the very least) I neglected the practice the art of design for my personal projects. And unfortunately, (at the very most) neglected the simple enjoyment of the art form itself. This was a huge personal failure where actively avoided Self-Care.  

January rolled around, and I saw The Merry Mushmen were calling for final submissions for The Chaos Crier #1 — I don't think I need to re-iterate my love of the system here, but if this is your first visit, please check out some of my previous posts. I decided to take a stab at submitting an adventure. My plan was to convert an OSE adventure I'd written for my gaming group a couple of years prior, but upon re-reading, I decided to start fresh. This was ultimately the right decision, but unfortunately, I should have spent more time getting in the correct head-space. I let the deadline and desire to "ship" something take precedent over the enjoyment of the creative endeavor itself - what a wicked trap I had laid at my own feet. I made rookie errors that were easily avoidable had I just taken more time to self-reflect, analyze, and above all: enjoy the process. 

I also began to take Self-Care more seriously. I won't get into the details here, but I will say that I have discovered that the time spent toward that effort has paid off far beyond my expectations.

So, in that light, I have yet again decided to start from scratch. Reworking the exact adventure felt more like hammering a square peg into a round hole. To be clear, I'm not throwing it all away - the advice and feedback I got from the Mushmen still stands true. The basic theme and tone remain in-tact. I'm nearly done with the outline, and frankly, I feel revitalized having gone through the process again. 

Once I have the first draft of the new manuscript ready, I'll post a portion of my design notes here, so if you are into that sort of minutiae, stay tuned. 

-Doktor Warlok