So I needed something else. I decided to try Inkscape.

If you read the headline, I guess you sort of know how the whole thing turned out, but let me tell you where it worked and where it didn’t.

Inkscape was remarkably smooth and featureful. It is representative of mature open source software. I use all sort of open source all the time, I’m a huge fan. I even made a tiny contribution back to a project once and had it accepted. That was cool. This site is served up on Apache, Linux, MySQL, and PHP, with WordPress ladled over that. So I know what a good open source project can produce. Inkscape was right up there, and eons beyond the better-than-nothing drawing program I found it to be a few years ago.

It had every tool I needed, though perhaps not as easy to use as even the old Corel Draw ones. I remember gradients being a lot easier to manage and edit the last time. It took about a day and a half from download to completion. Documentation was pretty good, though I shouldn’t have to go online for it as long as I’ve installed the software. Include the docs with the program, guys. It’s not that hard.

So that was the good news. The brilliant part.

Now, let’s talk disaster.

The reason to design something like that is so you can print it. Sure, somebody might be doing design for the web. But even then they’re going to want to print something out to mark up or pass around the room. So printing is sort of a major feature of drawing software.

Inkscape’s printing doesn’t work on Windows. Apparently, I’m not the only one with this problem.

What followed was a frenzy of PDF conversion. Wherein I discovered that the PDFs it produces don’t open reliably in anything but Adobe Reader, my least favorite PDF reader, and thus the last stop on my PDF reader experimenting journey.

So I don’t know what I’ll do next, but unless the nightly build of Inkscape fixes my printing problem, I don’t think I’ll be keeping it. I’m thinking of trying out a newer Corel Draw. Or Xara.

So, the first milestone was that new players tried Ultrablam. Players who aren’t in my regular group.

The second milestone was that somebody besides me ran a game of Ultrablamtacular. That’s right, my son didn’t just have a playtest, he ran it.

He had some help, of course. We sketched out a setting we thought his friends would like, and we worked up the skeleton of an adventure for them and built a couple of bad guys for them to fight. But except for a short “designer’s notes” spiel I gave at the outset, he ran the whole thing, from explaining the setting through character generation onwards.

By all accounts, it went over really, really well. The kids seemed to love it, and he had good things to say about running it.  Of his party of five players, three responded to the playtest survey question, “What would I have to do to make Ultrablamtacular your new favorite game?” with variations on, “It already is!”

Now granted, I can’t base all my opinions on player feedback from a group of 9-14 year olds. But as my wife pointed out, kids don’t pull any punches, either. They’re not afraid to say, “This sucks, man!” And many of these kids are, in fact, experienced roleplayers. Some have been gaming with my son through three other systems. So when they say things like, “I thought the rules were really easy to understand,” and “In other games, you just say, ‘I hit it,’ but here you can really get creative with your character!” they’re giving more critical feedback than I’ve gotten from adults in a lot of endeavors.

So yeah, I’m really happy with how things went. It seems like Ultrablam was firing on all cylinders – accomplishing all the goals I had set out to accomplish with it.

Also, the concrete deadline and the looming threat of disappointing my son really lit a fire under me. I got the character sheet redesigned, which has been looming over me for at least the better part of a year, if not more. And I got a quickstart / rules summary written up. It’s the second time I’ve done one of those (also long overdue for a refresh) and this one was less than half the size of the other and included character generation. It went together a whole lot easier this time, for a couple of reasons.

First, the game is a lot simpler and cleaner than it was. Which is good. I wrote a while back (good god! over a year! ack!) about how complexity is something I want to avoid. And I can tell that the time I’ve spent on it between then and now hasn’t been wasted – the whole experience is smoother now. Which means that more energy gets spent on the point of the whole exercise, which is having fun getting a good story told.

So happy birthday, kiddo! Thanks for the presents!

It was a great playtest! My feeling was that the rules were smoother and more manageable than ever, and most players commented that this was the first time it felt like a game. I agreed. And when rules questions came up, I was able to:

1. Answer them  (and)
2. Read them the answer from the rulebook

This was a huge step, because it meant that the rulebook now covered many questions that were previously unanswered! Also, it meant that I could find the rules, which I think speaks well of the reorganization I did following the last read-through. Here are some points which were tested in play and seemed to hold up well:

• The new character generation. Strength / Weakness pairs are gone, replaced by Strength / Burden / Detail triplets. And Jona (who also invented the “your friends choose your Weakness” mechanic, which lives on as the “your friends choose your Burden” mechanic, also suggested a dynamite way for players to be rewarded for invoking their own Burdens. Haven’t tried it yet, but the symmetry is too beautiful to ignore.
• Attempts – this was the first play in which players really seemed to understand how to make attempts, and took control of arguing for their Points to apply.
• Trust – Everyone jumped heartily on the Trust bandwagon. It worked so well that I was worried that I needed to put a throttle on Trust. Until a player failed a pretty easy roll – 4 dice in the Pool. She lost all of her Confidence and cost the others what they had Trusted her with. All of a sudden, there was more sense of risk associated with Trust. They kept doing it, but they feared that they could be burned. Which is exactly the point.
• Complications – At least two Complications were taken during play, and at least one was Shed. This was the first time those rules had been exercised, and from the GM’s chair, it worked wonderfully.
• Facts – Extra successes outside of combat give the player who rolled them the right to narrate facts. That happened at least twice during the game and they both used their opportunity to good effect – and moved the game along.
• Combat – My dungeon-crawling heart was warmed by the very first battle to be fought with the current combat rules – they were fighting rats! And the new Danger is potential Damage mechanic seemed to work – the rats shouldn’t have been killing these PCs, and they didn’t. Also, a fight of 3 PCs vs 9 rats went pretty swiftly, and I think everyone stayed interested.

All in all, it was a wonderful, rewarding, momentum-building event for Ultrablamtacular.

It just didn’t get blogged about right away.

Staking Your Name (SYN for short) was, in a word, broken. I was reading through the section on SYN and thinking, “Ugh! Even I don’t want to adjudicate this rule, and I wrote the thing!” So, I got rid of it. I tried to identify what I had been going for in the old rules, and how I could accomplish those goals with less complexity. I think I succeeded. The old rules suffered on a couple of points:

• The mechanic was practically the opposite of all the rest of the rules in Ultrablam. A bigger Pool made things worse instead of better.
• It was really complex – and by that, I mean that nothing you thought you knew about the ruleset was the same when SYN.

This last point violated what we in the software biz know as “the principle of least surprise,” which is a rule by which user interface design is guided. For example, if you’re writing a personal finance program and you have an icon with a printer on it, when the user click it, something about printing should happen. The software should not stab your user in the leg. That would be a surprise, violating the principle. SYN was a stab in the leg at best.

Now it’s gone, replaced by a mechanic that I think both accomplishes the goals I had with the last one AND makes sense within the context of the rest of the rules. So if you’ve ever been subject to playtest on the old SYN, thank your lucky stars that it’s gone. Good riddance.

All the content seems to have made it over, but I’m afraid that members who signed up on the old site will have to register again on this one. In exchange for this inconvenience, I’ll try to have a openID plugin running here soon so you can use an already established identity to login.

Thanks for your patience!

Update: OK, both domains (ultrablamtacular.com and blog.ultrablamtacular.com) seem to have made it over here safely, and nearly everything is working (notably, the IPhone theme is not, yet). But if you notice anything wrong with the site, please feel free to let me know!

1. It felt good to post again. How are you out there, anyhow? I don’t expect anyone is still with me at this point and that’s good – there’s been nothing happening. That’s going to change RSN, I promise.
2. My web host is making me very angry w/ downtime and increased expense. Expect some bumps in the upcoming transition.
3. That goes for the wiki and other sites, too. I’m not thrilled with any wiki engine yet.

That’s it! More soon!

I took Lenny (my netbook) there to get the rest of the simple notes I made on my recently completed read-through into the electronic manuscript. But they just shouted “Five minutes til close!” and started booting us out. So, I’ve lost the chance for outlet power, but the wifi still seems to be working, and I’m here, in my car, FINISHING THIS DAMNED EDIT.

Do you want to know why? Google “August 5-8 2010″ and see if anything jumps out at you.

I mentioned I was in a play…which was awesome, if time consuming. Now it’s over. So, to get back into the swing of things, I’m reading the text of the rules again. Remarkably, it does not suck. That’s always a fear when I return to a project after a break. What if it was just the momentum that made it seem good? What if in the harsh light of reality it was just awful?

Anyhow, so far, so good. I’m only a few pages into it, but they are the first pages – “What’s a roleplaying game?” and so forth, which I had particular trouble with and didn’t expect to like on this reading at all.

And another thing that really provided a lot of motivation was my way-early and totally awesome Valentine’s day gift: Dice. Custom dice. That say “Ultrablam!” on the 1 side. They are awesome. I got two sets from the smartest wife in the world (a name she earned many years and several blogs ago). A fantastic sparkly-shiny-translucent-iridescent set that change depending on how you look at them, and a classic set in basic black with red pips – twins of my go-to dice for d6 based games for the last…ugh…20+ years. Anyhow, they were a total surprise and the best thing I could have gotten. I totally want to use them during playtests! I’ll get a picture of some of them up sometime if I can.

Anyhow…game on!

The second thing that’s going on is that I’m in a play. It’s Twelfth Night, and will be playing at the Adobe Theater this January. It’s a lot of fun, but its eating all of my time until its over. And not just mine. My playtest group is largely either in or directing this show, and they don’t have time for Ultrablam right now, either.

So, I haven’t forgotten about it, it’s not just a “dead” project or anything. It’s just on hold until after…Twelfth Night, or so.

Last time, we got as far as the  setting introduction, trying out the new directed preparation template, (if you want to see it for yourself, check out the Ashes setting on the wiki), and making characters with the new rules balancing Experience and Confidence at the time play starts.

It all went well, as far as I could tell. I got a lot of input on how the character sheet should work now, so I’m laying that out again. I sat down to figure out exactly what I needed for playtesters, and created the initial playtest application form, which I’ll make available as soon as the rest of the materials are ready. I’m working on those materials – the playtest instructions, the sample adventure, character suggestions, and the post-playtest report form – as fast as I can.

So. I know it’s been quiet on the blog side. I’ll try to provide more information starting again now.