💾 Archived View for lantashifiles.com › gemlog › entries › 2023-10-23.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:17:04. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I've had the past week off. It's been awhile since I've had a week off at home (last Christmas I think!), which allowed me to clear my mind of all things work related. It takes me several days to quit thinking about work problems, and planning several days into the future to make sure I keep ahead of tasks.
For the first several days of my vacation, I spent time doing analogue tasks. Working on the house, which can be relaxing, being different from my 8-hour a day job. I spent time with my family. I got out of the house quite a bit, enjoying the cooler, but not cold, weather, with the cool breeze and the changing leaves. And I spent some time at the gym.
But toward the end of the week, I wanted to sit back down in front of my computer screen and do something creative.
It had been months since I'd put anything I'd written onto Gemini, and I decided to work on my "Lantashi Dance" Cosmic Voyage story.
This is not a serious story, by any means :) My characters are all goofy, especially since many of them started life as Dungeons & Dragons characters, played around a table, and have been "transplanted" into my sci-fi story.
The scenes I write tend to be short, around 1,000 words, give or take. So once I have a scene in mind, it takes me a couple of hours to write. I tend to go over it several times, before I say "good enough for now".
For my more serious stories, like Hybrid Shadows, I take *a lot longer* for each scene, and fidget with it forever before I dare share it. But "Lantashi Dance" is light-hearted, and I don't feel as bad when I make silly errors on it!
A couple days ago I published my latest scene, in which Sarah West, logging on the QEC, complains about a fellow engineer for nearly destroying the ship, and delaying their travel to a nearby star system. Also making an appearance is an "entity", that is haunting the ship, and manipulating the crew.
After finishing the scene, I uploaded it to Cosmic Voyage.
After publishing my scene, I began to imagine the main participants of the scene - Sarah West and Thane Biomax... What is their background? Do they know each other from before the voyage? How do they affect the captain (Lantashi... me!) long-term? Were they romantically involved in the past? Will they be in the future? Etc.
I need to do more character development! Normally I just lie down and imagine the characters interacting with each other, struggling on an alien world, or something, and when I am done living through the scene in my mind, I go to my desk and try to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).
For character notes, I then write down what I learned through the scene about the characters... and the characters grow organically through me thinking about them.
There are other models to follow, especially if I want to be more deliberate in shaping the protogonists of my stories.
I thought about the Snowflake Method, by Randy Ingermanson. That certainly sounds fun. I've looked at the method, and writing tools often incorporate it, like Scrivener, or Manuskript. But as I looked up on my bookshelf, I saw another book I wanted to try for character creation.
The book is called "Alternity - Core Rulebook".
I tend to refer to this version of Alternity as "Alternity 2018". It is a reimagining of the Alternity ruleset that TSR made in the late 1990s. I have the physical rulebook, but you can also buy it in PDF form (link below). I'm not sure the physical book is for sale anymore.
I ran an Alternity game as the Game Master a few times with my roleplaying group a couple of years ago. I haven't run it lately, but since I'm writing a sci-fi story, I thought I'd pick it up for some ideas. A lot of the book is dedicated to rolling up a character, from character concept, to rolling ability scores, choosing talents, choosing skills, an archetype, etc. Then of course there is how the game mechanics work, and a section for Game Masters to create awesome settings for their players to explore.
As I was paging through the book, I remembered it being quite a bit of work to create characters. I made lots of NPCs in the past, cool personalities for the players to encounter.
The truth is, character creation probably isn't *that* hard in Alternity, once you get used to it. But I found it time-consuming to wrap my mind around the whole process again. Making Dungeons & Dragons characters takes time too, but once you get proficient at it, it goes much faster. (And of course there is D&D Beyond...)
I guess what I'm getting at is that once I rolled up a half dozen characters, my speed at creating them in the Alternity system would increase... I was getting faster at it when I was running my campaign.
But that is too efficient, and too logical, for a red-headed Wood-Elf Ranger! Why just get more experience and faster creating your characters, when you can use it as an excuse to write a computer program instead!
One sure way to wrap your mind around the rules for creating a character in a roleplaying system, is to try to automate it!
A couple days ago, I fired up IDLE and started coding up the process for making an Alternity character. Since during the day I've been spending time with the family, the coding took place mainly at night. But I've made progress!
I now have a couple thousand lines of Python code, spread over 3 classes and the main program, that allow you to do the following:
Gear is coming... I haven't finished that yet. And determining how tough the character is (how many wounds she can take) hasn't been fleshed out yet either. And... saving and loading. I guess I have a lot more work to do :)
I've been testing it out. It isn't flashy, just a Terminal app, and not everything is as smooth as it should be. But I can create a set of character stats, including talents and skills (both were pains), within about 10 minutes. So the technical part of the effort goes pretty fast! This doesn't create the character personality, but it quickly defines what the character can do well, and not so well. That leaves a Wood Elf to lie on her bed and picture the rest of it, the *fun* parts, in her imagination, and jot that down later (btw, that's pretty much what I do now).
Part of this, too, is that I wanted to write a program that supports something *I'm* interested in - in this case both story creation, and gaming. Working with computers is great, but I work on business apps. They do what they do... and make my company more efficient.
Working on hobby code is a lot more fun!
Even though the code is not yet complete, I can still run through the parts that are done, and copy the data off the screen and into a character sheet. And this gives me some work to do for the next few weekends!
But for now, it is back to work.