The grind

Now that NaGaDeMon / RoleVember 2019 is over, it means we'll probably go back to the regular routine where I post stuff and hardly anyone reads it again. It also means that the motivation to keep working on my current project will probably start to wane...

...it doesn't help that my 12-month teaching contract hasn't been renewed for next year, and I'll need to find a new school to teach in over the next two months. That'll probably take up a lot of my time, and once again I'll end up with yet another backburner project. Hopefully not, but we'll see.

The other part of the grind at the moment is populating tables. In earlier posts, I developed a system for creating a character with a tarot spread, but now I'm assigning values to all of the cards based on their tarot correspondences. This means attribute bonuses based on the suits, and ability/aegis bonuses based on the individual cards. One of the issues I'm facing here is that some cards belong to one suit (and therefore offer a bonus to one predetermined attribute), but the specific meaning of the of the card lends itself to an ability associate with a completely different attribute.

As an example, Cups is the suit which provides benefits to the Social attribute, but the 4 of Cups has the correspondences of "Upright: apathy, contemplation, disconnectedness, Reversed: sudden awareness, choosing happiness, acceptance" and that lends itself to the ability to "meditate". The issue here is that "meditate" isn't considered a social ability in the game. I guess it really doesn't matter too much, and I'm either overthinking things, or I'm trying toread too much into the symbolism of Tarot knowing full well that the symbols were arbitrarily designed by people in the past based on dreams and assorted archetypal imagery.

In the end, it really doesn't matter too much. I just need characters to have 15 upgrades, it doesn't matter too much where those upgrades lie. If 4 attributes are upgraded due to suits in the spread, and 4 abilities/aegises are upgraded due to the specific cards, that's a total of 8. I'm thinking that characters should also get to choose three options from a basic range of abilities, and then get the four standard aegises that provide them with some narrative armour against the basic problems threatening to remove them from the storyline. The next catch comes from the magic. These characters are inherently more powerful than regular characters in the game system, because they have their connection, conduit, and capacity, and the ability to manipulate reality around them at a level beyond the mundane masses...and that's before the connection to the familiar. But maybe this is the whole point, familiars pick the mortals with the right innate potentials.

Anyway...enough blogging about why I'm doing things. Time to get back to actually doing it.