Jen

so, I did end up getting Dollhouse D.R.A.M.A. out by my entirely self-imposed deadline last week! huzzah! it got some really lovely responses, and I've already got some notes for the next update, which should polish up the rules a little, clarify some of the text, and include some more playsets. I'd like to get it to the table myself at least one more time before I commit to any rules changes, but I think I can make that happen soonish.

but since that's out there now, I picked back up where I left off in mid-June with Life of the Party - doing basic card layout so I can order a POD playtest deck. this is another one that's entirely card-based, much like Price of Coal, so getting an actual printer to make one (1) nice looking deck for me was vastly preferable to my old printer paper cutout cards lmao. I wrapped that up earlier today and ordered the "print proof" from DTRPG, so that should come in uhhh. 3-5 weeks, according to them (I feel like I usually get things faster than that, but WE'LL SEE).

I'm still slowly putting things together for Collegiate Gothic, but oooooh my god I forgot how long it takes me to do moves? for a PbtA game? the basic moves were fairly straightforward, but the individual playbook moves, like. wow. I haven't drafted a new PbtA game since like... 2018? when I started Blood of the Covenant, so it's been a while. I have the playbooks, I have the stats, I have the basic moves, and the playbooks have like, the relationship and name/look/style info on them, so it's not NOTHING. and I have my little brainstormed list of like "what each of these character types DOES that the others DON'T", but translating that list into actual moves takes a hot minute (for me, at least).

speaking of Blood of the Covenant, I realized one of the things that had me feeling blocked on it was feeling like PbtA games "don't" or "shouldn't" have things like playsets, like thematic little prompts with your places and NPCs and everything all in one. I love playsets, right? like I used them in Dollhouse, two of my favorite games ever are Fiasco and Dialect, I LOVE a good playset. but I hadn't been able to land on that thought or articulate it, I was just feeling generically like "something is missing" until I sat down and was looking through Pasion de las Pasiones (for move inspiration for Collegiate Gothic) and I was like. wait. this has playsets. two of them. right there in the core book. and they're great. and PdlP is one of my favorite games I've played in the last couple years. so why did I think I couldn't or shouldn't do this. so maybe we'll see some movement on BotC sooner rather than later! it's only been "in development" for 5.5 years at this point! who knows!

and that's where I'm at with my in-progress projects! why do I have so many of them! why am I like this!

(this is a thing I used to do when I had an actual blog, where I'd talk about the progress I'd made on my writing, any issues I was working through, my process, etc. I think this is a good place to start that up again!)

so, earlier this spring, I decided to basically toss out my current draft of Before the Season Ends, because nothing it was doing was really capturing the tone I wanted, and I had sort of gone down a rabbit hole with one particular design path that ended up not being a good fit. all well and good, it happens. I made my little list of what I wanted to keep and, since I was going back to the drawing board, what I wanted to be at the core of it. IN HINDSIGHT, I don't know why I was EVER so focused on goals and achievement and advancement in a game about friendship and peer mentorship between young women, but, you know, sometimes you don't see the forest for the trees.