Coding, Editing, and the Transit

Colorado has 300 beautiful blue sky days a year. Strange how one of the overcast days showed up during the transit of Venus. Luckily a few brief breaks in the clouds gave me an opportunity to check it out. I’ll be soil or something less pleasant by the time it happens again.

I’ve been hacking through the 6600 modern occupations in the occupation generator over the last few days. The editing is tedious. Given the classification origin of the list, I expected far fewer duplicates and variants. Once done, the database for the generator will be updated, which should produce more interesting results. I may also release the pruned list as a PDF. Six thousand possible occupations is a lot more interesting than the few dozen jobs most games include as interesting character occupations. The breadth of possibilities allows for more engaging NPC’s.

As my brain tired of editing, I got distracted and started yet another random treasure generator. This one is for Adventure Conqueror King (ACKs). The system is novel in a few different ways. If you want to expose the strange tendrils of a system, translate the tables into code. I mentioned a preview link on G+. Unlike most of my generators, I’m keeping this one stand-alone so I can toss it over to the fine folks at Autarch if they find it useful. It’ll have my ‘normal’ set of ajax related dependencies. Someday I should transition to jquery.

Finally, I chose to opt out of my original opt-in for the DNDNext playtest. The playtest launched while I was on vacation. During that time, I realized I just wasn’t that interested in yet another variant of the franchise. While I am certain the designers are working hard, nothing reported to date compels me to even bother reading the materials. Large corporations are not driven not by innovation, but by the bottom line. The crazy number of badly written polls regarding the release suggest the same. Far more interesting products are available from a plethora of small gaming companies.

Tags: ACKs, Occupations, Venus