Topic: Progress Report
Every other week, I run a D&D game. On those weeks, I often get very little done on the video game version of Serinor because I'm working on the D&D version of Serinor. I started the game to give me a better handle on the world of Serinor, which would in turn translate into a better developed video game.
Creative work is an odd process. Nobody knows Serinor better than I do. It's not possible. But every other week, I get together with my four players, run through a game, and they teach me all sorts of things I didn't know about my own world. Some of it is me having to go through everything I know about Serinor and extrapolate an answer for a given situation. Some of it is me realizing something I should have known all along. But some of it is them taking everything they know about Serinor and coming to conclusions I'd never thought of and may never have come up with on my own but that's still logically sound and enriches the world.
Things I learned this week:
- Elves and dwarves are communists, though for different reasons. Elves live in hippie communes based on total equality, where everything the dwarves own is technically property of the Miners' Guild.
- Dragons, and by proxy the lizardmen, are the universal bad guys; nearly every race in Serinor mistrusts every other race, but only the dragons treat every other race as nothing more than food. (Except the fairies. They've learned to leave the fairies alone.)
- The Canid Archipelago is much more densely populated than I'd anticipated. When you worship your ancestors, that ancestral homestead becomes much more important, and it has to be somewhere.
Things my players taught me this week:
- Lukosians are scarier than shadowkin. The shadowkin are very up-front about wanting to kill you and turn you into one of themselves, but the lukosians will be excellent and obedient students right up to the point where you have nothing left to teach them and they eat you alive.
- Sometimes an ability shouldn't do what it says it should (you can't counter attack somebody from 30 feet away.) Sometimes an ability should do what it says it does even if it probably shouldn't (you can bait a dragon out of the sky, stab it as you clamber up its side when it descends to eat you, and stick the landing from 15 feet in the air.) It helps if your description of events is colorful.
- A hazard, such as, say, a patch of ice, can be even more dangerous than an actual enemy. Even if the rules do rank it as four levels lower than any of the other enemies.
