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Saturday, March 14, 2009

Looking Backwards

I'm approaching three months writing this blog, My how time flies. I decided it was time to review what I was doing and see where I could improve things. Overall I've had a slow but steady upward trend on readership (yay!). I get quite a few reads via the RPG Bloggers feed. Comments and feedback have been pretty sparse, making it difficult to judge how useful readers are finding the material here.

I'm considering two changes to my content in the coming weeks. The first is a weekly feature called Grim Monday. No one likes Monday so I figured I'd add to the day's dismal reputation by focusing on curses, traps and other nasty tricks. It seems like a natural fit.

Second, I'm considering switching to a more numeric format, using stat blocks that are more in tune with D&D and d20, which is where most of these items have seen play anyhow. I liked the idea of using Fate/FUDGE style descriptors when I started, but with crunch-focused articles it seems like cross-purposes. If I made this change I'd go back through existing items and re-stat them.

Lastly I'm considering a larger-scale project as a focus for articles. I haven't given this a lot of thought yet--perhaps a sandbox starter campaign or a combined wilderness/dungeon setting.

For those of you playing along at home: What do you think? What do you like? What don't you like? What would you like to see more of?

6 comments:

Joshua Macy said...

I greatly prefer the Fate/FUDGE style descriptors. The system-neutrality is one of the most appealing things (to me) of the posts.

Changing the subject, I wanted to let you know that I used the Bag of Dagos (with a link to the original post) as an example table in my Rollon table roller program (available at http://rollon.tiddlyspot.com). Look under "Bag of the Luck God"

Soul Existence said...

For tracking readership, my wife was kind enough to point me to https://www.google.com/analytics/
it will do all your tracking for you and tell you who came from where. very nice.

the grim mondays sounds fun. looking forward to it. i need to come up with some features on my own site.

Mark Thomas said...

@jamused: Thanks for posting that link to rollon (and for considering the lucky bag good enough to use!) I love tiddlywiki -- I prep all my articles for this blog using it, and it's become my go to tool for any sort of campaign project. I'll definitely be using rollon.

@Soul: I've been using analytics off and on. I guess I need to pay more attention. Google's new alerts have also proven useful.

Joshua Macy said...

Not to completely hijack this thread, but be sure to let me know if you find any bugs or there are any enhancements you desire.

nanobri said...

The only game I'm playing in now is Exalted, which is really high powered and a bunch of the items that you have talked about are pretty cool but seem more suitable for a low-normal powered type game. Regardless I always enjoy reading your ideas, and I kind of agree with jamused that the system neutrality of your descriptions is nice. (I guess I'm biased though since I'm not playing D&D.)

I think the circlet of mental mastery was probably my favorite thing you've posted so far. A whole story arc of a game could center around a party unraveling the scope of a villain's network who uses that set of items.

I think the item type stuff has been cool, and I'd like to see that continuing. The grim Monday thing seems like it'd be fun, so I look forward to that too.

Anyway, that's my take on things. Keep doing what you do. :)

Mark Thomas said...

@jamused: I'll definitely let you know if I find any problems.

@nanobri: You're right, historically most of my gaming has been at the lower end of the power scale. I'll try and offer up some items to balance out the power range in the coming weeks.