Legacy of Destruction

I have wrought my work upon the world. I slaved for months trying to assemble something that my mind could use as a plan; I don't think in a linear manner. This often shows, but often works; usually when I plan a game for my players I plan it very loosely, and not very far ahead. I want my players to be able to make choices and do what they want, so I come up with things I expect they would do, and then try and plan for things they might do, and then, things that go wrong.

A lot of my GMing style is really making it up as it goes along.

But I finally sat down one day, in 2003, and started putting together a game -- my vengeance against Mr. Steinwinder for the E-Tourney, I suppose. It failed, in the original attempt, because one of my players got sent to jail for six months.

Some months later, after I'd fleshed out possibilities, and well, things I hoped were NEAT in my game to share with my friends, I tried again, and it worked. Now, this was a rare accomplishment for me; according to everything I was hearing, I was finally running a game well, and people were having fun with it. More importantly, the system was two-fold -- it had a technical underpinning beneath it that made it cool.

Essentially, I game up with a mechanic to make HERO even more complex, and that basically allowed me to offer my players what was effectively beyond cosmic levels of power, forced through merely heroic VPPs. And it seemed that it was working, too!

Then somehow (it's way complex, and makes my mind hurt just thinking about how), my math on my character sheets just got ... bad. Things stopped adding up, and then the game I invested so heavily in was basically at a point where I could let it die for a week or so, laboriously go through my ancient mIRC logs, and try and rebuild the characters, 1 CP at a time. One cell at a time. One line of mIRC at a time.

And I'd been trying that for nearly a week already. Some conversations weren't mIRC, they were through e-mail I no longer have access to, or AIM conversations which weren't logged at all.

And then, that's just chargen, not counting various tweaks I allowed to fine- tune characters as my players got familiar with the system.

So I could either (since the game was already struggling, and had just gone through several months of hiatus due to scheduling difficulties) kill it off and try to rebuild again. Or just abandon the mechanical side of the game and turn it into a freeform, which makes my attempt at running a HERO game online a failure.

So Steinwinder wins.