Fall Semester (2023)

Scheduling:
First and foremost, I'd like to talk about the timing of the blog, for the rest of 2023. I want to get back on track with my usual schedule of posting roughly every 10 days. As such, the plan is to do 4(!) posts in August, followed by 3 each in September, October, and November. I'll be posting on the 1st, 11th, 21st, and 31st in August, followed by the 10th, 20th, and 30th in the remaining months.

My thought with this has always been that a once per week posting schedule would never really leave enough time for actual development, but posting every other week (or semi-monthly) would be too slow, and cause people to lose interest. So the basic idea is to split the difference, and post "3x per month"-ish. With my scheduled breaks, this translates to 30 posts per year -- which averages out to 2.5 posts per month, and still more often than 1 post every two weeks.

Drafting:
The previous draft of the rules, I had basically broken into two parts, once I had finished what I considered to be the first part; this included the dice mechanics, different types of rolls, and other basics like HP calculations. The 2nd part mainly focused on the rules of combat, and on action economy. This part of the draft was never fully realized, since things like the disengaging mechanics and status effects weren't ever completely finished. The simplified idea for disengaging/"Tumble" which I mentioned in a recent blog post will probably be used as (at least) a "playtest-ready" placeholder. The status effects and conditions have mostly been ironed out, as explained in this post; I mostly just want to go over them with a magnifying glass, to see if I made any mistakes -- or else just playtest until something breaks. Essentially, finishing a new draft of "part 2" will go a long way to being able to run combats and test out the game.

Roster Updates:
Since I will be taking some time off (IRL time off, not just time off from blogging) in August, that's when I'm hoping to get done with the biggest chunk that still needs my attention: finalizing the remaining 5 classes. In case I haven't said it recently enough in the blog, the 15 classes in TNP have been set for a while now -- as far back as the 'Beta 4' version, circa 2016-2017. As such, versions of each class already exist, so it's simply a matter of updating to the current mechanics (such as using two class dice, the related changes in HP calculation, class categories, and so forth) and any polishing up that may be warranted, along the way. I would plan/expect to have something to announce in this regard, in time for the final post of this month.

One of the more minor things I touched on recently was deciding whether to keep advantage mechanics on base damage and initiative bonus, as well as whether to extend mastery on base damage to any extra damage applied to the same attack. Whether or not these bits of design spaces are still needed/wanted should become more clear once the roster of characters has had its rework completed. An outgrowth of the discussion around mastery on extra damage is whether the cap of 5d6/3d10 will remain, or if it should be revised down to 3d6/2d10; with percentile dice, if nothing else, there is an ergonmic argument to be made in favour of using 2d10 instead of 3d10.

Timelines:
As I said on the blog earlier this year, I'd like to have TNP wrapped up "sometime in 2024" for a couple of reasons. First of all, the game began as sort of a "love-letter to Essentials" or "an alternate-universe 5e," if you prefer. Design work began in earnest around August of 2014 -- when the "D&D NEXT" playtest gave way to the official launch of 5e, with the player's handbook. Today, we likewise find ourselves in the position of 5e (seemingly) preparing to give way to "One D&D" and (presumably) leading us into a 6th edition -- one coinciding with the 50th anniversary year of the D&D franchise.

In short, TNP is something of an anachronism at this stage. It has been fun to work on, and (possibly even more) fun to write about. But with all the starts and stops that life has thrown at me throughout these years, I feel it's time to really focus on wrapping things up. I owe a lot to the people who've come along with me and stuck around for the journey all this time, and so I really owe it to them to finish the job. If it ultimately needs fixing after it's "done," then so be it -- but I now feel ready for this project to come to its conclusion, in the near future.

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That said, thanks to all who've kept reading along with the blog so far. Hopefully there will be some exciting things to talk about very soon.
Check back for the next post on August 11th!