Pausing

Let's say that you're "progressing."  What does that look like?

Everyone's world is different, obviously, even when speaking of the way that modules are presented, in the way their words and features are emphasized.  So let's not speak about the exact form of progress your world is taking.  Let's take it for granted that you envision what your world is supposed to be like and what it's supposed to do for the players, and concentrate instead on your work plan.

Because I know it best, I'll talk about my work plan.  My plan has been, from the beginning back in 1980, that I'll never, ever be finished.  When I die, whatever I will have managed to accomplish in the time that I'm here, the end product will be an unfinished one.  I'm quite sure that for most people, this is unfathomable.  We tend to think in terms of projects that have an end goal; that one day, after all this work, like Thanos, you'll finally rest and watch the sun rise on a grateful universe.

This is a viewpoint you, dear reader, learned in school.  School teaches us as best it can that life is full of putting your time in and passing clear granite milestones set beside life's highway.  When you "finish" your education (gawd), you'll get a job, get married, buy a house and succeed.  None of these things are finite goals, but they're sold you to that way.  Each course and each grade is sold as though once you've gotten to that point, you've "accomplished" something tangible, that you can point to as evidence of your effort.  As a child, you buy into this delusion; and as you move into being an adult, you continue to speak of your goals in life as though they have end points.  You buy into this at least long enough to get your children to believe it, even though by that time you're already seeing that your wedding day wasn't nearly as important or as much of a milestone as you thought it was, nor your job, your education, your decision to raise a family or even the process of making yourself successful.  In fact, life teaches us pretty coldly that none of this shit ever really ends ... we just pretend that it does.  That pretense is, in some ways, a defense mechanism.  It is also something that causes us to keep walking face first into walls, when we should have known better.

Some of the best advice you've gotten, that you've ignored, is not to have goals that you can achieve in your lifetime.  For example, retirement is a crippling disease.  You've gotten used to this place where you work, this job you do, the ins and outs of the business, the contacts, the summer vacations and the winter conferences ... and then someone says, "Jim, you're 63.  Have a pleasant rest of your life without this place you've begun to accept as your whole world."

"All I want is to have kids," is another such awful plan.  Kids don't stay kids.  And those who grow up sometimes decide to have their own lives.  While we never stop being a parent, it's a big difference between managing children and spending one evening a week talking to your grown up offspring.  Or one evening a month.  Or less.  It's all the worse when your kids don't need you.  And what did you get out of it?  Twenty, thirty years of hard-core parenting?  What were your plans for the remaining decades of your life?  Live for your grandkids?  Trust me.  It won't be enough for you.

A favorite joke that my daughter likes, which ironically does not describe her parents.  A son calls his mother and she says, "Oh, thank god you called; I haven't eaten in 22 days."  --"Why, mom?"  --"I didn't want my mouth to be full when the phone rang."

I don't care about finishing my game world.  That's not my goal.  My goal is to apply myself to things that I think ought to be in existence -- maps, details, concepts, rules -- and to bring those things fruitfully to life with as much ability as I can.  These things enable me to structure and run the game world in my head so as to add depth and corporeality to the process.  Because the body of my world is ridiculously beyond my capacity to fully construct, and deliberately made that way, I don't expect to ever run out of designs that need adding.

Not being concerned with being finished, and not worrying about the end goal as though it needs to be written in stone at some point, is greatly freeing.  I can take a crack at a rule set, and do as well as I can at that time.  Five or ten years later, when I recognize it needs upgrading, I can take comfort that I never intended that would be the last word on the subject.  Every page I write on the wiki can be updated any time, from the next day to years and years from now.  My game setting doesn't need to be "perfect."  It only needs to be adequately functional for the needs I have for it today.  Tomorrow will take care of itself.

When I tire of a project -- and I do -- I take up another project.  I work on maps and give those up to work on the wiki.  Eventually, I take a step back from the wiki to work on the trade system.  At some point, I abandon the trade system and apply myself to reworking something like the character background generator.  Or some other new project I've only conceived of.  Then it is back to maps again, or the wiki or whatever next looks like it needs doing, which I am game to do.

Usually, the arc of my interest takes about three days to a week to get invested.  That investment can last anywhere from two to four weeks, or longer in some cases.  After that, it begins to wane.  Everything has a process, or a method -- a set of steps that I construct and then adhere to, particularly with things that I've been doing for ten years or more.  As the project's allure falls off, I'll push myself to do one more step; or I'll push myself to finish the step I'm on, so that I'm not leaving anything halfway done.  I'll give an example, because this is an important lesson.

I'll use mapping, because it's easy to understand.  The one shown is courtesy of a post I wrote in 2015, about mapping Gerona.  This shouldn't cover the same ground.

Here are the steps involved in making this map:

1) Starting with a blank, white hex map, add the elevation numbers to every hex and recolour the hex pink if an elevation number exists.  In obscure parts of the world, such as the Sahara desert, the elevation isn't recorded.  The elevation numbers come from this site.  Long, long ago, I copied every piece of data from that site, organized it by latitude and longitude, and got a composite number for everything inside the ranges that correspond to my 20-mile hexes.  Yes, it took a long time.  I colour the hexes pink because no finished map has that colour.

2) I plot the settlements (tiny black dots).  I have lat/long for these, so I only need to plot them inside the hexes.  I use a hex-sized graphed template to do this.

3) I plot the coastlines.  I use a pre-existing map and then, incrementally, adjust for the map projection of my game world from the map projection of the source.  I started with using map sites online, but as these disappeared over the years I finally settled on using google earth.  Google maps doesn't work because it doesn't have lat/long lines.

4) Having already researched the settlements, I draw rough green lines to indicate approximate 1650 boundaries.  Later, I will draw these with gray likes, like those shown at the top of the map.  I add provincial titles.

5) I distinguish river valleys from geographical ridges, and draw lines to indicate the approximate location of the rivers.  River valleys remain the original elevation indicated.  If a ridge hex has no settlement, I add a black circle.  If the ridge hex has a settlement, I add an orange symbol.  This is for future adjustments to the hex elevation that needs to be made on the map.  If the adjustment has already been made, I recolour the circle white.

This description is merely to emphasize that if I am working on a map like this, and I want to stop, then I will do so between one of the steps indicated.  For example, suppose that I were to do steps 1, 2 and 3 described above, but not step 4 or 5.  That's not a problem, because I know what the next step ought to be ... and if I don't come back to designing this map a year from now, that doesn't matter.  At a glance, I can see what I've done, and what needs doing.  I can pick up the work at any point along the process, so long as I don't quit, say, in the middle of plotting cities or determining where the river basins are.  This is what I mean when I say, when I'm ready to quit a project, I'll push myself to get to the end of the next step, so I can put it down clean and come back any time.

The decision-making process to produce the steps took between 1979 -- my first map -- and 2004, when the current mapping scheme took shape.  It is this step-method that enables me to steadily carry forward an immense project over 16 years without losing my mind.

And the above is out of date.  It's 20 mb as it is, but since this map I've added a big chunk of western China, much more of Sub-Saharan Africa and the British Isles, which are still pink here.  Alas, my computer protests bitterly at my updating this conglomeration -- but I'll have to apply myself some time.

After much practice, I've become adept at moving forward projects with the freedom to put them down.  There is always another project, as the wiki demonstrates with all its empty links that I'll never entirely complete (and that's okay).  Learning how to put a project down, so that it can be picked up again, is the lesson for human beings who must sleep, attend other duties and eventually surrender to that ennui I spoke about with my "progressing" post.  You are not a machine.  You will get tired, you will get bored!  You will not get your game world completed before frustration, weariness and dead-eyed apathy castrates you.  Sorry, I just really wanted to make the point.  I mean that you're going to feel like quitting -- not just this project, but everything!  Your vision, the game world, the prospect of being a DM, even the whole damned game.

So, prep for that.  Expect it.  Tell yourself, when you're still fit and fervent, that you'll stop and find a pause-point in the work, so you can put it on hold until such time as you're ready to pick it up again.  Divide your game world into separate, but related undertakings.  Use the guideline that the rule books offer: work on characters, work on combat, work on monsters, work on maps, work on your adventure, etcetera.

If you make a plan that includes a pause button, so that you know you'll be free to put this down any time you're ready, and it will still be there when you're ready to come back, you can free yourself to do something you're usually afraid to do.

Make it as complex as you want.

See, usually you'll shy away from that.  You'll think, "OMG, if I try and do it that way, I'll still be working on this plan in 2034!"  That's probably not true, but you'll think it all the same, and automatically hamstring yourself with a project that does half of what you want, but which seems like something you can do in ten or twenty sittings.  Here's the problem with that: it will only do half of what you want.  Which will mean that it's shit; and you'll know it's shit; so that no matter what work you put into it, knowing that it's shit will mean that you'll quit and trash it and start over.  With another project you think you can do in ten or twenty sittings.  This is where you've been for years now.  When does it end?

Imagine yourself doing a project that you're sure will take a hundred sittings or more to completely finish.  Then picture what the first part of that project will entail.  The first step.  Figure out exactly what you'll need to do to finish that first step, so you can put the thing down, take a breath, and go work on something else for awhile.  Maybe, you'll come back and try the second step.  Maybe not.  What matters is that you make the first step a good one.  Not perfect, but the very best you can do.  One that ignores how big it is and concentrates on what you're going to accomplish today and tomorrow.  The day after can go hang.

In the meantime, sure, the system you want to replace sucks.  Let's say you're anxious to replace the combat system.  And I'm suggesting you apply yourself to something that isn't going to change the combat system this year.  Okay.  So what if it doesn't?  You know the present combat system.  You know how it works.  You've put up with it all this time.  I'm asking that, for the players' sakes, you put up with it a little longer.  You can still tell the players what you're working on.  You can still get their input.  You can still describe the intentions.  And you can say, whenever you need to, "I'm taking a rest on that.  It's coming along, but I felt I was losing my perspective.  It just needs some time to gel in my head.  I need to look at it with fresh eyes.  In the meantime, I have this idea for a new spell system.  No, I'm not ready to trot it out, not yet.  I'm just getting started.  Just laying out the groundwork.  Give me a week or two and I'll be ready to talk about that.  Meanwhile, we can put up with the present spell system.  It'll be good enough for now."

This is how things actually get designed.  You want to build your own house?  You may find yourself building for two years before you're ready to move in.  That GTO in your garage that you're upgrading?  You don't work on it every day, and right now you're waiting for a part, but in the meantime you're fine with driving that old beater around.  Still, it's going to be great when the Goat's ready.

That's your game world.  Not great right now, sure.  Right now, you're making do.  Right now, you're using the rules as written.  Over time, however -- as you count time, according to your limitations and your enthusiasm -- this world is going to be terrific.  Taking a rest now and then by hitting the pause button isn't going to change that.

Pausing isn't quitting.  Pausing is taking a breath.  You've got to take a breath.  You're only human.