Like everyone else on the internet, now and then I watch one sort of reno video or another, with this fellow being my favourite. Judging from the comments, these are popular not only with those in the trades, but very often with men in their 70s and 80s, who I should think pine for the days when they could walk casually on beams thirty feet over the ground.
And this gets me to thinking. D&D perhaps needs these sorts of videos. Of course I know we have this sort of thing, and sometimes content like this, but it's not really, um, working on a D&D design, is it? Mostly, it's either a sort of purposeless artistic exercise, or filler commentary on half-considered themes, but we're not watching a person work on their game world in the way we watch someone building their house.
I try to imagine filming myself building an excel table, or filming myself actually writing the Streetvendor's Guide in real time, and it suggests something as interesting as watching the grass grow, or paint dry. The process is painstaking, time-consuming and not very productive over an hour time frame. I did do something like this, and wasn't pleased with the result. Recently, though, I acquired the GeForce experience screen recorder and have been playing around with it a bit. My daughter and I tested it on a let's-play video that she's in the process of editing now ... I'll provide a link when it's available. I could be recording myself writing this post right now, which could be an interesting experiment. Not your usual youtube fare.
The next thought that leaps to mind would be the 6-mile maps I had been posting earlier this year. That's a bit difficult because I'm working on two different incompatible computers at the moment. I have one that has Office 11, which I use for work content, and then this that I'm working on now that still uses Office 7 ... which my maps are made on. I haven't tried moving them over to publisher 11, though I suppose that's an inevitable experiment I'll have to take up some time. My previous experience with later publisher programs — 2016 I think it was — suffered in that the program ran so slow that my map files were impractical on account of being too big. I'd change a line and have to wait 30 seconds for the program to catch up. I haven't examined this newest version, and that computer is a lot more powerful than any I've ever had, so maybe things would work out all right.
One issue is that I normally work on a two screen desk top. I'd work on three screens if I had the table space. The screen capture can only grab one screen, so I'd always be doing something off camera ... which might work all right, I'd have to experiment a little and see. Stuff could be pulled over the main camera, but that would slow down the work I was doing in order to shift windows around. Could work though. Can't know without trying.
Returning to the Streetvendor's Guide, that's quite tempting. There's a lot going on there. Besides actually describing the object, along with research (though I'm having to depend a great deal on chatGPT to have anything to say about clothing articles, there's such a dearth on the net), there's calculating the price from my excel trade table — which might sound strange to a lot of people who could reasonably wonder why I don't just pull numbers out of my ass. I am trying to produce a consistency, however, though there are problems.
If you must know, it's like this:
Let's take silk and wool both have a price based on the availability of fibre, cloth and tailoring. My price table, however, is designed that if you're in China, the price of silk will be much cheaper than wool, whereas if you're in Scotland, the reverse is true. But I can't turn out a Streetvendor's Guide price for every part of the world. It wouldn't even look well to provide multiple prices for any given object (say an "eastern" price, a "western" price and a "tropical" price. Honest, it may sound like a good idea, but in practice this would look confusing and awful.
Therefore, I have to obtain an approximate "standard" price that, unfortunately, attempts to reckon with people's prejudice of what the price of wool compared with the price of silk "ought" to be. I've chosen Venice as the base location of my pricing table; for the economic system I'm running, it's more or less central to everywhere, having easy and quick access to the Black, Red and far Mediterranean Seas. As a choice, it's not perfect ... but ah well, there's no such thing as perfect. And since the content, in all honesty, is competing with those who are pulling numbers out of their ass, it'll do.
All the same, it seems a very nitpicky way to go about things, but I like it and there are other benefits. If I adjust the price of something for some reason — let's say sugar — that adjustment will automatically correspond to scores of other products. For this reason, while you may have seen a price for something on various teasers I've put up, that's really just a placeholder. The real price isn't absolutely established until all the prices are fixed.
I could have fixed the prices first, then written the book ... but as I've learned through researching the products, it's better to fix the prices one item at a time. As I learn about that item, I have a better idea of how to calculate the price. It's slow, it's methodical, but I stand by the results.
Well, all this sounds a little crazy. It might be interesting to watch me produce an hour of writing video, though I can't imagine who, besides the four people reading this, could conceivably care.
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