Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I'm painting my room in a colourful way
 And when my mind is wandering
 There I will go"
    -- The Beatles, "Fixing a Hole", from the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

"I'm taking the time for a number of things
 That weren't important yesterday"
    -- ibid.

[It was twenty uh, forty years ago today ...]

Dammit, life would be so much more convenient if the muse had a snooze button. (Was nearly asleep after a long night failing to sleep, when something popped up and demanded to be written down.)

Finally managed to fall asleep and stay asleep for ... [checks] ... nearly an hour and a half. (Oh. Well, that seems anticlimactic.) Woke up because a dream got too detail-heavy to support its own weight and burst: I was on a pirate ship, apparently in the PotC ficton since we were talking about trying to capture Jack Sparrow (this is already odd, as I've not seen any of the movies yet!), and what started making it fall apart as a dream was that as a result of that conversation we then sat down to work out exactly how much faster our ship was than Sparrow's, under what conditions ... and that turned into, ah, something in between {looking-up the combat navigation rules of the game our universe existed in | choosing which sail-racing or naval-combat game to swipe the relevant rules from |creating a yacht-racing game that would also scale up to pirate ships and down to Laser-class and generalize to use as part of a combat system from scratch and trying to work out how to best model the real world effects of crew-experience on various points of a race} in order to determine how long it would take us to overtake the other ship when it was trying to evade us and which tactics we should use. And that brings up the second odd point: I've never played a yacht-racing tabletop game, only even ever looked at a naval combat ruleset once about twenty five years ago, and the closest I've come to ever playing a naval combat game was a couple of sessions of Star Fleet Battles (yes, I know that spaceships do not use sail power...), also about a quarter-century ago.

When it got to the point of starting to designing a table of situation modifiers to skill-rolls to determine the likelihood (and magnitude) of a mistake at each possible action-point (tacking, overtaking, turning to bring weapons to bear, etc.), the amount of detail I was trying to track and manipulate became more than I could manage at the same time as I was also following the plot and sensory aspects of the dream, so, *kerplop*, I found myself awake again. ("Dreamer overboard! Man the lifeboa... Oh, never mind, too late, they've woken up.")

Y'know, I really do not think ninety winks was enough, however fascinating the problem of modelling the effects of skill and experience in a contest between two nearly-perfect crews in closely matched ships seems at the moment. And that was what {we-in-the-dream | er, I-the-dreamer} were/was assuming would be the most difficult part of the racing/combat model we'd have to get right if the ruleset were going to work for both a modern America's Cup simulation and a tall-ships era pirate game. (I'm not sure whether to elaborate on what I came up with before I woke, or assume that it'll just be re-inventing the wheel (okay, bad idiom to pick given that we're talking about ships -- but since ships that size are going to have a wheel to control a rudder, rather than a tiller or just a steering-oar, I'm allowed, right? We hadn't gotten as far as adding biremes and triremes and little 1- and 2-man fiberglass hulls to the game design yet ...). Then again, the whole concept of being aware that we were operating within a tactical simulation game and trying to sort out -- or to choose -- the ruleset within we which we existed, was nearly as fascinating as the modelling problem, and it didn't have the surreal "transplanted into the game from 'reality'" or "things even feel turn-based" aspects of, say, Erfworld. Everything seemed natural and continuous (and the air tasted rather salty, but I digress) except for the "can we do this?" and "how do we do this?" tactical and strategic planning conversations and the awareness of charts of probability modifiers.

[ETA: And here's the third odd thing (or is it fourth?) -- it wasn't until I'd already posted this and started to fix the typos and missing words that I finally got around to asking myself, "wait, what makes me think that I know enough about sailing to know what factors to consider in such a simulation or what the effects of mistakes will be?"]

Sheesh. Sorry about the run-on sentence and paragraph structure. An hour and a half of sleep was obviously not enough. Why does my body insist on waking itself up too soon?

I'm having trouble shaking this "I need to finish the game design that I started in my dream" feeling. But good googly moogly, I do not need another Project right now.