Fourth Wall Break #9: Leaving My Job, Leaving the Country, and Some Impacts

 

 

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• Leaving My Job
• Leaving the Country
• Embracing Constraints in the Hobby (and elsewhere)
• A Break in Posts Is Likely
• Slightly New Design/Flow in My Posts
• Working Out a "New" Oracle

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It has now been over three months since the last Fourth Wall Break and a great time for a new one. There are some big changes in my life and various impacts it will have on me and the hobby (and this blog). While the Fourth Wall Breaks tend to avoid getting too personal, I think the stuff going down is big enough and the impact wide enough that it's worth swapping up some rules.

Leaving My Job

I have been working at my current job since January/March-ish 2009. Sixteen years. Today [May 27, 2025] was my last day. The reason why will be really obvious with the next section of this blog so I'll get to that but I wanted to say a few words before getting into the why. I know not every one is lucky enough to have a career that fits their personality and a workplace that feels like a second home to them. I had both. I had great coworkers. I had a chance to work with many wonderful students. In general, I had an astoundingly wonderful place in the world that gave me lots of inspiration for all sorts of things.

I was a librarian — of the academic variety — and did webmaster duties as well as a lot of event planning and a lot of marketing & design.

It allowed me to be very technical, very creative, very organization-centric, and very forward-thinking all at the same time.

I am deeply grateful for all the years.

Leaving the Country

The reason I am leaving is because my spouse — Kazumi — has been offered a job overseas. While there are variations that could have entailed us being estranged — with one of us keeping our daughter — none of the work-arounds felt worth it, not really. Instead, we are going as a family into the kind of GRAND ADVENTURE that involves learning at least two new languages and working with at least one new currency.

It will represent the single greatest set of changes in all of our lives and I am (very mostly) looking forward to it. As much as I will miss all the stuff, above, and miss the kind of things where you just know the exact requirements to do dozens of daily tasks that will be subtly different in our new home country, it still offers that great unique chance to see sunlight in a whole new way. To find a different texture of brick. A new rhythm to things.

Nothing like change to help you see how the place you were standing really worked.

As of the writing of this, we are around six-weeks from moving.

While I might try and find a librarian position — or marketing, web, event planning, bookselling, etc — I will start out just being a house husband and taking care of cats and helping everyone to adjust as much as possible.

Embracing Constraints in the Hobby (and elsewhere)

One of the not-so-subtle changes will be the impact of our income from two professional-level positions to a single professional-level position. We'll have to work to keep most of our costs pretty low for at least the first several months. For me, this means (essentially) no new game materials and generally trimming dozens of recurring costs out of my life. I do not mind. I have a lot of game books. One of the joys of solo play is that a few books and a few tools are all you really need to get hours and hours of a product. I could play a lifetime of campaigns and arcs with just the Tricube Tales, Cypher, Shadowdark, Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Mythic, etc that I already have. So I will. For at least a few years. I have no hard set of rules but something like:

• No more crowdfunding except for maybe a few key systems that only hit rarely and which I love to support (Outgunned, Shadowdark, and Advanced Fighting Fantasy being prime examples).
• Only going for the main-line products and not third-party or wider-ranging products even when it fits above (Shadowdark-stuff by Arcane Library, for instance).
• Generally no new RPG products or other game products, except those I can get — and use — digitally and plan to use a lot.
• A focus on the kind of things I can use in multiple ways rather than something hyper-specific, so pretty much no "Print and Play" type products unless they hit precisely a right chord.
• In a lot of ways, these rules would even impact free products and pay-what-you-want products. There are some exceptions, of course.
• Absolutely no piracy, abusing community copies, or any other system to try and get stuff without spending.

I'm actually looking forward to these new rules. I used to do quite a bit of game design so modding/homebrewing things and coming up with my own systems to fill in gaps will be interesting.

In other ways, it will be less "fun." We'll have to cut out a lot of subscriptions, freemium-upgrades, and whatnot. I think we'll be fine. It just will take adjustment and there will be plenty of that learning how to read road signs, etc.

There's also just the simple reality of moving a lot of stuff. We've been married for over twenty-years and I have lived in Huntsville for very nearly thirty. Even with various deep- and shallow-culls over the decades, things have accrued. I need to "discard" something like 500-700 books. A number of DVDs. Some games. I'll make sure they go to good homes and such but I don't have a lot of time to be too hyper-critical. I will try and proceed carefully, though. Years ago, I had to cut out about 1/3 of my gaming shelf and I choose Dungeons & Dragons, 3E over my old Palladium Fantasy books. That I still regret. I'll try and not make that sort of mistake, again.

A Break in Posts Is Likely

It seems likely that somewhere towards the month of June the blog will go "dark" for around a month or more. I will hopefully have enough time and energy to bring things to a close before that happens. Depending on how things work out, the break might be less. I might be able to schedule a couple of week's worth of posts. I might have a portable device capable of posting occasionally. And so on.

Still, I plan on putting an update on the blog before it happens but just in case I don't...well, I'll see you when I see you.

Slightly New Design/Flow in My Posts

Really quick, a couple of pieces of "touching base." The first is that I have shifted broadly from using footnotes (that always caused some issues with editing and flow) to adding mechanical notes in as an in-line box:

Doug takes a sip of tea.

Then, to make it stand out, I made my "actual play" type box that combines mechanics with reactions and fiction a different color scheme that sticks out a bit more and kind of combines/shifts the color of the mechanics back to the color of the other elements:

Doug takes a sip of tea.

What would Eustace do now?

Probably kick open the door.

For the reader, there isn't a lot of bother about these differences but they do kind of work to help things pop out in different ways.

Then I made it so that the mechanical (but not the fully combined "actual play") sections can be hidden for those that just want to see the fiction and not worry too much about the gears.

Most of the elements have been re-written so they can flow and stack in various ways so a mechanic section could have a notes section and so forth. It helps me to tell the kind of stories that I want to tell.

Also, briefly, I am planning on moving the "post time" from 5pm Central Time to 8pm. Then, it will likely be 8pm Central European Time eventually.

Working Out a "New" Oracle

Finally, for now, I am starting to work on a "new" oracle. The quotes is because it will actually just be an extension of an oracle I have used a lot. The more I play solo RPGs the more I realize just how much I like oracles that are:

• Slightly limited
• Fairly interpretative
• Largely "at a glance"

As much fun as it can be to have dozens of pages with entire adventure/sandbox crafters, maybe 80% of the time I like to just riff off a one-sheet that gives me a lot of wiggle room to play at how the images or words hit me at that moment. Mythic does it well but Mythic does it so well that I would just use Mythic's meaning tables. In this case, I want something a bit more visual to use here or there.

I have a lot of fun using Tricube Tales' various Game-Icons.Net icons sets (see some examples of those I've used in games) and I was thinking it might be nice to create my own either d88 or d100 list of those. Probably by starting with some of my favorite one sheets — "Guardians of the Shadow Frontier," "Arcane Agents," "Maidenstead Mysteries," and a couple of others — and taking in some other icons I have found and like. Coming up with a good balance that fits the kind of stories I like to play but also challenges my expectations a bit. Where a skull can be death or injury or a corpse or simple "bone" or "white" or whatnot as I go.

I plan to start on that this week and don't know how long it will take me to make my first draft.

Ok, that wraps it up for now.