The summer is coming!

 Tell you what, there are a lot of things to look forward to right now, and here they are!

SUMMER.

I like nice weather. And we've finally got grass coming in, so I don't need to worry about my kids coming back inside covered in mud! And it's soooooooooo nice to be able to just tell my boys to go outside. No big jackets, and shoes only if I'm feeling particularly motivated. (Or sometimes Echo just wants shoes and won't take no for an answer.)

PLUS.

No more school for Daniel. It's been getting harder by the week, and I've been less and less interested in keeping up the battle to motivate him to do his work. I really really hope he ends up doing first grade in-person next year, so I don't have to be taking care of his brothers and the house while also making sure he's doing his work. I hope we all appreciate our teachers more after this year.

FULL VACCINATION.

Tomorrow will be two weeks past our second shots of Moderna, and I look forward to it all. I just want to be out and about without the extra worry. Taking three kids somewhere is no easy task as it is, and so, with the added difficulty of the COVID pandemic, I've been avoiding it all. But I look forward to that casual interaction with other parents I've just met, and seeing my boys socialize with kids they've just met.

Goodness, Crash Boy is so cute around other kids. They'll be talking about anything, and he'll interrupt them with "Yeah, but, my name is Crash-A-Boy. Or Crash. And that's Daniel. And that's Echo. And that's Dad."

And Daniel is just so excited to be with other kids. Especially older ones. I'm sure he gets a little tired of being the big one. Not often, but sometimes.

LEMON LIME

The park that's just a stone's throw from our house, Lemon Lime, is a great little park, and we've been going once or twice a day recently, sometimes bringing a quick picnic! It's surely going to be a staple for the summer.

It's been a rough year, but things are looking up!

All these tabletops!

So, if it can be said that I have one hobby, my hobby would be tabletop RPGs. Dungeons and Dragons and all that. And I like to make them! I enjoy playing these games, so I tend to see everything as a potential board game!

And you know what? After over a decade of loving role-playing games, I think I've found my target to hit; I'm a very good dungeonmaster, and I love the idea of having my friends play through games that I've made up.

Here they are, in order of how complete they are!

The Hocus Conspiracy

You play supernatural investigators in 1920s Chicago, working your way through gangsters, vampires, and all sorts of denizens of the city's underground.

There was no gameboard, and for the most part, it was all up to the players to decide what they were going to do. All I had to do was come up with a few different plots that the bad guys were going to do. Sometimes working together, sometimes working alone, and all of them ended catastrophically if the bad guys were going to get their way.

And so the brave agents of Hocus, with their varied understanding of the occult and limited magical power, faced down these many many many terrible things happening to Chicago, forged strange and fun alliances, and saved the day.

I plan on starting this one up again someday. It was easy to run, and didn't take a bunch of work for me to do beforehand!

Completeness: Could use some tuning up, but I've played this for hours with friends. It suffers from a standard problem with my games: Me, Woody, the Dadmaster, needs to be there for it to work as well as it does. I turned it into a system that is fueled almost 100% with improvisation, characterization, and bluster. I am VERY good at all three of these things.

Umbra

In an attempt at a more magical, less violent world, I made a simple world: everyone has a unique magical ability that is embodied in a shadow spirit called an umbra. And if you kill someone, that spirit leaves their body and kills you! So lethal violence was a really bad idea.

It was an interesting world, because although it was your standard fantastical swords & sorcery setting, there wasn't widespread war or violence. You took up your non-lethal weapons to fight others and incapacitate them.

The players enjoyed the world, because they had to think outside the box, rather than the usual "I cleave the foul brigand in half with my sword!" Also, rolling was story-related. In a normal action, you rolled one die. 6 was yes-and, so not only do you succeed, but something else good happens. 5 was yes, you did it just fine. 4 was yes-but, so you succeed, but something unexpected happens. 1 was no-and, 2 was no, and 3 was no-but.

It put a good amount of pressure on me, because I had to come up with unexpected results to happen all the time, but I enjoy doing that! It's a skill of mine, and it results in a bit of fun-as-heck mayhem. And again, violence isn't as important in this game, so our heroes are usually unraveling a mystery or escaping some dungeon!

I made a cheesy little conspiracy system, where you learned about different strange occurrences, leading you and your companions to uncover ONE BIG CONSPIRACY. It was shaped like a hexagon with triangles inside of it, each line a thread you could pursue and follow.

Completeness: Check it out, I made this game in ONE NIGHT, because Hodey was in town and said he'd be down to play one game. So I made it quick to learn, easy to grasp, and memorable. I've played two hours-long sessions of Umbra, and everyone really enjoyed it! There are some things that I want to follow, such as the conspiracy system, and how you take damage. But it's a lot of fun for not a lot of effort! However, it still requires the Dadmaster. Give me one day, I'll have it complete again!

Rollerpunk

I decided I would take things in another direction here. I decided to make character creation short and sweet. It's a futuristic game, but I feel like the system could scale to anything.

The character sheet is a four-piece puzzle that you mix-and-match, and I really like the design of it. Your equipment is tied to your role and one specialized skill, your level of cyborg-ness is tied to your ability scores, and it all fits together to make a really fun character design.

Gameplay is simple, a bit like Umbra, where you roll one or two normal six-sided dice. I made it as an introductory game for newbies, and I playtested it for the first time with these first-timers. Probably not the best idea, and there was a lot of stuff still not-quite-nailed-down. 

But it was FUN. And I loved making the character sheet. If there's nothing else I keep from Rollerpunk, I will keep that

Completeness: It needs loooooots of work... but, well, keep in mind, even for needing lots of work, I have played this with people and it passed muster, meaning that people were laughing at their antics and legitimately concerned for their characters' well-being at the end of it.

Dire Dire Dice

Now here's a fun one, and one that I've even tested several times! So I know it's FUN, it's just not entirely fleshed out. (Even Daniel has played it with me!)

There are dungeons that you need to clear out, and every time you return to town, the dungeons get harder. Each dungeon has a boss.

When you enter a dungeon, you see the boss, and you see three minions below him. You roll five normal dice and put them randomly in the spots for the boss. The minions each get one die, so the boss has two moves. Each of these does something different, sometimes it's an attack, or a block, or something special.

When you defeat a minion, it uncovers one of the boss's more powerful moves. So, as you fight through the dungeon (which is just one paper), the fight gets harder. I really like this game, because it's a bit simple and intuitive.

You play Yahtzee rules for your own dice, also five, and you place them in different spots. If the enemy is going to attack with a 4, you can block it with a 4 on your own shield. With a match, you can heal yourself. And you get better equipment as you go.

If you defeat two minions before running away, you get two gold pieces you can spend on your equipment. If you defeat two minions but then get roasted by the boss, your character doesn't die, but instead you manage to escape back to town, but don't gain any gold. And you 

Completeness: In a way, this might be the most complete? Kind of? In this list, it's the only one that doesn't require the Dadmaster. It has a set list of rules, that I even wrote down! This almost means it's the most restrictive game. That is to say, you can't exactly go off the rails and decide to start raising horseshoe crabs on the moon. It's not quite as much a tabletop rpg as it is a board game. But it's listed here because I love it and I'm very proud of it.

Legend of Zelda: Forsaken Age

This one is barely more than half-baked dreams in Microsoft Word, and I only playtested it once, enough to assure me it's far from ready.

But! I'm really excited for it.

First off, I love the world, because it's a sequel of Ocarina of Time, one of the most popular videogames of all time! It's especially popular with me! Because I'm a bit of a nerd! Woo! Second, I think it'll be fun to have different characters coming together to play through dungeons, unlike the normal game, which is single-player.

I can simplify a lot of the game by making it streamlined in the ways I want. In normal open-world rpgs, you can tell me "Okay, I rob the store and leave the owner tied up in the roof." In this one, I can tell you "No. You're heroes." Or, I could just let them ruin the world and roll with it!

Completeness: I was able to playtest one room, so that's at least a little bit of it! However, it showed me that the main mechanics of it need to be changed, because the heroes were able to easily dance around the bad guys.

Charon

Charon is a dream that keeps on giving. Meaning that everytime I think about it, I imagine up an entirely new facet of it, and so it becomes less and less reachable.

Let me explain what I can. Keep in mind, it's the least complete of these, although I've thought a lot about it.

You start out as one character, living in a desolate land, and your only shelter is Charon Tower.

Your goal is to expand the settlement you have, attracting anyone else who is wandering the wastes, and explore to discover what has happened around you. But the more you expand, the more threats are coming to find you.

That's as much as I can describe, because a big part of the game is that you aren't certain what the world is like when you start. You're building houses and cultivating farms, doing the sorts of things that aren't exactly exclusive to any scenario. Is this a fantasy world with magic? Is it a new planet? Is it a post-apocalyptic Earth? The scenarios change every time you play, and so do the end goals.

I have an idea where you can do special quests to turn the nameless people you come across into actual characters, with personalities, and you can give them classes and shifts and equipment and all sorts of different things to make them better-suited to playing the game.

In Charon, the entire world is against you, but no matter what, you can't LOSE. You can just get beaten back so hard that you and your little group of heroes have to huddle back in Charon, almost back to the beginning. But the threat of attack or disaster is only as big as your settlement, so if your thriving city is destroyed by alien zombies, the worst that can happen is that you have to start again, but with more heroes on your side, so it could take longer.

But, because the very idea of it is so certainly vague, Charon has, over the years, been a factory for making other games. The entire game of Dire Dire Dice came from me trying to create Charon and falling short.

Completeness: Hahahahaha, not very complete at all! The dreaming is there. I've printed out papers and drawn up ideas, and they haven't amounted to much, but it was Charon that got me to print out a hexagrid and glue it to the back of a board game, and I've used that board as a jumping-off point for a bunch of stuff! It's not at all complete, but it's right where it needs to be.

So, there you have it! I'm glad to have it all written down. It feels good to see the progress that I've actually made.

Mercury Doing Backflips

Last Friday, Daniel was being stubborn. And when Daniel does stubborn, he doesn't half-ass it. He was hiding under his table, out of sight from his class, refusing to even write the next letter (it was the "n" in "I can"). And I'm trying something new, where I don't punish. Because that has never worked. Instead, I've been telling him, "Okay, but you don't get to play Minecraft until you write this sentence." And I feel pretty good about that? Like MAN, I cannot WAIT until the responsibility of motivating education is off my plate. A school environment would do wonders for this kid. As it is, I have a hard time keeping Echo from running around naked in the background.

A strange side effect, though, is that DanPar has been doubling down on his stubbornness. So, all weekend, I had the assignment, the single-sentence assignment, ready to go. And every day, he's decided against doing the work, and instead finding other things to play with.

Which is... honestly kind of cool, although definitely not at all what I was trying to get from him. He'll decide that this sentence is SO LONG (it's not that long) that he'd rather get on shoes and play on the swings.

...oh darn?

The boys have all been pretty emotionally taxing. Crash screeches, Echo clings, and DanPar doom spirals. It's a lot to handle. Jessi and I have started spending our free time doing awesome productive creative things, like writing and drawing, but on rough days, which aren't uncommon, sometimes we'll just collapse at the end of the day.

It's gonna get better, right? The boys are just so much right now. Echo's young, he'll grow out of it. Daniel will go to school, and we won't have to be his everything. And the weather is getting warmer; we'll be able to send the boys outside, so at least when Crash screams, it won't be in a contained space!

But I'm very proud of my boys. The basement's a mess, but it's a mess of Duplos and Legos and Megablox and wooden train tracks and all sorts of fun building projects. I wish they'd clean up what they aren't playing with, but more than any of that, I'm just so darn glad that they're building, being creative, and sharing all their creative energy with each other and their cousins!

I caught Crash Boy singing Wellerman the other day, and that's AWESOME. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A6XcFE4CL8

Echo keeps getting more and more capable with his sentences, participating very well in our nightly "What was your favorite part of the day?" (He used to just say Jaina and Josie, no matter what actually happened that day.) And sure, he's clingy, but when he snuggles up in our bed the middle of every night, I know it'll be one of those things I might miss one day.

These boys.

This sweet boy refused to nap!

Aunt Jess with all those kids!

Rolling balls off the roof with Grandpa Bill!

All these kids on a tire swing!

Dyeing eggs!

Easter egg collection!

Miss Susan dropped off a bag full of sweets!

Snow!

 Yesterday was a snow day for all the schools! ...except ours, because it's online, and whoever makes decisions like this does not like children.

That didn't stop us from making the most of the last couple snowy days! My goodness, though. I'm beat. Crash Boy slammed into me boot-first right in my leg, so I've been limping! (But I did shoot out my leg so he wouldn't hit Echo, so at least it's a heroic kind of injury.) And I'm sooooo tired, and don't want to do anything.

It takes a lot to do what I think is right for my boys. Ugh. Blah. Blah and ugh. I'm hurt, I'm sore, I'm tired, and tomorrow is another day.

One cool snowman! Mostly Aunt Jessica's doing, but I contributed the shades and smile!

Woody's youth!

 It's been a while since I've felt young, but today? I feel young. I've got some stubble that looks out of place on me, and sure, I'm balding, but my face just looks light!

I think I've been doing a good job trying to keep myself up. And that's something! It's been hard. Especially since Echo turned two, and decided to start screaming (SO LOUD) about everything that upsets him, which now includes when his brothers don't let him steal their toys.

They're a handful! And they're hard. Crash Boy has apparently forgotten how to poo in the potty, and Daniel loses his cool more often than he should, growling, hitting himself, and just being short-tempered.

I try to keep my head screwed on right. I try to take care of myself, and I try to make time to clean the house (a thing I like to do!) while the kids are around. They're demanding, but they're used to me and Jessi telling them no, that we're busy.

That all said, yesterday, Daniel and I played a little game with Legos, each of us playing a character from the show Grizzy and the Lemmings (like a modern day Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner). And doggone it, it just felt good to be making stuff up with Legos.

Having kids young is awesome! I can keep up with them, and I feel like I've still got vim and vigor! Although, at the end of the day, I'm still exhausted. Being the parent of three young boys takes all I've got and then some!

But doggone it, I'm important, too, and I do what I can to feel like a human being. I've got my editing business, which can't really grow any larger, because I don't have much time for more! I've been doing my positive nonsense, my Little Delights, as a practice in positivity, a way to get people talking, and a way to just have a thing that's mine. I've got Dungeons and Dragons, and I've got my own campaign that I'm running, and all my players say that it's a ton of fun!

This is a big pat on the back for me, because I'm keeping my chin up, even when I'm stressed. And I know I'm stressed. My sweet boy DanPar, he was reading a book on emotions, and when he came to "stressed", he was like, "Hey, that's what Dad is all the time!" Hahaha, oh, sweet boy. I'm rather proud that he knows, because it's important to name one's feelings.

I'm stressed, yes, but I'm staying positive, by gum, and that's nothing to sniff at! I feel like I'm living my life, and in these times, when it's hard to justify getting out of the house, and most my energy is spent keeping up with the little ones, I feel great about it!

DanPar taught Crash how to swing on a swing when we weren't looking!

The boys playing Sorry! with Mama. DanPar's getting a bit silly with it.

This sort of thing gives me hope. Echo threw a rock at Daniel while he was on the swing, and after a little cry, Daniel laughed about it and commemorated the occasion in chalk!

Happy goobers!

Echo's ready to cause havoc with the unpacked Ikea shelves!

That smile. He's a mischievous little rascal, but he's at least a cute mischievous little rascal!

Crash Boy made his own "witch's hat"!

I've got my game shirt on! One of these days, I plan on being muscular, because I'd love to be the hunky nerd who plays Dungeons and Dragons.

I act with more patience than I actually have, and speak with more positivity than I've actually got. I used to dislike the phrase "fake it 'til you make it", but when it comes to my attitude, that's a good half of it. The other half is all procedure and discipline. When I feel like I might lose my cool, I wiggle my toes and pay attention to them for a little bit. I always keep a book nearby so I don't just zone out on the Internet. I have a list of friends who I want to make sure I don't lose touch with, and I will sit down and bang out an email to make sure I don't! I want to get myself into the routine of being a better person than I am right now. After all, that's how I grow into those big shoes!

Writing!

 I was talking to Bucky just yesterday, and yeah, we've both got that gene that lets us come up with stories on the spot. Wacky, zany, fun stories, and the ability to tie them in a neat bow.

But MAN, I just can't write a story that I want to for the life of me. Like, I can sit and pound out words, but the words make me dread the time that I'll have to go back and read through it all. I'm worried my trained editor's eye will be a little too judgmental on my own stuff!

But just yesterday, I picked up a little game, a one-player rpg where you draw cards from a deck, and they determine what your little adventurer encounters, where they are, what they find, and you write a journal about it. And I LOVE it. Because there's no plot, there's just Remi, wandering around a magical continent and meeting all kinds of people that, thanks to that aforementioned quirk, are all too easy to populate. I can create a character from nothing and make them unique, and then, with the next draw of cards, they'll be in the rear view!

It's the sort of skill that I have enjoyed, and I wish it could easily translate into the full-on books that I want to someday write.

One thing I have a fun time coming up with, are what I call concepts. Things that make a scene interesting on their face, even if the words (my words especially) fail to live up to all the interesting things I feel like I have to say.

So, for example, a concept for one scene is: A man finds a snooper going through his stuff, and he captures him. But he recognizes that this snooper is someone he promised an old friend to give an artifact to. So, he's got the strange situation where he's hostile towards the intruder, but at the end, he has to be like, "Oh yeah, and your dad told me to give you this."

Or, an overarching concept of the book is: The main character has a handful of superpowers; however, her ultimate goal is to get rid of these superpowers. So, instead of her getting stronger as the forces of badness mount against her, she's actively getting weaker; I guess someone needs to grow in ways other than her raw power, huh?

I love writing, and I love reading. And it feels good when I produce something that I feel is just halfway passable. The Adventurer journal is boatloads of fun!

Here are my boys making silly faces!

Working on the Matte Biscuit!

 I love this house. It's great for entertaining, and with the nine kids all wandering through and throughout everywhere (I've found the basement door leading outside open all the time!), it's a source of pride how often all the kids end up here.

Recently, I've tried to have some crafty thing on hand to do. We've never really had much of a problem with the boys playing videogames, but with all the cousins around, whenever one of them wants to play, everyone gets in on it! And while it's awesome they can all grab a controller and get on it, I want to make sure they're getting their imagination exercised.

Thankfully, they love building with Legos. DanPar especially has been having a great time building dungeons, and I love how quickly they can adapt whatever scenario they're playing in to include each other. They are sweet in that they always want to include each other. Just yesterday they had a Lego tower building competition!

Our house is always in the middle of three or more projects. And I accepted that as part of my vows, I believe! I'm very tired, but it's so nice every time I step back and look at all that's been done. Especially as we've been playing catch-up with the others in the Loft Club, who had a couple months' head start!

I could use some more free time; I always feel like whenever I've got time without the boys, I should either be doing something with them or sleeping. Life is still tough. It's getting better, and it's so nice to see it getting built up better and better, but I've been conscious of the time passing me by. I have very little energy nowadays, and any energy I build up is quickly allocated to something that needs to be done. Lots of things need to be done. It drags me down how little is left for everything else.

Uuuugh. I'm looking forward to the wintry months. Hopefully I'll be able to get through them without being too busy. I feel like I'm always trying to keep the house clean, the boys fed, the laundry going, and even then, I sometimes fall behind.

It's nice to not be doing this alone; Jessi helps whenever I ask, and I'm surrounded by kind family who are all going through similar situations. It's less tumultuous to know that this is the house that will be our home for, well, forever as far as I'm concerned! Someday, I'll be caught up and rested. Not a priority right now? Hurts to say it, but yeah, I guess that's the case.

Well, downer Woody has had a lot to say, and you know what, that's fair. I wouldn't expect anyone to suck it up and act like all is well around me, and I won't hold myself to any different standard. But you know what? Every day begins with a great cup of coffee, and it's always a good start to the day.

I'm doing what I can to keep it together while also moving forward.

Things are getting there. Things are getting better. It's a shame that we can't just fix everything in one go. Everything's a process.

I'm starting up a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign with Andrew and some of his friends. I think it's going to be a lot of fun! I'm the Dungeonmaster, and I'm in the mood to provide one of the greatest gametime experiences these guys have ever had! I'm a bit anxious because I feel like it's this huge thing for me, and it might not be for them! To me, it's the ability to create stories with friends! But maybe they just want to pretend that they can smash giant spiders. And you know what? That's okay. I just need to practice not pushing them into it.

Maybe I'm the only one looking forward to the winter, but oh, I am! I like chilly weather, especially with my tasty coffee, a warm home, and fun games to play with people I like!