Things have been pretty standard in the HM office as such. I just love it when things are running smoothly. The number of courses being taken is consistently high, we have had a weekly average of 60 for the last three weeks, in spite of the days members couldn't do courses thanks to the database downtime. Unfortunately I didn't make much headway with the HTML course, but it is on the agenda...

So instead of boring you with more stats, I'll give a few teaser insights into the RPG beta. Nothing too big, but we're there.

We've split the group of applicants into three subgroups, each of which is running one campaign. One of them has started, the second will begin this week, the third still needs a bit more work - the focus of each group is in different places, so they get things done at different speeds.

We have been toying around with the new character sheet and even though we use a far less user-friendly way of inputting and calculating things than you will see in the final version, I have seen very interesting and powerful setups even from those who don't have that much RPG experience.

Now you may be wondering what this whole test is about, after all a bunch of RPG rules cannot be this difficult. In fact it is not the rules as such - those are the easiest to write. What is complex is all the numbers that go into things - costs and benefits of all abilities must balance. Also, there's terminology to be created, and, we need to figure out where things can go wrong to give out the right instructions when things go live.

There's also the work of several other people to be integrated and made compatible without becoming too complex or changing it more than is needed - and we need to find ways to accomodate the stories you have written until today - it wouldn't be right for you to suddenly figure out you can no longer do what your character was always best at. (You'll have to compromise in this regard tho - if you claim to have been throwing Force Lightning like Firefox even as an Apprentice, you won't be able to maintain that ;-) ).

The future is brightly dark... we're getting there.