What has happened?

[Goji62]

Has the company shut down?

[BroAdso]

Nope! Tyrel's working pretty hard, but most of the discussion these days is happening over in the Discord he's set up rather than in the Forums here. He's working on a 3rd edition of VBAM.

[Goji62]

Awesome! Thanks for the reply!

[BroAdso]

There are a couple of active playtests going on there, I encourage you to join in. There are really only a small number of actively interested playtesters and brainstormers, it'd be nice to have another person on board.

[Tyrel Lohr]

Yeah, like BroAdso said, the takeaway from 3E is that there were some larger foundational issues that really needed to be addressed in order to clean the rules up and get things working.

That led to a protracted series of rebuilds and tear downs, breaking the rules into pieces and trying to isolate what exactly was "off" about each one so we could get it fixed.

I am feeling a lot better about where we are now, but we're at the point where I have to put my nose to the grindstone and finish fleshing the rules out and getting everything in a format that is closer to final form.

EDIT: Oh, and VBAM as a company is kind of in stasis. All of the other team members have more or less bounced due to increasing work and family commitments, so as the only one without kids I'm kind of been left to push things forward. This was a contributing factor to the slowdown during the 2E days, too. Sigh.

[mort2018confed]

Okay, what is Discord? I only joined Twitter in the last six months so you can't say I'm up to date with things...

[BroAdso]

It's a chat service with multiple channels and tagging features. If you've ever used Slack for work, or some elements of Microsoft Teams, it is somewhat similar to those. The learning curve is virtually non-existent, Discord is designed that way because it partly works as an adjunct for streaming live games with Steam integration, so they wanted to make it super easy for people to jump right on and join the chat around a streamer.

Come on over! The more the merrier! I've always loved your endlessly creative Starmada setting documents - you are really reliable at getting a new one up for people to enjoy every few months, at that!

[Tyrel Lohr]

https://discord.com/

I have the client installed on my local PC and running pretty much 24/7. Makes it easier to connect and discuss things. The conversions can be a bit transient, admittedly, which makes web forums like this better for long term collation or reference, but for good rapid fire discussion the Discord has been really great!

[mort2018confed]

I've always loved your endlessly creative Starmada setting documents - you are really reliable at getting a new one up for people to enjoy every few months, at that!

Thanks for that. At times I feel a bit down and wonder whether its any point doing them, especially when I've got a creative block, so thanks for giving me a bit of a lift today...

[Tyrel Lohr]

I've always enjoyed when I wander into the VBAM or MJ12 forums and find you've been active putting together new settings or playing through new campaigns, too!

[mort2018confed]

Regarding Discord: I'm going to be honest--a few years ago I was feeling depressed, and while I'm better now, I'm not 'okay', and I'm fairly certain it was my daily internet usage that was causing it (certainly the first few months after purposefully making it harder for me to be online made me feel better). To put it another way, it felt less like I was using the internet and more like it was using me, and a major portion of that was social media.

The description of Discord makes it sound way too much like social media for my liking and, while I would love to get involved, I don't want to risk backsliding to the extent of becoming sleep deprived and nausea. I'll keep up as much as possible here, as the pace of this forum, even at the most frenetic, is something I can cope with without feeling the need to constantly be online.

[Tyrel Lohr]

Completely understand, and if you installed Discord there could be a temptation to join other servers (although you wouldn't have to -- you could sit there just on the VBAM channel and never join any others).

I've had some times over the last few years that I've found myself spending an inordinate amount of time reading web forums versus getting anything meaningful done. I've been trying to wean myself off of most of them, but it's easy to get sucked in.