Newbie Finally Figures Something Out (NOT a help request)

First of all, thank you, everyone.  I am genuinely surprised at such a positive and encouraging response. I'm half-surprised you all didn't throw tomatoes at me for such a self-important post.

maybe I'm just not cut out for modding

Honestly, if you even managed to fix something to make it work properly(dealing with hex too) well, that is already something
that most of the wanna-be-modders that arrive(and then surrend and disappear in the shadow) will never achieve, so
i think you already succeeded where many others failed... be glad of that and keep on!   you're probably able to do even better
stuff(with pratice, of course)

I count myself in the wanna-be-modders crowd. I am under no illusions of being a grand ROM hacker, namely because I have neither the desire nor the skill to completely refashion FF6 from itself. There are a few things I would like to add to tweak the game (and chances are, someone has beaten me to them), but I don't have a burning drive to make these into a reality.  It's more like a curiosity. Then again, the goals I strongly do want to make into a reality are above my skill level in other games.

While practice would help me do routine tasks more efficiently, I feel like there's a giant conceptual gap that I need to close before I can proceed.  There's a level of proficiency that I've seen in the videos posted by members that I'm quite certain I won't achieve.  Most of the threads here are still "above" my level of understanding.

Actually, I think this story proves you have exactly what it takes to do this kind of thing.

1. You decided on a change to make and did the research to figure out what that involved
   
2. got all the necessary tools and documents
   
3. you attempted a change
   
4. you didn't quit when it didn't work the first time
   
5. you correctly figured out that you needed to blank both bytes in a 2-byte command
   

Everyone starts without knowledge and only gets more by doing this exact thing. Being willing and able to work through problems is the only requirement for doing this kind of work. Being smart isn't having all the information, it's knowing where to go to get it. It's always great to see new modders meet their first success. I hope it's the first of many. Well done! Now go chase that feeling!

It is a good feeling.  While I had edited a few graphics with tools, the achievements were muted because it was just changing the shell, not the mechanics of game itself.  On the other hand, this very tiny change broadens the possibilities of how the game can be played.

What was better than making the change and getting it to work, though, was understanding (sort of) why the first change didn't work. I had read the documents repeatedly, but I didn't understand fully what I was reading and the context involved.

By the way, the need to "blank both bytes in a 2-byte command" gives vocabulary to what I had misunderstood. I didn't realize both bytes made up the command. Looking back on it, it was stupid to think a command to take an action on an object only consisted of the action and not the object.  It's like a two-word sentence with a verb and a noun. If someone erases the verb the sentence is incomplete, but its remnant is still there.

I'm pretty sure Madsiur was the only one born with the knowledge of how to edit events.

“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”

― Stephen McCranie

That's true. However, I feel like the inept person who just tries, tries, tries, and fails mostly in real life. Forget mastery. Competency itself seems like a pipe dream.

My first event edits were simple but it did too a time to understand most of the things. I think the key is baby steps and increase difficulty every time you succeed. As B-Run stated, having the right documentation is one of the key aspect of modding, one thing I kinda dislike is having to point out the use of a document to a person multiple time for different uses. Another key is not giving up, in last resort start a thread so you can get help but finding the solution yourself is more satisfying.

Edit: @Turbotastic, I edited your font back to normal. While it's not against a rule it was somewhat annoying and looked problematic for you too...

Thank you for editing my post. I did not intend to have all those different font sizes in there, but since I was on the verge of falling asleep when I wrote the post, I could not tell if I were hallucinating or if my post really looked that crazy.

In all fairness, I didn't have much interest in editing events as the aspects of FF6 I wanted to tweak were related to battle and gameplay intead of the cutscenes and non-battle environments. Of course, now I realize events can be used to modify gameplay as well. After realizing that what I want to do would take moderate ASM work and I have trouble with basic hex editing, It's clear I was trying to walk before learning how to crawl.  There are beginner basics about the game's structure that I have just now started to understand.

At least now I have a better idea of what is a beginner task than what is an advanced one.  I don't like to bother people unless I have no other resort and the only way to learn is by doing...so I guess I need more doing.