So, to mark the completion of a metric ton of writing on Friday, I hit the Apple store to see if I could get lucky and snag a 3g Ipad. Turns out I could, and I’ve been running around with it for the past few days. It’s a pretty spiffy device, and I figured I’d share my observations so far.

• I have wanted a tablet computer for 10 years or more at this point. Apple has done a lot of not-great stuff, but by actually opening this market up to devices that cost less than 2 or 3 thousand dollars, they have earned a lot of points in my book. Also, this totally looks like I always envisioned the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy looking (though in my mind the HHGTTG was the size of a Kindle).
• As other reviewers have noted, the battery on this thing is a beast. 12 hours of use, no problem. The downside is that it takes a long time to charge, so developing a habit of plugging it in at night is a good idea.
• The 3g seems to work like a charm. Coverage has been good, data flows nicely. The speed difference from wifi is noticeable, but not onerous. . I shelled out for the unlimited 30 days for $30 because the alternate plan (250MB for $15) doesn’t hold up for me. 250mb is a trivial amount of data – for comparison, I’ve used 344 MB on my phone over the past 7 days. The $15 plan exists primarily for marketing purposes and as emergency connectivity, and possibly for people who will be in and around wifi 90% of the time.
• I also shelled out for larger storage capacity, going for the full 64 gigs. In retrospect, I think that may prove to be an unwise decision. The Ipad is a little half-assed at handling local content – it’s real strength is as a conduit for remote content. Certainly, it’s nice to be able to upload my gaming PDFs and a little music, but since I’m not actually uploading a ton of movies to this thing or treating it as an ipod, I’m not sure I’m really going to stretch its storage limits.
• That said, the gaming PDFs? Oh man. They’re a delight to read. Goodreader is the best 99 cents I’ve spent yet.
• Similarly, what comic books are available (through the Marvel and Comix apps) are incredible. The convenience and readability has resulted in my dropping money for a few BOOM titles (Irredeemable and Unknown) purely out of curiosity and giving them a read. I think pricing needs to still be sorted out, and different titles are doing it in different ways. The smartest ones are offering collections/trades of old issues as cheaper bundles, and charging more for more recent titles. If they can find the right price to content ratio, then this will be a gold mine. However, the comics industry is so intensely trained to overcharge that I’m not entirely confident that they won’t kill the goose, especially since this model would KILL the secondary market, which might have some pretty dire ramifications.
• I’ve been trying to use it for work, for note-taking and other things I might use a laptop for. So far, it’s ok. The big limitation is the apps. Some apps are good at taking notes, some are good at organizing them, but I have yet to find one that’s does both. That said, I expect the solution to that will present itself in time. The onscreen keyboard definitely seems up to the job, but it’s less useful than bringing laptop to do the same work. However, it is also a less of a barrier between you and the other people, and when it come time to brainstorm and collaborate, the ipad excels, if only as a fantastic digital whiteboard.
• And speaking of apps, you can see the evolution of the apps as they go. Most of the first generation apps are in need of UI fixes because they were based on a best guess about how the Ipad would work, but they’re getting those fixes quickly. There are still plenty of iphone apps that clearly SHOULD exist on the Ipad, but they’re just not there yet.
• And yes, I know the app store is closed and evil and stuff, but compared to it, the Android store mildly sucks, the Blackberry store is like punching myself in the face, and maintaining apps on a truly open device, like the Nokia n series is like dental surgery. I am tolerating closed and questionable in favor of “works”
• I’m still carrying my kindle. For straight reading it remains superior, but it remains to be seen if the difference is so great as to support the need for a second device. The reality is that since the ipad can’t fit in my pocket, it’s going in a bag, and if I already have a bag, I probably have room for the kindle.[1]
• I also got a bluetooth keyboard and have been pretty happy with it. It’s not quite as nice as a laptop for writing, but it works pretty well if you just intend to write. Doing anything more complicated than that is actually a bit of a pain – keyboard and touchscreen is far more awkward to me than keyboard and mouse, especially when you have to worry about knocking over the touchscreen. That said, it’s actually kind of fun to use it in a NON-writing configuration – typing into the keyboard with the device off to the side. I wouldn’t do anything long that way, but it’s kind of novel.
• The apple case has worked fine for me, and because it’s not obvious, I mention that I think that flappy bit is supposed to get tucked under your ipad. Strangely, it is often more comfortable to hold it in my hand with the case in display mode, effectively making the grip portion much bigger. Doing so opens up the hand and makes the weight of the device much less noticeable.
• I have yet to be too impressed with any of the games, except maybe Plants vs. Zombies. I’m delighted that Small World is there, but it requires a second player and the interface is occasionally weird.
• Todo and calorie counting apps are still fighting it out to see who the heck is actually going to be useful for less than $20.
• Tweetdeck is visually fantastic, but I’m sticking with twitteriffic because it actually has all the listed functionality. In a rev or two, I’ll probably switch.
• Yes the RPG potential is huge. No, it’s not even faintly there yet.
• The mail client is not as good as the gmail web interface, but *is* good enough that it has made yahoo mail useful again.
• Using the Ipad for a while has made me realize a few things about the rest of the market, most importantly about Android. If an android tablet can really offer strong Google integration, especially with docs, that’s going to be HUGE. The Ipad excels at handling material that’s in the cloud, so to speak, and you can see people fumbling their way to figuring out what that should look like. This is finally the device for which a google office suite is something other than a novelty or a statement of rebellion (or cheapness). The bad news is Android doesn’t get a free pass. I dig my Droid, but it’s got to be better than it is now to play in this space.

When the ipad was announced, I was on the verge of replacing my netbook (a first gen HP with terrible battery life, a half-broken charger and a too-small hard drive) for portable writing purposes. I put off doing so in the hopes that the ipad could serve that purpose. So far it seems to be, but to be honest it has yet to really be put through the paces. Novelty is distracting, and it puts a bit of a rosy glow over things. I still love my Ipad, and I expect I’ll continue to love it for things like watching netflix, reading comics and doodling, but will it hold up for real work? I look forward to finding out.

1 – And a Towel

David Allen has a lot to teach you about running a good adventure.

If you don’t know who that is, that may seem a little weird. If you do, then it probably sounds a lot weird. Allen is a productivity specialist best known for creating the “getting Things Done” methodology. I’m a big fan of his stuff, though I am not as disciplined a practitioner as I feel I should be, but that’s neither here nor there.

One of the central tenets of Getting Things Done (GTD) is using well designed todo lists. There are a few elements to this but the one I want to bring into focus is well-designed list items. The idea is simple: when we usually make a list if things to do we tend to list the problem to solve (‘pants’), or write something that’s too big to be useful like ‘Clean Garage’. Instead, you want to focus on the next action – you want to write down a task that you can explicitly *do* rather than something vague. The idea is that if cleaning the garage actually requires you do a lot of things – get trash bags, rent a dumpster or get your shop vac back from phil, for example – then “Clean Garage” is a lot less useful than “Call Phil about shop vac” or “Research where to rent a dumpster.”

This comes back to planning adventures because that advice applies to the situations you create for your players. The next action is as important to keeping an adventure hanging together as it is to getting things done.

Nothing grinds a game to a halt like players having no idea what to do next. Gaming is full of habits and traditions (notably, dungeons and railroading) that persist because they provide an easy solution to the problem by limiting choices so severely that there’s no paralysis. Things go the the next step (as conceived by the GM or the Adventure designer) because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

At first blush this seems like there’s already a solution to the problem that works fine with GTD, but the important thing is to remember WHO is acting here. Forcing the choice is a solution to the GM’s problems, not the player’s. The players are taking that path because they’ve got no other options, not because it solves anything that they want to solve.

So, if you’ve got a somewhat more freeform game, what can you do to get that same kind of certainty without forcing it on your players? That’s where thinking about next actions starts becoming useful. The same kind of thinking that breaks down a task (like cleaning the garage) can break down a plot into the actual tasks that need to be accomplished, and thinking about things in those terms can help open up your sense of where a plot needs to go. It’s uncommon for there to be only one task that must be done first – certainly some actions have dependancies, but there are usually multiple possible starting points.

So lets suppose that you, as a GM, take a look at one of your plots and break it down into an array of possible actions, what now? You don’t want to just force your players to do them, or you might as well have skipped this whole step and just shoved them in a dungeon.[1] No, the trick is that you need to make sure your players *understand* that these options exist. This might require something as blatant as discussing things outright with your players, or it might simply require a few hints. Either way, you want to make sure that whenever your players find themselves at a point in the game where they might wonder what to do next, make their options clear in very specific, actionable terms.

Similarly, if you find your players turning over a problem that seems to suggest obvious action to you, stop and consider that you may be skipping over a few next actions which are less obvious to your players than to you. Rephrase the problem in terms of the actions it requires and see if that shakes anything loose.

There’s a lot more to GTD than just next actions, and while it’s not all game applicable (I’m not sure what “Inbox Zero” is in game terms) you might be surprised how many of them are.

1 – It’s a subtle distinctions, but dungeons can be slightly better or MUCH better than straight railroading. Some dungeons demand you go through pretty much every room, and in that case it’s a railroad that gives you a little freedom in choosing the order you do things. But some are designed with the expectation that the characters will, in the pursuit of their goal or goals, not be entirely explored. These latter ones are rare, but they’re pretty cool. The problem, of course, is that even if the objective of the game doesn’t require clearing out the dungeon, players will often do so anyway because that’s the only way to get treasure and XP, which rather defeats the whole purpose of it.