We have a hard time handling well worn ideas.

If an idea was once good, but it’s taken a turn off the road an into the weeds, we often describe it as having “jumped the shark“. The popularity of that term means it also is used in situatiosn where an idea has been used so much that we’re now bored with it, and I find that a clumsy conflation of ideas.

After a certain point, ideas become cliche and familiarity breeds contempt, but that’s a very steep precipice, and lots of ideas are overused without quite reaching that point. This is especially true of ideas with varying degrees of exposure – I may have grown tired of Chthulu, but there are plenty of others who barely known the name.

I think that it’s all about chicken breasts.

If you spend any amount of time cooking, especially if you pursue the self-taught-American-bachelor school of cooking, you will use a LOT of chicken breasts. They’re reasonably priced, they incredibly versatile, and they’re easy to do well. They offer a depth of options for the beginner while still staying useful for the expert.

But sooner or later, you will have had enough, and that’s when it becomes interesting. It’s not that you start hating chicken breasts, or even that you stop using them entirely – sometimes they’re on sale, or they’re the only thing in the house or you’re in a hurry – but they just stop being something on your go-to list. If you see them on a menu, it’ll take something really interesting to catch your eye. When you’re planning shopping, you think about other meats.

That’s all well and good, but what’s so interesting to me is that when you set aside chicken breasts, you do so with respect. You would never suggest a new cook forgo using chicken breasts as he learns, nor would you suggest they’re not a worthy food.

And that’s where you see the interesting divergence from geeks. We all have our chicken breasts – maybe they’re ninjas or zombies or tentacled horrors but whatever form they take, we really stink at leaving them behind gracefully.

It’s fun to think about why this is. Maybe it’s a function of the fact that cooking takes physical effort or produces a physical result that can be measured. Maybe it’s part of that ingrained geek insecurity. Maybe it’s aliens. I doubt we’ll ever know, and that’s ok. Life needs mysteries.

But it also needs a little more respect for other people’s fun, and chicken breasts is now my codeword to remind myself of that. It’s a cue to remind myself that someone else’s passion about something I have discarded does not suggest inferiority or poor judgment. It asks me to think abut why I thought this was a good idea once too, and to consider that maybe the idea is not the thing that’s changed.

Or barring that, it’s just a reminder to make chicken salad.

Someday we will be able to have conversations about the kindle and other readers without someone bring in up the smell of books. Seriously. I love to read. Everyone I know who has gotten a kindle or a similar device loves to read. We are all book lovers. But all this talk about touch and smell is starting to sound like a fetish community.

My own understanding of the Kindle was clinched the other day when I was grabbing my bag to go out. Normally I’d bring my kindle, but I was loaning it to my wife, so I needed to pack a book, just in case.[1] Of course, I couldn’t pack just one, because one might get finished, or might not be quite the right book. So there I am, tossing a pair of hardcovers[2] into my bag and I have to fight off a flash of annoyance at how cumbersome this is. I have grown so accustomed to the ease of throwing dozens of books in my bag at once without any weight or hassle that the alternative seems awkward.

This kind of cleared up something for me. I have a decent-sized library of well loved books. We occasionally try to cut it down to reclaim some space, but we rarely do more than trim the edges. I am attached to the books, and I have often wondered about their future, especially now that my son is has entered the picture. How do I square these separate ideas of a love of ebooks and a love of paper?

The answer, as it turns out, is a lot simpler than I’d thought. It all comes down to why I keep books.

For the vast majority of them, the answer is simple: because I might want to read them again someday, or perhaps to look something up in them. My habits were established in the pre-amazon era[3], where your only chance of finding an out-of-print book was if you got lucky enough at a used bookstore. That meant if I found something like a copy of “The Well Favored Man” that I needed to grab it and hoard it, because the odds of my finding it again were pretty damn slim.

The next biggest reason, and this overlaps some with the first, is so I can loan them out. However, I am an old-school cynic on the subject of loaning books, and any book that’s been loaned should be treated as lost. This is why I actually own multiple copies of certain books I consider particularly loan-worthy.

The far smaller fraction are the books that have some value in and of themselves. Some might merely be well-loved stories. Others might be gifts. Some might be signed, or be particularly lovely editions. These are books which, even if I never read them again, I cherish.

Someday, my library is going to be almost entirely composed of that last category. It’s possible that the transition won’t really happen in my lifetime, but I look at the speed of change in general, and I’m betting 10-20 years. I consider this more or less inevitable, but I also find it informative. The trick is that with my understanding of why I keep books, I can clearly look at what ebooks need to do if they’ll supplant my existing categories.

To do that, ebooks need to be reliable, ubiquitous, and transferable. In practice, that means that:

• I need to be able to own the file enough to choose how to back up and protect it, and I need to be able to find it when I go looking.
• I need content to be available in electronic format.
• I need to be able to loan and give ebooks.

Unsurprisingly, DRM is the biggest barrier to these needs, followed slightly by the simple logistical problem of getting books converted to electronic form. DRM (and the perfidious idea that I am “licensing” the material) is a barrier to use that offers me no benefits in return[4]. Sure, there are other barriers – the cost of entry is too high, the technology of the readers is still clunky at best, the available content is limited and the various formats muddle the waters even further – but those are all problems that can do nothing but diminish. The hardware and technology will eventually reach a point where the price and convenience are comparable with (or better than) a printed book.[5]

But it’s all for nothing if the content is still stuck in the mud. The kindle give an interesting taste of what ubiquitous content might look like: you can access your library on your kindle, your phone or on your computer. That’s pretty fantastic, and that’s still a closed system; imagine if it was opened up further.

Of course, this might also have a transformative effect on the books themselves, but that’s another topic for another time.

1 – This idea, that you should always pack a book just in case, is one that may not be instinctive to everyone, but I think most readers get it.

2 – “Parking Lot Rules” (a parenting book) and “Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate”

3 – I cite Amazon here, and not print on demand or e-distribution for a simple reason. While someday we will probably have all this content available on demand, that’s not the case for the near term. Amazon, in contrast, is here now, and it has made exploratory trips to the used bookstore unnecessary because the used bookseller with the book you need is right there. I miss that sense of exploration and discovery, sure, but I
don’t miss the inconvenience and frustration.

4 – I completely understand the need for creators to get paid, but that not what DRM does right now. Consider book loaning and gifting – Amazon controls all kindle content, and there are few technical challenges that should keep me from being able to say “Take this book off my kindle and send it to my dad’s kindle”, much the same way I could hand him the physical book after I finished reading it. If they had such a feature, they might be able to say “We need DRM to protect ourselves, but look how we also use the software to improve your experience” and they’d at least have a leg to stand on. Instead, DRM is an attempt to erect a barrier against change that is doomed since it’s a barrier built on the very source of the change itself. A wall built on a foundation of sand will stand longer than one built on a foundation of bits.

5 – This is the “Bathtub Test”. Right now, one of the smug anti-ereader talking points is how much you lose if you drop it in the tub. It’s a fair cop, especially with readers costing what they do now. But there is a cost of replacing a book you drop in the tub too, sometimes a non-trivial one, since you are losing the artifact and the content (with an ereader, you lose only the artifact so long as you’ve backed up the content). If ereaders get cheap enough or if e-content gets ubiquitous enough, that gap may narrow or even invert.

So even if you don’t celebrate, take advantage of the season if you can, and go play something with people you love. I have a little kid to expose to wrapping paper, and I’m looking forward to the decorative tornado to follow.

So, there was apparently a bit of a (possibly engineered) storm over on the boards yesterday about a 4E GM saying that players couldn’t play Dragonborn in his game. This was waved around as an example of totalitarian GMing, and the snippets I picked up were enough to convince me to stay the hell away from the conversation, but it’s an interesting question, all the same.

I have exactly no information about the original situation, but I can conceive of a few scenarios which I would interpret very differently. On one hand you have a GM who simply does not like the race, and is unwilling to talk about it. That’s not great – ‘I don’t wanna, and I won’t talk about it because I’m DM!’ is pretty lame on the face of it.

On the other hand, if the DM had said “We’re playing a game in an established setting (like Middle Earth). There aren’t any dragonborn in the setting, so they’re not a viable player choice” that’s not such an unreasonable position,[1] Especially if the GM is willing to discuss things.

I call this a Pendragon Ninja problem[2] because that’s probably the most succinct way to illustrate the disconnect, as in:
Bob: I’m running Pendragon. Who’s interested?
Tom: Oh, yeah! I want to play a ninja!

I like this example because the problem is obvious (while the Dragonborn one is potentially muddled), which makes it easy to move on to the potential solutions.

First off, a lot of GMs will be comfortable just saying “No” to a request like this. I won’t come out an endorse this because I’m one of those guys who likes to talk things out, but sometimes it really is the right answer, especially if you know your players well enough to know that Tom is taking a piss or will be equally enthusiastic about his next idea. The failure of advice will always be that you know your group best, so if you’re really comfortable just saying no, then go forth and rock on. But if you’re not, there are a few other approaches.

First, try to figure out what about the idea appeals to them. For Tom, is it that he wants to play an outsider? A sneaky character? An assassin? It’s possible that he could play a character of that type that’s still within the bounds of the premise. Playing a saracen might capture the outsider vibe, playing a knight with “off the books” skills might capture the sneaky/assasin part. Try to find the things that make the idea cool to Tom and see if you can pitch ideas that capture those elements.

Of course, that won’t always work. Tom might just really be in it for the black pajamas and shuriken. In that case, ask yourself if the setting can deal with the idea as an exception – is it possible this is the only one in the world, so to speak. This can be easier to justify in magical games as the character is form another world or era, transported here through a freak accident, but you can usually find some way to make it work. Some GM’s buck as this idea as violating the premise, but consider that a lot of fiction makes good use of these fish out of water ideas, and it’s not unreasonable for players to seize upon them.

One catch is that it makes the fish out of water element front and center on the character. The lone ninja in the arthurian court is count to stand out as FOREIGN and DIFFERENT and a lot of interactions will center on that difference, and that may not be what the player is interested in. Perhaps even more importantly, such a character can easily become the lynchpin of a game unless you are careful in your handling of it. Maybe that’s a great idea for your group, but if Tom is not the guy you want to hang the game off of, then you need to be careful to keep it from being the adventures of a Ninja in King Arthur’s Court.

So, that’s nuance, and that doesn’t always fly. Tom may not want to have to deal with those issues – he just wants to have cool fights with ninja weapons, and Bob is having trouble explaining to him that these aren’t anime fights, and ninja vs. knight may not go exactly the way he imagines. So Bob is pretty much down to three options.

First, he can just say “no”. He’s made a good faith effort to accommodate Tom, but it’s just not working. No harm, no foul, just try something else.[3]

Second, he might suggest that Tom would not enjoy the game. He really should try saying “no” before jumping to this, but after a few no’s, this might be the only options.

Third, he could consider changing the game. Depending upon what excites Bob about running pendragon, he might be able to switch to a game like Legend of the Five Rings or Blossoms Are Falling and keep everyone happy. This is not a trivial consideration though: the amount of work Bob will need to do to shift gears is an order of magnitude greater than what it would take for Tom to tweak his character. More importantly, if this idea doesn’t excite Bob, then it’s a bad idea. If the GM isn’t excited about the game, then it’s very near DOA.[4]

There are a lot of issues that run through this topic, ones of player respect, GM empowerment, theme protection and god knows what else. The good news is that the theory is more convoluted than the reality. As a hypothetical problem, this can be daunting, but as an actual problem you’re talking to your friend about? You’ll be amazed how easily it clears up.

1 – 4e introduces another layer to this since the objection (and the desire t play a Dragonborn) may have been entirely mechanical. Thankfully, 4e also provides excellent tools for dealign with this, since it’s trivial to re-skin the race. Thus, for example, if the DM objected to the Dragonborn’s breath weapon as unbalanced, he could include Dragonborn, but use the Goliath or Hobgoblin racial modifiers to represent them mechanically. Alternately, if the player explicitly wants the mechanic, it would be possible to make the character nominally a member of another race but use the Dragonborn abilities, possibly reskinned as a war shout or magical ability.

2 – Pendragon, if you’re not familiar with it, is a game that is explicitly about playing ladies & knights in the Arthurian period. There’s some wiggle room around that, but it’s really all about ladies & knights.

3 – Yes, I know this is terrible. No is such a negative, unfriendly, non-communal word. A lot of us are geeks, and we want everyone to get along, and we don’t like drawing hard lines as a result. I sympathize, I really and truly do, but at some point you need to put on your big girl panties and do it. You’ll be amazed to discover that it does not actually end in tears and door slamming most of the time.

4 – This is actually a somewhat contentious point. I’m assuming in this case that we’re talking about very traditional games where the GM puts in a lot of work to make the game happen. Setting aside the issue of authority within the game, that raises the question of how much the GM can reasonably demand. Some people feel that the extra work entails a bit more weight to his opinions, while others seek something more egalitarian. This gets further muddled when you have groups with multiple GMs, since the decision is no longer between “Game or not game” but between “My game vs. his game” and at that point it ends up looking like…. well, I suspect you can imagine it.

There’s a concept that I don’t really have a word for, but that lies at the heart of a lot of gaming (and writing). I don’t see it talked about much, I think because it’s a little bit too big to see. It’s such an essential part of making anything happen that it’s easy to look. For lack of a better word, I’m going to call it “expectation” but that does not quite convey the whole of the idea, but let me drill into it a bit.

The core of it is this: people have a natural sense of what should happen next. We’re not all totally in tune on it at all times, but there’s a lot of commonality in our take on things. This sense is an essential part of storytelling because stories depend on violating that expectation. Something must take a turn away from the way things are supposed to go, or else there wil be no story, just a logical series of events. This expectation is also essential for great things like humor and irony, since they hinge upon the friction between that expectation and what actually happens.

This expectation is also essential to the mechanics of most roleplaying systems. More than anything, it is essential to the decisions around when to roll the dice and when not to roll the dice. A player describes what his character is doing, and the GM consults his internal expectation – if a clear outcome suggests itself, then there’s no need to consult the dice. If there’s uncertainty, then the dice might be turned to for an answer.

This tends to happen kind of naturally – it’s just the process that we go with, but it can be very interesting to stop and think about this step since so much hinges on it. Enjoyment of play can hinge on the players and GM having similar expectations – if they don’t, then it is easy for the other party’s decision to seem capricious or even malicious. Even more, the mechanics of almost every game out there depend in large part on this expectation.

But…

This is a hard space to call out mechanically. If you stop and think too much about it you run into the same problems you have when everyone stops and negotiates potential consequences of a scene. It might be very thorough, but it breaks flow pretty hard.

Instead, it is merely something to keep in mind as you run. It may be the single most important tool in your arsenal for deciding when not to engage the system. It’s easy to fall into the habit of trusting the rules to provide the cues for when to use the system – if there’s a rule, then you should use it right? That’s not necessarily a terrible thing, but it’s not a reliable yardstick for when it will be fun to bust out the dice versus when it’s smarter to just keep things moving.

If, instead, you can keep a firm grasp on your sense of what should happen next, then it’s much easier to tell when to turn to the dice. You can trust your own sense of uncertainty, and you can focus on those situations where you want things to take a drastic left turn. That ability to select when to engage the system helps make sure that you do it when it matters, and it’s amazing how many headaches you can save yourself.

The vast majority of problems that come from the dice going askew are rooted in a misjudgment before the roll, such as when a failed roll will result in an undesirable outcome. It’s possible to to try to wiggle out of such a roll, but it’s easier still to not make the roll in the first place. If only one outcome is tolerable, then that speaks directly to your expectations for the roll and the action – just go with what you expect, and save the dice for sometime they’ll actually help.