Still in the last stages of sick. Spent another day playing Mass Effect 2 and it still holds up as magnificent. Don’t want to drill into it yet, as it’s new enough to be very spoiler sensitive, so instead i want to talk a little about skill challenges and color.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, color is how things are described in a non mechanical sense. it is separate from mechanical effect but, ideally, closely related. When I make an attack, the mechanical description is “I roll to hit, if successful, I roll damage and apply the number rolled with appropriate modifiers”. The color may be “I make a heavy overhand swing, smashing through his defenses” or “I make a number of feints to the left, then strike a blow the to the opening in his guard on the right.”

The difference between those two elements of color is quite broad, and that points to the heart of the issue. Depending upon the game you’re playing, the mechanical description may have a similar level of variance – for example, if the game has rules for “all out” attacks or feints, then there will also be some mechanical differentiation. There are also implicit mechanical differentiations from things like the weapon used, stats, skill and such.

Ideally the mechanical and color descriptions fit together like hand in glove, perfectly matched for one another. In reality, that is very hard to accomplish, and it tends to depend on one or the other being primary, and then expecting the other to match. To illustrate, consider that all out overhand smash.

If I am playing a game which is “color first”, I describe what I’m doing and the GM interprets it to express it mechanically. In this case, for example, the GM might decide to increase the opponents defense slightly (representing the inaccuracy of my attacks) but increase my damage if I succeed. Or he might consider how the other guy fights and, based on whether this is a good or bad tactic against him, grant me some bonus or penalty. This has a lot of benefits for player seamlessness of experience, but it also puts a lot of onus on the GM, and is only as fair as the GM herself. Also, this is hard to do well: the GM needs to have mastered the system and be able to think quickly. Some systems are better suited to this than others.

If I’m playing “mechanics first” then I make the decision of which mechanic I intend to use, such as the Power Attack feat, and I then describe my action in a fashion defined by which mechanics I’m using. If I’m not engaging a mechanic then I might embellish the description with “pure color”, but that color still needs to fit within the general framework of action[1]. The exact boundaries of that framework tend to be social ones, laid down by the genre sense and general sensibilities of the table.

Most games waver back and forth along this line in play[2], but the most common default is “mechanics first, if there’s no appropaite mechanic, try color first.” Mechanics really drive action, often in ways we’re not even consciously aware of. And this is where we come back to 4e.

4e D&D is very much mechanics first. Admirably, it supports color first play with page 42, but that’s very far from its focus – most of the time you are applying a specific mechanic, usually in the form of an action or power.[3] This works very well for it, and it is supported well on the small scale (in combat) as well as on the larger scale (rituals and such). But not for skill challenges.

The mechanics of a skill challenge are very flat. Roll, add, accrue a success or failure. Nothing distinguishes between a Survival roll and an Arcana roll excepting the GMs say-so. It is because of this that it is absolutely essential that the color of a skill challenge be vibrant enough to make these rolls make sense – the players should be picking the skills they’ll use because they’re obvious, not because the GM has to explicitly ask for them.[4]

But that’s a pretty serious gearshift from the standard mode of play for 4e, and not every GM will have an easy time shifting gears like that, but thankfully 4e provides some easy examples for how to address this.

You need to treat every action in a skill challenge as a power use.

That may sound weird on the face of it, but the logic is simple. Rolling the dice for an action should be as interesting and have as much impact as it would in a fight, and the reason actions in a fight work so well is because something happens. If you call for a player to make a skill roll where nothing is going to happen (except perhaps an offscreen checkmark) then that calls into question why they should roll in the first place. The challenge to the GM who wants to create an engaging skill challenge is to offer lots of explicit actions to be taken, ideally with specific mechanical and color impacts, as if each action was a well designed power.[5]

The prospect of coming up with that many “powers” for a skill challenge may seem daunting at first. It can be overwhelming unless you take it as an opportunity to think about what makes this skill challenge awesome and fun (rather than just a placeholder). If you can’t think of ways this skill challenge can be exciting, then maybe you should consider skipping it.

1 – A good example of this is jumping 30 feet in the air and then smashing down on your foe with a mighty blow, like something out of anime. In some games that’s entirely appropriate (such as Exalted, where you might even get rewarded for that) but not in others. Especially not in games where you later come across a 20 foot high wall and wonder why you can’t just jump over it.

2 – Stunt systems, like Exalted or 4E’s page 42 are an interesting way to blur the line, though in different ways. Exalted’s stunt dice are rewarded for providing better color to your mechanical decisions, whereas page 42 is basically “the rules” for color-first 4E play. Needless to say, I love this stuff.

3 – 4e Powers actually make the application of color much harder. Their own baked in color (the descriptive text) is often only tangentially related to the mechanical effect. This is intentional, and it is a double edged sword: on one hand it has made the actual play experience much smoother, but it has explicitly also removed much of the “logic” from the setting. Fireball doesn’t light things on fire, Lightning can’t be grounded etc. The GM can set up exceptions, of course, but if they work all the time, it’s a change to mechanics that can throw things for a loop. The GM might be able throw around a few +2 bonuses for doing something clever, but that’s ultimately bland[6]

4 – Skill challenges work great as “color first” activities, especially if the GM never mentions that there’s a skill challenge going on, rather just tracks players actions and successes towards an end.

5 – It’s far from perfect, but I’ll point to The Siege of Fallcrest has some good example of making skill use explicit and impactful.

6 – This is a problem for 4e, but it’s even more of a problem for more freeform games like SOTC. If there is only one currency for dealing with all responses to a problem then there is no difference between having exactly the right tool for the job and just being kind of prepared. On one hand, this rewards players without them having them obsess over inventory management and tracking minutiae, but on the other hand it can feel disappointing to players who really have lined things up.

I am sicker than a dog, and this is mostly miserable, excepting that I’m getting lots of time to play Mass Effect 2. Holy crap it’s good. The Ars Technica review lays down most of the key points, and I’ll let that stand. Sometime after I’m done, I really want to get into looking at it next to Dragon Age to compare the respective strengths of these two really fantastic games.

But all that said I want to call out one thing that ME2 does fantastically well: It knows when not to use the system. It’s a shooter, but it resists the temptation to turn every possible scenario into a firefight, even obvious ones. Every now and again, you just win, and you do so awesomely (and in a way that really supports who your character is).

This idea of when to throttle back seems to permeate the system, from the barely-there-bones of the RPG system to the new ability to interrupt dialog with action. The net result is something contradictory and pure. The fight sequences are fighty, but the non-fight stuff is engaging storytelling with very little system beyond walking around and talking to things.

All of which is to say, if you GM D&D or some other game where the line between “Fighting” and “Not Fighting” is clear and bright, then you can learn a lot from Mass Effect 2 in terms of how to structure those very seperate things into a strongly functioning whole.

And now, more theraflu.

I meant to mention this last week but it kind of got trumped by the Haiti bundle ($137k and counting!) and I forgot about it until now. The nominations for the 2009 Open Game Table anthology got posted over at The Core Mechanic, and its a substantial list – 375 entries in all.

For those unfamiliar with the Open Game Table, the idea is more or less a collection of the best writings (which is to say, blog posts) on gaming of the past year. This started last year, and given that they apparently have twice as many nominations this year, it sounds like it’s getting some traction.

Now, this is not any kind of suggestion to go vote – the actual voting is now in the hands of a secret panel – rather it’s an urging to go look at the list. If you want to see one concentrated collection of really fantastic game writing all in one place, you would be hard pressed to do better. Take some time and look through the list, and if you see a blog you don’t recognize, take a minute to click through and give it a read. This is how you find treasures.

Now, I know that reading 375 posts is probably a bit to much to ask of anyone (and a reason to sympathize with the judges) so let me offer one other tip: look for the blogs that only got nominated once. There are several blogs (mine included[1]) which received multiple nominations. While this is by no means any kind of bad reflection on those blogs, it also suggests they’ve got an existing fanbase who were willing to advocate for them. If a blog got only a single nomination, then odds are that article is something really special (as is the case with my favorite of the batch, Fred Hicks’ “No Silent Fan“.

So go, read. I’ve kept it short today, so use the time to read something awesome. And if you find a post that particularly stands out, feel free to call attention to it in the comments![2]

1 – Though all from my LiveJournal before I swapped to here. I feel…obscure.

2 – And in keeping with Fred’s advice, comment on the post too – tell them how you found it and what you liked!

The idea of the Adventurer is a slightly silly one. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – silly can be a lot of fun – but the idea of a bunch of heavily armed ass-kickers wandering around and leaping into life-threatening situations for fun is a bit odd. It’s hard to fit that in the context of any kind of logical world.[1] Most justifications (such as the idle rich, one of the few careers that lets you run around swinging a sword like a fool) end up flying in the face of other adventuring traditions (the idle rich don’t need much loot, after all).

Because of this, most games (like most fiction) has at least some motive that necessitates the heroes take action. This is most often in the form of a threat which the heroes must face, but it can take other forms, like a quest. Curiously, the thinner the character is (say, an orphaned loner), the less work needs to go into this motive, because in a vacuum, all you need is a small push.

Players usually recognize the necessity of this motivation, and are often willing to put a little work at the outset establishing a pretense, and then just rolling with it from then on. The priority, after all,is to get onto the adventuring, and a thin veneer of justification is enough to speed that process.

Now, here’s where you hit something that interests me. Most such heroes are reactive (or if they’re proactive, it’s in a very straight line). The threat rises, and they face it. If there’s no threat, there’s not a lot for them to do. Now, villains are proactive, and that’s a good reason to play not-quite-heroes, but that solution doesn’t always work. So I end up looking for another alternative for an easy way to construct a proactive hero.

Paradoxically, one of the best solutions I’ve thought of is the reluctant hero, a staple of fiction. This is the guy who, if he had a choice in the matter, wouldn’t be adventuring, he’d be off doing something else; probably something normal.

Traditionally, this guy is a pain in the ass. A GM sees this sheet or hears this background, and red flags go up. If the character doesn’t have a good reason to adventure, then odds are good that play will be unsatisfactory for everyone. If you have to spend your time fighting the player in order to get him to play, then something is deeply wrong.

This is one of the clearest possible examples of why the relationship between the GM and player is not truly an adversarial one. The GM is responsible for providing opposition, yes, but he does this as a partner to the player, not an enemy. If it were a truly adversarial relationship, it would end in mutually assured destruction as the GM drops infinite elephants on the character’s head and the player decides he’d rather be doing something else.

But once the player realizes that this only works when he *wants* the GM to throw hard things at him, the dynamic shifts drastically, and a lot of things that had been roadblocks can make the game better.

Taking the specific example of reluctance – from a player who understands that what he really wants to do is play, not find excuses not to play, reluctance is an invitation. It says to the GM “Let’s make sure my reasons to engage have some teeth. I’m not looking for an excuse to adventure, I’m looking for a reason”. Now, this is absolutely a challenge, demanding that the GM step up as well, but GMs need that to keep themselves from getting flabby.[2]

So if you can end up with a character like this, consider what you now have: a strongly motivated, well fleshed out character with reason’s to act beyond the immediate plot. Whatever is motivating the character to act is an obvious character hook for other events and conflicts. You have a character who has an understanding of what he wants, understands why he’s doing what he’s doing, and who will – if left alone – step up and start getting proactive in pursuit of his larger goal. All without needing to be a lovable rogue or dashing scoundrel.[3]

Anyway, this isn’t a step I would suggest for every game or for every player, but next time you sit down to do character creation, consider arguing for why a character shouldn’t be adventuring. Putting the player is the position of arguing his case helps him think about it in ways he might not have, and gets him more invested in the arguments he puts forward. This could be as informal as a conversation or as formal as a phase in FATE committed to “Reasons to Stay Home” but simply having the conversation can tell you a lot about the player, and can really lay a solid foundation for your game.

1 – Not that a logical world is a necessity.

2 – The player also, implicitly, needs to step up. it’s a partnership.

3 – And, seriously, I love me some Han Solo action, but other archetypes deserve the chance to be cool.

(Bah. I may have screwed up the scheduling of this one, so if it double posts or something, my apologies)

I’ve been chewing on games with more potent characters with the issues that that entails. One of the real issues is that once characters are at a certain level of effectiveness, advancement becomes a secondary. Characters are more about what they do than what they might be able to do someday.

Now, this is not a tirade against advancement. It’s a fun part of games, and the classic D&D model of advancement makes for a fun minigame while the setting are designed to work with the logic of the level spread. The problem is that it’s something that people expect from a game, and it’s not always a good fit.

Some games absolutely support a model where characters get more powerful over time, sometimes drastically so. Level based advancement is the best example of this, but it can apply just as strongly to point based systems like GURPS or the nWoD.[1] I consider this to be “vertical” advancement – the character’s power goes up.

This is an idea that is probably better supported in gaming than it is in fiction. There are examples in the Luke Skywalker mode, but ironically those examples are often too fast for the taste of games[2] since they tend to hinge on broad, universal insights or enough power to create temptation.

But the point to that all is that there are plenty of genres where drastic improvement seems inappropriate. Some might support a small amount of improvement over time, but compare, say, a western with D&D and the difference between a novice and an expert illustrates the point well[3]. But people expect advancement, whether its appropriate or not, and that’s a reality that it’s worth paying attention to. They’re not sheep or fools – they know what’s fun and they have every reason to expect how to go about it.

So the challenge is how to come up with a system of “horizontal” advancement – one that can model characters growing and changing without them necessarily getting more powerful.

Spirit of the Century uses a model that allows for rearrangement within the existing framework. There’s a little verticality in that you might gain a few more stunts, but your core list of skills and aspects doesn’t get any longer. You can just swap things out within them. This made a lot of sense in intellectual terms: SOTC characters are already on top of their game, and since there’s no guarantee that ever player will be at every session, the desire was to keep there form being any kind of power disparity. But this was not ultimately satisfying to players, and advancement is a popular tack-on. As much as this made sense for us, it’s not a tack I would suggest anyone take.

For the Road to Amber MUSH, we added a currency to the game called “Focus” – it accrued much more quickly than XP, but it capped out at 10 points, so it was a “use it or lose it resource”. In game, it represented time offscreen and how it was spent, so it could be use to do things like learn lores, make items, do research, pursue agendas and so on. It couldn’t be used to improve skills directly, but learning lores or solving puzzled often opened opportunities to spend advancement on skills that would not normally be available.

It was a gigantic success, and by my understanding the idea has been adapted to a number of other MUSHes, with the details changed appropriately from game to game. My conclusion from this is startlingly banal: people love to spend points[4] and by giving them more points to spend, they got more excited about spending them.[5] It would not take much tweaking to adapt this to the tabletop, simply handing out points at downtime rather than counting on a timed distribution.

The trick, however, is what you can spend them on. Training is a good option, if your system supports that idea. Ritual magic and crafting absolutely. Research and Lores[6] if your system has those, though few do in any kind of useful ways.

Personally, I like the idea of using these points for building and maintaining relationships. NPCs are a subject that can be handled more effectively on the tabletop than in a large scale game, and it would not be hard to marry some currency to a relationship map. This idea that relationships can be maintained or strengthened can also apply to things like resources and contacts. Certainly, there’s a bit of a balancing act: you want there to be enough cost of maintenance to encourage re-investment, but not so much to just feel like a treadmill.

Now, there are other ways to approach this too, and I encourage thinking about the other ways you can provide your players rewards they can spend. The alternative is that you end up with painful treadmills, like the Amber DRPG advancement model (which was ultimately just a joke on the players)

1 – Point based systems have the advantage of allowing the game to have all the advancement “baked in” by simply starting the characters with a healthy dose of XP/points and then giving very little (or no) further advancement. WHile you can technically do this with a level based system, it tends to only work well for short games, since advancement is such an essential part of play in a level-baed game.

2 – WEGs Star Wars posited that the “Skywalker gene” allowed a character to advance in force skills for half the normal cost, which is why your jedi was never going to be as awesome as Luke. This was, to put it bluntly, kind of crappy.[7]

3 – Drastic advancement tends to go hand in hand with fantastic elements. This is partly genre habit, but it’s also because it is easier to model drastic, concrete differences between magics/psi/superpowers and so on than it is within the realm of normal human endeavor. Not that drastic differences don’t exist in the mundane world, but learning enough to grasp them is a lot harder than learning to read a spell block.

4 – It may seem silly to couch it in those terms, but don’t laugh it off entirely. There’s a reason that white wolf keeps using dots to represent what are ultimately numeric values: it’s just fun to fill in little circles. Never underestimate the awesome power of trivial joys.

5 – Curiously, this abstraction also addressed a lot of the problems of more structured “downtime” mechanics. If we had put in rules for training and research and other subsystems, people would have never touched them, but by giving them points to spend, they motivated _themselves_.

6 – Oh Weapons of the Gods, you beautiful, beautiful, intensely-painful to replicate thing.

7. But not as stupid as the Immaculate Conception of Darth Vader.

So, as of this morning, the RPGNow Haiti contribution level is up around eighty five thousand dollars. For some context, Wells Fargo gave $100k[1], which is to say, we’re awesome.

But this is the internet, and some people can’t see a beautiful pool without wanting to drop a turd in it. Then point at the turd. Then touch themselves inappropriately. Intellectually, this isn’t much of a shock, but it still ends up bothering me a lot.

See, for me, the reason I chose to contribute through RPGNow rather than some other venue was partly influenced by the awesome bundle of free games[2] but it was more a matter of my sense of identity. I’m a gamer, and this was the action that my tribe was taking, and I wanted to back that play. As a tribe, we tend to be pretty bad at organizing for this sort of stuff, so when the opportunity arose, it was amazing to see just how profound the outpouring of support from creators and players has been. [3]

And that’s why the crazy people bug me more than they should. They’re part of my tribe too. Sure, some of them try to self-select out of it by associating themselves with some narrow slice of the tribe or try to expel some groups from the tribe by force of will, but neither of those approaches affect me much – it’s my tribe, and I’m proud to be a member. And by extension, I am ashamed when a member of my tribe goes off the deep end. I might be able to handle it if it was just the Timecube style conspiracy theorists, but the petty stuff gets to me too, so let me just lay down this shout to the void. I invite the Internet to share this when needed.

1 – Totally anecdotal.

2 – Things I Can’t believe I Have To Say: OF COURSE you’re not going to find every game in the bundle useful. There are a lot of different games there. Shock. But if your decision-making process is “Well, I would contribute, but the free prize is just not good enough” then you may not want to publicize that fact.

3 – More things I can’t believe I have to say: Publishers are not getting any kickbacks or hidden benefits for their contribution to the bundle. Every publisher makes their own decision regarding what to contribute, and most of them (including Evil Hat) have included supplemental material, but there are no shortage of publishers with a single flagship game that have slapped that down on the counter. But whatever the publishers put up, they did it because they wanted to, not for any other reason. In fact, the bundle is hurting most of the creators who contributed (and rpgnow too, I am quite certain[4]): the combination of the draw of the bundle and the impact on the site as a whole has really cut down all other sales.

4 – Another thing I can’t believe I have to say: As much as this might boggle some people, the invisible magic that makes computers go is not actually free, even if it looks it to you. Bandwidth, storage, invoicing, administration, support and money-handling all cost money, even for a company which sells entirely electronic products like RPGnow. Even setting aside lost revenue from other products, and even setting aside the cost of the matching they’re doing, this bundle is costing them money, and very nearly nuking their site. And they do it anyway because these are the tools they have, and you make a difference with what you’ve got.

My brother came to me yesterday concerned that he’d totally screwed up a skill challenge. He’d been in a hurry, and had pulled down some WOTC content to run as is. He didn’t comment on the rest of it, but the Skill Challenge had really bugged him because it just didn’t work. We talked a little in general terms, but then he mailed me a copy of the challenge in question.

It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a dog. I’m not going to drill into the details because I don’t want to bust on someone else’s work, but I’m going to extract a couple general guidelines of things NOT to do.

1. Treat Complexity as Complexity
This is an easy mistake to make. After all, it’s called complexity, right? But the problem is it’s not. It’s just a measure of how often your players are going to need to roll the dice, which means what it should really be considered is a measure of how interesting a skill challenge is going to be. A skill challenge that uses few skills and is basically just doing the same task over and over again should be a low complexity challenge, especially if it’s really just a transition between other scenes where you have the group go “Gosh, I’m glad we have a ranger/rogue/druid/whatever”.[1]

2. Make Heavy Use of Aid Another
While the Aid Another action (make a roll against a target of 10 to give an ally a +2) is technically a combat action, it is so commonly applied to skill checks that I’d be shocked if it has not gotten the official nod somewhere by now. This is a good fallback for making sure everyone can participate in a Skill challenge: even if you don’t have the appropriate skill, you can usually Aid Another. The problem is that Aid another is duck tape[2] not mortar.

If most of the players at the table are performing Aid Another actions, that is pretty much a hallmark of a very boring skill challenge. Not only is Aid Another very much like doing nothing, once the characters are past level 5 or so, that DC of 10 starts getting trivial on stats and level bonus alone. But worse than that, every Aid Another roll is needlessly extending the challenge because it’s not going to get counted as a success or a failure. If you have, for example, a complexity 3 challenge with only one character with the appropriate skill and everyone else forced to Aid Another, your best case scenario is that you’ll have to have 8 rounds of rolling to succeed. How exciting does that sound?

It’s also worth noting that Aid Another can wreak holy havoc with the difficulties of your challenge, especially once the AA actions are pretty much a guaranteed success. It is entirely possible to get bonuses so high that rolling is pointless, and in doing so you’ve managed to make a boring event even more boring.

3. Make Outcomes Universal
Ok, this one I’m a little more sympathetic to. The idea is simple: have triggered events that will occour at various points within the skill challenge, such as attacks or scenes with NPCs. That’s pretty cool in the abstract, but it can get pretty lame when these event have no bearing on the skill challenge. That is to say, if the players are going to get attacked by a band of orcs after 2 failures or four successes, then that is intensely lame if that’s all there is to it. If the event is going to be threaded into the skill challenge, then the events of the skill challenge should color the events. I’m a fan of having different outcomes on success or failure, but if you must have the same events (like the Orc Attack) then at the very least frame them differently based on whether they were triggered by a threshold of successes or failures. [3]

Bottom line, not only does this make the skill challenges more dynamic, it is more respectful of your players, and it feels less like they’re just getting railroaded.

There are other points I could dwell on, like “Pay attention to your difficulty numbers” or “If you include one-off outcomes, be clear about how they could happen” but I would eventually run myself out of steam, so let’s just leave it at a nice, tidy 3. Hopefully those will help next time you’re going to use a skill challenge, or create your own.

1 – In a lot of these situations, I’m more inclined to just run what I call a “Table Check”. Everyone at the table rolls once, total impact is shaped by the proportion of outcomes. It can be simple majority, or it can be that some number of successes (as low as one) are needed. This can be a much faster way to handle transitory skill challenges in a way that lets the experts strut their stuff without needing to pretend that every endurance roll on your journey across the steppes is actually a thrilling event.

2 – Random aside: I ended up discovering in the deep cable that it really is duck tape, but the misuse (duct tape) is so prevalent as to have supplanted it. If you doubt this, I suggest trying to use it on your ducts sometime.

3 – My favorite trick is “Winner gets to place his minis last”.

The element of the Checklist Manifesto that really grabbed my attention in regards to RPGs was what wasn’t included in them. A well designed checklist assumes that you already know how to do your job (fly a plane, remove an appendix, whatever) and does not tell you how to do that. Instead it acts as a reminder for the little things that are more work to keep in mind than not.

That assumption of competence is an incredibly rich idea, and when applied to RPGs it raises and interesting question regarding rules. If rules were to provide the same sort of structure – assuming you know what you’re doing and just providing some support fo rthe stuff that’s a pain to keep in mind – then it really upends the cart in terms of how to judge certain games. It’s an argument for why the parts left out of a design are more essential than may be assumed. We’re not talking about a fruitful void here, we’re talking about lots of little voids, about the very weave of the game being intentionally more there than not.

Compare two really excellent games: D&D 4e and Mouseguard. [1] Both of them have very cleanly established rules for what and how to do things, but there are profound differences in how those things are structured. D&D is designed to provide all the tools you need to handle a situation, but the framework that surrounds that situations (how it ends up intersecting with play). There are guidelines and advice, sure, but it’s all a bit mushy until the fight starts. In contrast, Mouseguard is all structure, all the time – there’s a framework that surrounds everything at every level of play.

Viewed as checklists, I would say that 4e’s checkboxes are “further apart” than Mouseguard. That is to say, there are a lot more assumptions in 4e’s structure than there are in Mouseguard. This is not to say Mouseguard leaves no room to color outside the lines – it absolutely does – but the differing level of structure can make it easy for a player to be more comfortable with one or the other depending upon how much structure they’re looking for. Sometimes you want a lot of structure, because it gives you a solid architecture to build on. Sometimes you want just enough structure to give you more freedom than you’d have without it. Sometimes you’ll fall somewhere else on this particular axis, but wherever it is that you fall, stop and think about how that structure is impacting you, and whether it’s building walls to keep you safe or keep you trapped.

1 – Yes, they are excellent games.

On the off chance you haven’t heard, RPGNow has a bundled of over $1400[1] games available for download if you make a $20 donation to Haiti relief. This is slamming them so be patient with any slowness, but you can order here, and and check the total progress on the front page. It’s over $10k last I checked.

In addition to being a great cause, this is a fantastic deal. There are so many products in this bundle that they can’t show them all, but Fred’s got the whole list over on his blog. Even if you don’t care about the humanitarian side of things, this list is full of games that are worth $20 all by themselves. If the idea of gaming pdfs makes you break out in bleeding hives then, ok, you can give some money (and maybe you can consider it, even if you also buy the bundle) but if you’re even _faintly_ curious about small press publishing, electronic game distribution, or just plain awesome games, then you should pick this up for entirely selfish reasons. The bundle is that good. A few of the ones that jumped out at me include:

• BASH! Basic Action Super Heroes (New and Improved)
• Beast Hunters
• Chronica Feudalis
• Colonial Gothic: Secrets
• Cortex System Role Playing Game
• Counter Collection 4th Edition Paragon 1
• Damnation Decade
• Dork Covenant
• Full Light, Full Steam
• Hollow Earth Expedition Earth Drill
• MARS: Savage Worlds Edition
• Piledrivers and Powerbombs: Chokeslam of Darkness Edition
• Portrait of a Villain – The Desire
• QAGS Second Edition
• Serenity Role Playing Game
• Seven Leagues roleplaying game of Faerie
• Shaolin Squirrels : Nuts of Fury
• Spirit of the Season
• Summerland Revised and Expanded Edition
• The Kerberos Club
• The Squared Circle:Wrestling RPG
• Thousand Suns: Foundation Transmissions
• Thousand Suns: Transmissions from Piper
• Three Sixteen
• Thrilling Tales 2nd Edition (Savage Worlds)
• Trail of Cthulhu Player’s Guide
• [Savage Worlds] Strike Force 7 – Savaged!

And those are just the ones I know are good. There are SO MANY MORE, and even if Sturgeons’ law is in full force, you’re still going to get a great deal.

1 – Not a typo. There are times I am damned proud to be part of this hobby.

I finished the previously mentioned Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande, a few days back. It’s a short book, slim and copiously footnoted, and I suspect I’ve spent more time thinking about it than I actually spent reading it. It’s a good book, a really good book, and well worth a read if you deal with complex activities (be they for work or gaming) but it’s due for a rocky reception.

The book is pretty much what it says on the tin: an argument for using checklists. Gawande’s own interest in them came out of their application in surgery, but he does research in places like construction and aviation where checklists are an essential part of maintaining safety and quality in situations that are simply too big to fit in any one person’s head.

This is summarized particularly well in the chapter on construction, where checklists are used to manage the ocmplexities of building a real building that’s not going to fall down on anyone. In the past, this complete vision was the job of the Master Builder, the one guy who knew enough about what was required that he could personally issue orders and review work to make sure everything was going as it should. As building got more complex, that model stopped being viable, and expertise got distributed, with checklist systems evolving as the means for keepig it all together.

Gawande saw a lot of similarities between the historical master builder and the modern day surgeon. Historically, the surgeon is the rock star, the all-knowing figure who has the rest of the room dance to his tune. But, Gawande argues, surgery has grown much more complex over time, and depends on more factors than any one person can reliably handle, no matter how skilled they are. To make sure that stupid details aren’t missed, and to help the team in the OR work together, he made the case for using a surgical checklist.

But that was easier said than done. Construction checklists are huge affairs, concerned with minute details on projects that may take place over years. There’s no time for that in the OR, so Gawande looked to examples in another complex, high pressure field where lives are on th eline every day: aviation. Like surgery, modern planes are incredibly complex, and pilots have developed a culture of using checklists to deal with this complexity. There are basic checklists for everyday tasks, but there are also checklists for a huge array of potential problem scenarios.

The research and methodology that goes into these lists is intense. Whenever there’s a problem on one of the commercial airlines, part of the post mortem is to put together a checklist to help a future pilot deal with it if it should ever come up. Given that these may be life or death situations with little or no time, they have a lot of very specific guidelines and restraints on the designs of a checklist. It must be short enough to be easily referenced , but comprehensive enough to actually be useful. What’s more, there also needs to be a culture of use – checklists save planes because pilots are trained to use them in every situation.

This brevity and clarity seemed to match Gawande’s needs in the OR, but his attempts to create a model that will work (in his hospital and in others) demonstrates that it’s much more complicated to make a good checklist than it appears. The process of how he builds it, an dhow it is deployed and tests it is pretty interesting in its own right, but it also highlights a lot of issues he’s addressed along the way.

This is the kind of book that usually drives me nuts. The core argument is a pretty simple one; the sort that would make an excellent article in the New Yorker or The Atlantic, and when things like that turn into books they usually get puffy and diluted. This proves the odd exceptions for two reasons: first, as noted it’s a pretty short book. Second, and perhaps more importantly, getting this simple message across is such a profoundly uphill battle that I don’t begrudge him the space to make every argument he can.

This is a good, practical book with concretely useful advice, well presented and well argued, and I think it’s going to be well received, but I also think it’s primarily going to get treated as something that will be most useful for other people. The benefits are so clear and obvious that they can’t be ignored, but it’s very easy to say “oh, they don’t apply to me” because, as we know, we are all special snowflakes.

If I sound a little cynical here, I admit my experience from talking with people about every other organizational discipline, from Getting Things Done to project management[1], has lead me to that perspective. The majority of smart people hate lists because they’re either too smart to need them, or because they’re a straightjacket, a limiter on creativity. Gawande addresses this much more politely by talking about our heroic ideal of the guy who carries it all on his back. We don’t celebrate collaboration or procedure nearly as much as we do the heroic individual, and we treat things like checklists as a threat to ideal.

This is why I hope people will read the book, if only to realize that the checklists they envision are nto what we’re talking about. Yes, there are absolutely production-line checklists out there which are used in place of any skill or knowledge. They have a place in business for things like building a Big Mac, and when you say “checklist” that’s the first thing that people think of. But not only is that far form the case, that sort of checklist skips past the two biggest strengths of the idea.

The first is that the person reading the list knows what they’re doing. A pilot’s checklists does not tell them how to fly the plane. No checklist could. it takes years of training and experience to do so, and the checklists are written with the assumption that that’s the case. The purpose of the list is not to tell the pilot (or surgeon or whatever) how to do his job, it is simply to run through the stupid, mundane stuff that it’s easy to overlook because you know what you’re doing too well.

The second is that the list is a social object (though Gawande is never a big enough dork to use that term) that gives the team working on things a common reference[2]. This is powerful ina number of ways. In situations of unequal authority, like an operating room or cockpit, the checklist gives the lower-status person the means to speak up because they’re addressing the checklist, not challenging the alpha. The checklist also demands points to pause and review, if only for a minute, to get everyone on the same page.

It is only natural to focus on the idea of the checklist as automation, since it definitely has a role in that. That’s the bogeyman of our time, and we all have incentive (both for our pride and our hopes of keeping a job) to consider our jobs to be things that cannot be automated. They depend on our talent, knowledge, skills and expertise, and that cannot be boiled down to a simple list.

But even so, the question is whether there is no part of your job that could benefit from this sort of review? Do your complex, brilliant plans not also need to be implemented? Do mistakes made on obvious things cost your company money? Are other people stupid? If you answer ‘yes’ to any of these, then this book is almost certainly worth a read.[3]

1 – 3o say this book has useful applications to project management is a vast understatement, but that’s definitely not Gawande’s perspective on things, so there’s no handholding for PMs.
2 – Some lists also include explicit social elements. The big surprise for me was that the construction plans include explicit tasks for having people talk. The checklist does not dictate anything about the discussion besides that A and B need to talk about X. If that discussion produces more things to do, they go into the process. If not, then it’s just checked off and moved on.
3 – And yes, gaming is a complex, social activity with lots of moving parts. There are a lot of lessons that translate interestingly to RPGs, but that’s very much fodder for its own post.