The only time I can write a post like this is when I’m not quietly mad at anyone. Otherwise, it ends up being a passive aggressive snipe at something bugging me. Thankfully, I’m still in a pretty good mood post dreamation, and a disagreement I had with the inestimable Rob Bohl on couldn’t really be elaborated on twitter. And as we all no “To long for twitter” is code for “Blogfodder” I ended up answering that issue, and throwing in a few more tidbits of things to remember while navigating the Internet.

Unintended Costs of Polite Anonymity
It is not unreasonable to want to call out a bad behavior without going so far as to actually name the bad actor. It’s a restrained form of shaming, and the assumption si that, by speaking publically, you are communicating to the bad actor “I saw what you did, this is what I think about it, but I’m giving you a chance to save face by not calling you out by name.” This is quite civilized, but it has a non-obvious toxic impact.

The problem is this: a lot of polite people who are listening are intensely aware of how easy it is to accidentally engage in bad behaviors. You might be tired or distracted or stressed and as a result end up being an ass without ever realizing you’re doing it. When they hear a blanket statement, they immediately seize up and try to figure out what they might have done, since this could easily be about them. This is amazingly stressful, and eventually it leads to very nice people not giving a shit because it is the only way to stay sane.

Plus, as a bonus, if the bad actor thought their behavior was ok, they may never get the message. That’s kind of lose-lose.

Suggestion: If you want to call someone out without naming them, include enough corroborating detail to keep people from wondering if it is them.

“Obvious” is a Red Flag
You are never more at risk of sounding like an asshole than when you are discussing something obvious. Once we accept something as obvious it permeates our thought and speech in ways that we are not always aware of. This is invisible to our friends who also consider it obvious because it creates no discrepancies in their view. But when talking with someone who does not see this thing as obvious, these are obvious red flags, and they’re really off putting. On even the nicest, most off-putting of folks, this behavior can come off as zealotry.

That may sound too strong, but it comes down to this: Once we consider something obvious, we stop bothering to discuss it. Usually it’s because we don’t see a need to do so, but sometimes it’s a concious choice because we’ve grown tired of “that discussion”. I’m sympathetic to this, but to an outside observer, all positions that can’t be discussed look the same. Your perfectly reasonable position gets put in the same bucket as flat earthers and holocaust deniers because your decision not to justify it is indistinguishable from your being unable to justify it.

This is far from insurmountable. Once such a disconnect is identified, it’s easy to address. You just unpack your argument, and discuss the point. No problem. Except, of course, because this thing is obvious, then clearly this other guy is a TOTAL IDIOT for not seeing it, and it would be best to treat him like such.

Or, perhaps not.

Suggestion: I’m not saying to go back to core assumptions every time you talk with someone. That would be barbaric. We all know how to discuss things rationally with people we disagree with, if we can bother to use those tools. Just keep them in mind if you find yourself thinking that the person you’re talking to is missing something obvious. If you go to the tools, you might be surprised to discover who is actually missing something.

Disagreement is not Disrespect
The world is full of awesome people I think are wrong. Sometimes really wrong.

This does not make them less awesome.

It just means I disagree with them.

Suggestion: Seriously, if you can’t get your head around this one, I am not sure you should be allowed on the internet.[1]

The Support or Opposition of Fools is No Useful Metric
If you progress in any field of knowledge, you will discover a really common pattern, as differing levels of understanding and sophistication express themselves in the same fashion. Think about any book that you were told was great in high school, but you hated, but you really dug in college, but now think is tripe. Your current viewpoint is a nuanced, rich on built on experience and understanding, but in the abstract it’s the same opinion as a snotty 14 year old. Obviously, our currently held opinion is always the best[2], but without the ability to distinguish it from a similar opinion held for different reasons, we find ourselves grouped with EVERYONE who holds our opinion.

This is not limited to knowledge – it extends to opinions as well. If I am counting votes, I cannot distinguish between the 20 year business veteran who voted for John McCain because he believed his economic policies would be the right solution for the country and the guy who doesn’t want a black man in office.

This sort of difference is usually easily sorted out one on one, but on the internet, we have such a tiny lens that it can be impossible to make these distinctions between people, especially in places like forums. If 100 people bash your product is it equally likely they were too stupid to understand it as it is you were too stupid to explain it. Of course, if 100 people praise it, it’s equally likely they’re deluded.

Suggestion: You cannot take numbers seriously on the internet. Concentrate on individuals and discussions. It is too easy to make yourself crazy looking at tiny slivers of data that people throw, spit or otherwise excrete up online and try to make a pattern out of it. The monkey brain DEMANDS a pattern. But you need to give it a banana and tell it to shut up. You can get a lot out of conversations, but almost nothing out of noise.

Jargon is a Social Tool
Jargon does 2 things.

1. It helps a group communicate among itself by providing a shorthand for ideas the group values.
2. It provides a method for self-identification within a group while simultaneously excluding outsiders.

This means that the value of #1 needs to be balanced against the general shittiness of #2. The problem, of course, is that the group tends to overvalue #1 and underestimate #2 and most outsiders are insensitive to #1 but highly sensitive to #2.

Suggestion: I cannot think of a single group that does not fall into this trap, so I can’t just say “don’t do it.” All I can really suggest is thinking about it a little bit more, from both sides. It is most dangerous when unacknowledged.

Corollary: If you’re going to use jargon, at least be honest about it. Jargon that waffles or changes definition at convenience is basically a big red flashing light indicating that its purpose is purely social.

1 -And if your instinctive response was “but what if they’re really wrong, like, morally wrong, like, want to kill puppies or something? What then mister smart guy?” then my answer for your has three parts.

1. We are not 8. We know the difference.
2. If you really like and respect puppy killers, I don’t think the problem is with them
3. You’re a douche.

2 – Obviously!

I was thinking about language this morning. Not in any deep, profound way but in terms of my own decision to take French in school rather than Spanish. In retrospect I’d have done it differently, but I grew up a short drive from Quebec, so it was not completely crazy to consider French something practical to learn rather than merely a language that keeps being taught out of habit due to its former position of primacy in diplomacy and western civilization. If my kid insists on making the same mistake when he grows up, more power to him, but I am going to make sure he understands the decision better than I did.

Anyway, this ties back into gaming because it lead to me thinking about languages in 4e, and in games in general. It is almost always worth looking at how games handle languages because it tends to reflect a lot of the underlying thought that went into the system. This is because, to be blunt, differences in language are very rarely any fun at all to play, and trying to simulate the role of language with the same diligence that one might a sword swing is a path to madness[1]. There are a ton of ways to handle the pricing and levels, form cheap and abstract to broad and nuanced, but for the most part it’s all moot because most characters only learn new languages if they must: otherwise they have better things to spend points on.

Fantasy settings have an interesting out in this regard, and 4e seizes upon it with both hands. Building on the long standing idea of “Common” as a language, they’ve established a fixed, very limited, list of languages of the setting with almost everything in the setting speaking at least 2 languages, thus guaranteeing that scenes where people WANT to talk but can’t are quite rare. That’s smart, and it’s very playable. It was probably the right way to go.

But it’s really, really boring.

Like any genuinely complicated thing, language provides a vast tapestry of story opportunities. The underlying issues of understanding and communication are incredibly powerful, and they’ve spawned thousands of neat idea. As with many things in life, the interesting and powerful stuff comes out of the points of friction rather than where everything works smoothly. Languages, in 4e, work smoothly and as a result they are a bit of a dead zone.

Now, this is not going to be an argument for adding more languages to D&D. It’s hard to play well, and I’m the last guy to demand accuracy trump play. But I want to hold It up as emblematic to something that is a constant bugbear of setting and adventure design. Gamers tend to be completists, and when we design things, we want all the parts to work together smoothly. Leaving things incomplete is so hard for us to handle that there’s an entire business model built upon showing only part of something and then maybe revealing the rest in drips and drabs in subsequent supplements. We want neat, tidy packages.

And heck, maybe that’s some of why we game. On some level, an RPG is an assertion that the world and all the people in it can be understood. That all the myriad complexities we face every day can be boiled down and remixed into something that follows rules and logic, and even the capricious nature of luck is bounded within the system. Fantastic elements are only tangential to the escapism to be found in a game; the real power is in the mastery of situation it provides. Wherever we stand in our lives, in a game, the world can be known, and we are the ones who know it.

That is made much simpler when the world of the game makes sense. If the world of a game didn’t make sense, it would challenge this illusion of control.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, to hell with that.

History, heck *life*, is messy. It’s full of contradictory, nonsensical things that happened because one guy was pissed or another guy was crazy. It’s a big, beautiful mess, and as far as I’m concerned, gaming is at its most rewarding (artistically, emotionally, practically and personally) when we embrace that rather than try to hide it behind an illusion or order. And yes, that’s hard. Maybe really, really hard. It puts the burden of the act on us as people, because no system of rules or cleverly written setting is enough to even scratch the surface of things. This is why the best games don’t attempt to do this for us, they give us tools to help us do it better ourselves.

All of which comes back to this: when you’re thinking about the world of your game, try to leave it messy. Sure, you can pick and choose what messes you want to deal with[2], but the important thing is that you, as a GM and a creator, should be opening loops[3], not closing them. An author needs to close loops to make a good story, but a GM needs to open them so that his players can close them. Open loops are messy, and they bother us instinctively. We want closure. But the thing to remember is that your players share that instinct, and all you need to do is leave them the opportunity to do the job.

Embrace the mess. It’s where the game really comes alive.

1 – One illustration: if your system represents linguistic fluency, how do you represent the character’s native linguistic skill? If languages are hard to learn (expensive) or you put skill caps on starting skills, then how awkward is it to bolt on an exception for language? Kind of undercuts the idea that the system’s reflecting reality rather than arbitrary restrictions.

2 – For all my talk I totally avoid language whenever possible because it’s a pain in the ass.

3 – A loop can be pretty much anything started but unfinished. It’s opened by creating a situation: “the prince kills the king”, or “I need to buy milk” and it’s “closed” when its resolved: “The prince is punished (or crowned)” or “I have bought milk”. Loops are not a narrative thing, they are a life thing that is powerful enough to resonate into narrative.

I was talking to Dave (one of many Daves) at Dreamation and he mentioned that he really didn’t like it when GMs took certain actions to screw over players. Now, I’m a big supporter of GMs being mean, so I questioned this, and he gave an example of a GM looking at his players, realizing that they had no direction, and having a large price get put on their head to kickstart them into action.

I argued a few points for how that could make things more interesting, and the all important point that it’s unreasonable to expect that bad things wouldn’t happen to adventurers – dealing with bad things is kind of the point. Despite this, I had to concede when Dave laid down the killer point; that this had been done with no input from the players. The problem was not that it was mean, but rather that it was a betrayal of the implicit agreement between the players and the GM. That, I had to admit, was something of a problem.

Worse, it was probably an unintentional problem. The GM almost certainly was trying to create the kind of good, fruitful trouble that generates play, but he chose to do so in a way that the players took as a slap to the face.[1] That presented an interesting challenge: how is GM supposed to distinguish good trouble (trouble that drives play, engages players and makes for fun) from bad trouble (trouble that feels arbitrary and capricious, and fails to engage the players, possibly even upsetting them).

My advice was pretty simple. The trick is that the GM doesn’t need to do bad things: instead he should set up the situation so that the bad things is balanced precariously above the players, clearly ready to fall. The important thing is that it’s clear that the bad thing will happen if the players take no action, but they have the ability to stop it if they do act.[2] This serves to important purposes: first, it gives clear motivation for action, which may otherwise be lacking. Second, if the bad thing comes to pass (either through failure or choosing to pursue a different problem) it doesn’t feel like GM fiat because the critical decisions and actions came from the players.[3]

Put more simply, if you kill a character’s dad, that’s a jerk move. If you tell them that an old enemy has come to town to kill their dad, that’s an adventure.

1 – Tolerances will totally vary by table, based on taste and trust, but I suspect that more tables are close to Dave than they are to some of the pain-eaters I know.

2 – this is, by the way, totally oriented towards adventure gaming. Many of these assumptions will be entirely off base in other styles of play.

3 – Now, this is not to say bad things should never happen. Unexpected badness is the classic initiating event of an adventure, and players are ok with that because that’s the nature of the genre. Starting a game with the death of our family and destruction of our village is totally in bounds, because we begin play _from_ that point. However, the kind of capricious badness that a lot of people expect in the second act does not have similar blanket exemptions. If everyone at the table already has the sensibility that expects it, then great, but if they don’t then the darkness before the dawn just ends up looking like the GM taking a piss on the group.[4]

4 -This is one of those explicit divergences between tabletop play and the fiction it models. All that conflict and tension that makes for great stories has to ground out through your players. If they’re not synced up with you, then you can expect to smell a lot of ozone and burnt plastic.

Back from Dreamation. Survived, had a good time. As ever, I was delighted with all the people I saw, and frustrated with all the people I saw only in passing for moments at a time (or, in some cases, only by secondhand reports that they were in attendance at all). In retrospect I do wish I’d worked harder to sign up for things. Not that I did not have a lot of fun filling time, but I would have enjoyed getting in a little more play. Of course, crashing early Friday with an upset stomach (resulting in my missing a 3:16 game) didn’t help either.

The other issue is that Jamie has retrained me to crash early and get up early, which is very much not the schedule of the convention. A lot of cool stuff happens after midnight, after I’m in bed, and almost no one is alive as early as I wake up, and that disconnect is kind of wearing. No easy solution for it, but it’s something I need to remember. It did not help that my usual breakfast plans were complicated by the hotel charging $20 for their merely-ok breakfast buffet.

Still and all, it was a good time, and as always, it left me thinking. I know for some people Dreamation, with its excess of indie games, is a triumph of certain ideas of gaming, but for me it is always a reminder that theory is a pale shadow of play. I love these deep ideas and crazy system thoughts, but they smash to pieces under the weight of a good joke or that one guy with a crazy idea. For me, that’s a good thing: theory and system can be seen so clearly by me that I forget about the power of the unexpected. I am ultimately in this for the messy, human stuff at the table, and these pristine tools and ideas are never so fine as when they start getting some mud on them.

It also really underscored my current thesis in game design, and I ended up vocalizing this to a few people. System design doesn’t excite me as much these days. It interests me, but it has no dragons that I have not slain or made peace with. I like solving problems or thinking about it, but the real challenges are elsewhere. Specifically I think they’re in setting and adventure design. To underscore this, look at all the concepts that have been introduced into RPG systems in the past few decades, then compare that with the number of improvements we’ve made in the technology of setting and adventure design. There absolutely have been improvements[1] but the difference in the number of them is absolutely staggering. This is odd because the impact of these ideas is huge, and I feel that thought about them has been stymied by a need to give system precedence.

Anyway, not looking to delve into any deep insights here, just mentioning that the con makes me think.

Oh, worth noting, the Indie Roundtable went well in that I think it was very useful to the 4 people who asked questions about their games (thank you Sean, Dave, Andrew and Shoshana) but it was also a little bit sparsely attended – there were very few new faces for me, even after having missed a year, and most of those were already community folks (including Ryan “Ryan’s Awesome Idea” Stoughton), and that was a bit disappointing. That said, I am willing to attribute some of that to the fact that there was no way to know where it was taking place unless you already knew. I love Dreamation, but the roundtable was on the seminar track, and as far as I can tell that is at the very bottom of the queue of priorities. That is, I think, A great pity, and something worth fixing, but I always forget about it until I actually get there each year, especially because the have cool people doing seminars a lot of the time. [2]

What may also be starting some discussions is that Vinnie, the guy who runs Dreamation, pitched a couple of ideas at the roundtable. The first was to start videotaping games to help teach them. It’s not an unreasonable thought: Not all of the small games make sense out of the box, and having some sort of example to see would probably be useful. Unfortunately, the logistics might hurt. Setting aside the need to edit any recording down to something short and not boring (an activity that Vinnie offered to help with) I don’t think DVDs are really an effective means of distribution for it, for a host of reasons. However, I admit it might make for a good Youtube channel.

The other idea was to add a third con to the Dreamation/Dexcon family, one focused on game design and publishing. This is, I think, a response to the weirdly bifurcated nature of the indie games presence at Dreamation. On one hand, there’s a strong community element to it, with playtests, new designs and experimentation, all focused on the designer community. On the other hand, there are a million-zillion games being run and played. There are more Indie games than there are RPGA games at Dreamation. That’s crazy, and awesome, and it’s one of the big selling points of the con. So the idea of recognizing that split with a dedicated publishing con is kind of appealing to me, but I also admit that one more thing on my schedule makes life all the more complicated. If it happens, I’ll probably go, but if it doesn’t I might settle for trying to shore up the Seminar track.

Most cynically, I worry a lot that we, as a community, have been less about bringing in new people than we have about occupying the elevated position and holding it. It’s possible this sense of entrenchment is simply a result of the fact that, since I’ve had a kid, I have not been as able to keep track of all the new games coming out, but from where I stand, I know that new games are still coming out, but I am not seeing a corresponding growth of community. If that’s true, it’s kind of a big deal.

Anyway, because I’ve been rambly, I’ll reward your patience with a special bonus. I was talking with Chad Underkoffler about the role of randomness and its strengths and weaknesses, and in the middle of that discussion, I realized I could rip off Greg Stolze’s Reign[3] and get the best of both worlds with Dragon Age chargen. Now, this _is_ a geek solution, in that it requires tools that are not in the box, but I don’t think that’s going to be a problem for anyone geeky enough that they have Strong Opinions about random chargen.

Dragon Age Optional Rule:
Reduced Randomness Stat Generation

Step One: All Stats start at 0.

Step Two: Roll 11d8. If you don’t have 11d8, roll 1d8 eleven times and just track things one at a time.

Step Three: Each number corresponds to a stat, as follows:

1. Communication
2. Constitution
3. Cunning
4. Dexterity
5. Magic
6. Perception
7. Strength
8. Willpower

For each die that shows the appropriate number, increase that stat by 1.

Step Four: You may swap the values of any two stats.

For Example:
If you roll 6, 5, 1, 7, 5, 1, 8, 3, 6, 7, 7
Sort them out and you get: 1,1,3,5,5,6,6,7,7,7,8

Then the stat distribution is:
Communication +2
Constitution +0
Cunning +1
Dexterity +0
Magic +2
Perception + 2
Strength +3
Willpower +1

Simple as that.[4] The idea is hopefully obvious: You get the kind of organic, unexpected distribution of stats that randomness provides, but there’s no concern of one person rolling higher than another. The idea can also be tweaked easily enough to support other approaches. For example, you could start all stats at -1, but roll 19d11 – that would definitely make for some interesting outcomes.

1 – To rattle some off, Weapons of the God’s Lore Sheets, Alderac’s Hard & Soft Points, Savage World’s Plot Point books,

2 – On this point I also want to give a shout out to Dave Hill and Filamena Young, who were doing really cool seminars at the con, one on Worldbuilding and one on designing a game in under 2 hours. Not only are they thinking cool thoughts, they are taking them out there and testing their metal against the reality of con-goers. That’s badass.

3 – Which has the best random chargen of any game I can think of.

4 – It’s 11 dice because the semi-official point-buy system is 10 points, distributed as you see fit, none higher than +3. Because I feel the point buy should be the most conservative yardstick, I give one more die (which is to say, one more point) as a reward for going random. GMs are welcome to alter this number as they see fit in their own game, and I note that an extra die in the stat roll is a fantastic reward for player contributions, so long as the contribution gap doesn’t get too big.

Short one today, since I’m not actually writing because I’m currently driving to Dreamation. I just want to put forward an idea that may be radical or may be offensive, but which I hope may ultimately be of use to people out there who are thinking about writing and distributing your own game. That idea is this:

Maybe you should be writing in PowerPoint.

The rules and process for producing a printed book are well known, and we know what those books look like. Even if we’re not going to ever print a book, we write our books to look like that. It’s tradition. Habit even.

But there are other people out in the world who are doing interesting things with ebooks, with more of an emphasis on readability and presentation, books tuned to the screen and to printing. Go take a look at this pdf. It’s a good read if you’re into that sort of thing, but what I really want you to look at is how it’s presented. This is a simple, clean layout that is easy for even a novice to emulate, and it is well designed to explaining complicated concepts simply. This layout (and variations on it) shows up a lot in business texts. It’s PowerPoint, and while it’s not quite presentation-ready (too many words per page) it is based off a lot of good thinking about how to present ideas – one per page, with illustrations that clarify or explain.

The question I want to put forward is this: Is your game really that much more complicated to explain than these business ideas? Or are you writing to fill pages out of a sense of what your game should look like?

Obviously, this is not a solution for every person and every game, but I want to put this out there and into people’s minds. This is a club we need to have in our bag.

I am going to run my next 4e game like a caper, simple as that.

It actually takes surprisingly little in the way of preparation to make the transition. Characters are already highly capable and aware of their capabilities, the only real difference between the standard dungeon crawl and a caper is a simple matter of information management. All of the material is already in place, the trick is to change the players from the reactive group experiencing the dungeon[1] to a proactive group exploiting it.

Now, I could use almost any pre-published dungeon to do this, but I will definitely be a little bit picky. First off, I need ones where the motive to go into the dungeon is clear and is more nuanced than “There’s treasure there” or “The Bad Guy Lives There”. Those are flat motivations, and flat motivations make for flat capers. The characters are badass professionals, not simple thieves, and there should be a reason they are directing their considerable talents to this task rather than something else. Additionally, a clear motive helps make for a better adventure because players can come back to their true goal when they consider plans. For example, if they’re just after loot, then the plan is unlikely to get more sophisticated than a smash and grab. If, on the other hand, the goal is the recovery of a specific item, then the players could still smash and grab, but they might also try to trick the owner into moving it, swap in a substitute, con the owner out of it or almost anything else. A clear goal allows for specific, thoughtful action. A murky goal allows for only mess.

As such, a certain amount of urgency is usually called for. Without it, players can afford to wait for the perfect moment, and that can be dull taken to its extreme. In a caper, the characters have a LOT of information, but they shouldn’t have ALL the information, so there needs to be some sort of reason why things need to happen *now*, rather than the next time the bad guys are going to town for supplies.[3] Dungeons that also are strongly personality driven, that is ones that are the base of operations of a well fleshed out villain[4], also tend to be a lot more useful for a caper since they’re usually designed with more flexibility of response.

But with those simple ground rules, it’s a simple matter of handing the players most of the information you have about the dungeon. Give them a map, give them a breakdown of who is where and doing what. Don’t give them stats or anything, but rally give them enough information to accurately describe everything in the dungeon, then let them come up with their plan.

Now, naturally, there should be a few surprises. Pick a few pieces of information to keep in reserve as surprises – tunnels that aren’t on the original map, secret resources of a lieutenant, and unexpected twist or whatever. This doesn’t take anything hugely sneaky or cunning, just find the things the author clearly put in as twists and then make them real twists.[5]

And seriously, that’s all there is to it.

Ok, yes, I’m skipping over a big chunk here and just handing the players the information, with the assumption that they’ve already successfully done the footwork and research to get it all together. On some instinctive level, it feels like I should set up some skill challenges and die rolls to make this investigation part of the play process. But that instinct is dangerous. See, the caper is not a familiar model for players, so the first time I do it, I don’t want to dwell over the supporting details, I just want to get to the meat of it. Based on success or failure of this, I might take that to inform on my decisions for the NEXT caper, allowing for some rolls beforehand to tune what information the players do and don’t get, but at no point do I want that to be the *focus* of play. If I really want to make players work for information, I’ll make getting THAT information a caper of its own.

Anyway, that’s how I’d do it.

1 – Does that sound mean? It’s not mean to be but it’s really what’s going on in most dungeons. There’s an illusion of proactivity through player directed action as they explore, but that’s mostly sleight of hand. Excepting certain key decisions like when to rest, the set pieces in a dungeon might as well be coming to the players on a conveyor belt.[2]

2 – Yes, the players might decide between right and left and that impacts the order things happen in, but that’s still sleight of hand. Which does not make it a BAD thing. The dungeon is a very efficient adventure delivering device.

3 – Doing this also spares us the kind of convenient timing that guarantees the demonic ritual is underway JUST as the players bust into the room – fun once or twice, but absolutely trite after a while. If the players know that the ritual is coming and will happen in 3 days, they have a timeline to beat.

4 – Owen KC Stephens’ adventures tend to excel at this.

5 – More snark, I know, but the reality is that a “twist” in the context of a dungeon is virtually meaningless. It’s a disposable environment, and all the information within it is disposable too. Twists are merely unexpected. It takes some investment (as in the case of the knowledge that players are given) to give a twist some weight.

A few Random thoughts for today

– I got a new phone, which would not merit much comment normally, except I’m a gadget nerd and got one of the Verizon Droids. I’m pretty much shackled to Verizon, so it came down to the Droid or the Pre Plus, both of which are pretty sweet. Droid sold me on its google integration and web browsing, and a couple days in I’m still pretty much delighted with it. Biggest complaint is the app store: while it’s worlds better than the blackberry app store, there is really no filtering of crap from non-crap, so finding anything useful is pretty much a crapshoot. I’ve grabbed a few things on recommendations or because I know the brand: notably Evernote, astrid, Advanced Task Killer and Twidroid but I figure I’m still missing out on quality, so I put out a request for suggestions to anyone out there.

– I’ll be going to Dreamation up in Jersey this coming weekend, driving up early Friday morning and staying through Sunday. I have signed up for exactly nothing. This was not a cunning plan on my part, just a result of constantly forgetting, so I intend to play it by ear. I’ll probably hit the signup sheets for things, but I’m also totally up for some pickup play, and may even see what supplies I can bring to help that out. As a heads up, I have a bit of a Dreamation/Dexcon tradition of doing an open breakfast. I usually do this in the hotel, but I don’t know what the facilities are like this year, so I’ll be playing that by ear. Anyway, it basically goes like this: around 7:30 to 8, I’ll go an grab breakfast, and there’s an open invitation to join me that is limited only by whatever chairs can be scrounged up. So if you see me, please, come grab a seat.

– On the topic of Dreamation, if I introduce myself to you and we’ve already met, please do not take offense. At some point, my ability to keep online handles connected with names connected with faces with icons really took a hit. It is entirely possible that I will make that connection sometime halfway through any conversation, and while that’s funny to watch, no offense is meant by it.

– On a similar topic, I come to these things to talk to people. Playing games is an awesome bonus, but the context to randomly shoot the shit about games and gaming is a pure delight for me. So while I sincerely doubt that anyone in my VAST[1] readership would be inclined to shy from conversation, I just want to lay it out there for the record: say hi. I am totally happy to talk.

– The podcast suggestions covered a wide range, but there was no clear winner, so I’m going to call out for a tiebreaker! Of the podcast suggestions I got, the ones which got multiple suggestions were the following:

• Podgecast
• Return to Northmoor
• Atomic Array
• Actual People, Actual Play
• Canon Puncture

So, I will be picking one of these. Given that list, people are welcome to suggest which one I go with!

1 – Har har

Lines of Experience
So, the recent Marvel Superheroes RPG, the one with the stones system, was really interesting, but as I understand it, died because it was published by a comic book publisher. Good numbers for an RPG are bad numbers for a comic, or so I am led to understand.

Anyway, even if you never get to play it, it’s worth nowing about its advancement mechanics, “Lines of Experience”. Characters were medium-grained in detail, and when you gt advancement, it was given as “lines of experience”. Now, mechanically, each waas basically a point which you assigned to the thing you wanted to improve. if your kung Fu was a 7, you assigned lines to it, and after you accumulated 7 of them, it became an 8. Easy peasy.

But where it got interesting was that for each line you actually wrote a brief description of what you had done with that skill durng the adventure, like “Fought the Sinister Frogmen of Yslar in their underwater lair” and if on a subsequent adventure you are in a similar situation (fightign underwater, say) you could use that line of experience to temporarily boost your skill from a 7 to an 8.

I love this idea, and Fred Hicks ended up riffing on it nicely in Don’t Rest Your Head, but I think there’s a lot more to be mined out of it.

Player Contributions
I sometimes need to actively remind myself that the Amber Diceless RPG is a small, niche game. This is hard because it’s SO big and SO influential on me that I sometimes forget that not everyone else has is burned into their heart. And that means not everyone has been as exposed to the ADRPGs player contributions.

So Amber had a simple point-buy system, with 100 points to spend, but plyers could get extra points, usually in 10 point blocks, for maing contributions ot the game. Contributions included drawing pictures of the characters, keeping a character journal, writing stories about your character and so on. Over time different groups expanded what qualified as a contribution to include things like hosting or buying food.

Now, bear in mind, this was the time before Livejournal and fanfic communities, so the fact that the game provided a legitimate outlet for other types of creativity was a huge win in terms of creating player investment. What’s more, by granting players the leeway to author a lot of “offscreen” materials, it proved one of the few ways to really get player investment in setting that’s on par with killing Elminster[1].

Now, not every game necessarily calls for fiction or the like, but every game calls for _something_. If there’s some sort of behavior or investment you want to encourage or acknowledge, then consider formalizing in-game rewards for player contributions. It’s not fair in the traditional sense, but that tends to make it more motivating: you recognize your contributing members and provide others the opportunity (and clear direction on how) to do the same.

1 – This gets its name from a tale told on the Sons of Kryos podcast, of a D&D game where the opening even is the murder of Elminster, the iconic NPC of the Forgotten Realms. This sort of actionis a clear dramatic statement that the game is not going to be dictated by the official canon of the setting, and that the table owns the game.

If you are not stealing ideas in your game design, I might suggest you are doing it wrong. There are a lot of games out there that have hit upon really good ideas, even if the games themselves have met with a variety of fates.

Margin of Success Tricks

There was a game once called Secrets of Zir’an. It was a clever, interesting game, but it suffered the kind of printing problems that make it a cautionary tale rather than any kind of real success. It’s a shame, since it had some clever ideas, and one in particular really caught my eye.

SoZ had a system where you could learn various tricks to use with a skill, things like combat tricks for extra damage, extra spell effects, and so on. There were a lot of these, and they allowed for a lot of differentiation between skills. The trick was that each one had a particular cost, and that cost was paid out of the margin of success of an attack.

To illustrate, imagine a fairly D&D type-attack, where I roll d20, add a number, and hit you to do, say, 2d6 points of damage. I only needed to roll a 19 to hit you, and I rolled 24: that’s a margin of Success of 5. I have a few tricks: for 1 point, I can increase damage by 1. For 3 points, I can knock you down. For 5 points, I can perform a disarm. So using those 5 points, I could do +5 damage, +2 damage and knock my enemy down, or do a disarm.

There’s a downside to this in that it’s a little math-ey, but it’s got a big upside (beyond just cool fiddliness), since it clearly calls for description after resolution, so you get to incorporate your awesomeness.[1]

Inverted Pricing
Wilderness of Mirrors is an innovative game in a a number of ways, but one of my favorite elements to it is often overshadowed by the other novel elements, and that is role pricing. WoM doesn’t have skills, rather there are 5 roles you buy not representing the roles on the spy team. The danger with such systems historically is that the benefit of having a broad skill at all is usually much greater than the benefit of incrementally improving it, so there’s a strong incentive to buy many things at low levels rather than specialize. This is especially true if prices get progressively higher.

WoM turns that on its head by making the first rank cost the most, and each subsequent rank cost lest (so the price is 4:3:2:1, not 1:2:3:4), and I dig the behavior that encourages. It leans naturally towards niche protection and excellence within your niche.

“Wild Card” Skill
Eden’s “Buffy” system was a lot of fun, and it’s a shame it’s vanished down the licensing hole, but I want to see if we can hang onto one particular idea.

Buffy had what I would describe as a medium sized skill list. Long enough that I couldn’t rattle it off by memory, but shorter than 15-20. It’s a good size, since it allows for skills that are neither too broad nor too narrow, but it’s a bit of a crapshoot. See, at that size list, you have the greatest chance of having overlooked something important to one of your players.[2] Buffy’s skill list included one blank slot where a player could insert any skill he needed, so if it was really important that his character is an excellent accountant, he could put that in the Wild Card Slot.

There’s an obvious benefit to this – it introduces a bit of flexibility into the skill list without demanding that players come up with the skills on their own. But there’s also a subtle benefit: whatever skill the player put in that slot is a flag – he is more or less calling out the GM the thing he thinks makes his character stands out, and is inviting plot hooks to be attached to it.

There are, of course, lots and lots of other ideas worth stealing, but you can’t steal them all at once. I figure three at a time is probably digestible.

1 – Something similar was done in another brilliant-but-gone game called Fireborn[3]. The difference between them us subtle, but potent. In Fireborn, you effectively paid for actions in the difficulty. So if I want to do extra damage, I increase the difficulty to hit by some amount. There’s a compelling logic to this, but it has the downside of making cool behavior (stunting and the like) less likely to succeed – players are punished for doing something risky. It’s more ‘realistic’ (harder tasks are harder), but not necessarily more fun.

2 – With fewer skills, odds are good it falls under the penumbra of one of them. If there are lots of skills, then adding another is pretty trivial.

3 – Going from memory here though, so apologies if I’m misstating.