Creo Interest

This was an interesting weekend. I had Friday off because my parents were supposed to be visiting, but the storm up north put the kibosh on that, but it was just as well since I spent random parts of the weekend laid out by my sinuses. Net result is that it's one of those weekends where my awareness of the internet, or really the world outside my door, was pretty minimal. This is ok. Such things make for good relaxation from time to time.

Anyway, I've been thinking a bit about what makes people interesting. It's a broad topic, I know, but I was thinking a bit about the people it might be interesting to meet, talk to or otherwise get to know. Some of this is random fandom sort of thinking, but more broadly it was inspired by thinking about conventions and the nature of meeting large numbers of people. When there are so many folks on hand, why are some people more interesting than others? It's usually pretty easy to spot, since a certain amount of it is pure presentation and confidence, but that only goes so far. There's more to it. And for me, one thing that I can come back to is that, by and large, the most interesting people are the ones who have created something.

Now, the thing they have created doesn't need to be that interesting in and of itself[1]. It's the fact that they have gone through the steps and done the work to get this thing made that provides assurance that at least a certain amount of bullshit has been stripped away by the forces of necessity. It's not a guarantee - some writers will still be jerks, and some people who look like they haven't created are actually doing something interesting and worth knowing about, but when you're dealing with large numbers of people, you need some sort of rubric, and I'm ok with this (at least for the sake of argument).

And the argument is this: very few RPG characters have created anything[2]. And I wonder if that makes them boring.

See, the other thing conventions got me thinking about was compelling pregens. Characters which, when handed out, would make players have a hard time choosing which is most awesome as opposed to least lame. How many pregens do you pick up and think "This person is interesting enough that I'd love to have lunch with them?"[3] That in turn lead to me thinking about how powerful a question it would be to ask what a character has created.

It's a good question. Lots of powerful implications and secondary questions like "Why create that? What happened to it? How did people react to it? Is it your legacy?" Even if you ignore the rest of this post, consider adding that question to your bag of tricks when you're looking for a way to jazz up a character. Still, It left me feeling like I was on the cusp of something.

Creation is one good, interesting activity, but it's not the only thing we find interesting. We are intrigued by authority, secret knowledge, change and even destruction. There is similar mileage in asking "What do you have authority over (and responsibility for)?", "What do you know about?", "How have you changed the world?" and possibly by extension "What have you destroyed?". That's where it gets nerdy because those all end up lining up with, of all things, the verbs from Ars magica: Creo, Rego, Intelligo, Muto and Perdo.[4]

So now I have a neat little checklist of five things to ask about a character to try to bring him to life:


But that in turn suggests one more refinement. So far we've talked entirely about what the character has done: why not talk about what the character intends to do?


Adding a column for the future allows this to be a useful tool for the campaign as well as the character.

Now, in terms of actually using this, I think it might be interesting to fill in every line, but I think the result would feel overloaded and banal. A character with all of these things filled in is so thoroughly realized that it calls into question why he's being played. Instead, I think it becomes interesting in terms of the spaces left blank. If a player is told to fill in, say, five of the lines rather than all ten, which ones he chooses may be as informative as what he actually writes down.

I'm aware this is a little bit gimmicky, and for some GMs there may be an instinctive sense that this is too much to ask, especially when you're already getting things like beliefs and instincts, but I would argue against that. While I have not called it out explicitly, what is important about these five elements, as with things that make real people interesting, is that they tie the character to the world outside himself. Consider them to be complimentary to the benefits provided by more internal traits, like beliefs. One gives a better sense of what makes the character go and the other gives a better sense of their place in the world.

I consider this a big deal. One of the hardest things any person has to deal with is the gap between their internal landscape and how they're seen by the world at large. We trip up on it a lot, especially in our community, and I sometimes worry that the worst elements of that can be reflected in play when a character's design is entirely inward-facing. Mixing it up a little, introducing important ways that the character must interface with the world, is a very small step in the face of the larger issue, but it is at least a step in the right direction.

And if, as a result, it makes you a little more interesting? It's a nice bonus.


1 - Obviously, everyone creates, so it may seem a bit arbitrary that I put a published author in one category and a prolific producer of fanfic in another. At first blush that may seem like some sort of snobbery about the quality of their material, but it's more nuanced than that. Even if the book is terrible, the published author has done a LOT of work to get where she is - beyond simply writing the book, she has had to get an agent, get published and deal with the business and financial realities of authorship. The fanfic writer or self publisher faces few (if any) of these same challenges.

2 - Except magic items. But, to be frank, magic items in 3E and 4E are bland and disposable, so I categorize them as fanfic.

3 - There's an argument that blandness is a good thing in pregens, since that makes it easier for a player to make them his own in play. I am less happy with that thought as I watch games though: it's true, but it works because it does not challenge the players. Net result is you get a game that's exactly as good as the table skills your group brings.

4 - For the unfamiliar, Ars Magica used at Verb + Noun system of magic, so Creo + Pyrem (Create + Fire) was used to, well, create fire, while Perdo + Pyrem (Destroy + fire) might be used to quench a fire. The verbs were Creo (Create), Intelligo (Understand), Muto (Change), Perdo (Destroy) and Rego (Command). (edit: Will sets me straight, fire is Ignem, not Pyrem)

Internet Landmines

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!

Slop the Table

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.

Rethinking Props

This is a MUSH one, so other geek tribes can probably just skip it today.

So, I've bee thinking about props and realizing that I have a lot of faulty assumptions. To begin with, I assume that a prop should have a propco simply by virtue of being a prop. That's bad enough, but more subtly, I think I've made a somewhat backward assumption: that propcos are there for the sake of the prop.

That is, the more I think about it, all crap.

Ok, so here's the thing. Running plots on a MUSH is a pain, especially since consequences and impacts are hard to come by and difficult to implement. Staff can do it, but in the absence of staff, the theory is that a prop controller can have consequences of play reflected in the prop he controls. That seems like a very reasonable model, but how often do you see props handled in that fashion? The default assumption is that it is the propcos job to "look out for the interests" of the prop and to keep it form being abused.

That's one of those things that makes a lot of sense when you're hip deep in it, but from a distance looks completely ass backwards. Props do not need protecting. Props are, ultimately, not very important. Their importance is solely in terms of how much they serve play, and they serve play by reflecting consequences. To my mind, if the prop is not in the hands of the person most willing to see it changed by play, it is in the wrong hands.

Now, that's not to say it needs to be in any hands. For many people, props are an organizational unit of information. They are valuable for the background and playgroup they provide. Those are, absolutely, important things, and while they might require a subject matter expert - someone who knows the lore of the prop and can answer questions about it - that doesn't mean it needs a propco. The prop might well be off the table in terms of the impact of play, at which point it's not really a prop at all, just a background element. There's nothing wrong with that: setting depend on having some elements that aren't going to be constantly subject to change, and so long as it's clear what's "in play" and what is not then all is well.

What's more, the role of propco is one that gets horribly muddled by the non-prop responsibilities. Being a propco is a responsibility, and while most propcos will agree with that, the reasons they do so are a little different than you might expect. it is not that they feel it's a lot of work maintaining the prop, it is that by virtue of being propco, they are also de facto head of the playgroup. That means they spend their days herding cats, which is a lot of work. One of the rewards of that work is the social status that comes of being a propco.

At this point, it really feels to me like the bad parts of the system really feed back on themselves. Under this one umbrella, "propco" we really have several VERY different roles:

• Keeper of Lore
• Head of Playgroup
• Keeping Prop Dynamic (handling consequences)
• VIP of the Game

Is it any wonder that props end up static, fiercely guarded little principalities? Keeping the prop dynamic is the least rewarding of the roles, and is often in conflict with the other priorities. If a playgroup is tied to a prop, then taking consequences to the plot is often at odds with your responsibility to the playgroup. If you dig the social status of being a propco, diminishing your prop diminishes your status. Subject matter expertise is the only role that doesn't conflict with handling consequences, and it's the one most often farmed out to someone who is not the propco.

I propose that we rethink the prop and see about divvying up these responsibilities a bit. First and foremost, separate the props from the setting elements. The simple act of saying that the element-owner[1] can concentrate on other priorities will remove a huge amount of stress from the system. By calling out the props that can be impacted by play, and putting them in the hands of players who have a vested interest in seeing them change (which may mean players external to the prop, to prevent conflicts of interest) you free props up to be more play centric, and that would be a welcome thing.

What's more, it would also relax play in the fixed elements. If people know that play cannot substantially change something, and come to trust that, they will often get much more relaxed about short term consequences, knowing that the long term smooths it all out. Remote elements become more playable because there's no sense of needing to clear your play with the propco.

Other roles would, I suspect, sort themselves out. People have a way of finding leaders and social currency no matter what the situation. And this would by no means be a panacea - the first danger i imagine is that we'd end up with propcos who only allow their preferred playgroup to make changes in their personal element of the setting. That's inconvenient (though if done properly might work very organically), but since staff have fewer props to worry about, it's not hard to keep an eye on who is changing what, and watch for trends.

Whatever the solution, the bottom line is that a lot of what we do with props today is out of habit more than anything else, and like any habit, it merits some examination to see if our actions are really serving our goals.


1 - Yes, it needs a catchier name

Balancing The Stone

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.

Dreamation plus Bonus Dragon Age

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.

What Are You Writing In?

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.