Stress Tracks in Leverage

Note: This week, I'm going to really drill down into one topic - stress tracks in Leverage and how I applied them - with two goals in mind. First, I want to talk through the application of the mechanic, and second because i want to showcase the thought process behind how I made certain decisions at the table in a way that will hopefully be informative.

Leverage uses a fairly quick, escalation driven conflict resolution system. It works and works pretty well, but I found myself looking at how Smallville does that same, and being impressed. While i might not want to go all the way as to duplicate Smallville's model, I'm definitely happy to steal a few ideas from it. I did so for last weeks Leverage-Amber and it worked out well enough that I'll definitely do it again, and I figured it merited a writeup.

The first idea (and the big lift from Smallville - and by extension Mouseguard and some other games) is that of stress tracks. Stress tracks represent a number of different conditions. The most obvious, and the first most people think of, is the HURT track, which is a gauge of how hurt the character is. There are other stress tracks, but we'll worry about them later - for now we'll use HURT to illustrate.

This idea is pretty intuitive to most people who've gamed: the more hurt you get, the higher the stress track goes. In this model, the HURT is represented by a die value (d4, d6 and so on). The size of the die represents the severity of the injury, with d4 representing barely a scratch and a d12 representing something that would drop a horse.

The value of your HURT track ends up working against you any time you take an action where being hurt would cause problems (which is to say, most physical actions). In this situations, the GM (or your opponent) picks up a die equal to your HURT value to add to the roll.[1] If the value of your HURT die is ever higher than your highest die, you get taken out (in a manner determined by your adversary).

Stress is inflicted as follows: Before a roll, the GM lets the player know that stress is a possible outcome - since we're talking about HURT, we probably mean a fight or something else physically threatening (and, implicitly, the threat probably exists for the opponent as well, as appropriate). Both sides roll as normal, and once the roll is complete, the victor looks at his third highest die showing, choosing one in the case of a tie. The level of HURT inflicted is equal to the size of that die.

For example, if the winner of a roll has the dice come up 6(d8), 6(d6), 7(d10), 8(d8) and 4(d4), he's rolled a 15 (7+8). The next highest roll is a 6, which showed up on two dice (a d6 and a d8) so the player gets to choose which to use, and will probably pick the d8. As a result, his opponent's HURT stress track is now at d8.

If the target is already hurt, then there are two possibilities. First, if the new HURT value is higher than the old one, replace the current value with the new one. If the current value is equal to or higher than the new result, then increase it by one step. This last rule also governs what happens if there are no dice left in the pool - it's effectively a zero sided die, which means it will just increase the current stress level by 1 step.

Continuing the previous example: If the target had already been HURT d4, then at the end of the roll the d8 would replace the d4, and the opponent would now be HURT d8.
If the target had already been HURT d8, then the tie means it gets bumped up a step, and ends at HURT d10.

If the target was already at HURT d12, then the lesser value means it bumps up a step, which probably means immediately going down.

Ok, so that's the basic mechanic. Tomorrow we'll see about fleshing it out in other ways.



1 - This does create a small "death spiral", but it's quite mild, especially since exchanges of rolls are not common.

Amber in Chains

So, based on a convergence of guests and available free time, I ran a game last night. I had done very little prep to begin with, but I ended up improvising madly as the number of expected players jumped from 3 to 6. With 3 players I had been considering just trying some 2 Guys with Swords, modified for 3, but for 6 that wasn't practical, but I also didn't want to run straight Leverage - I had gotten a request for some supers elements, and what's more I'm not entirely sure how it shakes out with 6 players. So, looking at the potential spread of players, their overlapping familiarities and my needs, I very hastily threw together a Leverage hack, bolting on many pieces from Smallville, to run an Amber game. Sort of.

The premise of this particular Amber filed the serial numbers off, both in and out of game. At a high level, one of the princes had won, and ruled Amber as the Sun King with an army of elementals at his beck and call. More problematically, he had also wiped the names and much knowledge of his siblings from the universe with his destruction of the pattern and assertion of the new order. Players represented the underground, those with enough knowledge to know there's been a usurpation, looking to find and restore the nameless. One of them was said to be held by one of the lords of Amber, and the players took advantage of the wedding being arranged in the manor to try to find it.

I won't delve too much into what happened, but it went spectacularly, with one player taking advantage of a recent widow to get an invite (all the while being urged by her husband's ghost to kill her) , and with complications that spiraled out of control, including one dramatic romantic proposal accompanied by peacocks resulting in roast peacock getting added to the menu. Things culminated with the discovery that the whole manor rested on the shoulder of the Titan, his release and the subsequent destruction of, well, the whole building. I got at least one request to return to the setting at some point, and with a bit of polishing to the system, I think I'm inclined to do so.

System wise, I stole the four stats from Road to Amber (Force, Wits, Grace and Resolve) and a new set of roles: Soldier, Scholar, Tinker, Priest (which should have been Courtier), Ruffian and Hunter. Straightforward enough, but Priest ended up doing more heavy-lifting for rolls than anything else, perhaps a bit too much. Something I need to keep an eye on.

I let the characters take five distinctions. In retrospect it was too many. I think that many distinctions works with no stats, but in conjunction with the stats they just made for a little bit too much, especially for freshly created characters. It wasn't a huge problem, but it's something I'm going to note.

I also tapped into Smallville, loosely, and had each character pick a bloodline (effectively a heritage) and a gift (effectively a superpower). The two could be related, but did not need to be. These were pretty much entirely created on the spot, and they were structured after powers: three special things you could do with a plot point. As such we had:

• A scion of the house of the moon, who could turn into a shadow
• A Scion of the Titan, who was a badly trained mage
• A Scion of Mandrake with an entourage
• A Scion of Karm who could read thoughts
• A Scion of The Hanged Man who had Major Arcana related tricks
• A Scion of Feldane who mastered ghosts

Mechanically (and time-wise) this was the hardest part because I pulled these out of the air. For some of the poweres I just riffed off Smallville, but for the bloodlines, i was totally making things up. Worse, because I was working fast, I forgot to include any abilities based on exploiting opportunities (what you can do when the GM rolls a 1). If I take the time to go back and retune this system, most of the effort is going to go into making the bloodlines and gifts cleaner and easier to use.

Lastly, I hybridized Smallville conflict resolution by adding stress pools for Hurt, Tired, Confused and Upset. They worked like Smallville (opponents can roll them against you, the value gets too high, you're taken out) but I skipped Smallville's 'damage' roll and used this rule: Look at the third highest die you rolled - you inflict stress equal to that die size or increase the stress pool by one step, whichever is higher.

With that out of the way, I'll say this - All the good things about running Leverage very easily transitioned over to this. Chargen was a bit rougher than Leverage, taking most of an hour, but that was a function of the new system and the necessity of me making stuff up. Play was full of subplots and complications, but was still all wrapped up in about 2.5 hours of actual play. With 6 players and the amount that got done, I was pretty darn pleased. What's more, it was very low stress for me as a GM. I went in with a few ideas, but by and large I just let the complications do the work for me (which they did, with extreme prejudice).

I did use the "Complications start at d8" rule, allowing myself a free budget of d6s, and I think that worked out very well for one specific reason: When players wanted to use distinctions that seemed a little dodgy, I asked them to justify it, and often used those justifications to add some assets or descriptors to the table.

I also used a slightly different method of creating assets, where I let players create "permanent" assets - ones that last the whole game - for one plot point, but only if they went on the table, rather than remaining under the player's control. That let the players use these assets, but also let me turn them around to use later to complicate things (which I, of course) did. as a technique, I really liked this as a very organic way to handle players stretching their distinctions.

The bottom line of this for me is that I need to work a bit on my Leverage hacks to help make sure I have more of a toolkit on hand to draw from rather than need to totally make stuff up, but with that done, man, Leverage remains a super-potent go-to for a fast, engaging game.

The one tip that I'll add is this: While the system can support open-ended play, you're only going to get the speed benefits by having a clear goal in play. In leverage, that's baked in. For this, I needed to make sure it was inserted (recover the nameless). In the absence of that, we could probably have played all night, and that would have been fun, but it wouldn't have had anything like this kind of finish. The goal drives play, but it also gives you a stopping point - that's incredibly potent and important.

My Father's Sword

I was pretty young when I started playing D&D, and lacking people to play it with, I spent a lot of time making characters. I don't think this was too uncommon a practice, but it still sticks with me a little bit. Part of the fun of it was the mechanical element: rolling up stats, picking equipment and so on, but part of it was the fictional element. I'd come up with names, backstories, stuff like that. Never too much - I think I lacked the attention span for more - but enough to make this ranger different than that ranger.

These distinctions and histories did not matter much when I actually got around to playing. They mattered to ME, certainly, as they influenced how I played the character, but no one else was particularly interested, which was fine, because I was fairly disinterested in their stuff too. The adventure we were playing was the adventure we were playing, and we all might die anyway, so what did I need beyond some insight into playing my character?

Things have changed quite drastically for me since then, and the single biggest change has been that those ideas which matter to the individual player have become ideas that matter to the entire game. It wasn't an overnight change, and it's been such a large one that it's almost been difficult to see. To illustrate, let's use a very simple example: a player comes to the table and notes that he's armed with his father's sword. This is going to elicit one of three responses: disinterest, acknowledgment, incorporation.

Disinterest is the classic response. A nod and a shrug, and sooner or later the game going to have a +1 sword in a treasure pile and if you want to pass it up for your roleplay priorities, you're welcome to, but that's your problem.

Acknowledgment is a step up from disinterest in that the GM (and possibly other players) actually try to at least take some steps to not completely screw you over for your bit of history. The GM might, for example, come up with a way for your sword to gain or reveal new enchantments in lieu of gaining a new treasure. No one goes out of their way to bring it up, but they at least try to be considerate.

Incorporation is when the game takes it a step further and makes the idea matter within the context of your game. Perhaps the GM does it directly, by making the sword significant, or indirectly, by making your Father's history with the sword part of the driving story behind the campaign. This is the step when things really round a corner, primarily because response demands that the GM actually be willing to put in some work to support the player's ideas. There won't be much help for this in has no place in published adventures or settings, so it's all on the GM's head.

Note that none of these have spoken to game mechanics in all but the most tangential of ways. This is because there's some correlation between responses and methods of support, there's no clear oneto one mapping.

Now, disinterest clearly doesn't particularly match with any mechanical support, and that's fine, but Acknowledgment actually has some interesting options. D&D 4e mechanically supports acknowledgment, for example, by making magic item enchantments fungible. If it matters to you that you keep using the same sword, the game will support it. Earthdawn had an even more elegant model that let your magic items grow with you, an idea that has seen use in other places.

This is fine as far as items in specific go, but how about for broader ideas like backgrounds or allies? Still plenty of support in the form of games that allow players a certain amount of authorial control as part of chargen. That sounds like a very abstract idea, but it's actually something you'll find in almost any point-based game, as well as many with advantages and disadvantages. By buying allies and enemies or otherwise paying points for character elements that are important to you, you are gaining acknowledgment from the system. Similarly, fuzzier systems (like FATE) may allow you to use existing mechanics (like aspects) to 'plug in' those ideas that are most important to you.

Mechanical support for incorporation is a trickier matter. The rub is that no matter how well supported the idea might be, even if it's utterly essential to the game design (like the city in the DFRPG or the relationship map in Smallville), nothing can force a GM to acknowledge it if she doesn't want to. Where mechanical support for acknowledgment allows the player to force the GM to acknowledge his thing (so long as the GM follows the rules), when it comes to incorporation, nothing can force the GM to _care_. As such, mechanical support for incorporation is all about making it easier to use the player's ideas than it is to ignore them.

Now, I realize that in stating something like this as a progression might suggest that, since disinterest (and the implicit lack of support) is the least desirable arrangement, the best arrangement is incorporation with full mechanical support. The reality is not that simple. While I'll argue long and hard for incorporation as making for more enjoyable play, the question of how much mechanical support it requires is much fuzzier. You can have powerful, playable incorporation without a lick of mechanical support if the GM is so inclined. Assuming that one demands the other is a bad idea - it focuses on the tools rather than the ends, and it can paint other GMs with exactly the wrong brush.

A Foray into Comics

I do not usually dabble in fiction, but I think about it in very nerdy ways. This one is SUPER nerdy, and not really RPG related. You have been warned.

I like to think about comic books, especially because a lot of the things that make good stories hard with certain comics are the same things that make certain games hard. The easiest example of this is what it takes to tell a good Superman story – Superman is so powerful that it’s hard to introduce any legitimate external threats (even ignoring the reader’s meta-knowledge that the character won’t permanently change) without making the world silly. Anyone who can fight Superman toe-to-toe is a world-shaking bad guy, and to treat them otherwise is to cheapen the character.

Mediocre writers tend to address this by approaching his angles of weakness – introducing kryptonite, magic or other things outside his sphere into the story. This can work to a point, as it can introduce a legitimate challenge, but it’s ultimately unsatisfying. Outright bad authors occasionally handle it by undermining the character, rendering him some sort of idiot or caricature, but that’s even worse. Good writers find the meatier stuff, questions of who the character is, what he means, and how he connects to the world and make good stories out of it. Sometimes great stories. Between Superman and Batman, there is a vast swath of human stories.

The problem is that it’s sometimes a little too vast. In figuring out how to write a good Superman story, we are left with a bit of a gap when it comes to writing other characters in a similar niche. Most notably, I end up thinking about Aquaman and Wonder Woman. An author can look at them will ask “do their powers or situation allow me to write stories that are unique to these characters?” and often come up with a depressing answer[1]. Aquaman has tried to break out of this rut several times, usually by fleshing out his unique schtick (Atlantis) but it’s hard to get people to care. Tellingly, the most popular interpretation of Aquaman I’ve seen of late (from the Brave and the Bold cartoon) is distinctive for his characterization FAR more than his powers.

Wonder Woman has a rougher time of it. There may have been a time when the sheer novelty of a woman as an a-list super hero might have been enough to hang your hat on, but it’s not really enough anymore. In fact, it’s become a drawback as authors feel that Wonder Woman must represent some manner of feminine ideal (whatever that is) rather than be an interesting character. This has lead to a lot of uncertainty regarding the character as she goes from writer to writer, uncertainty that has kept her from ever crystallizing the way that Superman and Batman have. Her latest saga (where the character’s entire history and costume have been –temporarily one hopes – redone) is kind of icing on the cake for this.

It makes me crazy, because I know the answer I want. I look at Wonder Woman and her origin, steeped in myth and legend, and then I look at the DC universe, which has the most interesting and well done mystical underground of any comics company out there, and I wonder why those two things don’t come together. Every now and again a character in a Vertigo comic will mention Superman, and it’s always interesting because it’s usually with a sense of awe and distance, as if the two worlds never overlap. But it’s always Superman because, hey, he’s iconic.

All of which is to say, I would love to see Wonder Woman as the Superman of that part of the universe. That is to say, in a position of sufficient power that external threats are less interesting than going to actual storytelling.

Historically, she’s been on the receiving end of magic as often as Superman (maybe more often), even though it is nominally his weakness. This is, I think, mostly because writers get the idea that WW exists in the magical world, but they can’t quite round the corner on empowering her within it. And that last is the trick. To my mind, Wonder Woman has been steeped in magic since her birth and rubs elbows with the gods. Magic should not be something she’s ignorant of – it should be something that she is potently aware of, for good and ill. Part of the heart of magic in DC is that it comes with a price, and giving her the knowledge of that price, as well as reason not to pay it? That alone has huge mileage. All of which is to say nothing of the pure comic-book-y potential of facing mystical menaces of the interesting kind rather than the nth iteration of fighting something out of greek mythology. And, hell, stepping from the pure greek into the broader mythos of DC also does a nice job of putting the gods in context, shedding another sometimes super-lame element of play.

This is, by the way, a total pipe dream. I expect the character to continue to stagger along indefinitely, occasionally resetting to something akin to what you can find on a notebook or lunchbox. She’ll have bursts of excellent characterization in other people’s books (She had a page in an old issue of Birds of Prey that made the character 9 times more interesting than any recent issue) but really interesting stuff will be reserved to characters who can fly far enough below the radar to avoid uproars yet still make sales.

Anyway, back to games tomorrow. That one’s just been bugging me for a while.

1 – In contrast, Green lantern doesn’t have this problem. Not just because his power is so different, but also because his context is very different – he’s a space cop among other space cops. That’s potent.

Two Guys With Swords

My friend Clark was contemplating a one shot, but was hesitant to use Leverage because he knows it well (Clark wrote a big chunk of it). That got me thinking about how to do speedy starts for other Leverage-derived games, which in turn lead to some thoughts on the "Two Guys With Swords" game, which is intensely derivative in a way that is goofy and fun. Guys, in this case, is intended as gender neutral, as it encompasses both men and women, but certainly not gentlemen or ladies.

Chargen for a 2 player game

• Both Guys get Hitter d10
• Hacker is now Tinkerer. It covers gadgets, alchemy and locks.
• Each player picks one more d10 role for himself
• Each player picks on d4 role for the other guy
• Each player then assigns a d6 and a d8 to the remaining roles
• No stats.
• Characters get 6 distinctions, at least 3 of which must be chosen now, others can be chosen in play.
• Swords are d6 assets, unless they have names, in which case they are d8s. A named sword does not always need to be the same sword. All that matters is the name.
• Pick 2 talents for your guy, one talent for the other guy.

Next, Get Into Trouble
Where you Are Now

1. A caravan camp at an oasis
2. At a crossroads far from civilization
3. Atop an icy mountain peak
4. Strapped to the altar of something best unnamed
5. Wretched hive of scum and villainy (small)
6. Wretched hive of scum and villainy (large)
7. At sea, in a lifeboat
8. Miles underground
9. Falling from an unreasonable height
10. Surrounded by fire on three sides

What Brought You to This

1. The alternative was getting married
2. Treasure turns out to have been fake
3. The guild's assassin's are in pursuit
4. Angry husbands are entirely unreasonable
5. A terrible curse haunts you
6. The gods demanded, wheedled and pushed
7. Swore an oath while drunk
8. Temple apparently objected to you doing that with their matriarch
9. Still hungover, the rest is a blur
10. Snakes

How It Is About To Get Worse

1. Woke something that should stay slumbering
2. Reasonably sure those men with curved swords have taken offense
3. Wizard who, for no apparent reason, lives in that tower
4. Gods are miffed
5. Assassins have found you
6. Currently naked
7. These people aren't speaking any kind of recognizable language. And may not be people.
8. You're bait
9. Someone has just been scorned.
10. Tremendous success attracts unwanted attention.

Ok, yes, this is kind of minimalistic, but I admit, I have a strong temptation to take it for a spin.

Leverage Magic; What Not To Do

As noted, I've been thinking about ways to add magic to the Leverage system. It's actually quite easy, especially if you're going to be adding it from scratch. It's a bit rougher when you are trying to emulate a specific magic system, but that's always the way of it.

This has lead to a bit of mechanical experimentation, and one particular bit of sausage-making struck me as something useful to talk about. There's a particular approach to fiddling around with Cortex Plus that is intellectually very appealing, but which produces the kind of results that look cool on paper, but end up leaden at the table.

Consider, if you would, Button Men. For the unfamiliar, button men is a simple dice fighting game from Cheapass games. The basic mechanics are very simple and easily adaptable to many situations (I've run entire wargames using them), and at their heart they boil down to "Each side rolls a bunch of dice. On your turn, you can remove another players dice if one of yours shows a higher value, or if you can add up dice to equal a value they show. After a 'capture', reroll any dice involved in the capture" Dice are scored based on their size, so you run the gamut from d4 to d30, and you can really throw down with almost any 5 dice. As time went on, special dice were introduced into the mix, with extra rules, and that's where things get curious.

Button Men is interestingly informative for Cortex Plus design because the dice tricks it includes are designed for a range of die values rolling against a competing pool. It seems very natural to bring those ideas over into a Cortex Plus roll by introducing ideas like "Knock a die out of the opposing pool", "Force an opponent to reroll a die" or "Reroll one of your dice". You can build some pretty cool stuff with this, stuff that allows for some sophisticated interplay between opposing rolls.

But whatever you do, don't.

This is one of those cases where the fact that you can do something doesn't mean you should. At present, resolving Cortex rolls is pretty quick - determining success is very fast, and spotting any complications or opportunities is only slightly slower. There may be some delay _before_ the roll, as decisions get made regarding what dice get brought in, but by and large that is a fun kind of delay because, to sound a little wonky, players are usually engaging the fiction (which is in turn represented by dice). The inertia of play keeps moving (or can keep moving - it's possible to bog down if people get too bonus-obsessed, but Leverage doesn't particularly reward that).

In contrast, playing dice games after the roll is a total show stopper. Yes, some players can glance at the dice and near-instantly make all the decisions necessary to move forward, but they are very much the exception. Play is more likely to stop as players consider the smartest option. This speaks directly to Linneaus's first principle of dice game design: Downtime is the enemy. No one want sot be left sitting there at the table while a player decides which of two options is marginally superior.

In broad game terms, this is something you avoid by making choices simple or obvious. This seems counter-intuitive, at least in part because we don't want to neuter the player's choices, so let me unpack this a bit. When we're talking pure game decisions, we want to minimize uncertainty. To use 4e as an example, players have a lot of tactical choices, but the only real uncertainty is whether they'll hit or not, and that applies equally to all options. A player may need to make a decision between burning a daily or encounter power in a given attack, and while this may lead to some indecision, that indecision is not rooted the player not understanding the outcome.

In contrast, let's imagine a Leverage rule that let's you force a reroll in an opposing die. If that die came up showing it's max, then it's no real choice, but what if it just rolled ok? What if forcing this reroll means you also reroll one of your dice? On a close roll (especially if there is other uncertainty, such as what tricks the GM might pull[1]) you can utterly freeze up.

Anyway, the bottom line here is that it is possible to introduce all sorts of dice tricks into Cortex Plus, specifically Leverage, but it's not a good match.


1 - This, right here, is one reason I prefer GM transparency. When the GM has mystery powers to throw into the mix in response to player actions, it invites paralysis and paranoia.

Friday Roundup

It's been a bit of a rough week - I've spent much of it trying to shake off some sort of bug and trying to not to completely lose my schedule to Wow, two distinct challenges. Still, good things are floating around at large.

• If you haven't already heard it, I was recently on The Game's The Thing with Cam Banks talking about Leverage. It was fun, and I don't think I sound like too much of a mouth-breather, so score one in the victory column. And in an unprecedented media blitz (at least for me) I was also on Narrative Control, talking about Apocalypse world with Sean Nittner and Judd Karlmam. I just listened to that one this morning, and it also went pretty well.[1]

• I admit that the two podcasts have left me tempted to show up at Fred's with an Ipad and just record _something_ while we both play with our kids. It might be the first gaming podcast to include phrase such as "when the dice hit the what the heck is oh no honey don't east that don't oh man!",(a sentence which I suspect can only be parsed in parentese).

• A new and, by all reports, very cool game shop has opened down in DC, Labyrinth Games. This is a fantastic thing since the DC are has a real shortage of game stores relative to its population, and most of them aren't accessible via the metro. Fred wrote about it more extensively and I'm envious since I have yet to actually make it into town to see.
  
  

• Fred's also taking advantage of the new space to take a page from the Endgame playbook and organize a Taste of Gamma World event, running a couple of tables of Gamma World on the 18th. I'll be missing it, but it looks like it should be a great time. The funny thing is that this is not even a faintly sponsored event. Fred just likes Gamma World, and things like this happen when he gets enthusiastic.
  
  

• A fantastic new blog has started up called Beyond the Golem. It's pitch:
  
  This blog is not about the Golem. It’s about the underdogs. Over millennia, Jewish writers created a vast, imaginary world filled with demons, fabulous beasts and demi-human monstrosities, a world where vast deserts cover the open gates of Hell, and where singular individuals can traverse planes of existence and wield awesome powers. Compared to all this, the Golem is just a clumsy block of clay.
  
  Two posts so far, and they've both been great. This one very quickly ended up on my feed reader.
  
  
• Someone was smart enough to publish Chuck Wendig's 'Double Dead', so keep an eye out for that showing up sometime down the line. Chuck's a non-stop font of talent who's put in the time and effort to really pursue what he loves, and between this and Sundance, I'm super happy to see it bearing fruit.

• Peter Bregman talked about not letting the package distract from the message. Not much pithy to say here, except that it was a useful read to me.
  
  
• Speaking of useful reads, I have just finished my unprecedented second read-through of Influencer, by Paterson, Grenny et al. This was one of those books that was so good that I own it in three formats (print, kindle & Audio), but reading it twice, back to back, is something I can't remember having done with anything else in a while. I've been recommending this one right and left, and I think it's been making an impression.
  
  Basically, it's a book about changing behaviors, and how it's accomplished. In material, it has a lot in common with the remarkable Switch. However, since the authors are, ultimately, writing for a business audience, the net result is somewhat more practical while still being profoundly potent.Changing behavior is one of those things that matters on things as personal as me trying to lose weight to as large as solving serious business (or world) problems, and the book runs up and down that scope effortlessly and usefully.
  
  What's crazy is that this book has lots of things that I really don't like, stylistically. It's got a business-y, sometimes jargon-y tone that can really grate. I hate stuff like that, especially when they make mention of their other book (Crucial Conversations) but the material is so useful that I could just ignore it.
  
  The book really ended up getting into circulation after a Gamma World game. A friend was having trouble with carnies in the kitchen (code for problems you know you should avoid, yet don't.) and upon hearing him talk, I reached into my bck to pull out my copy of the book, complete with highlights and numerous little post-it flags sticking out. I hadn't even finished it yet at that point, but I handed it over right then and there for him to read. I finished it on the Kindle, and I'm glad I did, since I think it ended up being the right book t the right time. Fred was there for the exchange too, and I hadn't even realized it was on his radar, but somewhere in there it must have caught his interest too, because next thing I know he's thrown quotes from it up on his tumblr.
  
  I think Fred ended up summing it up best with the observation that it was hard to figure out what not to be highlighting in the book.
  

Anyway, I hadn't mean to talk to much about Influencer, but I guess it's self-evident how good a book I think it is. Beyond that, lots of good stuff out there in the world something worth rememberingon a cold, blustery Friday.


1 - I'm a sucker for the Narrative Control guys because they read my blog. I means, sure, they're smart, insightful and talented, but that's purely secondary!