My First Retail Display

Proof of Retail Placement

So a few weeks ago I bit the bullet and asked my FLGS if they'd be interested in selling some of my gaming zines. I went in for a meeting with a bunch of copies printed, and walked out with some cash. Last week I heard that they put the display out, so I went in to take a photo to brag about it.

So here I am, sharing the photo I took of the zines I made in my local game store and bragging about it. I'm reaching out to other local retailers, so we'll see what happens with those inquiries.

"Local Designer T.W.Wombat" has a nice ring to it.

If you're local to Worcester, MA, you can run over to That's Entertainment on Park Ave. to pick up a physical copy of some of my titles. After that, download a PDF from the links below. If I've moved away from Pay What You Will pricing when you get there, email me with what you bought, and I'll send you a code to get the PDF for free.

Huge thanks to Sorana and the That's Entertainment crew for taking a chance on my oddball titles.

Gary's Visit

Gary visited me last night.

Or rather, I had a dream where I went to Gary's house for the weekend. It was a shack in the woods, half a mile up a pitted dirt road. Snow had fallen overnight, losing the battle against spring's warmth. The next morning his house lay just out of the center of town, across the railroad tracks and through a park where people in Victorian finery rode horses. Maybe it exists everywhere, sort of a Gaax's Magnificent Mansion. It fits.

Dreams are dew, evaporating in the morning sun. Splinters of this one stuck with me a little longer like frost on the grass. I got up and started typing this out on my phone in the bathroom in the wee hours before dawn.

The Right Job for the Fool

via Wikimedia Commons

Why do I edit?

Why do I put myself through the wringer? Sometimes I scramble to find the time to edit before the deadline when my day job crushes my schedule. Sometimes I hit a brick wall and have no idea how to express what needs to happen to improve the manuscript. Sometimes I wait for a manuscript to arrive after clearing my schedule so I'll have time to focus on it. Sometimes my edits are flat-out wrong for the project.

These are hard situations to face, but I keep finding myself coming back to editing.

Where It All Began

I knew I still had this kicking around somewhere, and recently I found it in an envelope labeled "Medieval Prints, etc." I present to you, for your amusement and edification, my first game hack and the board game/minis/RPG crossover game that paved my way into D&D.

The box disintegrated, but I cut out
and saved this much of the cover.

Back in 1980, possibly for my 11th birthday, I received a copy of Caverns of Doom. Check out its BoardGameGeek page if you want a full copy of the rules and map. It was a cheap D&D knockoff in board game form, complete with lead minis and a cheesy little painting kit. It had a fold-up dungeon map printed on card stock. The dungeon overflowed with monsters and treasure, populated anew in every game using die rolls against a table. I don't think it came with dice, but I scavenged a couple of six-siders and went to town.

It scratched an itch I never knew I had.

I solo-played the hell out of that game.

2013's Last Gasp

It's been a building year.

Don't get me wrong. It's been a great year, but it felt very preparatory in a way, like I've been gathering for something greater in 2014.

He's even got a red pen!

The Editing Business
I focused on smaller projects in 2013, since they fit into my schedule much more easily. I also didn't spend much effort on developing leads over the summer, so it felt like I was coasting for a while. It shows in the numbers. The number of projects I did in 2013 doubled from 2012, but the income was about half. I've been keeping my RPG Editor CV up to date, so take a look if you want to see what I've been working on professionally.

Since this is a side business, I'm not terribly concerned about the money at this point. I did get to work with a wider group of really cool people, which worked out very well.

On a related note, I think I hit a tipping point in December when I got a couple of inquiries in a single week. It's taken 2 years, but people are starting to seek me out as opposed to me asking and pounding the pavement. Not that I'll stop asking, but it's nice to have great gigs fall into my lap.

The Gaming Den of Iniquity
I've been shooting for a blog post a week, and I ended up with 42 posts this year. Usually I've ended up posting on Fridays, madly scribbling something on the morning's train ride, and I don't see that trend changing anytime soon. There's nothing earth-shattering being posted, but I think I've done some good work.

• On Editing and Writing More Better - I posted a series of writing and editing tips, but tapered off when I got busy in the fall. There's more to come here.
• I find myself writing more fiction lately, mostly 200 word flash pieces with occasional lapses into Elizabethan sonnets and cyberpunk ad copy. They go quickly and keep my writing muscles limber.
• I ran two sessions of an RPG for kids. I'd like to do more in this vein, possibly with Fate Accelerated Edition, but scheduling got to be a nightmare. Maybe I'll do a smaller group in 2014...
• I was on a couple of panels at PAX East 2013, and I posted about Worldbuilding 101. Yes, I'm planning on going in 2014, and hopefully speaking again. I hope I'm healthier this year than last.
• I've posted my share of the usual navelgazing fare about gaming, including evocative titles like Remnants of Analog RPGs; Demons, Practice, and Keeping the Creative Faith; The Rhythm of Year's End; and Holiday Traditions which examines the Boar's Head Feast and thinks about how it would work off-world.

Other Stuff

I wrote up a one-page scenario for Brent Newhall's Dungeon Delvers, which I called Village of Troubles (here's the PDF). It's fairly skill-challenge based, but I wanted a counterpoint to the usual hack & slash I've seen with most lighter systems.

I wrote a guest post for Troll in the Corner called Three Reasons You Need an Editor for Your Game. Yes, it's mildly self-serving, but many designers still need a nudge to make them realize another set of eyes on their writing is a Good Thing. And I have a hard time not editing, so if there's an extra quotation mark before a quote that'll be the only thing I see on the whole page. And that drives me up a tree.

I also wrote up the Deck of Many Legends as a fantasy artifact to support Kaitlynn Peavler's Deck of Legends Kickstarter. It's available under Update #28 if you're a backer, otherwise you'll need to wait until after it ships to take a look. The art for the deck is almost done, and latest estimate has it shipping sometime this spring.

I got all of these projects either through the Gamer Assembly or through personal contacts. It's still all about who you know, so hopefully I can make contact with and start talikng to more people in 2014.

I've gathered some projects I'm proud of and put them on an Author/Designer Credits page for reference. Feel free to peruse the list and get in touch if you want to talk further about any of them.

So yeah. No big breakthroughs this year, but plenty of solid work and good contacts made. And to me the journey is more than a media blitz, so I'm happy with how this year unfolded.

Let's see how this year goes. I'm itching to get back to work.

ONWARD!

"It's a Magical Place."

It was either "Tahiti" or an animated gif.

Earlier this week I returned from a trip to Disney World. It was my first time, and more importantly my daughter's first time. We had a blast, and in seeing Disney through her eyes I rediscovered my sense of wonder.

The grind of daily life brings out the cynic in me. My imagination rebels against the repetition of work, and it lashes out. Sometimes it's funny; other times it's downright offensive. I didn't understand the big deal about Disney, but I get it now.

Magic exists at Disney.

My daughter wanted to catch a show called "Cinderella's Christmas Wish". It was a 10 minute stage show in front of the castle, where everyone debated about how to decorate for the holidays until Cinderella makes the call and her fairy godmother makes it happen.

As she waved her wand we watched this...

...turn into this...

...and in that moment I felt magic happening.

Don't get me wrong. I have a degree in theater. Intellectually I know it's a carefully staged production, reproduced every day at 6:15 sharp. I know there's some techie behind the scenes pushing light buttons on cue. I understand how the magic works.

But it's still magic.

I watched my daughter as she took it all in. The look of wonder in her eyes told the whole story. Her perception changed, and I think she has a greater sense of possibility after that experience. If she wants to build a life-sized castle, hang lights on it, and make those lights change colors, she knows it's totally doable - she had an example right there in front of her. What else can she imagine and eventually make real?

Magic isn't an effect we have on the world, it's the way our experiences change us. It's realizing we have more possibilities and more potential than we originally thought. The next trick is what we do with that realization and all that new-found power.

What should I dream up and create next? The possibilities are endless. They're also much more easily attainable after visiting my first hackerspace last night, but that's a different story.

I'll write up some ideas on how the Disney experience can apply to RPGs next week. Thanks for reading!

On the Power of Tabletop RPGs

(Originally conceived as a lecture or 5-minute bit of a con panel.)

Want to know why I think Tabletop RPGs are cool and better than other games?

Hey! Leave that dwarf alone!

I'll show you. Let's play right now. I'll be the GM and give you a scenario. You be the player. We can make the rest up as we go. Ready? Begin.

"You're in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. What do you do?"

If you're like most people who have ever played an Infocom game, you flip into that mode of play and immediately think of things like LOOK, or INVENTORY, or the cardinal directions (N, S, E, and W), or even UP and DOWN. These make fine choices, but a computer game's programming limits your possibilities.

1. Unlimited Options
If you LOOK in a computer RPG, many times you'll see a list of your available moves and you can choose an option from that list. We're playing a tabletop RPG here so you don't have those limits. If you want to GO OUTSIDE, or WALK THE PLANES, or NAVELGAZE, or even EMBARK ON JUNGIAN JOURNEY INTO THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS USING SHADOW AS A METAPHOR FOR THE PRIMAL SELF, you can do that if everyone else at the table agrees to go along for the ride.

You have no limits in a Tabletop RPG so long as everyone at the table agrees.

It bears repeating: You Have No Limits.

I bet your demon is in color.

2. Player Control of the Game
While computer RPGs offer stunning graphics and a blindingly-fast servant who will take care of looking up rules for you, they don't do open-ended storytelling very well. But in a Tabletop RPG you can simply SUMMON DEMON and *poof* you've created a game element that didn't exist until you created it. Not only do you have a demon, but you've created the ability to summon demons.

Another example: you can FIND THE NEAREST CASTLE. With that one statement, you've not only challenged the GM to create a castle in reasonably close proximity, you've established the very existence of castles in the world. If you want to DESTABILIZE THE LOCAL ECONOMY have at it, but in my game you'd better start doing research and come up with a plan.

This is Player Agency, when players make conscious choices which have a meaningful impact on the world. Computer RPGs and Choose Your Own Adventure books offer a limited set of endgames; their meaningful impacts have already been defined and coded. A Tabletop RPG offers the choice to go completely off the rails into other adventures, other plotlines, other worlds, or other realities.

Hedge maze or stone? You decide!
Either way they're mostly skippable.

3. Skip to the Good Parts
Computer RPGs sometimes let you skip travel, usually as an unlockable advantage you gain along your journey. You find the airship, or you get the portal network back online, or whatever cheat will let you zip from Point A to Point B without all those inane random encounters between. Tabletop RPGs let you focus on whatever you want to focus on and handwave details that aren't relevant.

With a willing GM, you can always find a way to TRAVEL TO THE CAPITAL in an instant, or you can SKIP THIS ENCOUNTER SINCE WE'RE GOING TO WIN WITHOUT BREAKING A SWEAT. You've already defeated the Rat King waaaay back in Chapter 1, so why should you waste your time beating up a couple of refugee rats from that adventure? Computer RPGs keep track of details really well, but that advantage also spawns the Dark Side of Incessant Pedantry. Some GMs fall into that trap as well, but I've taken to handwaving the final few rounds of combat once it's clear the PCs have the upper hand.

Pretty walls are still walls.

Why do I play Tabletop RPGs?
As mentioned above, Tabletop RPGs let you:

1. Do Anything You Can Imagine
2. Change the Game World
3. Focus on the Good Bits

With any other form of game, you eventually find the walls that define the game world. A board game can't reach beyond the confines of the board. A computer RPG will block you from specific areas until you're ready, and it will contrive to keep you under its control. If it doesn't have programming to cover what you want to do, it doesn't exist in the game world.

In a Tabletop RPG, you get to create the walls. If you share your table with adventurous souls, you don't need walls at all. If you want to have a gonzo planehopping game without serious PC consequences, have at it. If you want to create a world where butchers rule and processed meat products are used as currency, knock yourself out. If you want to explore possible reactions to a specific situation, you can replay a scenario over and over using different approaches.

You have control with Tabletop RPGs. Take it. Use it. Push the limits of your imagination and creativity.

But most of all:
HAVE FUN

Thanks for reading!

The Thinking Verb Taboo, Idea Theft, Paper Reality, and Teachers

Today inspired me with a pile of high-octane brain food from online sources, so here I gather and share. Please click through to the original articles and read them for yourself. Each of these will pay dividends on the time you invest in reading them.

1) Thought Verbs by Chuck Palahniuk on Culture Porn
A challenge for writers: For the next 6 months, don't use any thought verbs while writing.

"These include: Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you love to use.

"The list should also include: Loves and Hates."

Find these verbs in your writing and destroy them. Unpack them and lead the reader to figure out what the character thinks instead of using the crutch of looking into the character's head directly. Show, don't tell, but unpacked into observable action. He also reserves a section for is and have.

Mere Existence and simple Thought no longer suffice. Act and Demonstrate to draw your reader into your writing.

2) "What If Someone Steals Your Idea?" as blogged by Daniel Solis
Daniel's enthusiam and passion infect anyone in his immediate area. In this article he clears the mind's cobwebs and dispels meaningless fear on the way to working through your idea. An idea alone does not make a game, and at least part of the idea came from somewhere else in the first place. The development of that idea and the constant revision inherent in playtesting make a successful game, and that takes effort.

"NO GENIUS. NO MYSTIQUE. ONLY WORK."

Also, get over yourself and stop worrying about intellectual property until after you create the property in the reality outside of your head. Which dovetails nicely into...

3) You Are Wrong: A Place to Start by Quinn Murphy on Thoughtcrime Games
Ideas stuck in your head will not serve you. Get past the perfect crystalline structure of your idea and start working out the flaws, but first you need to get your idea on paper. An editor (even you yourself) can't edit something that doesn't exist. Ideas in your head remain formless until you commit them to reality.

"'It was just so perfect, but I couldn’t find a way to express it!' is the phrase you can put on the tombstones of most of the world’s failed creative projects.

Don’t make tombstones. Make art. Make games!"

4) What Teachers Make by Taylor Mali with art by Zen Pencils
Here's my favorite passage from What Teachers Make:

Words to live by, even with all the "this"es. High octane.

(Note to self: Catch up on the entire Zen Pencils archive. Awesome stuff.)

What inspires you?

Focusing on the Positive

An unsolicited recommendation brightened my yesterday and touched off this post.

Everything outside the metaphysical construct of Me piles on the crap day in and day out. At least that's how it feels some days. The feeling that some deeper life exists just under the surface itches in the back of my head, and I feel powerless to capture the infinite possibilities passing me by. The unconscious conspiracy aligns the world against us, as if there's a universal Them tasked with making us miserable.

Perspective for one, no waiting...

But here's the Capital-T Truth:
Nobody conspires against us except us.

Nothing brings that into focus for me like getting unexpected good news on an otherwise bad day. That jarring bit of sunshine makes me look at the mire of the day and start singing along to the Indigo Girls, "It's only life after all." It provides perspective and offers a choice.

My life comes from my experiences, and experiences only happen through what I perceive. Therefore, my life comes through my perception of the world. Just as I can block someone on a social network or change the TV channel, I can choose what I perceive. "Perception Is Reality" lies at the heart of Schrodinger's Gun GMing, but it works in life as well as in games.

I watched "This Is Water" yesterday, which comes from a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace in 2005. It covers this idea in short film form quite well.



Do I want every tedious situation to sap my life in a stupid internal me vs. the world default setting? This is water. I need to remember that I have a choice. This is water. I can dwell on the negative and feed my life to the darkness, or I can focus on the positive and live in the sun while I can. This is water. This choice happens every moment of every day, and in the words of Rush, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." This is water.

Found at Healthy Blender Recipies.

I edit. I am an editor. I want to edit for a living, but right now it's a side job I use to improve myself while improving small corners of this RPG hobby I love. I fear jumping into it with both feet, mainly because I have a family that I need to provide for and with whom I want to spend time, and partly because the psychological and financial pain of past businesses failures still lingers. I don't know if I'll ever get past those fears, but I hope to. In the meantime, I'll work at it when I can.

Here's the thing: I'm good at editing. Sure, I'm still running on intuition at this point, but I notice my toolbox filling up with new skills on every gig. Part of me still fears the Fraud Squad, but that fear diminishes every time a creator wants me to work on a new project. I'm still working on ways to deliver criticism that don't make authors automatically reach for a pack of razor blades, but I'm learning with every new manuscript I read and piece of feedback I write. I can see the path I'm on rising up the mountain, and I'm looking forward to the climb.

An out-of-the-blue recommendation for my editing work tells me I'm doing something right, or at the very least that someone else thinks I'm doing something right. You can't pay for that kind of validation because asking for it cheapens it. These moments shine like gemstones in shale, and I am so thankful for them when they happen.

Thank you to Christina Stiles for thinking of me, for taking the time to respond to a G+ community thread, and for lifting yesterday out of the grey ooze of mundane drudgery with nothing more than four words and an acronym.

If you need more words of wisdom spurring you to do rather than just dream, I give you the "Make Good Art" commencement speech from Neil Gaiman.



I have a path. It's slow going, but I have a path.
Much as my mind resists the idea editing is art, and I make good art.

Now to continually steer my mind toward the light and keep walking my path.

This. This is water.

Communities Rock

So I hang out with The Gamer Assembly online; wander into the webchat and introduce yourself, if you like. Earlier this week we heard that the licensing agreement fell through and that Margaret Weis Productions would discontinue Marvel Heroic Roleplaying as of the end of April (but follow the link to purchase print copies of the Basic Game from Amazon). Sad, but that's the way business runs. Related: I'm really looking forward to the Cortex Plus Hacker's Guide.

The next thing you know, we're in the chat talking about what Marvel heroes each of us would be. Natalya started grabbing pictures and mashing them together, then took those images and mashed up a wallpaper image. In the span of only a few days, we have this little slice of awesomeness:

Gamers, Assemble!
Image heavy lifting and assembly by Natalya Waye. Thanks, Natalya!

Dr. Strange? I'll take that gladly, thankyouverymuch.

Two things of note here:
1) I am astounded at the speed of online community rivaling the speed of thought itself. Ever since the Winter Is Coming blogfest went from idle chatter to advertised event in about an hour in September 2011, this speed shouldn't surprise me. And yet, here I sit, groping my cubicle floor in a vain attempt to find my jaw.

2) I have never met about a third of the people pictured in meatspace, but this image crystallized in my mind that we share a community. Period. Full stop. "Online" modifier label be damned. This is my tribe, one of many to which I belong. We don't always agree, but we continually decide to keep putting effort into the relationship, to understand what lies outside the realm of our personal experiences because we matter to each other.

We're more than avatars and username headers tied to bits of text scrolling by on a screen. People come up with all those bits of text and every idea you read, and people choose to shape ideas into words and share them. Why? The ideas mean something; they're important on some level to the person giving them form.

We can all use an occasional reminder that we're all people, whether the words you read make you angry or happy or sad or whatever. A person sits on the other end of the conversation whether you agree with them or not, and maybe their life experiences have been very different from yours.

Minor edit: we're all people until Skynet builds the Turing Horde and corrupts humanity through social media. But hopefully that day is a ways off yet. I'm not touching AI rights and the rewrite of the Constitution that would require.

Back on point: I think communities rock. What about you?

Looking Back at PAX East 2013

So PAX East happened this past weekend. I wasn't around as much as I could have been, but I decided that discretion was the better part of health this year. I've been sick off and on since Christmas, and the latest cough/sinus thing has been with me for the past 4 weeks. I think it's finally clearing up, but I didn't want to push my luck by staying at PAX until all hours.

Abbreviated though my pilgrimage was, PAX never ceases to amaze me. The amount of things to see, panels to hear and participate in, and people to talk with creates an embarrassment of creative riches and collaboration opportunities for game players and game industry folk alike. For those who have never been, I made a few crappy cell phone vids to give you an idea of the scope. You can go see all three videos on YouTube, but I've embedded the top-of-the-escalator view of the Tabletop Area below because in my mind it's the most impressive: thousands of gamers in a single hall talking and playing tabletop games for 15 hours straight. In the words of Rob Donoghue, "This is not a fringe. This is a THING."

PAX East's Tabletop Area is the largest high school cafeteria you can think of, crammed with people playing games and a pile of retailers to buy from. The game library is impressive, if slow to use. I heard 30 minute wait times to sign out a game were common at peak times, and almost the entire con is one big peak time. For me it's about the tables: a blank canvas on which to paint the world of your chosen game.

"But Wombat," you ask, "what did you do at PAX East other than gawk at the Tabletop Area?" I'm glad you asked.

Friday
Thanks to crap traffic on the Pike, I ended up arriving around 11, about an hour later than I expected to. I parked in the Overflow Lot down by the drydock, and half-walked, half-shuttled up to the hall. I had a bag of food for the hotel room that I bummed a key to deliver even though I wasn't staying the night this year. I needed dice to choose which of the many bathrooms in the suite to use. I also got a picture of the BCEC from the Commodore Suite high atop the Seaport Hotel. Swanky.

PAX East lies within. Do you dare enter?
(Correct answer: YES.)

I headed back, bumped elbows with Storm of Paul & Storm, walked the expo hall (overwhelming!), and hung out in the Tabletop Area for a bit. Pro Tip: Plenty of tables are empty on Friday during the day while people are still at work, so stake your claim on a table early. I limited myself to playing a demo of Dino Dice at the Steve Jackson booth since I wanted to hit the 2 PM panel on the Future of RPGs (guaranteed wrongness: 90%). The Tabletop Theatre line was declared full about a half hour before seating happened, but I hung out and sleazed into one of the seats left over after the crowd settled. An excellent panel was heard by all, challenging the idea that basements and caffeinated sparkling beverages and threatening the PCs' lives are somehow integral to the "true" RPG experience.

We had our Worldbuilding 101 panel immediately afterward at 3:30 PM. It was "full" a half hour before, but we ended up with space for 5 more. We had a great time with a very responsive and appreciative audience, and we fielded a few questions. We also had it filmed by professional videographers with actual borrowed video industry high-end equipment (thank you Natalya!), so stay tuned for the edited video as it becomes available. I can't wait to see it myself.

After the panel we talked with panel attendees, then dispersed. I wandered through the expo hall again, and ended up picking up some PAX Merch. I found Dan in the Jamspace to return the room key. (Note to self: Spend time in Jamspace next year - that freestyler kicked ass rolling costumes and props into his rhymes.) I was tired, so I left and ended up getting home around 7.

Saturday
The Saturday morning commute held no slowdowns at all, and it delivered me around 10:45 because I started out later. Overflow parking became my friend, and the shuttle bus service didn't have me waiting at all on either end. Win!

I walked the hall briefly and stared at dice (the Chessex booth is the penny candy store for tabletop gamers), saw that the merch booth still had scarves, decided to take the aforementioned crappy cell phone vids, and wandered into the Tabletop Area, my default destination at PAX. I hooked up with both circles of friends, one group sitting down for a demo of the X-Wing mini game on the table directly next to the other group fighting through a game of Zombie Fluxx. Odd how convergence happens. I took over for a round or two at the end of the Zombie Fluxx game, and then we wandered over to the Tabletop Theatre for our Tabletop System Wars panel.

I prefaced the panel with a brief talk about the usenet newsgroup wpi.flame and the ritualization of flame wars in a safe space so nobody's feelings got hurt, which set the tone for the good-natured intra-panel disprespect which followed. After a rousing chorus of, "You're wrong, the correct system to use is..." from every panelist, we gave away Bob's bags of gaming loot that he was contractually obligated to part with if he wanted to remain married. Everyone who stuck around got something, I think. If you didn't, let me know or poke a head into the chat and we'll rectify that situation. And yes, I'll post the video of this panel as it's available.

We wandered back into the Tabletop Area, and Brent convinced Daniel Solis to demo a few of his card games for us.

Belle of the Ball has come a long way in the past year.

Suspense (I think?) is an evil little game with a 13-card deck which plays in about 2 minutes and breaks your head along the way. Part logic puzzle, part playing to achieve an unknown victory condition, it packs a lot of analysis-paralysis angst into a tiny deck. Belle of the Ball has become a complex game of matching guests and using Belles to change the game, and it'll take a few times through for me to really feel some of the subtler strategies for the Belles. The good news is it'll be Kickstarted in August, so stay tuned for that.

My mother calls me around quarter of seven, just about halfway through the game of Belle, about an hour after she should have delivered my daughter back home. If you've ever tried taking a call during PAX, you'll know that tens of thousands of smartphone users tend to stress the cell network a bit, and the roar of the hall doesn't make phone communication exactly easy. Suffice to say that monkey wrenches were introduced and I had to leave slightly before I wanted to.

Overall

• I spent a total of 15 hours in or near PAX. That seems like so little for a 3-day event, but it felt so full.
• Playing games with their creators just can't be beat. Thanks, +Daniel Solis!
• On Sunday, I learned that I missed a free ninja gig by +Molly Lewis and +The Doubleclicks on Saturday afternoon. Also various other folk I've talked with online were trolling the hall and active on Twitter. Note to self: Next year look at Twitter, you knob.
• It was a pleasure meeting everyone, especially folk at the panels. If you want to get in touch, please do so by stalking me or connecting to the Gamer Assembly webchat.
• Special thanks to +Brian Liberge for organizing and moderating our panels.
• Huzzahs to fellow panelists +Brent Newhall, +Kaitlynn Peavler, +Casey Peavler, +Bob Smith, +Tresi Arvizo, and Art Vaccarino.
• Thanks to my crew of friends for letting me live vicariously through you with a little help from Google Messenger. +Joe Amato, +Todd Dibble, +Sarah Schlesinger, +Daniel Afonso, +Tom Carr, +Jeremy Medicus, Keith, Airlia, Mike, May, &c.
• Hi to +Matt Maranda, +Tracy Hurley, +Meguey Baker, +Philippe-Antoine Menard, +Christopher Amherst, and various others I bumped into who I may or may not have names for.
• If we talked at PAX, feel free to ask me anything. It's like Reddit, except it's all the time and everywhere. Seriously.

I'll see you next year, PAX East.

Growing Up Gamer

The purple/blue d20 is her favorite.
Yes, she's in Fairy Form here.

I grew up a gamer. I played chess with my father until I fought him to a draw when I was about 10, then we never played again. I used to read his Games Magazines when he was done with the World's Most Ornery Crossword, and I got hooked on cryptograms. In 5th grade we played board games at school sometimes, and they gave me Stratego and Careers to keep at the end of the year. I still have them.

I got my first D&D Basic set (Moldvay - now available in PDF!) in 1981, and a multiverse of possibilities opened up. RPGs gave me a structure around which to build worlds, and to tell stories in those worlds. Sometimes the story came first and begged for a world, sometimes the world spawned stories on its own. In any case, the creativity genie had escaped the bottle, never to return.

And now, I'm a father. I have an intelligent and precocious daughter, who sketches books and designs outfits and willfully has trouble listening sometimes. We build robots and play chess and read stories.

And we game.

It started with Princess Ruth when she was 4, which was an interactive bedtime story. We still have some of the story yet to go, since she still has to find the Dark Cave to destroy the Heart of Darkness. She told the story. I just provided details and challenged her occasionally with NPC reactions and information from her research.

Recently, we've moved on to actual RPG play with her and her friends. I chose to go with Warrior, Rogue & Mage, since task resolution requires rolling a d6 and adding a modifier to beat a target number. I went into the first game with very little prep, and we all had a grand old time. I need to limit handing out Luck Points, since getting 2 6s in a row seems fairly easy. Maybe 3 6s in a row instead? Take a look at other lessons learned from the first game, if you're so inclined.

All diced up and ready to roll.

Santa got her a pack of 4 Hello Critty dice in her stocking. Last week we went to our FLGS The Whiz to pick up a full set of dice and a starter dice bag. She picked through and got different colors that she liked, and now she has dice that are all hers. She's outfitted and ready to go for the next game on Saturday. She's excited. Her friends are excited. Hell, I'm excited.

I've started a Game & Potluck Night on the second Saturday of the month at my church. We had over 50 people come out for the first event in January. I hope to do at least that well for the next Game & Potluck Night in March. Eventually we'll put out a tip hat and see if anyone wants to chip in for new games. And we may have a table for RPGs before long. We'll see what the market will bear.

That's the glory of gaming. It's discovering something new to pique the interest. It's allowing everyone at the table to create or change the world or story in some way so everyone is invested in the game. It's keeping everyone coming back for more to build on the pieces they've invested in. It's sharing a table with people you like and making memories that get better with every retelling.

I hope to infect future generations with the gaming bug.

I think I'm doing fairly well so far.

The Story of the Haunted Guard Post

On Sunday, I ran a roleplaying game for 4 kids, aged 6-8 years. And it rocked the house.

I've been planning this for a while - we started scheduling this in the summer. I was looking for a lightweight ruleset and toyed with a few systems before settling on Warrior, Rogue & Mage. Truth be told, I hacked WyRM a bit, but I think the rules came together. If you're interested, download my Excel 2007 WyRM reference sheet (I printed it landscape 2-up and 2-sided so it fits on one piece of Letter-sized paper), the blank character sheet I made (you'll need the Hingham Text font), and the pre-generated characters (10 of them). I chickened out and didn't offer the Hairfoot Summoner, but I had visions of that magic system being very cool and flexible.

Their version was nowhere near this.
Theirs was cooler, hacked from the
Lego Ramses Return game.

Starting Up
My daughter and her friends are very independent, so they started hacking together their own version of Lego D&D before we even started. I let them go until they were good and ready to sit down and play. I set out 9 minis and gave a brief overview of each, then let them choose one to play. We had a Human Monk, a Human Druid, an Elf Wizard, a Dwarf Warrior, and a Human Archer. No disputes; so far, so good.

I handed out the character sheets based on their choices and gave a 5-minute crash course of the rules and where to find things on the sheet. Even five minutes was too long, so I dove in to getting a sketch of party history. Everyone shrugged when I asked how the characters knew each other, though "Because the players are friends" made me laugh. We eventually decided that they had just finished an adventure defeating a dragon in a cave, which was very similar to an impromptu game of Hero Quest I ran a couple of weeks back.

I wanted their input on the town, so we spent some time coming up with ideas. Since the party had just defeated a dragon and saved the town, we decided on Dragonville. The party was staying in town because the townsfolk were holding a feast in their honor.

If you're interested,
grab your own copy.

Introducing the System
Since the quick overview didn't really take, I thought I'd give them a quick taste of what a roll looked like. I decided that contests of skill were part of the feast, so there was an archery contest, a wrestling contest, and a spellcasting contest. I had everyone choose their strong suit to compete in, and give me a roll. The 1d6+stat+skill system worked fairly well. I made it as easy as I could by recording the stat+skill as a single bonus, but doing the math took some kids longer than others. When the Dwarf Warrior (Warrior 6) and the Monk (Warrior 5 +2 Unarmed) wrestled each other and the Dwarf's die exploded, it took a minute to verify the 12 vs. 15 result.

Setting the Hook
The day after the feast, the characters were talking about what to do next over breakfast. They were thinking about going back to the cave and looking for dragon eggs to destroy, when a farmer burst in. He sounded delirious, saying "The guard post is haunted!" before collapsing from an arrow wound. The Druid revived the farmer as the Wizard examined the arrow, which looked Orcish. The farmer got too close to the abandoned guard post when catching a stray cow, and a voice threatened him to stay away. Some bodies near the guard post stood up and started chasing him. He was so scared, he just ran. He passed out a couple of times, but ran directly to Dragonville for help. The characters left for the hilltop guard post immediately.

This was a great time for a quick break to get more food.

Not quite like this. Our
guard tower was round.

Action!
The party arrived at the hilltop guard post. They saw a short tower next to a stable and another building, with dead bodies lying around the tower. When they started talking about what to do next, an eerie voice called out "Come no further unless you bring money." Between a lack of Incredible Hearing talents and abysmal Awareness rolls, everybody was wondering which dead body said that. After some bickering, the voice said, "Then suffer!" and seven bodies stood up, shambling toward the characters.

Throwing axes, arrows, and Fire Bolts streaked across the sky, and the Monk and Warrior dove into the fray. The Monk kicked off Ironskin, which held death at bay as the skeletons and zombies slammed him down to 1 HP in a single round. Then the sharp-eyed Archer caught an ogre trying to sneak around the stable to flank the party. The Wizard and Archer opened fire as the Druid cast Startle on him. Next round, the Wizard dropped him with a Fire Bolt.

The party was starting to mop up the undead, when they noticed a team of orcs coming out of the tower. The Warrior's player decided to spend a Luck Point to change a detail of the story. Since he couldn't make the orcs disappear, he made them not have swords. I gave them clubs instead, but he basically traded a luck point to drop their attacks by 2 points. Was that luck point too powerful? Maybe, but it sparked the idea in the rest of the group that Luck Points could do some funky things. That level of inspiration and engagement is worth a great deal more than a Luck Point, so I wholeheartedly allowed it.

Since the orcs were so nerfed by their lack of swords, and since the Wizard dropped the Orc Cleric in a single shot, the 3 that were left made a run for it. Then the 1 that was still standing surrendered. There were calls to kill him, but only from the youngest. I offered that there were law enforcement people to take charge of the orcs back in Dragonville, and cooler heads rallied around that idea.

Like this, only glowing.

Aftermath
The Archer with her Interaction skill questioned the remaining conscious orc and found that the stairs in the tower were trapped. She also found that the orcs were an advance scout for a larger warband and got directions to that base of operations.

In exploring the tower and stripping magic items from the fallen, the party came up with 150sp, a red spinel gem (probably 150sp), a glowing magic sword, a magic chain shirt made of extremely fine links, a potion of healing (defined by another use of Luck Points), and a ring of defense. Everyone wanted the ring. Uh-oh. I pointed out that there was enough for everyone to get something, and nobody should get more than one thing until everyone had something cool. I started going down the list, and everyone negotiated well for what they wanted.

And with that, we were out of time and off to run to a family dinner. Busy weekend was busy. Sometime soon I'll start scheduling the next game. We'll see if everyone wants to keep the same characters.

More thoughts forthcoming in a Lessons Learned and Ideas for Next Time post.

Non-Sequiturs, Inspiration, and Blowing Off Steam

So I had a non-sequitur tweet-off earlier this evening with the inimitable Tracy Barnett, the driving force behind Sand & Steam Productions. It's been a long day and I needed something to jar my mind out of the rut it had been in all day. Apparently all it takes is one simple statement and the will to continue, and suddenly you get something like this...

• @TheOtherTracy: All I feel like doing right now is tweeting non-sequiturs.
• @twwombat: Lemon Lemurs?
• @TheOtherTracy: Biscuit disco.
• @twwombat: Mother Pheasant Plucker.
• @TheOtherTracy: Chain-link gazebo.
• @twwombat: Aquarium Mousetrap.
• @twwombat: Though I think we may be straying into band name territory.
• @TheOtherTracy: Mousse-based dental work.
• @twwombat: Handcart congregationalism.
• @TheOtherTracy: Band name is the name of my previous left shoe.
• @twwombat: ...in the whisky shower.
• @TheOtherTracy: Logical bean trails.
• @twwombat: "Bucky" Bradbury, western futurist.
• @TheOtherTracy: Leftover band-aid gravy.
• @twwombat: We Are The Hamlet's Father's Ghost In The Machine
• @TheOtherTracy: Blanche the grapes until the supine threshold has been reached.
• @twwombat: Subluxate the metatarsals, submerged in Napalmolive.
• @TheOtherTracy: To be, or slap someone on the wrists for yodeling.
• @twwombat: Having the consistency of bran.
• @TheOtherTracy: Blank stares into the vorpal netherdrome.
• @twwombat: Folded left-handed Huxleyism.
• @TheOtherTracy: Lacking the Proust of our yestergenerations.
• @twwombat: Pulling cotton candy from the tentacled maw.
• @TheOtherTracy: Zebra-striped blazing adjectives with buttery steeliness.
• @twwombat: Doing the tonsil cha-cha with garlic-stuffed olives.
• @TheOtherTracy: I think you win. I'm sequitur'ed out. Well done! =)
• @twwombat: Awesome! I was about to concede so I can get my daughter bathed.
• @TheOtherTracy: This slice of non-sequitur theater is brought to you by #SchoolDaze. Pick up your copy here!
• @twwombat: And definitely well-played, sir!
• @TheOtherTracy: Thanks!
• @twwombat: Thank =you=! I needed something silly after this frustrating day.

Buy this from Tracy.
Seriously.

One statement fed into another as tangents grew tangents, and the ridiculousness kept making me laugh. Now our exchange is preserved for posterity, as if this little bit of fluff needs a solid remembrance. Yes, I took editorial liberty with the order of things, but at least there are no issues with changing the order of a stream of non-sequiturs like this.

Now let's take it one step further.

READER CHALLENGE: Pick one thing (word, concept, syllabic cadence, anything really) from this unrelated pile of absurdity and turn it into a game element, whether for Paranoia, Gamma World, School Daze, Call of Cthulhu, or whatever your fevered brain can think up. Post it somewhere and let me know about it in the comments.

Inspiration can come from anywhere if you let it. Even otherwise frivolous interactions like this. Now go shake your idea tree and let fall what may.

Meanwhile, In The Game Box...

So I'm dealing with a VPN issue which makes working nearly impossible. I'm waiting for updates to install, and I dig out my Game Box.

The Game Box

Yes, that's my original name tag from freshman orientation at WPI way back in 1987 on the lid. I open it, which I haven't done in a while...

Idea Treasure!

...and I start digging. I find my old Hero System binder for the modern-day game...

This is Blade. He's basically Wolverine
with more sharp edges and more issues.

...and I see the character sheet for Gregor Ramon, a swarthy chap. He's a gypsy art thief, one of Derek's characters. Derek has been gone a long time, and losing him still cuts me when I least expect it.

Digging deeper, I find Aurora's Whole Realms Catalogue, which still rocks.

Still a great resource for fantasy gadgets
and high magic pseudo-steampunk inventions.

And I found the 7-pointed star of correspondences, lining up my system of gods, colors, WoD magic spheres from Mage: The Ascension, Chakras, and Egyptian souls.

And this is why an Elder Sign works.
It doesn't have Time nor Prime, so it'll eventually fail.

For those of you wondering how a systems guy tries to make the world fit together, keep staring at the star until something clicks for you.

I found the notebook from my several Highcastle games, started back in 1985.

Highcastle and northern environs.
Includes the Rat Cave, where normal rats
made for the scariest adventure ever.

The Tomb of Tor-Kantor.
He's an insane undead elven general.
The PCs lived, but set him free to seek revenge.

I even kept my visual aids from when the Lizardmen and Dragons tried to invade Highcastle.

Priests of Kreigan try to cover for the
routed conscript spear units, heading for the walls.

I remember they had to rebuild a few wall sections after the battle, but they held firm and pushed the invaders all the way back into the sea, 20 miles away.

I even found some magic items I had made and transferred to 4x6 index cards for reference.

This is Water Brand, a Footman's Mace
with a Decanter of Endless Water in its head.

And yes, I colored the pictures in my Player's Handbook. At least I used colored pencils and not crayons.

I'm never selling it.
Don't judge me. You did similar things.

Every piece of paper holds something precious. The smell of old line printer paper, a scribbled map, a jotted idea, photocopied flags of Japanese Prefectures. Research of things never quite real to begin with, but cast in concrete memory of challenges and laughter. And I miss diving into the guts of a long campaign and juggling the rest of the world while the players dance on center stage.

So that's the photo diary of this morning's trip into my Box of Games Past.

What's in your archives?

PAX East: The Secret to Great Gaming

We all want to play, write, or be a part of great games. We all have some internal list of dos and don'ts to help us find great gaming experiences. But there's one ingredient consistent across all great gaming experiences that I've ever heard of.

It's the People, Stupid.
Playing with friends or like-minded strangers who will soon be friends makes for a far richer gaming experience than playing solo. I'm not going to get into gaming with people who hold definitions of fun which conflict with your definition of fun - that's a different post.

When you play a game, the real world melts away and every player ends up on an even playing field in the world of the game. There's no starstruck awkwardness, no entitlement issues, nothing else that has any useful definition in the world of the game. You play your part, whether a faction, a member of a team, or a set of colored tokens, and all that matters is that you play your role to the best of your ability.

At the Game Table, We're All Equals
What does this have to do with PAX? PAX East has the highest rate of Cool People per square meter that I know about. I have never met anyone at PAX that I have disliked.

It goes beyond that. PAX's environment encourages people to drift in and get involved with each other. We're all there to enjoy gaming in all its forms, and it pays to strike up a conversation or start a game with someone next to you in line or at a table looking bored. We all take responsibility for each other at PAX because every last person there shares a passion for gaming.

That passion trumps everything else at PAX. Gamers are the Us instead of the Them at PAX. You're allowed to be awesome in the geekiest way you can imagine. Nobody even flinches when you laugh maniacally holding a pawn above your head with that look of joy on your face. Everybody shares in the experience around the table, even if they're not playing. And that, my friends, that is magic, pure and simple.

If there's something magical about the environment, then I have to ask...

How Do We Clone PAX?
How do we create the environment of gaming inclusion? How do we get over ourselves, over the parts of us afraid of rejection, over the discomfort of reaching out to another human being and finding out if they're a member of our tribe or not? How do we generate a bubble of PAXness reliably in public without mistakenly scooping up trolls intent on controlling the situation to their exclusive advantage?

I don't have a reliable answer. But I do have friends. And I have enough space at home for 3 game tables to run simultaneously, albeit barely. So I will have Potluck Game Nights, and I will invite people over who I know will enjoy games in the company of others, and I will do my best to weed out the trolls.

It's imperfect, but it's what I have available to me, so I'll use it until we can figure out a way to reliably recreate PAX at the drop of a hat.

How do you create your zones of PAXness?

Why Is D&D the 800 Pound Gorilla of RPGs?

I keep coming back to D&D. I'm not committed to it, and I have no professional or monetary stake in D&D other than the rulebooks and supplements I've bought. I love other RPG systems because they let me tell different stories or play out conflict in different ways, but when I want to start a campaign or knock some imaginary heads I always start with D&D.

Quest for the fountain of youth?

Why? Why do I keep coming back to the sweet siren song of my first roleplaying game, even though the rules have gone through revision after revision, each one effectively spawning a new play experience? Am I trying to recapture the nostalgic "first game" vibe in some misguided attempt to recapture my youth? Possibly... But I think there's a more objective reason that D&D has remained popular through almost four decades and countless edition wars.

D&D Gamified Gaming. And it did so 30 years before Gamification was even a word.

Pointlessly redundant? Maybe, but stick with me for a bit.

Yes, D&D was the first commercial role playing game, spawning a whole new game industry. It was fresh and exciting and a whole new way to play games. But it was just a game, as fresh as it was. What made it different from Avalon Hill wargames? We played it incessantly, but we'd have to be in the right mood to set up a Panzer Leader game. Why? The D&D rules were just as arcane, and there was no physical representation of the action to fall back on. In fact, D&D may not have survived the controversy, the infighting, and the legal troubles if it didn't tap into our psyches and keep us coming back for more. But how?

For those of you unaware of gamification, it's the practice of infusing game elements into something to make it more engaging and fun. For more, start with the Wikipedia entry. It's the tip of the iceberg, but it'll get you a decent baseline. You can take a few minutes and watch this TED talk by Seth Priebatsch talking about the Game Layer, and you can also watch Jane McGonigal's TED talk on making a better world through gaming.

First one's free...

Certain ideas keep popping up that attract us to games. And now companies use these concepts to make their interactions with us more compelling so we buy more of their stuff or remain loyal to their brand. Here's how D&D used gamification ideas even from the first white book edition of the game to hook players and keep them coming back for more. Other games may have had one or two of these elements, but D&D hit 'em all in one shot.

Achievement Levels: Character levels have been around since the very beginning of D&D. Each level has a strong package of character upgrades in the form of more spells, better bonuses, new abilities, and more hit points. Rewards act like a good drug, producing feelings of contentment and satisfaction. They also make you want more rewards, so you're immediately hooked into playing again. First level up's free...

Progression Dynamic/Progress Bars: A character's XP total provides an easy progress bar to let us know how close we are to the next level and its dopamine-inducing rewards. If the DM uses adventure modules, completing one in a series can strongly compel players to come back and finish the rest of the series just to see how the story ends.

Status/Achievement Badges: Whatever you can brag about fits this bill. Level 20 Lord? Groovy. Your party beat up Lolth? She kicked our butts, so good for you! You found Excalibur? Dude! What does it do? D&D provides endless potential because it doesn't provide a fixed list of badges. In this case, it's even more compelling than electronic games since you never have to wait for the next rev of the game. And if you want actual badges (even though we don't need the stinkin' things), check out Stuart Robertson's GM Merit Badges over at Strange Magic.

Appointment Dynamic: This gamification idea has been in place since families have had game nights, so it's actually been built into games prior to D&D. When is your next game? If the game is important to you, you'll make time for it. And if you have the next one scheduled as you're ending this game, you're hooked into coming again.

Party of Awesomeness found on Reddit.

Collaboration/Communal Discovery: Everyone needs to work together to overcome challenges, achieve goals, and unlock bigger rewards. Solo adventures work, but the soul of D&D requires a party that works together for the greater good. D&D assumes this collaborative behavior or the adventures will overwhelm the party. This collaboration also manifests socially. When you discover another gamer, you have an immediate ally with whom you share an entire vocabulary of gamer terms that you could never use at work without alienating some of your coworkers.

Challenges Between Users: I don't mean Player vs. Player here, though if everyone buys into the challenge that works. I think of friendly rivalries, like a race against time or a Gimli vs. Legolas "Most Orc Bodies Wins" challenge (see that scene on YouTube). A larger version of this manifests in a...

Leaderboard: XP totals serve this purpose in a game, especially when characters get personal ad hoc XP awards for roleplaying or side quests. Way back when, the RPGA maintained point totals for members and ranked them at a national level, but the minmaxers took over and discouraged the practice.

Sadly, it's all virtual.

Virtual Currency: This can mean gold and treasure, or it can mean other game currencies like magic items or even spells known in a wizard-heavy game. Anything which gives the player control over the game world counts as virtual currency, as I mentioned previously in The 3 Types Of Loot.

Trust: When the characters undertake a quest, the NPC questgiver implicitly trusts the characters to execute the mission. On a metagame level, the DM trusts the players to run around the world and not burn the whole place down, and the players trust the DM to respond rationally and consistently to their in-game actions. Feeling that trust from others makes the game experience very compelling, especially when compared to real life where temporary employment rules the labor force, probationary periods make you work hard to prove yourself to others, and you need to demonstrate that you don't need a loan before a bank will give you one.

Challenge Level: DMs have access to all sorts of metrics that keep challenges from being too easy or too hard. Character level and party size contribute to how much punishment a party can take and how big a monster they can defeat. Even if the metrics fail, the DM can modify an encounter on the fly to change the level of challenge. Can't hit the demon? An NPC or god gives the characters a boon to make life a little easier. Elementals dying too quickly? Oh, look - they call another batch of reinforcements.

That's what this steaming mugfull
of liquid does when I drink it...

Instant Positive Feedback: When you try something in D&D, you get immediate and very clear feedback on how well it worked. Did the silver sword do a better job hacking through the hordes of critters than the Flame Tongue? Did a sip of the potion heal you? I wonder what this steaming mugfull of liquid does if I drink it? Once something exists in the game, it typically has a numerical bonus so it's crystal clear what something can and can't do. Rewards tie into this as well, since you get XP and (usually) treasure for every monster you defeat as soon as you defeat them. That sort of feedback rarely exists in the real world. You typically need to wait years before finding out how well you invested.

Control of the World: When playing RPGs, you typically play the part of a hero saving the world from desctruction. You have access to powers beyond the imaginings of mere mortals. You're a 9th level Cleric? Congratulations, you can now bring people back from the dead. You control countries and decide the fate of the cultists who tried to summon the Eater of Worlds. We don't usually get such planetary-scale opportunities or decisions in real life, and thinking on such a broad scale empowers us so much that it can be frustrating to go back to the mundane grind of the real world. The superhuman powers don't hurt the buzz either.

With all of these gamification concepts compelling us to play again and again, is it any wonder we're hooked on D&D and RPGs in general? Who knows if they were intentional in D&D's design, but they certainly worked on me because here I am still playing D&D 30 years after my first taste. And now we can learn from D&D about how to keep people playing games even if the rules are arcane or contentious as we move forward with designing new games. Here's hoping we're just as successful.