Maslow's Purse

This plain leather coin purse or pouch comes in a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes, but it always appears empty on initial inspection. It radiates low-level conjuration magic, and coins stored inside will disappear within an hour. Activating the purse's magic requires paying for a purchase of some sort.

If the owner holds the purse in hand while agreeing to purchase something needed for survival or security (food, basic shelter, a mundane weapon when unarmed, mundane armor, climate-appropriate clothing, torches, tinderboxes, etc.), the purse perceptibly fills with exactly enough coinage to pay for the need and not a penny more. Attempts at extravagant spending will not be funded by the purse, nor will attempts to purchase magical items.

Aligned Swords and Cold Wars

I started reading Smart Things, or How Many Magic Swords Are There? by Rick Stump over at Don't Split the Party, which analyzes how common magic swords are in AD&D. Rick uncovers some surprises based on the random treasure tables, like...

"Holy Moley, over 1.2% of all magic items are talking swords! That means, if you use the random treasure charts, talking swords are almost exactly as common as Potions of Healing."

Sure, it's a relic.
But why bother with just this...

It's a great read if you're interested in 1e AD&D magic item distribution and answering why everybody and their duck has a magic sword.

I read something in the alignment section, and my mind took an offramp. Based on the treasure tables, 75% of magic swords with alignments are either Lawful Good (25%), Neutral Good (20%), True Neutral (20%), or Chaotic Neutral (10%). If you just look at the Good alignments, 50% of aligned magic swords are good. And the obvious conclusion follows:

"Advantage - the good guys. Implication - most aligned swords are made by/for good guys."

And I asked myself, "Why?"

"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 Gaming Daughters and Life-Knitting

My five-and-a-half year old daughter rocks the house. She's smart and creative. She writes and illustrates stories on her own. She's learning the piano and taking gymnastics. And she loves games.

Her favorite game lately is Forbidden Island. She plays with everyone she can. I think she's only lost one or two games in about a dozen plays on Novice, so I think that encourages her to play more. There's something tremendously satisfying about getting all the treasures and escaping before the island completely sinks.

It kills me that I feel like I can't game with her more often.

Last night I tried an experiment. I didn't turn on my laptop at home. I wrote email with my phone, but I didn't get sucked into the trap of checking Twitter and G+ and Facebook simply because those browser tabs were loaded anyway and it would just take a minute. I had some time to disconnect and reattach with my home.

Then we decided to play Once Upon A Time when bedtime came around. We made up a main character and gave her a problem to overcome. It was all free-form, asking questions and making up answers. I connected with my daughter through the medium of the story in a way that's difficult in today's "need to get everything done right now" world.

Last night, the Princess of the Kingdom of Flowers didn't have a place to live because her parents moved to Japan, a 3-day journey, and the enchanted castle broke down. She asked everyone to help her, but nobody had any place for her to stay. Then she talked to the owner of a hotel, and he gave the Princess the last room on the 100th floor of the 2000-story hotel. Next episode, the Princess will lose a bracelet and we'll figure out how she resolves that issue.

We have a new game to play, a new tradition. We both have something to look forward to at bedtime now. The story doesn't have to be deep, or complex, or even sensical. It just needs to be told. And in the telling, we make memories. And memories tie us together in tiny touchpoints of awesome.

When we game, we knit our lives together with yarn spun of pure creativity. That's real-world magic. You can keep your fireballs and strength buffs. Give me a good game and good people to share it with, and I'll knit memories to keep with me for the rest of my days.

So thank you to everyone I've ever shared a table with. And here's hoping we can all share many more games before time realizes we're not immortal.

The Gaming Experience and Virginity

I want to expand on an idea I just tweeted.

The desire for Old Skool gaming is the quixotic quest to re-experience gaming for the first time. http://bit.ly/dbopYY - From @gelconf

The video shows a talk from 2009's Gel Conference given by a sleight-of-hand magician named Jamy Ian Swiss.  He talks about user experience and how marketing is about empathy, about connecting with people, about getting inside your audience's head and telling a story that resonates with the person going through the experience you're providing.  At the end, he does a magic trick with a volunteer to illustrate his point.  Trick is, the volunteer is the only one who can't see how the trick works - then he apologizes to the audience for spoiling the experience of that trick for them forever.


He talks about magicians losing their "visual virginity" and how they can't see anything with innocent eyes any more since they know the trick and their job is to fool the audience.


How does this tie to gaming?  Many of the laments I've heard over the past few years are tied to re-experiencing the sense of magic in games.  "Today's games aren't as good/exciting/mysterious/wonderful as the games in the old days."


The games haven't changed.  We have.  We've lost our gaming virginity.  We've played and discovered and learned, and now our minds have categorized and been limited by our experiences with the games we've played.  We know not to try things because they don't work well.  We know that D&D isn't great for non-combat encounters since the point of the game as written is to meet interesting monsters, beat them up, and loot the bodies.  We know the Monster Manual entries.  We memorized THACO tables.  Fill in your own examples, you've got plenty to choose from.


Point is, we'll never have that experience of newness ever again because of our past experience with the game.  We've lost our innocence, and that means we've learned to limit ourselves.  The glory of children comes from their fearlessness, their lack of knowledge of what's possible, and their ability to throw their entire selves into what they do.  How many 40 year olds do you see balancing on one foot on the back of the sofa in an attempt to do a flip?  Not too many.

In our quest to discover what the game's all about, we paint more details onto our mental model of the game, and we eventually make that mental model solid, unchanging, brittle, and much less fun.


We have ways around this to re-inject a sense of wonder into the game:
1) Become a GM.  Game Masters perform magic by bringing a world to life.  They can take their knowledge and relive their innocence vicariously through their players.  Nothing is more satisfying to me as a GM than watching a player's face light up because they've had a breakthrough in the context of the game.


2) Have experiences in new contexts.  Whether you play a new game system every month, or shake it up and do a game at a con instead of at the dining room table, changing the context can change the game.  I remember my first LARP experience - at one point I was huddled in a bathroom in a friend's apartment ready to cast a teleport spell because the lynch mobs ran the streets.  It felt real because I let myself get into my character and I had no expectations about what was possible.


3) Remove the system.  Much of the shared experience comes from the shared rule set.  A player may know more about how the rules work than the GM does.  In the past I have removed the rules from the game with success.  Players create their characters and then I gathered all the character sheets during play.  The players focus more on the world of the game since they don't have a list of pre-fab rule options on a sheet in front of them.  The extreme result of this is to play without rules at all, but that requires absolute trust between every person in the entire group.


I may focus some of these ideas into another post, but I just wanted to get my ideas down before life washed them away.