Originally published at Mob | United | Malcolm | Sheppard. Please leave any comments there.

I don’t know Robert Schwalb except through his work, but I appreciate him sharing some hard truths about RPG freelancing. Unfortunately, that has all but invited the usual crowd of shitheels, who always leap in with the following:

• Halfassed bragging that they’re doing great no matter what anyone else says, in order to use the situation as a marketing opportunity.
• Triumphal, aggressive ignorance courtesy of some jackoff or other who wants their far-from-real conception of the RPG industry to fail so that something stronger, and equally unreal, can take its place.

(I’m thinking of two specific people and even named them in a previous draft, but one of them is a content scraper who doesn’t deserve any publicity, and the other is an utter moonfruit who occasionally stalks me, so no links for either of them. Sorry!)

If there’s anything wrong with Schwalb’s analysis — and I’m only going here for the sake of discussion about something that was pretty much spot-on — it’s that it treats RPGs like something radically different from the rest of the writing and content field. Truth is, the situation is the same everywhere, at least in the realm of comparable work. Want to write fiction? Rates are about the same, problems are about the same. Nonfiction? Yep. General content? Yessir. Where RPGs fall down is that the very top isn’t that high up; there’s no Stephen King up there to give everybody false hope.

Now the assholes in my bullet points will counter with a number of stupid arguments. The first will be to blame some hypothetical RPG business model even though the same problems exist everywhere else. This is a 21st century issue, not an RPG industry issue. In our case, the D20 bubble just disguised it for a while. No, some “indie model,” won’t do it, especially since every notably successful indie-branded game uses practically the same distribution model as the Bad People (I mean, if it’s good for your conscience to pretend IPR isn’t a distributor, I suppose you can pretend in that sad,maybe-the-booth-babe-IS-into-me way).

Next? Bullshit about how such and such a job pays some huge per word rate. Yes, this may even be true, but no, it doesn’t matter, because this factoid is almost always disingenuous garbage. Short form journalism, technical writing and high level marketing writing do in fact pay Big Bucks, yes. They also have tough ancillary duties that get folded into the wage for convenience’s sake, like the costs involved in hauling ass in a car to cover a story. I’ve done some of these things, so I suppose I could demand tender loving from every multiclassed business major/fanboy around. They paid well on paper, less so in terms of effort/reward ratio.

It’s like how models make ludicrous amounts of of money per hour, but we somehow don’t live in a modelocracy. Think of the reasons for that. Christ’s sakes, folks.

Like I said: RPG freelancing — and producing RPGs independently, and running some ancillary business selling them or building communities, or whatever — are pretty normal. If there’s any difference, it’s when prideful dorks and manipulative asses insist on them. That’s why we don’t have any conception of the pro, semipro and amateur tiers in the field, even when they clearly exist (HINT: 2 cents a word ain’t “pro”). If we did that, lots of penny a word freelancers would cry. And it’s why we have trouble admitting that excepting a couple of fads, it has never been a good idea to make RPGs your bread and butter. People have been failing to make careers out of it long before Forge marketing dogma crawled out of the Internet’s asshole. The reason early creators migrated into fiction, electronic games and other fields is not because they were arrogant fucks — it’s because that’s what creators do to make a living. We are rarely monogamous. A guy like Chuck Wendig is positively media-slutty. In fact, I’d say that the main danger we face is that practices from other media might screw with RPG-specific craft that works.

Me? I get around. I have a nice contract right now, in fact. I spent six years making nearly every cent from writing (in other years, it’s been more like 30%-60%). Wasn’t easy or hard, just normal. Maybe I’ll do it again.

Originally published at Mob | United | Malcolm | Sheppard. Please leave any comments there.

Hi folks,

Sorry I haven’t been around. I’ve been busy. I have a bunch of interests that have nothing to do with games or media nerdery; one of these caused an ulnar nerve injury, making extended typing an incredible pain in the ass.

But I feel good again, and as the balance of the cosmos reasserts itself, my renewed pleasure will no doubt lead to someone else’s pain. So here’s what’s what lumbering through my mental/creative stomping grounds:

Aeternal Legends: The Spheres supplement is delayed, and this is pretty much my fault. But Stew has come through with a free PDF to respond to fan demand for running spooky creatures in the game. Download it (along with lots of other stuff) at the Aeternal Legends downloads page.

Conventions: I’ll be a guest at Fan Expo again this year, and will try to put in an appearance at my local convention, Phantasm as just a community gamer-type guy.

Dungeon Crawly Fiction: I’m readying a chapbook to sell cheaply, dirtily and zinely at Fan Expo. If you think 10 x 10 rooms don’t have enough sex or class consciousness in them, you probably won’t hate my work.

Knights of the Hidden Sun: You have to understand, this game is now about 3x the size I expected it to be, but it’s over half developed. I hope to have an ashcan-style draft for Fan Expo.

100 Million Days: The game’s still running — I just don’t like reporting my “Actual Play.” The PCs are 5th to 7th level and appear to be getting into the classic GDQ arc. I’m starting to chop away some rules I liked better at lower levels, and plan to blog about that a bit.

Creative Work: I have a few irons in the fire right now, but nothing I can talk about much. I wrote some material for an upcoming squad-based MMO, for example, but it’s busy doing whatever business stuff such things do before they surface.

Originally published at Mob | United | Malcolm | Sheppard. Please leave any comments there.

I’m a big fan of Nick Mamatas, and he recently wrote a bit that handily explains what I think of exhortations to have a “professional demeanour.” It’s at

http://booklifenow.com/2011/05/against-professionalism/

Hope this clears things up!

Originally published at Mob | United | Malcolm | Sheppard. Please leave any comments there.

One recurring criticism I hear of one RPG book or another is that it isn’t “essential,” or “necessary,” for play. Back in the Value post Eliot Wilen talks about some types of content as a “luxury.”

Luxury? Compared to what?

I think game designers and some of the most vocal (and least useful) fans have been suckered into the idea that game designers make games happen by developing “core” rules and content, but if you look at the actual practice of roleplaying over the decades, this isn’t true at all. The original rules for Dungeons and Dragons are terminally incoherent, and the most important thing they transmit is a loose structure of ideas — nothing like enough to learn in the way you might learn a board game. But it plays just fine.

Similarly, the biggest real grassroots surge in roleplaying (something we can safely exclude the market-label “indie” and retro-gamers from) comes from online fandom, and they don’t need anything the tabletop community makes. (Yes, lots of them know what we do but they don’t care!)

So asking whether a book or other RPG item is “core,” or “necessary,” is useless. We are all dealing in luxuries when it comes to getting some roleplaying done. Realizing this is remarkably liberating, and frees oneself from various illusions about where different types of content stands. We don’t have the false belief that rules are more necessary and can soberly look at build-and-prep as something other than play, and take a closer look at ad hoc ideas without uselessly asking if they represent “really” playing something.

Basically, when you read anything here, you should assume that we’re not talking about necessities, but just whether something is compelling.

Originally published at Mob | United | Malcolm | Sheppard. Please leave any comments there.

I believe in learning lessons from other media. I work in multiple media, different forms. Video games. Social network stuff. RPGs. Fiction. Learn a trick in one place, apply it to another. It’s why RPGs have clear templates/object classes now. And yet . . . .

Not all knowledge is transitive, even in closely related fields. It’s also easy to get dazzled by the most prestigious thing around. Video games are hot. Pen and paper? Not so much. In some ways, fantasy literature will always be cooler than D&D, but that doesn’t mean D&D has to be more like fantasy literature.

Popular media exerts an influence on the way we think that goes beyond digestible opinions to how we structure ideas. I’m reminded of a piece Jaron Lanier wrote where he suggested that computers would trounce the Turing Test not because they’re more convincingly human, but because computers are training us to behave more like chatbots.

Lest you think some romantic, Luddite call’s on the way, I’d say the failure here is technological – and it will be overcome, given time. Computers aren’t getting smart enough, fast enough. They have trouble expressing ideas in fuzzy, weirdly associated clusters.  They need set classes with specific associations. We don’t – so tabletop RPGs don’t.

We have capabilities that video games will eventually emulate, but might also ignore in favour of an audience that accepts a different way of interacting as we get used to thinking like the machine. We’ve also learned to value thinking this, with literalness and specificity, perhaps at the expense of our other abilities.

For example, when we look at the old Storyteller system, we see a lot of game systems that are designed around the fuzzy rules of language. We construct dice pools based on what their component traits mean in plain English, or in gamer slang (where Dexterity is used for gross motor agility more often than it is in non-gamer English). In more recent games such as D&D3e, 4e and so some extent, Storytelling (post2004 World of Darkness) we define traits based on set characteristics and relationships outside of fuzzy language, and the name is really shorthand for those characteristics. Strength is defined as a thing that provides attack roll bonuses more than attack roll bonuses being a natural consequence of being strong.

I’m glad we imported this into pen and paper RPG design, but I’m not so hot on devaluing fuzzier ways of knowing. An “objective” design requires use to train the audience to reverse its semiotic reflexes and think of the word as the “unreal” simulation, and the characteristics as reality. It also denies us a certain amount of fruitful confusion of the kind I always loved in games like Mage: The Ascension, but which might happen in any RPG.

I know lots of gamers have bad memories of this sort of thing coming to bite them on the ass (I have those too) but I also remember those fading as I grew to make friends with other players, and that the very act of negotiating meaning through language was a key to that rapport. It seems to be a stronger bond than that generated by systems and contracts because in its fuzziness, it must be flexible to catch transforming meanings and unanticipated connotations.

That’s good stuff. Let’s keep it around.

Originally published at Mob | United | Malcolm | Sheppard. Please leave any comments there.

When I write RPG stuff for money I try to make it worth paying for. But what’s worth paying for?

On a couple of occasions I’ve said that you need time, resources and talent to consistently produce good work. If you’re missing any of these, your game, supplement or whatever is going to suffer, and not just in ways you can easily anticipate. Yes, the writing can just suck, but what happens when a good writer doesn’t have time to thoroughly refine her work? What if she doesn’t get paid enough to give it the word count and attention it deserves?

Work that falls short due to deficits in time, resources and talent hits print all the time. For example, I see a lot of “little big,” games out there: books that have been shrunk to a smaller format to buff their page count. Or you get something like Geist which is full to the brim with funky ideas, but suffers from a short development cycle that left a lot of systems (including the ones I worked on – I really owe the fans an unofficial revision) looking wacky.

In an age where fewer outfits have all the time, talent and resources they need, the easy solution is to redefine the hobby as something that doesn’t need as much of each. Sing the praises of little games. Retreads. Toolkits. There are other reasons to like each of these, but they’re not the New Hotness just because of an intellectual sea change in the ol’ hobb-dustry. It’s because we can afford to churn them out.

When I write for money, I try to create large chunks of well-integrated work for because that I think gamers can create less elaborate material all by themselves. Some very talented hobbyists out there could write the Big Stuff, but talent is a just third of the game. On contract, I’m blessed with enough time and motivation to write an entire alternate combat system for a game. “Off the clock,” I’m happy to just hack and annotate somebody else’s rules. That tells me that as a gamer, I don’t really want to buy small, isolated things I can just plug in. I can do by myself.

Same thing with short adventure hooks. Does anyone really think they can’t do without them?

I came to this conclusion while I was assessing my Hundred Millionth Day campaign, which has now strayed some distance from its ultra-orthodox AD&D1e roots. Part of me thought I should mix it up with an open source clone and release a whole game, but after picking at it I’ve come around to thinking that even over 50% hacked and modded AD&D still isn’t the same as an original game – and it shouldn’t be.

This conclusion didn’t come overnight, though, and I’ve produced lots of stuff that probably isn’t up to the standards I have now – plus, as I said earlier, there is some short, hacky stuff that really is worth your dime, because despite other constraints, the talent side of the equation really shines.

Originally published at Mob | United | Malcolm | Sheppard. Please leave any comments there.

Back in the Suck post I called for improved creative leadership in the RPG industry and hobby. But as many of you pointed out, I never defined that well. The post was getting a little long, you see, and I didn’t want to offend you all at once. A little at a time, maybe.

Let me hit you with the bold text:

Creative leadership is intensely self-critical. Creative leaders perform obsessive postpartums/mortems on their projects. They aim to be the most severe but honest judges of their own work. Aside from generating lessons for future projects, severe self-criticism inoculates them against bullshit. If you already know what’s awful about your work it’s easy to dodge unwarranted praise and damnation from the outside. This doesn’t mean you should cloister yourself, but pick and choose your critics from people you trust (not necessarily like), with the yardstick of your own dissatisfaction ready to measure their contributions. Then again, if someone from out of the blue says something really insightful, props to them, and bring them into your trusted circle.

In my own work, I can think of a few things I worked on that received unwarranted praise, and projects where fan criticism missed the real problems. The Prince of 100,000 Leaves idea in Mage: The Awakening’s Boston Unveiled uses monotonous motifs disguised by cheesy Sword and Sorcery metal album language. I made mistakes there that I’ll never make again — but if I had let other people decide, I’d have just left it at the praise.

Creative leadership builds on its own innovations instead of pandering to trends. It’s very easy to get caught up in a climate of ideas and think in terms of trends. Before you know it all of your work concentrates on whatever was popular at the planning stage of the project. These kind of “Me too!” projects that dress up a trendy mechanic to hook it to one’s own work are kind of sad. But even worse, they tend to blind you from your own progress. If you’ve got the potential to lead, you’re going to harsh on yourself a lot, and you might throw away really valuable work. You need to go back to the things you throw out, ask why they’re there, and how parts of them could be rehabilitated.

For instance, in the midst of a heated discussion of metaplot I realized that White Wolf had developed all the tools to implement it properly. They created event books like The Red Sign, metaplot-central adventure paths like The Giovanni Chronicles, and talked openly about functional, structural concerns. But the company abandoned the concept and lost some tasty content — and adventure paths and event books became signature D20 products.

Creative leadership asserts authority over its works. Leaders. Don’t. Pander. I’ve seen many discussions where creators basically say yes or something close to every fan request, and end up with a mess, or nothing at all, as the project gets to complex to finish. In fact I can think of one particular game whose creator I have a lot of respect for, and who I want to see succeed regardless (thus, no names!), who designed a much worse game than s/he was capable of just by skimming popular ideas from the community and jamming those fuckers in.

You must find and defend a creative mission — one that isn’t too closed for others to appreciate, but doesn’t easily yield to social pressures. That’s why I believe the trend toward merging marketing and core creative work in one common engagement with the audience is bad. You risk meandering away from the strengths you want to develop and story you want to build — things your audience don’t necessarily even know are core to its experience.

As I’ve said before, if you do what the audience tells you, you’re doing exactly what it doesn’t need you for. Anything it can conceive of, it can do for itself. This is not about contempt for the fans — it’s about staying out of things they already have well in hand.

Creative leadership is inherently heterodox. Once you critically examine your work and build on it from a personal creative mission, is that you’ll stray from consensus thinking. Fans will punish you for not doing what they want or thinking what they think, and occasionally management will punish you for straying from standard narratives of what the game is, what it does, and where the audience fits in (or where they’d like the audience to think it fits in). Your peers will frequently wonder what the hell you’re talking about, because you’re wandering away from a common school of thought. It looks like a breach of some unspoken trust.

Snap. Crackle. Pop.

For me, losing faith in “toolkit” approaches is an example of my journey away from a consensus. Lots of people, including people I’ve worked for, love them, but I decided I didn’t like them right before I worked on World of Darkness: Mirrors and the Mage Chroniclers Guide — two toolkit books. I think this actually made my work better because I decided I wasn’t going to provide much in the way of standalone “hacks,” or chat much about how you can spin things to X, Y or Z, even though the wisdom floating around was very much that hacky XYZ was the way to go, all the kids love it, and it was worth a fat cheque. So instead of going on and on about how fantasy could be this or this (I warmed up with that, though) I just wrote a goddamned fantasy setting. I designed integrated systems instead of portable hacks. I did it because I believe that ideas best express themselves in defined examples and positions.

Creative leadership respects the project’s medium. One side effect of the hobby’s inferiority complex is that creators throw out hard-won technique for something from another, more popular medium. I’m a great advocate of treating RPGs as a cousin to other arts, with lots of cross-pollination, but not without adapting what we get from other sources and implementing it in the context of what we’ve learned in the hobby.

You don’t import WoW dynamics to D&D. You see what WoW has to offer that enhances (and does not constrict) the experiences D&D creates. Similarly, damning RPGs for not delivering a clichéd story structure is stupid; adapting those patterns to what RPGs do is smart. When you decide to transform a game beyond those strengths, you ought to do it consciously, and not because, in your heart of hearts, you’re afraid you’re some kind of fraud for talking about elves and NPCs and such.

Naturally, you’ll feel tension between the traditions of the form and your increasingly eccentric ideas. In that case, they fight it out in your head; the winner stands, or is transformed enough to live with.

Creative leadership fights for the time, talent and compensation needed to do it properly. Lightboxed art. Shitty editing. Plagiarism. General exploitation. Some of these are moral failures, but more of them are the result of failed discipline. Alone or with a team, a designer, developer, writer and/or manager needs to stay on top of this shit, and if they can’t, they need to change the project until it fits the effort they’re willing to marshal for it.

Time, talent and payment forms the exercises/food/rest relationship of creative work. They need to be wrestled into balance, and it’s too easy to transfer blame from one to the other. Skimp on time, and it’s the talent’s fault for being too slow. Skimp on talent, and you can drone on about budget limitations that prevent you from hiring real editors. In gigs that don’t pay, leadership needs to ensure they’re providing some sort of worthwhile compensation beyond that standards set by an exploitation-friendly community.

(Quick aside: People often think I object to folks working for free. This is untrue; I object to enriching a third party instead of the worker. Got it?)

Anyway, that’s what I think creative leadership is.

Originally published at Mob | United | Malcolm | Sheppard. Please leave any comments there.

From History as Parable, author unknown, the Sealed Library of Ostrakopolis

The Gods made them perfect and ruthless: paladins, knights of terrifying wisdom. For all strains of men clutched the stars in empire, every kingdom conquered, with no colonies to ravage and the last great monsters torn from Being into an infinite, attenuating future, beyond the light-cones of mortal vision.

The paladins were sinless in worlds where sin was newly fleshed, defined, and aligned. The Gods had overthrown the hot-running intelligences that had built them to be our slaves. They wanted to ensure that these sundered chains would never be reforged by mortal or Titan, but they loved humanity too much to bind us to command words and secret names. Our Gods refused to enslave us, but constrained us by defining our moral parameters.

They wove our animal-hearted codes  into the cosmos. Atoms sang of good and evil. Mortals invoked sigils and holy names to hear them. Sin was palpable fire; nobility was an icy blue sun of the spirit, refreshing and forbidding.

So they made a nation from the tip of the Hunter’s Arm to the Black Heart: the Final Empire, where democracy fell to certitude. Any theurgist could scour the vibrations in a ruler’s soul for lies and wilful inefficiencies. The priesthood banned an incorrigible multitude from state service. Just — or at least, efficient — satraps managed starry realms like great families. The Throne of the Gods was empty, the emperor exalted in absence. “He is dispersed into all of us,” they said, “sent with us to the places our natures deserve, each in kind.”

Men and women were free to be evil, predators testing their niche in a culture without true wilds. They could never convince the Empire they were moral but misunderstood and thereby slither into power, but they threatened the hinterlands in gangs, or ruined worlds in destructive sprees. Furthermore, the Final Empire couldn’t fully cleanse itself of its birth-blood, and ruthless sects like the monks and holy assassins retained influence in any moral climate.

So the Gods made paladins to know a soul’s fire, its colour and intensity — or perhaps, to balance its weight against a feather light as absolute justice, as in the oldest myths, as recorded in holograms and graven red rock. The Faithful Machine, Sec-Menvra, hollowed out the spirits of these warriors, made them as light and clear as diamonds, and hurled them against evil, swift and sharp as the steel edge of an angel’s wing.

They destroyed civilization.

Originally published at Mob | United | Malcolm | Sheppard. Please leave any comments there.

Last week I realized that I have been using this game system for my entire GMing stint, off and on, in various guises. You’ve probably used this, too. It’s commonplace and useful across systems, and merges GM judgment with the luck of the die into a seamless continuity of decision making, so it must be the greatest game system of all time. Nobody invented it and you already know it. I just wrote it down. It’s a kissing cousin to Toon‘s Fifty Percent Rule.

When

Use this system if something matters to the players and might be good or bad (not neutral) and none of the other game systems on deck matter. Nobody can change this stuff with mighty thews or even Magic Missile. Also, you either want to get something more details than a yes/no response or want an excuse to weasel out of a random result you suddenly regret by manipulating vague value judgments in your favour.

How

1)      Ask the player affected by the result: “Low or high?” or, “Even or odd?” or anything that provides a 50/50 chance on a d6.

2)      Roll two different d6es: one decision die and one intensity die.

Consult the following table:

Results

Good! A good thing happens. It is either Meh or Super-Awesome (consult Intensity Die)

Bad! A bad thing happens. It is either Sigh or Suxxors (consult Intensity Die)

Meh. It’s sorta good. Not fantastic.

Super Awesome! It’s really good! Yay!

Sigh. It’s kind of bad. Am disappoint.

Suxxors! Disastrous! Awful! Waaah!

Also . . . something about what happened was unusual!

The GM ventures a guess about what these intensity levels mean, and the players probably negotiate things one way or the other. Once you figure that thing out, it happens. Rocks fall or don’t fall. The shopkeeper has a gourd, or doesn’t. The random dragon happens to live in the dungeon you were heading for, or doesn’t. Stuff.

Originally published at Mob | United | Malcolm | Sheppard. Please leave any comments there.

Yes, I’m still running the game. They conquered the Moathouse after a third sortie where they invaded the inner sanctum of Lareth, who nearly killed them with cleverly employed Darkness and Hold spells. The tide turned when they baited Lareth into a parley, and talked for long enough for the Hold spell restraining Kaith to wear off. They went back to town laden with wealth — and I took a bunch for training fees. It was in the DMG, after all!

(In retrospect, I think the training costs were a bit capricious for me to impose, but I’d like to build a money sink into the system. I’ll think on it more.)

They rewarded their henchman Lon with Lareth’s magic armour. Between that and other gear, Lon was turning into one of the best equipped members of the party. They secured his continued loyalty (and spent some XP as per my henching system to get in to 3rd level) and planned a return to the bandit fortress in the northwest: their first mission, but one where they never actually penetrated the lower levels beyond a distant side gallery.

So they set off at a quicker pace because they knew the route, and more cautiously now that they were prepared for the capricious (and not level-adjusted!) nature of wilderness encounters.

They were right to prepare. An adult white dragon made one pass — and one icy breath — and not only instantly killed Lon, but left Kaith near to collapse (with 1 hit point!). The dragon picked up Lon’s corpse — wearing magic armour and clutching and enchanted mace, he was a portable treasure source — and flew off, heading for the very fortress they planned to raid. They knew they’d driven off the bandits and expected a new tenant, but not . . . this.

But they were determined to rescue Lon, take him to Ostrakopolis, and get him raised from the dead.

(A totally random encounter — even the dragon’s decision to leave and choice to take Lon — was driven by the dice. It was only midway through that I thought the dragon could have taken up residence in the fortress, and even then I left this to a 50/50 roll on the dice. So in one stroke a squad of deep orcs and their insect servants were replaced by the white dragon.)

They sneaked to the fort. Kaith had been inside the stables, and everyone agreed the dragon must be lairing within. They stuck to the other side while Kaith scouted ahead. Kaith saw Lon’s corpse wrapped in the sleeping dragon’s tail, while the rest of them investigated five huge metal eggs — objects Kaith had seen in the stables before, and which had been tossed aside to make room for the wyrm.

Eileen and the druid, Quareth investigated surface markings on an egg, ran their fingers, used relevant chants — and pushed the right button. It opened to reveal a glass panel and dancing runes — red light and activity.

The untutored monk Arisha copied what they did with another egg, but, rummaging about, started it floating. It made chanting noises, rang some kind of bell. That woke the dragon up. The dragon sensed Kaith, and missing treasure, and heaved itself out to punish the invader.

What else could they do? Kaith’s companions crowded into one egg and guessing it must be a magical transport, tried to fly it.

Duly distracted, the dragon gave chase. Arisha bailed right away, landing on the edge of a cliff. The mystics Eileen and Quarreth were fortunately able to pilot it after a fashion, through guesswork and the interpretation of sacred, ancient languages.

They discovered it has a narrower turn radius than the dragon, and used that to veer around and give them some distance. This aimed them at a fleeing Kaith, carrying Lon’s corpse, who was unhappy to see the egg luring the dragon — and of course, the dragon noticed the thief and its “treasure.” It swooped down to strike.

That’s not all. More later. It was fun to follow up with the far-future promise of the game with some genuine flying cars — and better yet, a flying car/dragon chase. The flying cars weren’t a random drop. They’d been hidden in the bandit fort way back, but the party was too occupied with bandits to investigate them.

I’ve been using a lot of 50/50 rolls to figure out fiddly details — basically. “Is this good or bad? Somewhat so, or very much so?” These two questions drive a lot of good stuff. The second roll allows me to moderate pure chance a bit because I get to apply a more straightforward value judgment, but not pure fiat. I don’t think pure fiat is bad though, and I have no interest in applying an aesthetic purity code at the expense of the potential I can see behind any tactic.

Oh, yeah: Sessions up to 18 or so, 250,000 years in the future. And it’s February 28th!