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Fudging, Fiat and the Regulation of Desire

2009-12-21T12:58:54Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

Participant fudging and fiat are excellent techniques for all RPGs (and other games, but they’re really great in RPGs). People say a lot of silly things about it for three reasons:

Peer pressure.
An unacknowledged desire to dominate others through the game’s text.
A misunderstanding of how it works (which is often contrived due to the influence of the other points).

The first two problems are pretty easy to fix unless you get caught in a destructive scene, which happens frequently when people start gaming as teenagers. Teenagers are status and peer group focused to the point where it mutes individual moral and creative agency, but that’s not their fault. The second and third points stick around because of Graphocentric cultural biases and poor explanations in the books, respectively. They reinforce each other in a pretty insidious fashion.

What do I mean by “Graphocentric?” We belong to a literate culture where certain texts are privileged as sources of revelation. These texts typically have teaching roles, are the focus of communities and are not written to be chronologically sensitive, like newspaper articles. At the simplest level, we have a tendency to revere texts, but once you combine that with a slightly educated middle class its members discover that they can jockey for position over who gets to tell you what the text means. Either way, power doesn’t flow from the text, but from us. One really dangerous aspect of the Graphocentric perspective is that even though hermeneutics are subjective, we are reluctant to admit this because it makes the text look weak and undeserving of its central role. That’s where you get a lot of chapter and verse bullshit about what things really mean, but make no mistake: It’s really a social control strategy using the text as an instrument. To express it simply:

People use RPGs to tell you what to do because we all like to pretend the RPG is really telling us what to do, to the extent that even the folks telling you what to do through the RPG believe it’s all the game, not them.

Vague advice about fudging doesn’t help, though it’s vague for a reason. In their own way, game designers understand the triple threat and usually advise fudging as a way to escape it and take ownership of the game. Many know (though some have forgotten) that the most serious play issues have little to do with differing agendas or any of that bullshit. They stem from hermeneutic conflicts between people aiming for the same thing. These people fail because they put the rules at the center of the relationship instead of each other. That’s why designers who advocate fudging are reluctant to codify the process. They fear that text will just assimilate the specifics anyway, making them a new source for dispute, but it should be obvious by now that people are so twisted by Graphocentrism that they’ll use any bit of text to reflexively impose their wills.

(Once we acknowledge Graphocentrism we can also see that hitching your wagon to a text is a foolish way to cure social problems, that expressing the group’s relationship as a contract [text] of any sort isn’t significantly useful compared to a bunch of other things, and how poisonous in-vogue advice to do either of these things is.)

This insight frees us to talk about what fudging and fiat really are. Let’s begin by looking at a common but incorrect formulation:

Fiat happens when the GM ignores the results of the rules in favour of what s/he wants.

Ignore the system for a GM-determined result.

But when you observe fudging and fiat in the wild it generally doesn’t go down this way. The GM is usually very concerned with the rules, and rarely makes a decision that ignores them in such a simple, binary fashion. (If you haven’t taken the time to sit by a game as an observer, there are a bunch of places you can read about this stuff. I recommend Over the Edge 2nd Edition to start, though it’s more about in-world consequences than where the dice fall.)

It’s more like this:

Rules results + player input + GM input + story needs = result

Changing your perspective answers the question of why GMs roll dice if they’re going to make a ruling that ignores them – they aren’t! GM-adjusted/”ignored” dice rolls (or equivalent system outputs) are extremely useful. Let’s look at a classic move: Changing a hit that will kill a PC if left as is. The rules results tell us that the monster hit and inflicted 20 HP damage. The target character only has 8 HP. Depending on the exact situation this could tell us the following:

The encounter might be too difficult if the scene’s function was to drain resources. This teaches us to use the system better and recognize any issues that require our ongoing attention.
If it’s a fluke result we get a better understanding of how variable rules results can be.
We might learn more about the player’s competence as a tactician, or whether s/he even cares about that aspect of play.

With this information in hand we consider the player’s input. What does s/he want? What did s/he do to get there and how does it relate to the situation at hand?

If the player really wants to be thrown to the wolves for strict tactical gaming we might let the roll stand. If not, we’ll consider fudging it.
If the player wants something in between or is at a critical stage where s/he’s testing the waters of tactical play but also feels very invested in his/her character or a certain narrative arc, it may be more useful to use the result as an inspiration, scaling it back to an incapacitating blow, to send a signal to the player that this is a serious situation without killing his/her character.

GM input exists throughout the whole process in this instance, but it’s easy enough (though not always desirable) to open this up to group discussion and reduce the GM”s direct input. In terms of traditional GM responsibilities s/he may consider the following:

The whole encounter might have come about due to players ignoring or misinterpreting signals. If the campaign is meant to impose serious penalties for error or question player agency in course of events (concepts that many people are terrified to bring into play, but which can work well) then it might be time to let the dice stand. If Frodo and co. head in through the Black Gate, they’re screwed.
Then again, it just might be the GM’s fault for any of the reasons above or because s/he communicated the situation poorly. S/he may be forced to tweak the entire encounter to compensate for the mistake, starting with this roll. After that, s/he revises monster stat blocks accordingly and inserts the possibility of new narrative threads that stem from this encounter.
The GM may have something special planned for that particular character, and sticking with it would be more interesting for everyone than dropping it upon that PC’s death. S/he fudges the roll, but takes its existence as a hint to foreshadow or even implement the special event. In some situations s/he could pull the trigger on the event without fudging the roll. S/he might bring the character back from the dead – it worked for Jesus!

Fudging is the sum total of these influences, so it really is silly to say that the dice or player actions are meaningless. They’re usually more important than the GM’s intentions, though the GM has some serious responsibilities in the whole equation. I should also note that this flood of information doesn’t wait for the decision point. Most of it happens in the run up, as the group discusses its situation and play unfolds, so it’s already done most of the “work” required. It’s not that hard when we compensate for the Graphocentric perspective, put the game in its place and trust each other.

That’s it for now. I was going to delve into objections that hiding fudging and fiat is a bad thing, but it struck me that the arguments against these are so value-laden (like getting mad at costumes in plays, erasing wires with CGI and a host of other craft techniques) that it’s probably a waste of my time to deal with them. The idea that fudging and fiat can be eliminated by better design is dumb, but I’ll talk about that some other time.

You Can’t Do That in RPGs: a History

2009-12-17T13:51:55Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

The history of RPGs is the history of things you can’t do, and various strategies to veil, deny or accommodate that fact.

Players like to think they can go anywhere and do anything with their characters unless there’s a mechanism in place to solidly prevent them (and make them like it) or trick them (also, to make them like it by preserving the illusion of freedom). The desire for freedom versus its practical impossibility is an enduring tension so it’s easy for RPG designers/thinkers/grognards to score cheap points by railing against restrictions in one game, or designing a solution that is really way of disguising restrictions.

The oldest restriction is the dungeon crawl. Gamers like dungeons because they have pretend physical walls. For some reason, pretend matter trumps other kinds of pretending, and players don’t mind it getting in their way much. Classic dungeons are usually flowcharts that push explorers toward some signature encounter, even if there are some pass/fail encounters, backtracking and general screwing around to deal with in the interim. The only exceptions are random dungeons, and even the old generators enforced some rising tension with the character level to dungeon level equivalence.

(Wilderness encounters in old D&D were interesting in the way they weren’t level dependent, but the need to get from location to location was restriction enough.)

The dungeon’s flaw is that many people eventually get bored of them, or learn to despise increasingly dodgy rationales for hauling ass through a flow chart. These types accused GMs of lacking imagination or defying realism, and complained they wanted to focus on character portrayal and romance and things, but they had to deal with the Maze of Peril of the Week.

Eventually angry players and inventive GMs figured out that you could do without physical walls and simply outline the rough course of play, but they kind of blundered into this with a healthy dose of denial, because nobody could really admit that the whole point of these structures was to remove the freedom to do anything you want.

Unfortunately, without pretend walls, GMs were forced to get honest or desperate. Some asshole would always ignore the signals and wander off. This happened in dungeons, but the jerk couldn’t get far, because he had to walk the flowchart. When the only restriction was linked to story flow, it was harder to develop a pretense to keep everyone on the rails. Designers provided theme and mood and setting tools to help GMs roughly delineate what players could do (plot against the Prince in Vampire, say) and couldn’t (all kinds of stupid shit that Vampire players did anyway).

One of the tricky elements of this scheme was that it required the GM to show his hand as an artist instead of ascribing it to a trick of the dungeon. But people have been educated to be suspicious of art. They believe it’s something social deviants make to subtly mock them, or it was something created by mighty white men in days of yore, such that it would be arrogant to follow in their footsteps with art of your own. Certainly, modern people are not allowed to manipulate signs meaningfully unless it’s for large commercial interests. Some companies tried to convince gamers that they were some form of social deviant and allowed to dress oddly, dye their hair and make art, but this was only semi-successful and generated resentment that would simmer over the next decade and a half or so.

At some point, people playing through these plot and trope-based restrictions started to believe the GM was making all the decisions (which was pretty much bullshit, but these players have been around since the dungeon, when they kept walking the wrong way up the walled flowchart). Interestingly, many of these players were total book bitches. They didn’t want to be told what they couldn’t do, but vaguely understood that they needed to point to some basis of unity, even if it wasn’t the other players. If they were going to do anything, it was what the book told them. If things went bad, it was the book’s fault.

Eventually, this heady mix of misanthropy and ad hoc textual criticism met the Internet and formed a community. Members wrote their own games. Naturally, they (like so many others in previous eras) half-knew that the central problem was keeping people from doing whatever they wanted, but this group was even less likely than the last to explicitly admit this. They did however know what they would obey, which was whatever was in the book. They’d ruined play by picking text over people, so they thought they could probably solve it by tinkering with the text.

Naturally, the games that resulted were more restrictive than all prior games, but this could be ignored if you believed that “playing the game” was equivalent to “obeying the book.” In the dungeon era, you’d throw up physical walls inside a mountain to kick people to a final confrontation with an evil witch, but some bastard might run away and get drunk in a tavern, and the best you could do was ignore him, give him a loaner character or kill him. The new games were designed so that there was no support for ever going to a tavern – that doing anything besides getting up the mountain to face the witch was meaningless, stupid, and possibly a moral violation resulting from abuse or brain damage.

Game designers like feeling like they’re making people they’ve never met play a certain way, so this approach became quite popular. People who’d left the business to do something more profitable wished they’d thought of it, and some folks working in the commercial end of game design realized that it was terribly simple to come up with contrived metrics for design success by using this style. If it didn’t work, the players were obviously doing it wrong.

Unfortunately, these new strictures didn’t sit well with everyone, and newer games were designed to be unplayable if you didn’t accept your inability to wander off to the pub. These malcontents stuck with older games. Some of them went right back to the dungeon, where the old Flowchart Made of Rock would provide some solace. Some of them stuck with plotty games. The community was a house divided, except for the shared belief that if they played some other way, they’d lose their freedom but if they obeyed their school, they could pretend this wasn’t really happening. It was happening, though. To everybody.

What’s the solution? In some special play groups (though more than you might think) participants crossed the watershed and realized two things:

1) Restrictions were necessary.

2) It was natural to fight against them.

And in these special groups, the participants realized that this tension was never a flaw, but a remarkable source of inspiration. This tension created novel solutions. The group needed to develop new mechanics to support leaving the beaten path, but in such a way that the wayward player returned. The GM learned to moderate his vision, or figure out what happens when the group leaves the dungeon half done. They accepted that some disputes were inevitable, even passionate ones, as people are liable to be passionate about their creative efforts. Through forthright talk, compromise and above all compassion for every participant, these groups accepted the problem and turned it into another toy to play with.

Knights of the Hidden Sun: Inspired by Star Wars Done Right

2009-12-15T20:01:59Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

It started with a Star Wars game. I loved the old West End version of the RPG but had always run and never played. I was ecstatic when I found a handmade poster in my LGS requesting players for a local game. I was so elated a friend ordered me to “stop beaming.” The next week, I met up with this new group and that session changed the way I saw RPGs forever.

Before Star Wars, my modules worked much like a standard Knights of the Dinner Table session. The PCs would be a group of strangers who united under some nebulous pretext. We’d find a dungeon filled with traps and monsters. We’d avoid the traps, kill the monsters and take their stuff. Along the way the PCs would try to outdo each other in carnage. Crits were politely applauded, fumbles would be met with mocking scorn. I’ll admit it was fun and besides, I had no idea there was any other way to play.

The Star Wars game I walked into was a new kind of beast. The GM ran it like a movie. He had a soundtrack, celebrity portraits for NPCS and detailed maps that were drawn to look like something out of an official supplement. What truly stood out however, was his pacing. He kept the game moving. Our characters ran from one scene to the next at breakneck speed. He didn’t give us time to argue rules. We didn’t measure out 5 foot blocks on dungeon maps in order to calculate the volume of our grenade explosions – we threw and prayed. An action round involved more than move, hit and damage. We had to weave through traffic, leap across rooftops and dodge explosions in the thick of the fight. The GM seemed intent on using the universe to kill our characters. We loved it.

The players in this group were amazing. Something happened with them that I had never seen before. Near the start of the first session our characters had to chase down a rebel leader on a monorail. It was leaving the station when we arrived. Every character but mine succeeded on the roll to jump on the train. My ended up clinging to the side for dear life. In my old group she would have just died. Everyone would laugh and the game would continue while I found a new sheet. This time, without hesitation, a player informed the GM that his character was smashing through the window, grabbing my character, and pulling her in. I was floored by the idea of a party where PCs looked out for each other. Of course, the GM had given us a good in-character reason to work together form the start. We were an Imperial Special Ops team who had worked together for years.

Needless to say, it was one of the best gaming experiences of my life.

This has coloured how I run my games since and it’s also heavily influenced how I’ve written Knights of the Hidden Sun. I want my game to play like a movie. I want Knights to look out for each other, and I’ve designed tools to help other GMs do this:

I’ve added a Hazard System to the Ready 2 Run core rules (used in Aeternal Legends) so that characters can jump through windows, pull innocent civilians from harm and run through an exploding dreadnought in the midst of combat.
Characters start the game knowing each other; they’ve trained together for five years before starting their first mission.
The reward system is designed to encourage teamwork, not showboating. Of one person does something cool, everyone wins.

If you can easily run this game like a high-octane action flick then I’ll consider this project a success.

Knights of the Hidden Sun: Chapter One Developed

2009-12-15T06:21:37Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

You are floating among blue clouds. The Archon Bureau of Records sigil appears.

Bureau Announcer: This is a thought construct from your Bureau of Records. To receive a balanced, accurate dream of the following report please clear your mind. Thought transmission will commence in 10 seconds.

Bureau Anchor Valdyn Trad emerges from the clouds. His silver robes, finely chiselled, ochre face and double-irised green eyes radiate convey concern, wisdom and trustworthiness.

Valdyn Trad: Galactic harmony suffered a grave challenge today when the pirate Bartholomew Deth’s so-called “Black Fleet” jumped into Tuldekath and severely damaged its orbital defences. Military sources indicate that his fleet consists of 63 heavily modified Second War dreadnoughts, 38 of which were sent for the assault.

You are in the observation deck of an Archonate transport. You slip and catch yourself as the vessel lurches wildly to avoid a golden bolt from a huge basalt vessel. Fade out to clouds and through to the office of General Than. You stand before her.

General Than: They took us by surprise. One moment, it’s Sovereignty Day. The next, disaster – but we rallied to prevent an even worse crisis. We lost so much in that instant that if we hadn’t responded, Tuldekath would be ashes and stone, nothing more.

The General and her office fade into the bridge of an emergency response ship, soul detection spires extended. Valdyn Trad beside you, right behind the captain.

Valdyn Trad: The pirates’ primary target was the cruise ship Serendipity, where Speaker Alice Chant was attending a charity gala. With orbital defences neutralized, Black Fleet marauders looted the ship at their leisure and scuttled it. The Bureau has confirmed that Deth personally assassinated Speaker Chant before binding her to a think disk.

According to reports, defence fleet fragments appeared to be falling stars from Vindicun City’s ground level. Emergency personnel say the number of ghosts in orbit make it unlikely that the Black Fleet took hostages.

Deth spared one solider to deliver a message via think disk. Forensic examination confirms that the disk is powered by Speaker Chant’s soul.

Bureau Announcer: The following transmission been altered for content.

Bartholomew Deth wipes his blade with the hem of his cloak. A chill wind roars: air coursing through the shattered crystal of the Serendipity’s recreational deck.

Bartholomew Deth: Hail, sheep of Roaa, cowards. You’re fit for domination by a superior force: a predator to thin your ranks and teach you to adapt or abide in misery. I will grant you that which you so richly deserve. Know this: No star can hide you. No army can protect you. No matter what you do or where you go, I shall sup upon your suffering.

The image dissolves into blue clouds and the Bureau sigil.

Bureau Announcer: End transmission. Alteration of this thought construct is a major infraction of Archonate Law. Please report any discrepancies to the nearest Galactic Security office.

* * *

I admit it: I’ve been tardy posting progress updates on Chris Challice’s Knights of the Hidden Sun. I actually finished developing Chapter One at the end of October. Chapter One is the history and current affairs section. Chris did some fantastic work here that underlines one of the challenges of developing setting-focused material: taking a cool idea where it demands to go.

In KotHS, people on civilized worlds use strand stones to fully immerse themselves in runecrafted media. This network of dreams allows people to fully experience events on other worlds (subject to editing, of course). Consequently, literacy is uncommon except among the highly educated. You don’t need it to dream, and most other interactions only require spoken words and images.

Chris included several examples of these thought transmissions, so my job was to reconcile them with established facts, (literacy is uncommon) highlight their role as forms of popular media and make it feel like these dreams flow right into your mind. That’s why I expanded the text into a script style, with imagery to immerse the reader in each transmission.

Chris also wrote most of the chapter from an in-universe perspective. I love this technique because GMs can take material right from the book to use as-is. I developed this chapter to cleave to that perspective whenever possible. Chapter Two will have a similar focus as we move into descriptions of daily life, important people and the other information players need to feel like they live in Roaa.

The RPG EBook of the Future

2009-12-04T20:49:23Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

To follow up on the Next Gen RPGs post I’d like to toss up a sample interface:

RPG E-Book Interface

This is probably a Flash application. You can resize, minimize or dismiss each pane in the interface above. The book screen is actually the second screen you’d get after opening up the game, after going to your library from the start screen (and seeing options to click through to campaign management, communities and play tools), though you’d be able to bypass that if you want.

I can visualize a lot of options, and a real danger in giving them near-equal standing that destroys the benefits of a minimalist interface. Funneling people to the most common functions without making it a total pain to go somewhere else is the challenge, and would require some experimentation to get right.

Let’s take it pane by pane:

Book Media Pane: Your book’s images appear here. They fade in when you hit an appropriate part of the text. Additional media plays here too. You can set images to appear in the text body instead, or link media to particular sections, so that clicking on them summons them to the media pane. If you want pure text, just dismiss the pane. Layout/design may configure the pane to automatically resize based on certain cues, to maintain its functionality while taking advantage of the aesthetics of traditional layout. You can also break out of the book completely to add media from your own library, that of the community, or any other mashable media object.

Book Text Pane: The game text goes here. You can select page by page layout, but the default is continuous scrolling, though not in the same sense as a big browser window. It may or may not have embedded media depending on the book and your preferences. The navigation pane makes it easily to find the content you want, but the text itself includes hyperlinks to other relevant sections, tutorials/FAQs, a as developer comments and community content (one touch brings up options and two goes to your default). You can also add your own comments in text regions to build in house rules.

Book Navigation Pane: The basic options here let you tab between text and gallery-style media navigation. In text navigation, the pane lists your current “page” (scrolling spot), chapter and heading, and lets you either navigate back and forth in each category, or pick from a pop up or drop down list. You can also perform a text-based search here. This sticks to the book by default but you can set it to search the entire game-as-service.

Tool and Community Tabs: Your tabs illustrate a major concept: Your book is never just your book, but one emphasis in the resource cloud. You really only need two tabs here because these can “rotate” through a list of options, including play tools like a dice roller, community forums and your campaign notes.

Next Gen RPGs

2009-12-02T19:42:31Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

Between the CCP/White Wolf announcement and the obvious rise of e-publishing as a vital component in the industry it’s time to ask: What should electronically delivered tabletop RPGs look like?

The Current Formula

Electronic implementation is currently a user-organized exploit of current cheap technologies. You could express it this way:

Hardware + PDF + Native Applications + Web Tools + Community = Tabletop Simulation

Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with this model:

It isn’t integrated. Even DDI is a jungle of web apps and PDFs that require individual kludging to wrestle into an easy process. My DM Steve has a DDI subscription and campaign notes in Word. As far as I can tell his processes uses DDI for prep and community insights but it doesn’t have much of a table presence. If it did, he’d be switching back and forth.

Steve doesn’t use electronic dice. I do, using an iPod Touch app. I also use the Touch to share relevant media from the Star Wars setting. I showed them a picture of The Force Unleashed’s PROXY when it joined the party, for example. It’s still clumsy, and I spend about 75% of my time using paper.

It aims low. Theoretically, GMs should be able to show rich media applications with a touch. Rules documents should be extensively hyperlinked, including links to FAQs, tutorials and community feedback. All of this is possible with current technology. Furthermore, PDFs are too wedded to the illusion of paper. Why can’t I have continuous scrolling for one big page, with page markers unobtrusively popping up to let me know my progress? Why can’t I get rid of unwanted art, or change its size and location? Why can’t I make a character as a read character creation rules? Why aren’t there a dozen characters available at a click?

It’s a slave to the tabletop concept. A new medium should inspire a new kind of game. Fandom RPGs already show us the way by building play into the community portal. that I suspect many companies are boldly striding toward dead ends by trying to simulate the tabletop on whatever technology looks cool and trendy.

For example, I’ve read a lot of dubious stuff about using augmented reality to create a virtual game table. Are five guys really going to squint through iPhones to look at a phantom battle map? Plus, even though I loved the demo too, the recent hype around using Surface as a game table disguises its impracticality. Even though we have desktop multitouch now we don’t have cheap, rugged Surface style tables, and won’t get them for a while yet (Surface machines cost about $14,000 now – drop it by half every 18 months and we’re talking about four or five years for viable consumer versions). Smarter, more practical ways to take RPGs in truly innovative directions are out there.

The New Formula

Instead of talking about how we’ll use sexy-trendy tech to replicate the offline gaming environment, let’s put together a new formula informed by the real potential of technologies that are going to be widely adopted:

Couch Computing + Cloud Portal = Integrated Gaming Environment

Now, to break down each component:

Couch Computing: The big trend in consumer computing right now lies in multitouch interfaces wedded to OLED and e-ink screens that are either built into tablet computers, or into laptops that easily configure into tablets. The rumored Apple tablet isn’t the only game in town, either. Nvidia’s Tegra chip is due to launch in at least one tablet. For those willing to navigate the chaotic Shenzhen OEM market, cheap resistive tablets are already available. These “couch computers” won’t draw users away from play with a clumsy interface, provided they host the right tools.

Cloud Portal: If we’re going to drop the physical book, why stick with the illusion of a book? I can visualize an interface that lets me look at the rules in “book mode,” but will also give me one touch access to a dice roller, character generator, wiki and community, all laid out in one window, not several. We can achieve this by using the browser as our primary way to interact with content. This is something folks partially kludge right now with tabbed browsing and online SRDs, but we’ll be able to take it a step further once browsers make the jump to HTML5, which will display rich content without needing plugins and support offline access to web resources.

Integrated Gaming Environment: When I fetch information from the cloud, summon, mash and dismiss elements at will, and jump straight to community content without tabs and self-bookmarking, it means the game becomes a place instead of an artifact. This place includes community forums, blogs, character databases and campaign wikis. My players know where to go to either continue the game of the table or run new games in a shared setting. This environment should be designed to capture the bulk of the player base not only because it’s where my game comes from, but because the features are attractive in of themselves. Players become interest groups within a bigger community and can opt for any level of interaction they want. Beyond these traditional-style groups, the community should also be able to self-organize massive multiplayer games.

The next time I talk about this I’m going to throw up a few diagrams to butter explain what I’m talking about. For now, take a look at Wired’s tablet concept:

. . . and Time’s (with Sports Illustrated):

Mage: The Dirty Version – The Hegemony

2009-11-22T09:15:55Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

That a person exerts his will over another is instinct, but how he structures the act is technology, and his justifications? Magic. Therein lie the roots of the Hegemony: a network of Awakened who uphold modernist values – including those the great Masses, its protectorate, rarely speak of but firmly believe. The Hegemony is the Consensus’ guardian and shepherd, devoted to a Great Work that would whip and bribe Sleepers to the cusp of Ascension as clients, not creators. They guard the Pure Forms of ultimate truth from assault by anarchists, unearthly beings and other threats to the Great Chain of Being.

Part of the Hegemony is truly ancient. This Kyriarchy claims descent from ancient priest-kings and culture heroes: the first lords of fire, agriculture and medicine. They learned that true power lay not in discovering wonders, but capturing them within a structure of control. The enlightened deserved undiluted access to the source of power – everyone else lived to serve. Over centuries, lord and sacral officiant drifted into two distinct roles and the Kyriarchs diversified into numerous factions. By the Middle Ages their secret orders (In Europe, the Cabal of Pure Thought and the Sangreal) dominated the world in secret, acting through kings and bishops, soldiers and scholars. Serfs toiled, nations went to war and it was good.

As long as inventions and spiritual studies reinforced the Great Chain of Being, the Kyriarchy had no quarrel with them. If they challenged the order of things they deserved death or exile. Most renegade Awakened chose the latter, and why not? The world was vast, mostly unexplored and filled with spaces where sorcerers could study in academic covenants. Where magi and philosopher scientists could not physically relocate they hid among the people, fearful of exercising too much influence lest Kyriarcy warriors respond.

As the late Middle Ages bloomed into the Renaissance Europe brimmed with wild ideas and rebellions, challenges to sacral authority and rule by oath. The opportunity wasn’t lost on the exile wonder-worker, who plotted to expand long-constrained dominions. Behind a crusade against heresy, the Cabal of Pure Thought raised armies at Languedoc against Mistridge and Carcassone – an error, for the resident Hermetics and Artificers gave no thought to an alliance until a common enemy battered at both their doors.

The seed bloomed, attracting other covenants until a truly dangerous idea took hold: that a world without aristocrats and serfs could exist. At the Alliance of the Ivory Tower, dreams coalesced into worldwide ambitions.

This wasn’t the first time the Kyriarchy had faced this kind of challenge, so it used a practiced response: It bought half of the rebellion. In truth, it had long since seduced some of the newer mysteries – those of the merchants and explorers – to its side. It was easy enough to bring the majority of Artificers across with the promise of wealth, influence and the freedom to pursue their most ambitious projects. The life-scholar Cosians were already strongly associated with the Church, and were offered indulgences against all sins in perpetuity, and freedom against the earthly punishments they would normally demand.

Never numerous, the Solificati alchemists were offered nothing more than the opportunity to survive behind the promise that win or lose, the Kyriarchs would take pains to extinguish them utterly. Philosopher scientists from all factions switched sides, but the Solificati pretended to stay with the alliance until they opened the Ivory Tower to invaders, on the day of the Great Betrayal.

The Kyriarchy made concessions. It incorporated the technologists as equals and aligned certain occult ideas to match the newcomers’ obsessions. It didn’t matter. From the dawn of their order the Kyriarchs knew that bringing fire to the people was nothing without the power to deny it, to ration the merest sparks as rewards for obedience.

The Hegemony changed greatly in the intervening centuries, but it still reflects the unity of two former enemies that uneasily manage the world. The modern Kyriarchy and Technocracy are more ideologies than factions now, and adherents of both systems inhabit every Convention.

Conventions

The 21st Century Hegemony consists of:

The Cartel: They’re masters of economics down to its purest form, where value is relative, finite, manipulable and beholden to desire, not moral principle. The Pragmatists employ formulae that reduce everything to a unified abstraction and manipulates it to serve their wills. Cartel prodigies use Platonic-mathematic rites, economic power blocs and the social structures of sanguine utility made manifest.

The Curia: Descended from the Cabal of Pure Thought, the Curia applies moral absolutes in the name of a remote God, creating taxonomies of sin drive obedient behavior. The Exarchs rarely believe every value they insinuate into the populace – one law applies to the common Sleeper but another rules the Elect. Their theurgy, though subtle, still disturbs atheist allies.

The Illuminati: The Administrators overthrew the aristocratic Sangreal, replacing divine right with applied science and political theory. Still, many of their techniques are simply rituals and biases inherited from a world that believes in reason but doesn’t practice it, from cult-like managerial techniques to applied “evolutionary psychology.” Their Men in Black are some of the most feared operatives in the Hegemony.

The Ingenium: The Engineers concentrate apply physical science the problems of power. The Hegemony needs AI to monitor its possessions, machines to measure, move and work, and weapons to kill their enemies. Some “engineers” devote themselves to pure research, but the Convention’s primary focus is application in the service of the Hegemony’s agenda. The Ingenium possess some of the purest Technocrats: mean and women who believe that human destiny is best entrusted to scientific principles – and the fact that they create and interpret them is merely the advantage of superior knowledge.

The Progenitors: Despite reductionist efforts, living things continue to hinder the dream of a unified Enlightened Science, to the Progenitors maintain their place. They apply their particular expertise to drugs, genetic engineering and surgery to everything from human enhancement to agriculture, defining subjects by the most obvious potential in their genotypes. Deviation is disease. The Physicians will cure it.

Mage: The Dirty Version – Transhuman Adept Tradition

2009-11-09T16:52:28Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

Transhuman Adepts

We Are All Beautiful Information

Immortality is a dream as old as Gilgamesh. Scholars have hungered for transcendental knowledge from the most ancient days, and didn’t separate numinous enlightenment from their pragmatic studies. The Transhuman Adepts may be a new movement but they partake of that most ancient impulse – the same felt by Plato, Pythagoras and William of Ockham.

The Enhanced know their legacy but they don’t look back; archaic memes are for the archives. In the here and now, science and technology prune away the most egregious mistakes in human thought. The Tradition’s efforts rest on dozens of pragmatic technologies, but take their unifying principles from a smaller number of powerful ideas. First, there’s the idea of a computational cosmos. There’s no difference between a sufficiently accurate mathematical model and the object it represents.

Subordinate to this grand idea are others: universal evolution via mathematical replicators, the denial of a “mind essence” so that consciousness can be limitlessly expanded, and the body-as-information’s mutability via genetic engineering, practical nanotechnology and more. All of these tools focus on overcoming physical, mental and political barriers to human development. Abandoning the natural, evolved state is essential; the Enhanced believe the Ascension War is a battle between memes stuck in the Darwinian game, lashed to the human mind’s limits. Victory relies on becoming more than human, thereby developing a vision greater than the rest.

History

It’s easy to forget that Great Betrayal grew out of virtuous motives. With the Kyriarchy’s help, the Order of Reason turned away political collapse, total war and threats from Beyond. They prepared Sleepers for the coming Utopia – an age of peace and plenty that the Hegemonic Time Table delayed again and again. A few scientists of conscience became dissatisfied with the status quo’s glacial pace.

Many members of this faction belonged to groups that the Kyriarchy discriminated against. The Hegemony’s elders told female, homosexual, Jewish, and non-European members of the Order of Reason that policies repressing their Sleeping counterparts served the greater goal of cultural unity. It was supposedly no statement on their personal abilities, but it was more telling that scientists from these groups never rose to a position where they could change the policy.

The Æther Society’s defection did little to inspire the discontents. Ætherians were eccentrics who lacked a constructive vision for the world. Still, they demonstrated that there was room for Awakened Science outside of the Technocratic fold. The Utopians developed into a semi-formal faction that the Hegemony was forced to tolerate – it couldn’t stand another defection.

The Second World War was the Utopians’ watershed moment. Every state had its sins, but the Axis was a study in unalloyed evil – and the Hegemony supported it. Officially, it was a purely pragmatic decision that had nothing to do with the Axis’ foul ideologies. It would just be easier to guide a few totalitarian regimes than a shifting political mosaic. The Utopians not only believed that no rationale could justify the choice, but knew that true Fascist sympathizers populated the upper ranks. The Utopians abandoned the Technocracy, supported the Allies and at the war’s end, negotiated an alliance with the Traditions.

The Utopians kept their name until 1979, when cultural and scientific changes prompted the Tradition to debate its purpose and reassemble on the basis of the rising belief that members could create a better world by attacking human limitations over any specific political goal, but a significant faction believes this was less of a constructive development than appeasement designed to snatch talent away from the Technocracy. The remaining Utopian Engineers continue to be the Tradition’s conscience.

Appearance

Some Transhuman Adepts are moderately fit and rail thin – calorie restriction is a proven life-extension method and they hope to survive long enough to attain Consensus-accepted immortality. Others don’t care about a future where they might live forever with Sleeper-friendly technology. Some neglect their bodies, caring more about life on the plane of abstract information. Another group uses drugs and genetic therapy to gain superhuman abilities, but the benefits are usually short-lived or exact a penalty in medical and psychological complications.

Homemade surgery is an initiation rite for some, who carry scars and other obvious signs of the results: strange ports and studs erupting through their skin, or wires visible just beneath the flesh. Smart Transhuman Adepts learn to hide any sign that can’t be explained away as radical body art, and many camouflage their efforts with ordinary body modification. Meat is a mutable decoration.

Style-wise, Transhuman Adepts are all over the map. Older members cling to the punk fashions that were in vogue during the 1980s, but the majority either care nothing for fashion or accent a mainstream look with oblique references to cutting edge technology.

Paradigm

The Tellurian is a computational medium: a cosmic bestiary of equations that range from galaxies to atoms. Conventional science sits on the verge of seeing reality’s basic unit of representation, but even then can’t view the computational states beneath – much less alter them without the crudest of tools. A Sleeper scientist or engineer is like a blind watchmaker adjusting his creation with blacksmith’s tongs. The goal of science is to behold the cosmos’ pure mathematical forms. The ethos of science is to apply the results to humanity, freeing it from the savage evolutionary games that prevent it from transcending its boundaries.

Sleepers lack a certain degree of . . . inspiration. They might want to improve the species or have the capacity to view their own consciousness as an objective target for study, but they don’t combine both desires with a signature spark of genius. Theoretically, anyone could study science and technology while cultivating an objective view of consciousness but in practice, few attain the refinement to become mages. Sleepers can become experts in a narrow, static field, but psychological barriers prevent them from truly Awakening.

Magic? There are only technologies: methods that manipulate the universe’s mathematical forms by affecting their external manifestations. There’s little need to exert one’s will on the pure Telluric substructure when enlightened applications of biology, chemistry and physics will do. There are a few numinous operations that break down the divide between individual consciousness and the rest of the cosmos, but these are so rare that some Transhuman Adepts doubt they truly exist.

Nevertheless, there are crude ways to hack reality through direct psychic command and proto-science. That’s what other mages do. They manipulate symbols that happen to be effective memes or accurate models of an object, and catalogue these correspondences in their own traditions. They’ll never attain the breadth and efficacy of true technologies, but they serve and occasionally even inspire.

The computational cosmos’ one flaw is that it can accept multiple models – and some models have more potential to improve the human condition than others. Limited paradigms leave much to the dumb operation of cosmic forces by appealing to a great mystery or incompleteness principle. Once confirmed by observation, these models gain standing in the meta-Darwinian competition between cosmological models. That’s why the Consensus exists, and why less desirable models still dog Enhanced efforts to go farther, unlock the fundamentals, and give all humanity the power to master them.

Foci

Computers, scientific instruments, synthetic drugs and other chemicals, surgery, laboratories

Spheres

Correspondence or Mind

Sects

The Enhanced’s factions are political, with each accepting scientists and engineers of any specialty, though each group attracts specialists in particular fields. Transhuman Adepts routinely drift from one faction to another as their opinions shift.

Posthuman Front: A direct action cadre of the physically enhanced, the Posthuman Front serves two vital roles. Members recognize the importance of the human body. They “upgrade” their own with a variety of technologies and apply the results to research that may help Sleepers overcome disease, aging and disability. They’re also the Tradition’s most effective soldiers, strong and fast enough to counter comparably augmented enemies. The Posthuman Front’s members are the most likely to carry serious Paradox backlashes, since they apply radical experiments to themselves.

Reality Hackers: Peerless computer scientists and programmers, the Reality Hackers are the most devoted to the Tradition’s metaphysics over its numerous applications. They wish nothing less than to make the universe programmable by everyone, breaking down the division between physicality and information. In practice, many show disdain for “meat” issues. Matter is just a particularly obstinate form of data, and it might be better to disdain it entirely by creating a new universe with more tractable “permissions.” They develop better ways for people to interact with computers, improving the number of “digital natives” able to transcend the physical world.

Utopian Engineers: Utopians carry the Tradition’s original torch, urging it to pursue its efforts in a socially responsible context. The global majority is more concerned with daily survival than novel technologies. Without political activism, the Enhanced will only benefit the already-privileged, making them nothing more than a Hegemonic tool with delusions of independence. Utopian memeticists, anthropologists and economists focus on how to make scientific development relevant to the needs and values of all cultures, instead of the elites most able to skip to the head of the line when it comes to reaping the rewards.

Concepts

Hacker, scientist, backstreet engineer, information broker, technology smuggler, doctor, designer drug merchant, social scientist, Web activist

Stereotypes

Æther Society: Science isn’t a set of personal preferences, but you have to admit that their obsessions bear the odd fascinating fruit.

Eumenides: I like my justice without porn. Reincarnation is strangely plausible – replicators are everywhere – but I doubt it goes that far.

Order of Hermes: It’s failed science, but they make up for it with pure attitude. Sometimes the math even works.

Templars: If we’re living in a simulation, there is a God. If it’s all about randomly spawned replicators, there isn’t one. In CERN We Trust.

Vajrapani: They stretch the potential of unimproved minds and bodies to their very limits, but they won’t take the obvious next step: Improve the potential!

Verbenae: There is no memeplex so silly that someone won’t sacrifice a goat over it. Just saying.

Hollow Underground: RTFM.

White Wolf: Now It’s Semi-Official

2009-11-07T08:30:59Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

Today’s been an interesting one for White Wolf, CCP’s tabletop imprint. At ICC it announced that it was “freeing” (and dismantling much of) the Camarilla, developing new community and game management tools, and kinda sorta maybe not printing game books as we know them any more. Ryan Dancey was quite a bit firmer in a Gamasutra interview where he declared the whole thing a “legacy business.”

I’ve been aware of what was coming for a while and suspected it since 2008, when I heard some serious shifting of the tabletop release schedule, ranging from the EVE RPG being shelved to some other developments which were leaked to the tabletop gamer public, but as I found the rest out in confidence I’m not going to repeat them here.

Can I tell you exactly what’s going on? This is difficult as there are some things I know which I think give me a somewhat informed opinion, but which even couching in weasel words would make for a breach of ethics. But I can use it as a way to comment on trends I think apply to the situation and are relevant to a wider audience.

Tabletop RPG Producers Are the Best Open-Ended IP Developers in the World

Is this a hubris-ridden statement? Maybe — but it ain’t braggin’ if it’s true. There are multiple occasions where RPGs have had a drastically positive influence on intellectual properties. Star Wars is the best known example. As an open-ended property, Star Wars essentially owes its chops to West End Games, which managed the thing while it lay fallow and turned what was a closed, small story into a possibility-laden narrative field. Oh, and you know how Enterprise turned from a lousy series into something passable by the end? You can in part thank Paramount sending an intern to the Merril Collection to photocopy its Trek RPG archives. They didn’t keep them around at Paramount.

(That last bit of info comes from the collection’s curator, by the way, when I toured with Justin Mohareb a while back.)

Also, about ARGs? You’re welcome.

Now aside from these examples (which I’m sure will spark their own special nerd war) this particular skillset has managed to earn me a fair chunk of change for clients outside the tabletop gaming field. Fans tend to believe that this kind of work is at its best when done by the IP management team with the most money. These fans are wrong.

Unfortunately, well-heeled IP management teams tend to believe this too — and so do tabletop RPG developers who would really like to have as much money and prestige as folks in mainstream media and games. So with the exception of some visionaries, this kind of thing isn’t well known. On the Big IP side you get closed concepts without backbones. (Terminator, anyone? Yes, I am really saying that a Justin Achilli or Matt Forbeck could make it a bajillion more dollars.) On the RPG side you get creators learning the wrong lessons because they mistake a fat wad of cash for an applicable creative style.

(This is one reason why licensed games often under-perform. Game designers and developers are at the mercy of people who really do know less about how to transform their IP into an enduring success than they do.)

What does this mean vis a vis CCP? They’re pretty smart guys who seem to know the kind of talent they acquired. Do they know how to fit it into their own culture? The folks who were on the White Wolf side seem to be doing okay and I trust them. But this is a fragile situation. When you’re trying to show how a process that moves thousands of copies is legitimate in a culture used to a few orders of magnitude more, you have to be really goddamn convincing. And if you do convince them, why would they want you earning them beer and toilet paper money from tabletop RPGs? Even if you win, tabletop gaming doesn’t.

Converged, Mashable, Hackable Content — and Confusion

Think of DDI. It sucks — and it looks successful. It’s an underwhelming set of tools and resources but it still meets a need. We feel the need because familiar technology has primed us to do so. We’re reaching a convergence point right now where cheap ebook readers, mobile applications, netbooks and PoD technology are poised to radically change tabletop gaming. I currently have the rules for all of my go-to games on a tiny touchscreen MID that cost 150 bucks. Want a book? High quality PoD is simple and cheap; OneBookShelf nearly has the option ready for its merchants. It’s already easy to hack together exactly the game book you want, use it in multiple forms and share it if you’re an early adopter of the necessary tech. By 2011-2012 a physical RPG book may well be an affectation and right now, it’s only a marginal convenience.

(And let’s not forget about piracy. It matters. The tabletop RPG business isn’t the music business, folks, and it’s not the work of Cory Doctorow either.)

Here’s the rub: Nobody really knows what this means yet. My feeling isn’t that this isn’t a new way to play tabletop games but a new type of game — a “third way” of gaming that isn’t a managed electronic property or traditional RPGs, but draws a lot from self-organized social networking — something that White Wolf fandom adopted early.

(You know those chat games everybody craps on? Rough and tumble stuff like that is called “innovation.”)

The community is primed for a new type of game, and letting loose the reins on fans will help CCP understand what that is as long as management doesn’t listen to attractive, high level prognostication that tries to force it all from the top down. That’s always that danger when there’s a big difference in the monetized accomplishments of one group (CCP) compared to another (the nerds running a zillion chat games and fandom RPs).

And if you can’t get into this new game there’s always PDF and PoD. With piracy rampant, CCP probably has to emphasize the convenience of their own option by building better fulfillment and exerting some fearsome downward pressure on pricing. The price of an OBS-hosted game is already approaching bottom-tier smartphone app levels and CCP already has plenty of content in the system. Adding new content that lacks additional features isn’t cost effective unless it exploits fan contributions (always risky) or uses a new scheme to draw them into the sales funnel gracefully.

I don’t think anybody really knows what the next step is here, but let’s make one thing clear: LARPing with an iPhone or Droid isn’t going to bring back the earthshaking Mind’s Eye Theatre hordes of the 90s any more than a slide rule App is going to replace your calculator App. But is CCP going to give it a serious shot? Making money off of this sort of thing isn’t easy, and social media-based schemes are vulnerable to fads and fan refusal to participate in the moneymaking side. (Most Facebook ads and apps have a shitty most desired action rate, for example). Plus, some successes are bad example from a creative point of view, a la Mafia Wars.

Come on: We all know Mafia Wars blows. But it sure makes bank.

Ehm-Ehm-Oh

Yeah, a lot if it probably is about that — after all, it’s probably coming next year. The question is whether CCP will use its assets properly, or kill off what made White Wolf’s in-house style special. This is not to say the rest of CCP should just learn, since from what I’ve read, the tabletop staff seems to be get real inspiration out of their current roles.

The Unsolicited Advice

What do I think CCP should do? Aside from finding some excuse to pay me significant sums (which I am qualified to receive — email me!) I think they should stick to some form of traditional gaming as a form of rapid IP prototyping. Tabletop RPG design is an ideal technology for developing and testing intellectual property with a minimal budget in a short time frame. It’s inherently social and provides a way for quick, meaningful feedback. Plus, you’ll build fans and anticipation cheaply, and might even get a new idea or two about game design.

But about that feedback: Let’s filter the online RPG community. If we map by fan/non-fan and player/non-player we get a nice set of quadrants we can use to figure out what matters. I can’t help but suspect that the New World of Darkness reacted to the wrong quadrants — guys who want to fantasize about certain structures in games (5×5 splatitude!) instead of having a vivid participatory experience. We all know that there are very vocal folks out there whose opinions don’t really have bottom-line relevance. You want to make retired gamers happy, but you want to see what compels people to play more. On the fan/non-fan axis . . . that’s tricky. Some fandoms are toxic and closed, but some are open, and draw people from the non-fan category. The boundary between the two types isn’t fixed. Open fans identify with closed fans. The Games Workshop approach is to fire fans likely be in the closed category by demographic (defined as “boys with hair where there wasn’t hair before”). Use RPGs to fine tune an IP for an open fandom, but see if you can grab the odd grognard.

I’m not saying this as a stuck in the mud tabletop guy. I love that medium, but I’m working on my third electronic games/media project now and it’s awesome. There are substantial differences in presentation and practical role. Still, I think the tabletop (or wired post-tabletop) medium can enrich every stratum of IP development. Use it intelligently, respect its assets and keep its budget sane, and it won’t steer you wrong.

Mage: The Dirty Version – Transhuman Adept Tradition Prologue

2009-10-28T01:20:28Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

It’s a toss up between the eye socket and nostril. The nose is safer, but the eye’s quicker, more direct. Luc doesn’t want to go blind but part of him thinks that if the Wire goes down wrong he’ll toss something steel in there – a few LEDs, a half-petabyte SSD – something that proves he’s ready to drop the meat.

Still, Luc cut himself a mix of modafinil, phenobarbital, and pinkie nail’s worth of Manila Shabu dipped in slow-release caplets, just to keep his hands steady. Maybe he’s not quite ready to heap contempt upon his unimproved flesh. He wipes drool from the left side of his mouth – it’s slackened by the nerve block – and clamps back his eyelids on the same side.

The Wire’s smart enough to find its way home but too weak to make it through the first few layers of protective tissue. Luc calls up the manual again; it calls for an “assertive push.”

So Luc stabs himself in the eye socket.

Tremendous pressure. The sensation of weeping on half-numb skin (Luc knows it’s watery blood and wipes it away like the drool – another messy flaw in the meat). He knows the brain feels nothing, once you get past the guardian nerves, but he imagines the sensation of something slithering along bloody paths to clutch his left parietal lobe.

It’ll branch out from there, ruthlessly pruning unused connections: a second wave of neural Darwinism for a parallel mind. But even now, at its simplest, the Wire hums with potentiality. It sings to the world’s currents, and Luc answers.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Rules-Wise)

2009-10-23T02:24:43Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

I recently put my homebrew SF game on hold to get back to our previous Star Wars Saga campaign. Now I like Saga in a lot of respects, but all in all I think it has too many rules, requires too many “build” style decisions and limits my ability to improvise while drawing from the full rules set. I was hoping to gradually migrate my game back to something as light as Microlite20 or my own Quick20 (which is sort of my “fork” of Microlite, since I was around during the original ENWorld discussions). I told them I’d gradually introduce stuff. I explained I wanted more stunts, looser Force powers.

So I put it to the group. I didn’t do a great job of explaining what exactly I wanted in some respects. Some of my players read a rules change as learning a new system (I want to stick to the D20 base) and maybe more complexity (obviously, I want less!) but I got the basic idea across. They had . . . mixed feelings about switching.

(Incidentally, I hope my players who read the blog click the Microlite link so they can see the kind of thing I’m talking about – maybe that’ll make it clearer.)

Aside from the aforementioned adaptation issues, the main concern was niche protection. We have two Jedi, and the rules are good at letting them develop in different directions. And y’know what? It was a fair point. I could design some loose systems to develop this sort of thing but it might take some time (though I do think I would do it.

So I think some things are definitely going to get axed (some skills, the injury track), but the Saga system is going to stay more or less intact. I’m pretty happy with the way the discussion went even though I didn’t get my way. I’ve often talked about the importance of listening and cooperation, though I have privately wondered if it has really come down to the fact that we’re all friends who have developed complementary interests. Now I’ve had the first chance in a while to put that to the test. We didn’t agree, and that’s okay. A better game will come of it.

(Though I must say, really guys, wouldn’t rules-light be snazzy? I have plenty of other ideas . . .)

All Talk, No Rock, No Friends

2009-10-19T16:18:47Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

I think the RPG scene is plagued with two tendencies that feed from each other, blocking gamers’ ability to get regular games off the ground, but these disguise a bigger social problem.

Gamers describe games in terms of problems, not opportunities. After all, there’s more to talk about when something bugs you. This isn’t the issue by itself though. It’s normal to let off a bit of steam. The proposed solutions end up being the real time wasters. Gamers love to describe things they have no intention of playing. How many people do you think really play RPGNet’s gazillion game/setting hacks?

The other issue? Games. Lots of games. RPG fans own many more games than they’ll ever play. They read them, imagine games they’ll play . . . then get back to D&D. Maybe they play these games at conventions or over Skype, (with months and months of lead time per session) then spend their downtime asserting that extended play sucks.

(I’ve been critical of the “Old School” movement before, but I do think it’s great that they’re playing regularly without a set of online or event-based crutches. )

As a result we have a community spinning its wheels, writing epic preps and hacks for games, yet doing next to no gaming. This is why actual play is so atrophied that it needs to be isolated as a category to survive (before the rise of “Actual Play” gamers actually played — it was not an exceptional activity). And in that category, online APs feature lies, creative editing and bloated preparation. Play’s on life support, but reasons to not play have a cancer’s durability. Games don’t realistically deal with what hidden elves or shotguns would really be like. Games are “incoherent” or “illusionist.” Gamers are sons of bitches who aren’t worth hanging out with. Besides, you don’t have time.

What you have to understand, however is that these are coping mechanisms: ego defenses in the face of a larger social malaise: the decline of friendship.

Think about it. The issues I brought up here boil down to a mix of self-centeredness and contempt for others: signs of a culture whose basic platonic relationships are ailing. This problem infects the whole social discourse of RPGs and even shapes their commercial development. American friendships have been degenerating since 1985. When you think about the difference between gaming then (long term social contact, negotiation over loose rules) and now (brief or online contact, rigid rules that make cover even informal speech and story interpretation) you can see how they’ve adapted to serve people who don’t know each other well, don’t trust each other as much and have lost the will or skill to get close to other human beings.

They say 25% of Americans have no close friends at all. Think of the scene’s tendency to accept people with socialization problems, our aging, more family-focused base and that means gamers might rate at what — 30%? 50%? More? This isn’t just our problem, but we might have it worse than most. The community has certainly flocked to excuses not to make friends or pretend that the superficial online relationships they have are just as good. This is why gamers love the Five Geek Social Fallacies essay — it exaggerates normal problems with friendships into full-blown pathologies, justifying why they don’t bother with close personal connections at all.

Am I applying my own values against a transforming society? Yes, and that’s a fair basis for criticism. I have to admit I’m not comfortable with the expected, widely cast net of shallow contacts that others thrive on. At conventions I prefer to spend an extended period of time getting to know a few people. I don’t take pictures to document my handshakes. If a meeting is important, my memory is enough. But I’ll go out on a limb and say I honestly try to make up for it with intensity and sincerity. So if you meet me, have a seat and take some time to talk. Making contact is okay. Making friends is better.

GM as God 4 . . . ish: More on the Land of Miracles

2009-10-19T01:11:58Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

As I said in the last part of this leg of GM as God, settings are bullshit. There are no vampires and elves. Even in grounded settings, real human beings are interested in a whole bunch of ordinary things I doubt you have any interest in playing.

I don’t just mean the love and friendship themes groups often have trouble getting comfortable with (though to be clear, I’m not excluding them – these are huge). I’m talking about times when what you eat or the particulars of going to the bathroom temporarily consume you. I may sound picky here, but the combined effect boots you out of any pretence of simulation (which is why the identification of “simulation” in RPG theory never worked to begin with, and is still treated as a dust heap for things people have trouble with).

RPG settings can’t provide a simulation of what an authentic narrative would be like in a speculative world, but that doesn’t mean they can’t feel authentic. Suspension of disbelief enters the picture here, because despite everything I’ve said, the players need to be able to commit to sincere participation. It’s your job to work with your resources and the game’s, producing an end result your friends can jump into with gusto.

The two basic ways to do this are by either changing the setting (and sometimes the rules, where players believe they represent game “reality” – they don’t, but this semiotic shorthand is pervasive and often even useful) or by identifying implausible points, explaining why they exist and moving on. Aeternal Legends features the latter method in action, as we explained that the supernatural is hidden but pervasive just because that’s really cool.

(Let’s be clear, however, that players are expected to make a good faith commitment to getting into the game. You don’t have to constantly appease unreasonable players.)

Beyond suspension of disbelief, authenticity comes from setting up the rules as a point of tension against traditional narrative structures. We all know how traditional stories work because we’ve been educated to anticipate their structures. We expect writers to build stories with a certain rhythm and economy. Instead of looking at a rules set’s defiance of these as a flaw, we should see it as an opportunity – the opportunity that makes tabletop RPGs worth playing.

It’s not easy. It means that sometimes a failure is just a failure. It means that sometimes an NPC upstages the PCs. Looking at these events as RPG failure modes is a huge mistake, but an understandable one, because these are hard situations. They represent an encounter with the kind of anti-story situations that appear in real life. It’s the GM’s responsibility to help players make the most out of these difficult but powerful creative opportunities.

Emphasize that player characters are important because they get the most attention, not because of some in-world power play. There was an RPGNet thread recently where folks complained about Divis Mal being central to Aberrant. This is only true if the GM goes on an on about Divis Mal as if he’s being played at the table. It doesn’t matter if they don’t beat the bad guy or if anything procedurally interesting happens. The characters sitting and chatting is inherently more important than what some NPC is doing, no matter how impressive it is. Instead of using in-world events as a crutch to demonstrate to players that you like them and are interested in their characters, get genuinely interested. Use your omniscience to ask probing questions and help them apply the results to their portrayals.

It’s like being in love. You don’t make artificial demonstrations every day, but you’re interested. No word is wasted, even when the talk isn’t about poetry or storming the castle.

General Update

2009-10-09T08:40:05Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

Hi folks! I’ve been really busy lately. Actually, I’ve had a really bad cold and then I’ve been busy writing. I’ve made it over the hump though and I should be updating with new articles and such soon. That means more Mage: The Dirty Version, more GM as God and a bunch of other stuff about RPGs and related narrative/social games. No lack of inspiration — just time.

Poooooooodcasting! On Darker Days

2009-09-30T23:21:30Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

I did an enormous podcast interview — almost three hours — with the folks at the Darker Days podcast. Check it out! I think the important bit is where I answer why I like RPGs, but there’s lots of bits and bobs about the Mages and many other things. Kudos to both interviewers, who did a great job.

Aeternal Legends: Price Drop!

2009-09-21T23:18:56Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

Folks who buy Aeternal Legends at IPR have been able to get the PDF for free. We got a great response when we had the special and we’ve noticed a lot of folks landing on the Aeternal Legends Pitch article, so now’s the time to officially announce that we’ve dropped the price on both the PDF on RPGNow and the print version on Lulu to be competitive with the IPR deal — and to make either version more attractive.

So: Aeternal Legends in print was $26.95 — and it’s now $21.00! Grab it at Lulu.

Aeternal Legends in PDF was $11.95 — and it’s now $5.95! Grab it at Lulu or RPGNow.

Plus, you can always grab both for $26.95 at IPR. But let’s say you have the print version and want that PDF. We’d be happy to send it to you. Just email a picture of you holding the book (you don’t have to show your face if you’re shy) to m AT mobunited DOT com along with an email address RPGNow likes and we’ll send you a free download from RPGNow.

The game’s getting a bit more buzz, but naturally we’d like to get more. So we encourage you to talk about it online. Let us know about your impressions, games, hacks — we want to know about it. It was never our intention to build an urban fantasy RPG that was excessively “gimmicky,” but one where we fit playability and depth into a small, accessible package — something we hope is greater than the sum of its parts. Continued support is coming. Fight Like a Legend is going to be joined by the Spheres expansion as soon as the art’s done and we find time to get it ready.

Tour the RPG and Fiction Web With Me!

2009-09-20T03:31:19Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

This post is all about plugs. Here’s where you should go on the Web.

This coming week I’ll be interviewed for the Darker Days Podcast. You can ask me questions at this link. The podcast should be posted shortly after – I’ll let you know when that happens.
I drop by Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds pretty regularly. It’s a miscellany that covers fiction, games, pop culture and whatever else Chuck wants to talk about.
Also, give Eddy Webb’s Whitechapel Project a go. The Project is episodic weird fiction in podcast and blog formats. I tend to check it out in binges.
David A. Hill’s Machine Age Productions is currently full of development notes for his Terminus Est RPG project. It uses a d4 as its basic resolution die, which is a brave choice out of the gate.

Now there are tons of other great things out there – enough that I should really work out formatting quirks with my blog to get a proper blogroll in (I’ve tried, but the theme acts odd.) This is just the stuff I wanted to talk about this week. There’s Jess Hartley and Jet Pack and Shadowstories and more: a real wave of creativity coming from a community that I kinda sorta know. I say this to accurately describe my relationship with these folks, not to be clever. I don’t have much more than a “fellow freelancer” tie to them, but I do like their efforts a lot.

Suicide is Painless

2009-09-16T04:06:31Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

I normally don’t talk about my house game here, but on my personal journal. Indigo uses a heavily hacked version of Adventure! set on a Dyson Sphere. The protagonists are posthuman members of the Fleet Syndicate: the exploration branch of an anarcho-syndicalist culture heavily influenced by mid-21st Century South Asia (as explored in its prequel, a cyberpunk-genre homebrew). It’s a sandbox game where I emphasize the characters’ freedom not only on the metagame level, but in the world. Ships are even run as collectives where people can come and go as they please. They’re free to fail too – fail utterly. They’ve done it before.

Tonight’s game was special enough to bring to Mobunited.com because it ended in a peculiar triumph: Four of the five PCs committed suicide, and the fifth was murdered due the the machinations of one of those suicides.

It was a matter of principle, you see. The characters were on a mission to either steal or suppress force field technology that belonged to their culture’s rival, the hypercapitalist Universal States. Tough job; the research lab was in an Exthreat Facility, designed to contain experiments that might draw the ire of the Transapient AIs who built the Sphere. The facility was a tetraneutron bottle suspended by virtual particle switching, which made it indestructible and in emergencies, collapsible, whereupon it would release lethal radiation and sink into the Sphere medium.

Our heroes wanted to avoid the deathtrap and steal its data from an overhead dirigible that contained hard storage of the US’ research. They bluffed their way in but were eventually forced to kill a number of surgically engineered warrior “debtors” (the US underclass) and officer-interns, until a chase speckled with brain/network hacking got their asses lasered and stunned.

I woke them up on the USS Manifest Destiny, an local enemy destroyer under the supervision of intelligence officers. Their enhancements were gone and their “brane” neural implants had been hacked to hit them with epileptic seizures if they tried anything violent. Their host Major Yamazaki told them their ship had been captured and that unless they answered her questions now (before their thoughts were converted to data – not an easy thing to do fast in this setting) she’d kill 10 of the crew (a lie – the Antipodean was safely hidden underwater).

Now I expected the PCs to hatch an escape plan by using their common culture and wits, or shift things forward to leave them on a prison colony in US territory, able to escape (or lead a revolt) and deal with the reshaped politics that came about due to their actions.

Instead, they chose to die. They viewed the situation as an abomination, against everything they stood for, and three of the five believed that any future duplicates would be them, even if they were out of date, memory-wise. One more believed she’d die, but her double would be “good enough” for the cause of total liberty.

Let me emphasize one thing: This wasn’t their reluctant last choice. They started killing each other after about three minutes of discussion, and were happy to do it. And another: It wasn’t a fit of pique, an expression of anger on the meta-game level.

Steve’s character Buck thought that was bull, but he didn’t interfere as Kearsley’s Mikhail, our anarcho-Kirk, rapidly broke three of his comrades’ necks and stomped on their skulls to ensure data recovery would be impossible, even as he shuddered through an oncoming seizure. Major Yamazaki ran in with guards and dragged the three bodies away (Sita, Aviva, Anton – the medic, XO and helm, respectively) in a futile attempt to suck some information out.

Yamazaki was going to salute Mikhail for his iron will, but Mikhail and Buck mocked her (a good thing – it was her gambit to get them to calm down, stun them while making them think she was killing them, and just suck the data out) but they mocked her and with the last of his strength, Mikhail threw her across the room. The insults cut so deep she put the brig in private mode and vaporized them.

They won. Holy fuck.

See, I had a certain vision about their culture and values, but I was gloriously wrong – I couldn’t have been right, because I set up an atmosphere where individuality was sacred and bound in a common hatred of bondage. They saw the debtors. They didn’t want that. After the session they talked to me about influenced ranging from historical anarchism to the Ramayana and were supremely satisfied with their decisions, from giving their necks to barehanded death to the sarcastic barbs they hurled at Yamazaki, where they disarmed even the notion of dignified last words.

Their successors – clones with out of date memories, half-compiled from public records and spun into a fragile algorithm of consciousness – are ordinary crew now, their own legal heirs, preparing as the Antipodean joins the Fifth Battle Collective to answer for the decisions of their forebears.

Freedom. Grim, incredible freedom.

We’re taking a break, watching a movie next week. Then Star Wars to lighten things up, while I figure out how we can possibly top what happened tonight.

Mage: The Dirty Version – Eumenides Tradition Prologue

2009-09-12T02:05:44Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

Kira’s rough kiss had put a ragged mark on the inside left of Markus’ mouth last night, but he regained some sickening symmetry when Jude’s fist snapped out a tooth on the right, ripping its root straight through the gum. Jude picked it out of his glove; Markus spat out a thin line of bloody drool. Red pain.

Markus twitched and shifted so Jude’s partner (T-something or other – some fake-ass Midwest gangster handle) tightened his full nelson up, but that was a misunderstanding. It wasn’t the hit. Markus just hated it when his cock scratched right up against the denim like that. He grunted and wiggled his hips.

“Say again?” Jude smiled and bunched a fist again; the stomach punch hit like a mallet on a taut drum. The force bounced down to Markus’ perineum and up sweetly to his crown, bursting into the outline of a flower on his skull. “Where’s my product?”

The hot flower in his mind bloomed and Kira was with him, crowned as well, tipping a skull of wine down his throat while she straddled him.

“Well I tried your shit, J,” said Markus, giggling in the rush, “But it was so pure. My heart stopped. That’s what happened to those kids, right? You barely cut it. Heh. I flushed the rest.”

“A very, very wrong answer. I’m gonna feed your fuckin’ heart to my dogs.” Out came the cleaver. “You’re one ignorant bitch, son, ‘cause yours won’t be the first one they ate.”

“Not big,” said Markus, then he barked out laughter. He was drowning in the wine now and her tusks cut his cheek.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Jude slapped the flat of the cleaver against his palm.

“You play big, think the people you fuck up carry an indelible mark, like you own them, right? But they’ll get better. You’re little.”

“So? You’re dead.”

“Yes? Yes.” Markus didn’t struggle with the man holding him but dislocated both shoulders around the other way. He popped the wet bone knives and entered the Goddess in his memory and death, death death stained the sweet air of one long, orgasmic exhalation.

RPG Settings: Messiness Rules, Structure Drools

2009-09-11T02:40:57Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

One of the things I’m playing with in Mage: The Dirty Version is a partial rebellion against highly structured RPG settings. Setting design took its lumps this decade, driven partly by genuine changes in what gamers want, and partly by non-playing hobbyists’ desire for easy meta-discussion that doesn’t have much to do with play. (Should you really give a shit about hidden supernatural population when you’ll only interact with a few small group yourself? Unless you’re playing in a big networked game, probably not.)

Evocative settings are pretty messy. In the case of licensed games, this is due to the effort required to open them up for RPG play (and beyond RPGs, books, comics and video games). Star Wars is gloriously disorganized now. A lot of it’s pretty bad, but some of it’s great — and that’s largely thanks to the work you need to do to get away from the Skywalker family drama. Purpose-build RPG settings like the old World of Darkness and the Forgotten realms gathered all kinds of strangeness to escape the strictures of their original designs. You’ve got to do all kinds of crazy shit to make three-eyed anime vampires work with the Cain(e) myth.

Why do you get good stuff out of this? It feels truthful because the original structure gets obscured enough that it’s up to you to draw the material into coherent threads — just like real life, which is notoriously plotless and bad at sticking to themes. Character types lose their firm connections to base ideas, because somewhere along the way somebody wrote about the Badass Wing of the Debating Society, and the Righteous Demagogues of the Badass Tribe.

But there’s more to it than creating a setting and waiting for material to build up. You need to loosen your grip on structure from the ground up. You’ve got to introduce certain imbalances. For example, in The Dirty Version some Spheres are more prevalent than others. Some folks got the niche, some folks didn’t. I did this on purpose, because it will encourage some specific behaviors in play (people are more likely to stack efforts with common Spheres) and imply that some types of magic are more common than others. It also lets me relax and go with what feels right for a character type instead of strictly worrying about niche. We’ve all seen classes or splats that feel half-assed because they needed a place to put the Bling power or whatever.

You can get some creative traction out of following a structure too (Vampire: The Requiem has a few clans that probably never would have been there under a looser regime, such as the Mekhet, and its Discipline breakdown gave us Nightmare and cooler Nosferatu) but working under a firm model right from the start can get stifling. Ultimately, your only refuge under a strict structure is to relegate anything off-kilter to toolkits. These can be good, but all too often they make the game as a whole feel weak and unfinished, or surrender the possibility of deep development. For example, Requiem’s VII book is fantastic. It’s full of evocative options. It also made it nigh-impossible to do anything else with VII in the line without alienating somebody. Bye bye, VII. Unfortunately, if you define VII you just stave off the problem until you’ve covered it in detail, hacked out some metaplot and run it into the ground.

Structure now, or a closed, “finished” game later? It’s tricky. But I think there’s room to maneuver in the middle . . . and sideways. Add ambiguities, imbalanced coverage and you’ll stuff a game full of messy ideas. For instance, I think the current World of Darkness got a hell of a lot more interesting with two Arcadias and a mysterious Hell floating around. Before that point, the cosmology was a bit too cut and dried. Fans have come up with a lot of cool ideas by groping for structure in the dark. I want to add weird, clashing, imbalanced structures to inspire that sort of thing. The Dirty Version is a no-risk lab for the idea. After that, who knows where I’ll take it?

GM as God Part 4: The Land of Miracles, Chapter 1

2009-09-06T13:23:44Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

Haggard morning video blogging! Couldn’t sleep! Here I talk about engaging a setting through its premises instead of rejecting it, using that to invent cool stuff, and how Libertarians in space are irrelevant.

Fan Expo – Whew!

2009-09-02T03:27:50Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

Fan Expo this past weekend was a blast even though I didn’t get to do much gaming. I got to chat with Jonathan Lavallee, Peiter van Hiel, Jess Hartley, Adam Jury and former RPG guy turned Ganz developer Jesse Scoble, all thanks to the tireless efforts of Justin “The Bitter Guy” Mohareb.Oh — and Chris Huth, and Leo Lingas . . . and other people I’m probably forgetting about.

I did panels on freelancing and White Wolf; sadly, I couldn’t make the publishing panel due to confusion over the schedule. It was great to talk with gamers throughout, especially since the convention had a stronger RPG presence than ever before thanks to the Canadian Camarilla, Toronto Area Gamers and other folks — it was definitely an example of area gamers joining forces to get things done.

The only thing lacking was game companies. The Cam ran a White Wolf booth, Steve Jackson Games had a demo team and Fiery Dragon had a booth too (though they never left it to socialize, it seemed) but given that this year Fan Expo seems to be approaching major media con status by continental standards (people were turned away because the con’s MTCC section was over fire code capacity). The convention is hardly perfect (Hobbystar’s . . . not great) but there’s plenty of room for the gaming segment to grow in gamers and company exhibitors.

As I said, aside from playing a great Euro board game with Jonathan I mostly stuck to conversation, and co-sponsored a meet and greet at a local bar to get away from the hierarchical panel structure. I really wanted to play an indie game called Psi-Run, but panel confusion prevented that. It made me think of my own local con, Phantasm. There, you’ve got a big room full of roleplayers, and more wandering around and casual conversation. I’d love to see a bigger room for RPGs – a space where play and discussion happen side by side, just as it does there.

I would also like to be able to drink booze while I game, like I did in Ottawa.

I wanted to do and see more, but I ate a very nice piece of cake, and as I hardly ever eat sugar these days I rapidly fell asleep for most of Saturday. That occupied some time. Sorry!

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-08-30

2009-08-31T06:41:23Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

I'll be playing Psi-Run, then doing penal, then not sure what else today. #
At hotel in Toronto. FanExpo is enormous this year. Hid. Still need to do tete a tete with @jesshartley. #
Going to Fan Expo soon to meet @thebitterguy, @jesshartley and others. See you there if you're coming! #
Ah the Tudors is one. Did I mention we like to call Anne Boleyn "Saucyface?" I can also see the king's ahistorically thin bum! #
And Fan Expo has a White Wolf booth? Damn . . . That's what I get for working and not paying attention. #
Fa Expo has a full slate of RPGaming this year! And @jesshartley! And more! I think I may try Psi-Run if I can manage it. #
Very tired. Very busy. Been not tweeting because of this – well, not tweeting *here.* #

What I Did At Gencon – and What I’m Doing at Fan Expo!

2009-08-27T00:53:54Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

Actually, I didn’t go to Gencon! I did on the other hand have some presence there through my work.

Geist: The Sin-Eaters

I wrote the (unfortunately, somewhat version-dated, compared to post-playtest revisions) krewe rules and I hashed out their role in the setting. Previews made some people assume the krewes were all gang-like, but the other half of that section shows that this isn’t the whole story.

One thing I wanted to do in my section is get rid of one of the big barriers to using mythology and the occult in RPGs: the sense of ownership, expertise and authority some folks feel they have over it, which drives people to avoid hacking together things as they see fit. Ironically this makes it more like actual occultist or mythology, which is pretty much cultural Lego anyway. In Geist, people have revelations that don’t make sense, don’t have to make sense, and combine all the chunky debris of pop culture with the cool flow of recurring motifs. Nobody gets to play the expert, and everybody does.

I also wrote some stuff on antagonists.

Eclipse Phase

I didn’t do any writing for this one but Rob Boyle and co. kindly asked me to drop in and participate in initial brainstorming. I helped out with some names for things, (the Exsurgent virus) suggested an embryonic version of the tagline, warned of a terrible Putonghua pun and took a strong AI/digital consciousness stance in discussions about psychosurgery and forking. This wasn’t because I’m a transhumanism geek but because I happen to be familiar with the more extreme end of the stance and thought it should be considered.

Now Eclipse Phase doesn’t entirely adhere to the strong stance and this is a good thing. When people complain about the limits of some version of transhuman technology they often don’t consider the global picture. They want effortless body-swapping and personality apps, but don’t deeply examine the combined effect these things have at “maximum setting” in RPG narratives: They totally trash them. Yes, that even includes your funky nu-game POV nobody’s thought of before, because you’re just not thinking big enough. Egan’s Diaspora is too weak as well, for that matter. The primary issue is the nonexistence of real risk or tension in characters that simply cannot have involuntary experiences in any way, shape or form.

(This kind of reminds me when people didn’t get my work on the old Mage’s Ascension, because they figured it was “One side wins!” or “We get to ride unicorns!” No, it’s bigger than that. The ultimate potential of idealized, Singularitarian transhumanism is bigger than our narratives too.)

Fan Expo

I’m going to Toronto’s Fan Expo this weekend. I’ll be doing panels and maybe handing out cards but no table – I want to get out there, game a bit and look around. I’ll be co-sponsoring (putting in for snacks) a Meet and Greet at Hoops, a nearby bar. Feel free to drop by and chat! People sometimes seek me out to sign things and I’m always happy to do it. This event is your best bet.

What Else?

This is the first blog entry in a while because I’ve been very busy with an electronic gaming project (not the WoD MMO). I will have more stuff on GMing, more announcements about upcoming games — just not right now.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-08-23

2009-08-24T06:43:24Z

Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there.

This is the direct link to buy Aeternal Legends at $11 off: http://bit.ly/aeternal. It will be gone in no less than 5 hours. #
Good morning ESTers. Odd not using a client. What do you guys use to track followers and such? Afraid of snubbing folks, many options 2 use. #
Day 4 of fight diet. 10 lbs lighter. Most of that is water (I have a lot because I'm tall) but man. #
Watching someone be terrified I'll show up and be mean doesn't hold a candle to someone being terrified I'll show up and be nice. #
Damn, a great Indigo session, even though it involved taking minutes and building consensus. #