The Razor Thin Edge Between The Desire for Community vs. Commodification

    You're getting multiple posts in the same month, that's how you know I've got way too much to do and how badly I need to free up mental computing power. Sorry not sorry. Also, a quick heads up: I am sponsored by literally nobody in this post, and in fact am quite the opposite - I would argue everything I'm about to talk about is stuff I've paid for myself or received as an inclusion with something I've bought with the notable exception of The Chair, which Zach Hazard Vaupen literally hunted me down and handed me at PAX Unplugged like the world's most helpful Terminator. This will become relevant, but I'm also letting you know because hoo boy am I about to namedrop a bunch of people and supplies and I'm doing that because they're relevant, not because someone's paying me to do it.

Also, this is going to be yet another long one - if you'd like to cut the crap and get right to the actionable content without all the context, just CTRL+F "What Is Adam's Actual Vision" without the quotes and you'll hop to the end.

An Introductory Diversion: The Return of the Convention Go-Bag

    I know not many people read it, but one of my first posts here was about my convention go-bag and how I'd fine tuned it for anything I'd conceivably need at a convention, because after one year at GenCon lugging around my huge heavy duty backpack with room for my laptop, extra screen, big wooden GM screen, all my books and more I had had enough. It's been long enough since my days in marching band playing sousaphone, my body just ain't built for that anymore. The thing is though, when I'm not at cons but AM running other IRL games, I find myself longing for something with a bit more storage space - not as much as the heavy duty bag, but more than the go-bag. That leads me to opting for a messenger bag and the old classic: the Trapper Keeper. (Yes, that's the South Park Trapper Keeper Akira/Terminator/2001: A Space Odyssey homage. I usually hide some link gags in these posts but I figure I'll throw a content warning out for cartoon body horror on this one. Let's not think about how long ago Season 4 of South Park was, okay?) 

Enter The Trapper Keeper

Don't you give me lip about falling for nostalgia. Just let me have this okay?

    This is great. I've got basically all the space for everything I need, I could throw dice in the pencil bag if I wanted to, the interior pocket can comfortably fit a few zines inside it (if I'm taking it with me on a trip, I will often throw game design zines in there to get me thinking, or sometimes a worldbuilding game if I think I'll need to entertain friends). It's great, and it's specifically great when I know I've got plenty of prep time to bring everything I might need with me at once. But I don't really like taking a messenger bag with me everywhere I go these days, and if I want to write notes down to keep with me for upcoming game things, it's not the most convenient. I mean I GUESS I could type them into my Notes app on my phone or throw them in a private Discord chat to myself and then copy them down later, but that's a lot of steps AND reliance on technology/my faulty brainmeat to remember to sync things up before the game. Part of the reason I wanted to get that go-bag ready is to have everything in one spot at all times, and so that got me thinking about something a little more compact. 

    In the go-bag, I've got the little utility bag that has the e-reader, mechanical pencil, and two Field Notes journals in it, and that's honestly just about perfect - but with the e-reader in it, it's a little fragile to just throw in any old bag/cargo pants pocket and go. I like a lot of the options the little utility bag gives me though - just like the Trapper Keeper, it's got pockets to slide things into, space for a writing utensil, and is otherwise of the correct form factor to slide into my bag without taking up much space. But also, I've found out that I write like a caveman and cannot be trusted not to constantly break and/or jam the lead, so I want some kind of durable pen and I'm not quite ready to commit to the world of fountain pens yet - I was gifted one, but I use it so rarely I have to clean when it I pick it up to use it since the ink dries on the nib. While hunting around Richmond for advice on cleaning that fountain pen, I stumbled onto a happy compromise which would spiral out into the real reason I'm writing this post. But first: the compromise.

Yo Dawg, I Herd U Liek Journals

    In the not-too-distant past, I had also started trying to use some of the journals laying around the house to help create a physical backup of my Google Calendar. I like to joke that I'm the most extensive Google Calendar user that's not in a polycule because thanks to your friend and mine ADHD, I can't remember when anything is in the future. I also plan my life out many months in advance. You can see where this might begin to present a problem. So, I try to make physical backups of my schedule since it helps me visualize my upcoming time commitments and I can also do things like physically map out my days to combat time blindness. I had been getting better about this, but had also been trying to keep one journal as just my scheduler and one for all the random things I'd need to work out during the day and come back to, and this arrangement was just bulky enough that it was causing me to forget to take it with me places, which was again beginning to defeat the point. 

    While I was bouncing around various stationary stores in town trying to get advice about cleaning the pen (spoiler, I was basically just told to use soap and water and to just dry it thoroughly and quickly after cleaning so it didn't rust), I began to see certain accessories pop up in multiple stores and one in particular caught my eye and really started locking this into place for me - the stickable pocket. Leuchtturm 1917s have a pocket in the back already, but it never occurred to me that someone might make replacement pockets - or, for that matter, pockets for journals that didn't have them in the first place. The fact that it also came with a pen loop was all the better - I had gotten a nice Sharpie gel pen during a trip recently as well as some tiny Bullet Journals to use for keeping inventory for merch at a music festival, and THAT meant I could slap one of those in one of the pockets, stick a second pocket into the journal just in case, and as long as I could find something I could use to make a straight edge with when I needed it I'd be good to go. I ended up grabbing a brass stencil and another slide-on holster for it - overkill, sure, but until I find another one that can go in one of the pockets it'll do. I've managed to keep this with me every day when I've gone to work and it's always nearby at home, so I consider this a success. But we're not here to talk about my journaling habits - at least, not exactly. Put a pin in this because what we're actually here to talk about is...

Gameable Ephemera

An assortment of games of various formats, plus related bookmarks & business cards.
I have more, but lord knows where they are

    I loathe single-use objects. I rarely use bookmarks, but they're always included as special bonuses with books when you order from places because hey, it's free promo right? Usually, they end up in the garbage can. Likewise with business cards - after I've made contact with the people after the event I've received them from, unless they're really spectacular I very rarely have a need to keep them. This is something the TTRPG community has realized and has thankfully started to combat - whether you're Yochai squeezing whole keyed dungeons into specially formatted business cards, Reilly Qyote including instructions and some statblocks on a bookmark so you don't have to keep flipping What A Horrible Knight while you're using it, or the birdman himself giving you optional IRL drinking game rules + some cocktail recipes to go along with the in-game drinking game rules, these can serve as anything from additional marketing for yourself to standalone gameable content. They sure can be troublesome to keep up with, though, especially if they were to fall out of the book or zine you're keeping them in. Sure, you can just paperclip them in I guess, but unless you're stealing them from your office job who has paperclips these days? Plus you run the risk of damaging them or the book.

    All-around cool kid and well-known maker of keepsake games Shing Yin Khor has an answer to this in the form of their a short rest series of randomized game-enhancing booster packs. These have long-since sold out, of course, but the idea here is solid - you take your little bonus stuff, slap it in something labeled to keep it safe and then you just keep it with whatever game materials you want to use it with. This is the more minimalist approach to something rather than, like, one of those huge packs that Beadle & Grimm's sells, and significantly more system neutral. 

    Actually, hang on a second. The cool thing about all of these bookmarks and business cards and booster packs is how interchangeable they are. In fact, I know I've seen people put whole games on business cards and bookmarks before, to say nothing of just the abundance of one page RPGs. And what are all these microRPG elements if not basically the same as the joesky tax? People love writing little things to stick into games. Hell, people love writing little games to twist other games. Once you become enough of a gaming sicko, you practically have to start making little bits of homebrew or you start to lose your grip. It's like some kind of law of g-

Ask Not For Whom The GLoG Calls To...

    I'm not explaining the Goblin Laws of Gaming. You can listen to the Dead Letters folks talk about it if you really don't know, or you can read Arnold Kemp's original post linked above, or you can visit the subreddit, or go watch Hexed Press or any number of other YouTube people talk about it. There's probably a thousand other online communities for the GLoG I don't know about, and it's because

People

Like

Making

Weird Little Stuff

And

Sharing

It

Particularly those of us with terminal cases of can'tshutthefuckupitis.

A Tangent About Convergent Evolution: Artist Trading Cards

    Whilst chewing on everything that has/will go(ne) into this post, I discovered a whole other community out there - artist trading cards. I knew nothing about them before today, but this video goes into the whole ethos behind them as well as some basic techniques for making them - and since so many TTRPGs I know involve altering playing cards, I thought this might be a welcome inclusion for those of you who also might not be aware since there's a lot of overlap in goals. But this, too, appears to be a scene who loves making things for making things' sake and trading them around with other creators. Also, critically, according to this video the scene is staunchly anti-compensation - that is to say, the goal of these is to make a thing and spread joy, not money. Again, if this video is to be believed (and I have no reason to doubt it, of course, other than it's the first thing I've seen about this scene so I haven't gone and done further research because holy shit this post is long enough already), buying or selling ATCs is a pretty big taboo, and I want you to put a pin in that as well.

Capitalism Is Always The Bad Guy

    So, let's thread all this together. While trying to find a way to minimize the number of notebooks I'm carrying around while also making sure I've got enough supplies with me at all times that I can jot notes or run a game at a moment's notice, I simultaneously realize that I've got a bunch of random gaming ephemera that I don't really have a place for but does seem to be made to be stored in something like what I'm slapping together. I also realize that people love making these kinds of things, they can either be pure game mechanics or gameable content plus marketing, and that if someone were so inclined they could create little packets instead of just single objects but ultimately you could still keep everything together to mix and match however you liked, and if these things were made cheaply but abundantly enough they could be traded around, collected, and allow people to have whole bespoke systems unique to each person depending on what you did and didn't want to keep in your notebook folder. All at once, I saw three possible futures: a world in which I started Yet Another Game Jam and maybe got people trading things around at events or maybe even encouraged creators to start making event-specific content to pass out as promotional material; a world in which I worked with people to make some seed content packs (i.e. a pack of fantasy rules, a pack of sci-fi rules, a pack of system neutral monsters, etc) and sold them as little collectible doodads; and the world where I walked up to John Leuchttrum or Mr. Simon Schuster and went "Hello, I have an extremely marketable idea that already has a community around it, please give me your big time printing money to coordinate a product about this." With visions of gaming communities and dollar signs dancing in my eyes, I did what any reasonable person should - drove 8 hours to talk to Shing about it.

    Disco Business

    OK actually I drove to NYC to see Nicky Siano DJ, BUT Shing was happy to get lunch and chat with me. They had a lot of really good community-centric ideas - things like having LARPs codify event-specific rules in little cards along with your character-specific rules, or creators at cons collaborating ahead of time to create a multi-part adventure that you'd only see the full version of if you visited each of them not unlike a stamp rally. They were also super into the idea of, if the form factor was more in the playing card size, having binders of rule cards to show off and trade with people like Magic cards. I brought up the idea of the game jam and providing people templates so people could print at home, and they mentioned if a bunch of people ended up wanting to go in on it, getting bulk printing made of each of the projects and then distributed to the creators either by mail or at events would be a really fun way to encourage people to trade things around and keep costs generally low while keeping the quality consistent.

(Also, I sadly did not get to see Nicky DJ, the venue lost power. I did take the time to finally visit the Twenty Sided Store in Brooklyn, however, and ran into quite a few people I knew as I was buying games, so that was an unexpected delight. Also Shing gave me some of their games?!)

 

He Is A Real Blogger, Not A Real Worm

    As luck would have it, Mr. His Majesty The Worm Josh McCrowell visited Richmond very recently and I also had a chance to talk about this whole concept with him. As someone who's much more tapped into the Blogosphere (and the GLOGosphere, for that matter), I figured he'd have some thoughts about this. We had as many intelligible ideas as soju and fast-casual Korean food would allow us that evening - mostly in the context of His Majesty The Worm. I feel like the way the GM builds Wormgame's behind-the-scenes functionality could work very well with something like this - whether that be detailing whole floors of The Underworld or just single encounters. And as I type this out, I realize that as long as your entire stack was the same form factor, this would be a really fun and tactile way to stock your Meatgrinder table for each level of the Underworld - with players getting to keep certain cards once they defeat them/find the item on them/otherwise remove it from active use. But regardless - I think that if you're the kind of sicko that loves making dungeons and fiddling around with little bespoke mechanics, as I know you have to be if you're running HMTW, this kind of thing would be right up your alley. The quasi-official HMTW fan Discord already has all kinds of projects on it including bestiaries and converting various megadungeons to be usable with it, there's no way an IRL meetup of Adherents of the Worm wouldn't be made better with swapping around tiny pieces of homebrew.

What Is Adam's Actual Vision 

(And More Importantly, Do We Need To Beat The Capitalism Out Of You)

    OK look, as cool as it would be to have like...bespoke A5 notebooks with art that I've commissioned from people with enough pockets and accessories that you could carry one notebook stuffed to the brim with gameable content from everyone I meet at conventions and get to quit my job because everyone paid me to be the middleman to get all of this done for them, that's not actually the thing I want. That's just the dream of being able to bring joy to people without having to worry about finances. And in the unlikely event that one of the like three people I know who could somehow begin the process of making something like that happen both read this blog post this far AND wanted to get a project like that going, it's something that would still largely have to be free and open source regardless, so no need for the pitchforks yet.

    No, what I'd actually like to see and maybe can try to facilitate would be something like a series of interconnected, themed jams to start - giving people specific prompts as well as templates to allow folks to start building up a body of work and then organize meetups IRL to trade them around, maybe coordinate with some friends who have their own companies to get them to give out little booster packs of event-specific content to encourage people to come to those booths, and if I was feeling like a real sicko, maybe get some buttons made to denote people who have stuff to trade at cons. I uh. I have a reputation with giving out buttons.

    The thing is, this kind of thing could absolutely be co-opted and monetized and turned into a whole corporate...thing. Like, Field Notes has a goddamn partnership with Dungeons & Dragons now. The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book (I linked it earlier) inexplicably has perforated tearaway pages, and though they're WAY too huge to paste into an A5 notebook, there's no reason they couldn't release a smaller edition in the form factor of the Ultimate RPG Campfire Questions or the Worldbuilding Guide - which, again, no shade to James D'Amato, he's out here proving this kind of thing has a market which is exactly my point. On the one hand, I'd love a premade kit of supplies to get out and mass produce this kind of stuff on the fly - like, could you imagine going to the store to pick up a kit that had one of those thermal printer sticker machines that has the app that links to your phone, a bunch of paper perforated to the right size, and just being able to snap a picture of something you sketched, print stickers of that sketch and stick them onto that paper and then just write your contact info on the back, and then that person takes it and shoves it into their Bullet Journal branded with their favorite AP series? The convenience would almost make up for the fact that you've got to use a proprietary app, and proprietary paper, and of course there would have to be a monthly subscription and you know there would be a way to sneak AI tools nobody but corporate wants into it and suddenly what started as a community project ends up tasting of ash to anyone involved from the beginning.

    I'm exaggerating and invoking a lot of negative buzzwords for effect here, but the point remains that I guess somewhere in the heart of this idea, there's grappling with the fact that the closer something like this gets to mainstream viability, the less it feels like there's a community behind it, and frankly I don't know how to grapple with that. It's something that seems to be in all the other parts of the hobby, and it's so easy for a new idea to succumb to being morphed and changed in ways that seem good at the beginning only to have them secretly be cursed the whole time. I'm gonna chew on this for a while - I'm certainly not in the place to start a whole jam movement right now, but maybe someday soon with some thoughtful help from other folks who know what they're doing. Is that you maybe? Reach out.

Outro & Citations

    I've talked about a lot of people here today. I try to be meticulous about in-context hyperlinked citations on these things, but from my old college chiptune blogging days I still have the urge to provide a bibliography for these things, particularly since a lot of folks whose material showed up in pictures didn't get talked about. If you're interested in anyone whose stuff you've seen me reference but you don't want to try to flip back up for it, never you worry.

In the meantime, stay weird out there, and if you're not already working on an Appendix N Jam entry, maybe you should go look at some of these other jams.

Stay weird out there.

Mentioned Above:

• Zach Hazard Vaupen/Emo Sludge: Bsky | Website
• Josh McCrowell: Bsky | Itch | Blog | editor for KNOCK! mag
• Reilly Qyote: Bsky | Itch 
• WF Smith/Prismatic Wasteland: Bsky | Itch | Website
• Bo Ryan Crum/Gravy Press: Bsky | Beneath The Muckfort on Itch & Cairn Press
• Adam & Jamie/72 STATIONS: Adam's Bsky | Jamie's Bsky | Infinity of Ships on Itch | Website
• Yochai Gal: Blog | Ludography | Between Two Cairns | Cairn Press
• Shing Yin Khor: Bsky | Website 
• Arnold Kemp/Goblinpunch: Bsky | Blog 
• Dead Letters Podcast is Sam, Misha, and Walid
• Feral Indie Studio: Charlie's Bsky | Alex's Bsky | Into the Wyrd & Wild Itch | Website
• Johnson² is available through Peregrine Coast Press, which has all the links
• Thrill of Dracula is by Kenneth Hite via Pelgrane Press

FEMA ICS/CRM as TTRPG SOPs: or, Using Government Strategies In Your Game Design

    Y'ever just get a thought in your head for one of these here blog posts and go "No...no, I can't write that. There's no way that people will read this and not think my head is lodged so firmly up my own ass that when they call EMS to save me, not even the Jaws of Life will be able to pull it out?" This is one of those posts.

Not pictured: my head or ass. Use your imagination.

Get Me Those TPS Reports

    I do not and will not talk about my dayjob as a general rule - not because I'm ashamed of it nor out of any particular degree of personal safety (my name is my brand, after all, if someone's going to come and kill me there are much easier ways to find me than indulging my ramblings on this blog) but this one time I will say that during my training for a new position I've taken, I was introduced to the emergency response procedures used by the federal government here in the United States (at least, in theory, when those organizations aren't being defunded): specifically, FEMA's Incident Command Structure and Comprehensive Resource Management principles. Now, I'm not going to just re-teach you what I learned in my training - if you're really interested after you read all this, there's actually plenty of information up on FEMA's homepage and on YouTube. But after watching many, many hours of instructional videos, I began to realize a few things:

1. The people who came up with these principles designed them to be broadly adaptable to any number of situations that could arise
   
   
2. Adventuring parties are, functionally, national disasters 
   
   
3. Understanding and mapping the effective flow of information during An Event between the people in charge and the people who need to act on it is not unlike writing an adventure module, complete with the fact that optimizing that flow can highlight actors that are underperforming/can be reassigned
   
   
4. High level tactical play in certain RPGs both on the PC and GM side mirrors threat responses 

    With this in mind, and with the Appendix N Jam deadline looming ever closer and only my cover page being properly mapped out, I sought out to see if I was completely full of shit or if I might actually be onto something here that could help me write more effectively. My apologies to anyone who works at FEMA or who has had to implement any of this in an actual emergency - I'm going to be butchering this for my own needs here, but please know I think your current training is very nice.

Incident Command Structure

    Pictured above is a sample ICS diagram - at the very top, you've got the person taking ownership of the entire situation, below them you've got the people who interface with the public and with other people working The Event, and then below them you've got four separate branches: Operations, who are responsible for getting everything set up and making sure things go smoothly throughout The Event; Planning, who handle documentation before/during/after The Event; Logistics, who make sure things get where they need to go; and Admin, who manage expenditures of time and money. While not everything maps 1:1, if you start looking at the writing of an RPG adventure as An Event, you could use that map to separate things into the following categories:

• The very top level is The Author - the person responsible for shaping the flow of the game.
• The roles that report directly to The Author are basically Marketing, Art Direction, and The GM. 
• Operations would entail any NPCs or story beats that are responsible for the interstitial movement of plot - that is to say, the driving forces, the things that interact directly with the player characters to provide input on what is going on in this adventure.
• Planning would be any critical things that the players need to progress through the adventure - your MacGuffins, your Things The Players Should Already Know, the Things Your Players Must Learn To Make Meaningful Choices, things like that. 
• Logistics would entail how any information from the other sections is delivered to the players and to the GM - the "Service" side being the players, the "Support" side being the GM.
• The Admin section is the least directly analogous in shape but still looks the same in functionality - it's the ephemeral blob of levers and dials the game provides and the GM brings with them to control the flow of the adventure itself

Let's take last year's Appendix N Jam winner, The Knight Errant. Ignoring the meta elements (i.e. the Marketing, Art Direction, and The GM), an oversimplified ICS flowchart of The Knight Errant could look like this:

    You could spend a lot of time breaking down each element of the game beat by beat, which is probably what I will do when applying this to my own work, but for demonstrative purposes (and without spoiling too much for those of you who have somehow not already gone and read it/listened to the Between Two Cairns review of it) you can kind of see how this plays out - you've got your main named characters responsible for moving the plot along as well as the big random events that cause time pressure in Operations, in Planning you've got all the things that the players explicitly need to find/interact with/know about, Logistics shows how the information gets to who it needs to get to, and Admin details things that depending on how you implement them will either speed up or slow down the game - but likewise, depending on how much people players interact with them, may affect the overall "value" of the experience or perceived efficacy of the writing/GMing of the module itself.

    Is this basically just a different way to outline? Yeah, of course it is. But we're not done yet!

Comprehensive Resource Management

    What really strikes me about the layout of CRM is that this really does detail a strong approach both to playtesting as well as for players actually playing a game. From the creator side of this:

• Before running the actual module you're writing, you sit down and lay out the plot (the Incident Objectives), your interactable set pieces and/or intended solutions (Strategies), and how you envision the Platonic Ideal Run of your module going (Tactics).
  
  
• You then test your hypothesis: take stock of what the player characters have at their disposal, throw situations at them, see how they react to them, talk about what went well and what went poorly with your playtesters, then try it again with another group while making changes and documenting the new results.

From the player side of this, however, this is kind of the unspoken calculus underpinning every adventure:

• See what your party has at its disposal 
• Learn what the adventure is going to be about & stock up on supplies/information 
• Start dungeon delving, and 
• After each encounter assess if you're still able to keep delving or if it's time to pack up and go back to town.

    Obviously that just describes a very particular kind of play mostly common to the OSR (and, statistically, if you're reading this you're probably an OSR-head with a lot more experience than I have anyway so what are you doing here?) but I think it's broadly applicable to more story-focused games as well. Who among us here, after your PbtA game of choice, hasn't looked at the playbook you've chosen at the end of a session and thought "Y'know, I bet I'd be more effective at getting across the point of my character if I planned towards this move next/focused on this aspect of my character/roleplayed out this condition I've taken" or the like? I think there's real room to be explored here by people who want to quantify what they're doing - and not everyone would want to, of course, but for those who do having a standardized format to assess the choices you're making means that you have a repeatable methodology across your gaming career to help you play the kinds of characters you want to play/have the kind of gaming experience you want to have.

In Conclusion

    Was this mostly a way to try to relate the things I was learning back to something I care about that is immediately relevant to me so as not to fall asleep during training at work? A bit. But do I stand by this? Yeah, I think so! I'm going to try out the ICS breakdown once I've got March of the Eld Kin written out, and if I have a chance to do a playtest of it I'm absolutely going to be using the CRM-inspired methodology I detailed above. Do let me know if this ends up helping you at all.

Stay weird out there, and good luck to everyone else scrambling to get their Appendix N Jam submissions completed!

Mid-Year Gamer Checkpoint: Mythic Bastionland & The Electrum Archive x Ave Nox

 

    Since roughly the beginning of 2026, I've been in two consistent TTRPGs in my spare time - one being a player in Josh Domanski's Mythic Bastionland game along with two of their other friends, and one being my home group where we rotate games and GMs periodically where I've been running the adventure Ave Nox using The Electrum Archive. With the MB game having wrapped up recently (much later than we originally projected, oops) and with the AN x TEA game getting into the endgame, now's as good a time as any to reflect on these two experiences.

Mythic Bastionland: or, Three Weirdoes Keep Stumbling Into Danger

    I am always incredibly grateful when other creators, especially ones I consider actual professionals compared to whatever it is I'm doing out here, invite me to their game table - and yet somehow it took me months before I actually had time to sit in on a game with Josh. It turned out I picked a great time though - Josh had been gearing up for Mythic Bastionland, and I had just recently read it with my local TTRPG bookclub so I was ready and raring to go. At the table were myself and two of Josh's regulars - one of whom I learned had taken several decades off of playing TTRPGs, and the other was someone who ended up being responsible for dragging me into a Caraphracts game where I ended up being a silly little lizardman jester for what turned out to be the Cartoonishly Evil Empire. So. Y'know. Vast breadth of skill levels, experiences, and general expectations for how this game would go.

    I ended up with the Weaver Knight, and I also ended up with what we might professionally refer to as "absolute fucking dogshit" stats for my young knight. This meant that I was leaning heavily on gimmicks to stay alive because boy howdy was this guy not getting in combat. To my delight, the Weaver Knight got a fun little magical swapperoo ability as well as a horse whose super power was the ability to unerringly smell fruit. This meant that in our First Age (i.e. before we did our Shonen Anime Time Skip To Power Up) I accomplished something that I feel will be a high point of my gaming career for quite some time, which if you'll forgive some screenshots was documented and commentated on back when it happened (and includes a seal of approval from Daddy McD himself).

    In our Second Age, my Weaver Knight thankfully rolled way better and could actually contribute in ways that involved rolling dice. And I know what you're saying, "if you're rolling dice you already fucked up" and yeah, yeah, I know, but sometimes it feels good to be able to roll the dice without fearing for your character's immediate death. All in all, over 16 total sessions we completed three myths, partially completed two more, and had elements of a few others thrown into the world. There were also a few side mission days - the very first session, which I missed, Josh ran folks through What A Horrible Knight, one of the other days when we didn't have everyone Josh pulled in something from Valley of Flowers, and another week we were down we played through a thematically related scenario in an unreleased game of Josh's called In Residence which was somewhere in the general space of Silent Hill and Trophy Dark. Obviously, given the GM, many of the things we interacted with were horrifying in some way, which made me all the more apologetic when I pulled some absolute clownshoes nonsense out to get us through a situation. That said, even I had plenty of opportunity for heartfelt roleplaying with the other characters and even when myself or one of the other players took a more bombastic swing narratively, it always felt like we were being supported both by the GM and by the game itself. Our final battle involved the three of us + a warband versus two enemy knights + their warband, and it truly felt like a clash of superheroes slowly wearing each other down as the enemy knights used the same tools we had against us. Truly, the only thing that won us the day was the fact that our third knight and the warband were able to punch through the enemy warband and come just in the nick of time to weaken the enemy knight commander such that the knight who had been fighting with me was able to harm the enemy knight commander and disintegrate him with his cursed blade. Legitimately epic stuff.

    So obviously, Josh is a demonstrably competent writer of games and scenarios, so anything they were running was going to be good, but knowing what I do about how absolutely little the Mythic Bastionland book does in terms of spelling out concrete situations, from the player side of things it still felt like there was always an answer for any time we had any kind of weird scenario come up which meant that there were very few situations where Josh was left struggling for a ruling. We might have played a little more cautiously than some groups, but it still felt like the game was progressing at a pretty decent clip, and we never succumbed to my great fear in hexcrawls - a terminal case of "wherethefuckdoIgo-itis." No matter where we traveled to, things happened - and not in a funhouse kind of way where it felt like the important stuff was just waiting for us to show up, but rather that we were in a living and changing world. I am both curious and terrified to get on the GM side of this for a full game, but to dip my toes in I'll be running a few sessions of What A Horrible Knight at GenCon this year so hopefully I'll be able to carry what I learned from Josh forward.

Ave Nox x The Electrum Archive: or, Just How Deep Does This All Go?

    As I identified in my post back in January, running AN with TEA presents a few weird issues. For one thing, the lore of the two games doesn't necessarily line up, but it's not wholly incompatible. 

• TEA's lore says that the underdark is home to a number of bug-people kingdoms and that humans are wholly extraterrestrial to the planet Orn, and that any super high tech ancient stuff is from the old precursor race that abandoned the humans there. 
• AN is built on the premise that meets somewhere between Dark Souls and Fallout with an ancient civilization having gone underground and now explorers have found evidence of that civilization and want to find out more.

There's also the combat elements:

• TEA, as an "attacks always hit, armor is damage reduction, and spells are WEIRD" kind of system means that any situation where PCs are taking damage can spell the doom of one or more PCs
• AN, legally being system neutral but functionally being built on an OSE chassis, means that it kind of expects PCs to be a little bit tankier when it comes to combat and while it tends to omit random encounter tables in all but a few areas (which both serves as a storytelling point as well as a way to teach people how to engage with the dungeon), it means that some challenges are functionally impossible without a high degree of mastery/cheesing of the base game system

And perhaps most interestingly is the economy:

• TEA has kind of a unified economy of "elder ink" - a kind of magical gasoline that can be found in tech abandoned by that precursor race I mentioned - being both used to buy and sell things but also to teach spellcasters new spells (and to cast the spells in the first place). What we consider precious metals are functionally worthless due to them being present in the sands of the planet Orn. 
• AN, presuming a normal fantasy world, obviously still occasionally has coins as treasure - but more bafflingly presents a situation in which very little random loot appears paired with very few places to spend it as the locals in the area of the dungeon (the folks living on the surface, that is) don't really use money and basically only use it to trade with the few outsiders who have set up shop in the area.
• Both games present some vaguely similar items at wildly different price points - this was such a head-scratcher I went and harassed a friend of mine who's an economist to try to help me put together a blog post explicitly on fantasy economies but you'll just have to have the version of that I allude to in my original Ave Nox post I linked earlier.

    There are a few choices in Ave Nox that chafe a bit, and not just because of trying to make the module and system speak the same language - and what's interesting is which of those chafe points are intentional and which are not. Having talked to Charlie, I know that one of the things I wish the module had was something that got left on the cutting room floor and which I know still exists (which means hopefully someday we can get it as an extra zine or something to help out): what the goals of all the NPCs in town are! The factions in the dungeon itself are all well defined, though most of what the players learn is sparse and can leave them confused. This is an intentional chafe point, and it pays off later on. But there's all these NPCs in town that have little descriptions, and then there's all these mercenary companies around - but none of them have any goals! And when you've got a game like TEA that has a lot of systems that depend on the wants and needs of NPCs - carousing, hiring minions, etc. - not having clearly defined goals for them can be a struggle. That's not to say that that void is completely free of fruit - for example, one of my players really wanted to set up something of an adventurers guild which eventually pivoted to a bathhouse, and so while following the rules for making an institution we ended up getting results showing that some other local group was pissed at them, and so we got some of the other mercenary groups involved and it was fine - but otherwise, you've gotta really work to figure out where to slot these guys in in places that feel natural. Setting up some objective clocks for each faction, or even just some wants and needs for them to match similar things in the dungeon itself (see: Knife Man and his list of goodies he'll trade you for particularly hard-to-procure meats) can fix this, but it's a shame to know that that kind of thing was intended to be included but cut last minute.

Sketch of "The Snapdragon" - a monster without official art in Ave Nox, by my player Krysta Collins

    To get back to intentional chafing that pays off - a few sessions in, one of my players remarked that the first two levels of the dungeon feel really sparse. Like, there's almost no loot, there's almost no random encounters, and the few obviously story-relevant things hanging around kind of don't mean anything to anyone. This is all by design and pays off once the players get down to the third level and they figure out why everything is so sparse - it's because those top two levels were the most easily explorable by other adventurers. Sure there's almost no cool loot - people already grabbed it! Sure there's only a smattering of random cultists going around and hunting - they're just trying to get some easy food! All the juicy stuff is down in the bowels of the dungeon itself - and in the "final zone" which my players stumbled into after realizing that they had the macguffins necessary to access it without understanding what it was. This was fine - the module punishes those who delve too deeply when unprepared and they got their shit REKT. All of this to say, it becomes painfully obvious where the active story is once you get there - but if you play too cautiously and keep returning to town after every encounter (which is something that TEA can sometimes push you towards thanks to limited inventory and torch guttering, which is not a bad thing but is an unintentional chafe point when combining these things together), you might just think there's not actually anything going on.

    At this point, the players have learned a lot of the secret hidden backstory of the adventure, although there is so, so much more for them to find. Some of the characters are approaching max level, which is an interesting situation - the Vagabond currently has a golem arm grafted to his back and is basically wrecking any corporeal enemies that get in front of him, yet he still dares not hunt King Linnorm (one of the several world bosses in the dungeon which may actually be functionally impossible due to the aforementioned auto-damage of combat). One character has found some shards of an obsidian mirror with a particularly interesting spirit within (weirdly, a piece of lore that works both in TEA and in AN!). One character was writing an adventure novel, only to have it be destroyed by a Rotgeist and to have had his entire character motivation shift to becoming the most deadly motherfucker in the dungeon as revenge. And one character (who is the second character for this player) is desperately trying to level up and keep pace with her companions who are all becoming more twisted and horrible the longer they stay in the darkness. It's a lot of fun. And it's only going to get wilder once they start moving into the bottom floor of the dungeon where the big-time run-enders are - things like...well, you know that one scene that Comedy Central cut out of reruns of Dogma back when they played it super late night in the 00s? If you do, you already know what kind of time this party is about to have - and that's not even including the options they have to go down into the mines, or to the oubliette, or to become HVAC repairmen.

Art by Worthikids. Both Bob Hoskins lives are available to you in Ave Nox.

    I'll probably come back and do a final post-campaign roundup for this one once we're really done - I'm guessing depending on how quickly the players start plowing through the final areas (assuming they're not overwhelmed by the things that truly can just wipe a team) we may have somewhere between 4 and 10 sessions left.

Outro

    GenCon is coming up, and I'll be running some sessions of What A Horrible Knight and something for Moonlight on Roseville Beach with the folks at PlusOneEXP - come out and find me if you can! I also threw my hat into the Appendix N Jam this year to force myself to actually finish something, and if I can get that done then that bodes well for my other pending projects - the vastly overdue Kingdom of Slime splatbook for Down We Go, finishing all the tables for The Ballad of Johnny 45-Dicks so that can finally be complete, and a few others I've got rattling around. I've also started playing in a small game of Stonetop where I am once again playing a weird little guy, but at least this time I also somehow managed to opt into the version of weird little guy that gives me a bunch of magical spirit friends that absolutely aren't going to murder me once I help them achieve autonomy.

    Stay weird out there!

Why You Should Write Your Games To Be Played At Conventions

 

    As I begin my prep for running games at GenCon this year, I've been chewing on the idea of how games are presented for running at conventions. My take on how to prep may be slightly different than yours given that basically since I started running games at cons, I've been doing so on behalf of various companies - at this point, I've run games for Hunters Entertainment, Kobold Press, Plus One EXP and Mythworks over several GenCons and PAX Unpluggeds. And here's a little secret - with one and a half-exceptions (I ran CBR+PNK once for some friends, and I was running 5e for KP but with one of their own adventures), each of those events was my first time running and often even playing the game I was showing off. "Why would you do that?" a smart person might say, "Wouldn't you be really stressed and afraid of doing a bad job?" YES! Yes I would. Thankfully I've been running games for close to 20 years so I've developed a lot of the soft skills that can help smooth awkwardness over at the table, but while reading through each of the games I'd be running I found myself trying to hone in on the things in each game that really made them pop, the things that made me excited enough to risk running a game for the first time in front of a bunch of strangers on behalf of a different bunch of strangers that if I did a bad job presenting their game might never want to work with me again. 

    Running games at cons has been a part of the hobby almost as long as both games and cons have coexisted. There are many early D&D modules intended for convention play: the "C Series" modules were functionally what predates modern videogame speedrunning culture, and of course many games will include "quickplay" rules which can help you get up and running for when you want to test out a game before really fully committing to buying the product. In the indie scene, with loads of games being somewhere in the 16-40 page zine format and including both the rules of the game and often a starter scenario, it can be pretty painless to pick up a game and run it with little to no experience after a quick readthrough - and hell, the Mothership scene has gotten so proficient at whittling down information necessary to make a game work that the fancypants boxed set comes with like six trifold pamphlet adventures along with a few zines to show you the difference between what a shorter and a longer adventure can look like in a game designed to put characters through both a literal and metaphorical woodchipper. The thing is, "short games" are not the same as con games despite the limited amount of time you have at cons. Neither, necessarily, are "one shots" necessarily synonymous with con games despite the fact that con games are by necessity one shots (this is a squares and rectangles situation). When you're running a game at a con, the people who choose to invest their time (and, in GenCon's case, money) to sit down at a game are either 1. people who have never had a chance to play this game and want to see what it's like, or 2. are people who really like that game and are willing to play with strangers/have a whole group of friends they're going around and playing with. In either case, it's your job as a GM to be able to pull out a vertical slice of that game to show off all the best parts of it while also competing with those peoples' limited time and limited attention. As designers, I think this is a play format that should be considered when writing rules much in the same way that many games will include a solo mode or how many people will hyperlink their PDFs - both a kind of accessibility solution, in their own ways, and I think writing with convention play in mind is another kind of accessibility concern to keep in mind.

    Before continuing, I should say that this is something I've previously talked about in the third Wassailing of Claus Manor zine, The Pine Tar of Claus Manor. Consider this a much expanded version of that essay. I should also say that curating a game experience to a particular limited time frame is something I have a lot of experience with - One Night Strahd, although intended to be a 12 hour one shot, still required a lot of what I'm about to go into. And finally, I should point out that a great blogger would turn this into a miniseries of blog posts that are in an easily consumable length in order to create proper engagement with their blog. Unfortunately for you and I, I am simply a mediocre blogger and can only be succinct when people pay me to be, so strap in.

Minimum Viable Products, Vertical Slices, & GM Soft Skills

    While I'm not a videogame developer nor programmer, the person I wrote One Night Strahd with is, and so over the many months we wrote it together I had a bunch of videogame design principles thrown at me. Likewise, some of my earliest convention work was representing MAGFest at PAX East and talking to a lot of different developers showing off either demos of their games or lots of proof of concept builds of their games. Through those times, I was introduced to the difference between "minimum viable products" and "vertical slices": a minimum viable product being the absolute bare minimum things a product needs to have to both correctly resemble the end product you're trying to build towards; a vertical slice shows off the project as it is intended to be consumed but only through a very small, curated window. While those things are part of the design process that ultimately leads to a full and complete game shipping, when we GM games we are consciously or unconsciously tearing down the complete product into these two categories and trying to recombine them on the fly based on the ambient factors while running it - how to budget your time for each part of an encounter, how to keep people engaged, how to make sure everyone gets to contribute, what things can be cut for time when an unforeseen event happens or even if players just locked in too hard on some random part of the adventure and now suddenly the easiest part of the adventure has taken half of the play session. Likewise, you're also juggling your (and, if this is a game the players have played before, their) interpretation of what things are exciting about the game you're playing and trying to highlight those things while downplaying the things that are active detriments (things that are unfun, processes that take too long, etc.). Some of you might go "But those things are a part of what makes the game the game!" and to that I would say, congratulations, you agree that some things are required to be the minimum viable version of that game in your mind and some things are not, and knowing how to differentiate is important. For example, check out this post about this person's Minimum Viable D&D - which is great for breaking down what the base constituents of what feels like D&D are both on a tone and rules level, but don't address what it's like to actually play the game. That part is one of the most ephemeral skillsets we have to interact with: GM Soft Skills.

    If you're not the person who wrote whatever game you're playing (and whatever scenario you're playing), you do not have the intimate knowledge of what the person who wrote those things wanted this experience to feel like. And to a certain extent, fuck 'em, right? Its your table and your group, so you're in charge of the experience. But I bring up this authorial intent because if you do not have that intimate knowledge, it falls to you as mentioned before to deconstruct and recombine everything to give to the people playing your game, and that means you need to be able to understand what things are fun to interact with, what things need to be interacted with to make the game happen, and what things can be hindrances to both. This is all the more important to keep in mind as a convention GM because it is extremely unlikely that whatever you're running was designed with the constraints a convention places on your time and the attention spans of folks at the table. When you're running a home game, you can reschedule, you can extend it out into multiple sessions, you can take 20 minutes arguing about a rule, you can apologize for triggering your friend because you forgot about their arachnophobia, and ultimately everyone there is still going to get to Do The Thing. At con games, you're battling the ticking clock, the preamble (introductions, safety tools, explaining the initial rules, letting people get their characters set up), the actual playing of the game, and then any number of outside distractions that pull people away, and all the while you are responsible for delivering the best possible experience because you are expected to Be An Authority to these people - after all, if you don't know what you're doing, why are you even there? Now consider all of that, plus the fact that you need to have read what it is you're running before, find all the things that YOU think are cool and mentally bookmark things you think should be highlighted, and then be able to adapt when the players have different opinions about what parts of the game they want to interact with or think are cool which are actively preventing you from concluding the experience in the correct amount of time. That is not a small cognitive load for a GM by any stretch, and being experienced at spinning all those plates doesn't make there be fewer plates to spin.  

    Going Through The Gauntlet 

        In older D&D modules, a lot of the ways the people writing the modules would deal with minimizing the cognitive load on GMs and players would take the form of providing premade characters (skipping the arduous process of character creation) and by either having explicit "win" conditions or by providing a scoring table. One of my favorite adventures to demonstrate this is C-1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (there's a reason it shows up as an Easter Egg in One Night Strahd, after all). 

By giving Referees a list of things that can contribute or deduct from the party's score as well as a concrete "win" condition of making it to a certain room within the time allotted, it inadvertently also provides a list of things that can speed up or slow down play - and this being from the published version rather than the initial version run at Origins '79, this scoring table (and indeed the whole module) also had the benefit of receiving feedback on how the game played across multiple tables. You can look at this and go "OK, these things are what the writers thought would challenge players, this is the kind of behavior they're trying to reward or punish," and so on. It also included pictures to be handouts - when you're on a time crunch, the thousand word value of a picture is much more present when you have to weigh it versus the time it would take you to describe something to your players.

    But people play other games than just the D&D-oids, right? If we remove ourselves one step from this style of play, we get to The Gauntlet gaming community and its publications - namely, Trophy Dark and the various Carved from Brindlewood games. Trophy Dark in and of itself is an interesting game in this context - its direct parent, Graham Walmsley's Cthulhu Dark, was an act of reducing Call of Cthulhu and similar games down to its most minimal, rules-light form. Trophy Dark acts somewhat similarly to dungeon crawling games - I won't go over the whole history of that here, you can go listen to Jason and Alex talk about it - but with an intentionally horror-focused lens as the intent is you should be "playing to lose." In quite literally the opposite approach to Tamoachan, Trophy Dark doesn't want characters making cool, calculated decisions while trying to beat the clock - your characters are all deeply selfish and can, will, and should actively throw their fellow treasure hunters under the bus to try to be the last person standing. On the subject of one shots, the Trophy Dark rulebook has this to say:

Moving down the design lineage, we get to Brindlewood Bay and The Between. Both of them contain more or less the same advice as each other so to save time, here's the version of it from Brindlewood Bay:

Both of these pieces of advice are concise, directly reference mechanics in the text, and provide reasoning behind why this advice is being given. Brindlewood Bay and The Between also both provide an outline with approximate timing on how long each section should take. If you follow those estimates exactly, you'll have wrapped up both games in around 160 minutes - which means you'll be right on track if you have a 3 hour slot or you'll have had to figure something out if you had less time as many conventions stick you in 2 hour blocks (although, understanding how long it takes to run a game is in and of itself a Soft GM Skill to master, so if you're at such an event you might want to choose another game). As an alternative to this, Mike Martens has been working on an another mode of play for his upcoming CfB game Planet Raygun which he posted a video about recently - a duet mode (i.e. one player, one GM) which contains the same structure of play as a traditional CfB game but wraps character creation and the plot of the story you're exploring into one tight package. Mike described it as being somewhere between a Trophy incursion and a normal CfB scenario, which makes sense - when you cut out most of the meta-trappings present in a CfB game, what you're left with basically is the same narrative structure you see in the Trophy games. And critically, what this means is that this duet mode of Planet Raygun is still being designed to hit all the beats of things that make it feel like you're playing the base game, but at the same time it strips away many of the parts that can cause speedbumps and take away valuable gaming time. The fact that some of the things it strips away are...well...other players...is a thing that should be noted, but that's still a choice to design towards - after all, how in the world are we going to keep paying Elliot Davis' rent if people stop wanting solo modes for their games?

An Aside: Do Only Horror Games Care About Time Pressure?

    You may have noticed that all of the games I've mentioned so far are inherently horror-forward. To directly quote Josh Domanski, who explains why much more succinctly than I would have: 

    And that makes sense! But surely there has to be some game out there that both nails presenting the vibes and rules in a self-contained package while also being about something that isn't horror, right?

I mean, yeah, there is. I'd forgive you for not having played it at a con because of the many many issues surrounding its physical release but it's Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast.

Zeeb and the CfB family of games fall into what some taxonomize as Capsule Games (see: a different Josh's blog post for more on that), and removing lots of player choices does in fact remove a lot things that can slow down play and eat up your precious minutes. Josh has another post about designing capsule games and I encourage you take a moment to read both of those, because a quick glance will reveal that each of the other games referenced are also games that are horror-forward (and yes, I count D&D as horror forward - it's a game primarily about solving problems through extreme violence dawg, I don't know what to tell you). Other intentional one shot games that hit all the marks I'm talking about, such as Ten Candles or Dread, are also horror games. Yazeba's does also include horror elements in some of its scenarios, so why is it different? I think it's because each chapter in the book is intended to be its own standalone miniature game intended to take place in around 90 minutes. The whole design process is with that in mind - you (both the person acting as Concierge/quasi-GM and everyone else) are only given as many rules as are necessary to run the scenario, and with each scenario focusing explicitly on certain characters and portraying a specific episode of their life, time crunch doesn't need to be used to add terror - it's used to simply denote a natural stopping point for the story. In some ways this seems like the same advice for the Brindlewood games, but the intentionality is different: rather than saying "just play the game as it's written and change these few things to account for time remaining to get through it," Yazeba's says "no matter what happens, what you are about to do is going to be a complete experience." It's subtle, but an important distinction.

What Wisdom Can Be Pulled Forward?

    For creators, I think it is important to really, deeply understand what it is that you think makes your game cool and then make sure whoever picks up your work knows that too. If you're creating something that bolts onto someone else's game (i.e. an adventure module), it's important to not only understand what makes your thing cool but also what elements of the base game you're writing for you think are the coolest that you want to show off with your own work. No matter what, it's important to understand what components of your game slow down gameplay and increase cognitive load for players and for GMs, and you need to decide if those things add to or detract from the experience - things that slow down gameplay might be The Point of what you're creating, but if that's the case you need to be able to account for that elsewhere. Be mindful of how you want people to use their time - whether that means flagging content that is easy to "cut for time" or just a preamble in the beginning of your writing explaining the intent and potential pitfalls associated with certain parts of the game. Give your players only as much as they need to play, and give your GMs only as much as they need to run the game, but whatever you give them needs to be able to show off all the best things about the game. And finally, remember that "one shot" only means that you intend the game to be played in one go - that doesn't help people understand how long it should take or how important certain things are in the plot, so you can and should consider including the intended play time for what you write to help people make choices about what to run!

    For game runners, it's important for you to understand what YOU like about the game you're running. Make sure everyone has rules reference sheets, even for games that are slim on actual rules. Watch an actual play of the game if and where you can to see what things come up during play that aren't present in the text. Read through the text a few times, highlight the things you feel are the most relevant to getting the point of the game across. Don't be afraid to turn longer parts that could derail the gameplay into cutscenes - con games are probably the only time it's OK to railroad players, and that's because the shared social contract of a convention game is that the players know you're trying to get them to the end in a limited amount of time. If you do cutscene your way through a portion of the game for time, consider letting the players respond to that or otherwise help shape that cutscene (see: Painting The Scene in CfB games). Also remember that for better AND worse, it's likely nobody you're running the game for at a con has any preconceived notion of what the scenario should feel like, which means you're going to be stressed about a bunch of stuff that those players will not even be able to perceive. Keep an eye on the table - if everyone's having fun, you're doing it right, and you can probably let go of the fact that you misread a rule on page 5 which completely recontextualizes the whole module and you've had to absolutely freestyle it for the last 30 minutes. Just be honest with folks after the game about it so they know they got a slightly different experience than intended!

    Overall, just remember: if you're running something at a con you've got about 2-3 hours - give or take for breaks and emergencies - to present a vertical slice of a game you love. Enjoy it, and do whatever you need to ahead of time to make your time at the table go as easily as possible. You're curating this experience - make it as fun for you as it should be for the players! 

Outro & Shoutouts

Shoutouts to Josh Domanski and Mike Martens for chiming in on my original Blooski thread about this. Also shoutouts to Josh McCrowell and Jason Cordova for having meticulously documented their thoughts and opinions on gaming over the years which have helped me build my own GM Soft Skills, certainly around their games but also for others. And finally, shoutouts to Yochai, Brad, & Sam at Between Two Cairns and Chris Airiau of Ansible Uplink for delving into some of the behind the scenes things which can be important to know when running adventures in the systems they frequent in.

Stay weird out there.

A Quick Blog About The Joys of Item-based Character Advancement

A friend of mine was telling me recently that a player in his Conan RPG wanted to switch to D&D or PF because he felt like Conan didn't "give [him] enough freedom for [his] character." This was confusing to me and my friend - from what I've been told by that friend, the most recent Conan RPG is very much one of the modern 4-stat, stats are dice that you can buy up to bigger dice kind of freeform games that's a little crunchier than The Electrum Archive and a little less crunchy than, yknow, 5e/PF. When pressed, he clarified that he meant that he didn't know how to make his character "good" because there was no clear path to make his character do more damage in combat. When he was told that this was giving him less freedom to express his character as he wanted, he didn't seem to understand.

I don't fault this guy for this opinion. I've stated before that I started playing TTRPGs on D&D 3.5 and was DEEP in the CharOp build buildcrafting mines, like I understand wanting to do that - but the fact that someone viewed that as MORE freedom rather than less surprised me. More likely than not, this is just a good old fashioned neurodivergent quibbling about word meanings - his "freedom" might be what I think of as "parameters," and that's fine. My years of hanging out with the chiptune community have reinforced the idea that constraints breed creativity. But then I got to thinking about games that just don't do character progression that way - no levels, no classes, no skills, just the stuff you find and the way the world reacts to what you do in it. Cairn does this, of course - as do most descendents of Into The Odd. When I brought this up to my friend, who's a longtime AD&D fan but didn't really do much with OD&D, he was curious as to how that would even work in a longterm game: in his mind, if everyone had access to the same pool of items then there's no way to make the characters feel meaningfully different from one another; and while diegetic rewards like land or titles or retainers or an airship might be cool, if not everyone is bought in on the world of the game then there's not a lot for them to engage with. 

My first response was "I hear you, and I want to talk about this but actually Gamefacecon is this weekend so I'm just gonna go take you to meet Yochai and Amanda P and the other non-Cairn OSR folks and I'll just ask them to explain it better than I ever could," because boy howdy do I love taking people directly to the source to get their information. And to be fair, I did also explain a little - about how the kind of items you bring with your can inform your play style and how you interact with the world, and what you prioritize keeping with you determines what kind of character you're really playing without those pesky labels. 

But I did earnestly engage with this - because I feel like there has to be some kind of happy medium between the "hee hee, make number go up" crowd and the "I have fun by chucking weird little freaks into the meatgrinder" crowd, and I think the happy medium is The Wildsea! Whereas Into The Odd et. al. have your single Background/Failed Profession/Whatever, The Wildsea has you build someone out of multiple archetypes. Likewise, where the Oddlikes have you with a limited inventory and a small pool of health which when combined dictate how effective and survivable your character is, The Wildsea literally combines all of this with all of your defining character traits (which includes iconic items) having HP boxes associated with them, and when you take damage you tick boxes on your items and traits - which means that taking damage may mean you lose access to vital abilities until you heal rather than the "only the last hit point matters" mindset in most games. You don't have to worry if everyone is bought in on the game world or not because YOU DON'T HAVE A CHOICE, YOU'VE GOTTA CHIP IN AND BUILD THAT BOAT, and otherwise anything that shows up that might be a reward or quest for your characters is going to be very directly shaped by active choices the players are making. It remains just tactical enough that CharOp gremlins can have fun getting their greebly little hands all over everything while not making any one build more or less "viable" than another, meaning that you cannot make "bad" choices (a thing I find plagues all games descended from D&D).

Anyway, this is just a bit of a ramble to pass the time until we can skedaddle up to Baltimore for Gamefacecon, but if there's anything to take away from this it's that you should always do root cause analysis on your players' opinions (and your own, for that matter) because you can't trust that everyone is self-aware enough to be able to accurately articulate their own preferences.