As I take a momentary break from working on Mythender, after hitting a couple of epiphanies about presentation & content, I am reminded of something that, frankly, I could use more reminding of: there is no replacement for just doing the work.[1]

Thinking about the work will help you answer questions you know, so it’s good to chill and think outside of the actual moment of working. But in doing the work, writing or designing or whatever, something interesting happens: you discover questions you didn’t expect, and — more importantly — you discover answers you didn’t expect.

I’m changing Mythender’s character creation up a bit, to make it faster for convention play. If you’ve seen the character creation from before, you’ll see that there are different questions for your Heart and for your History (now called Past). They were open-ended questions. Some people dug them. Some people stalled. So I decided to just have three stock answers to chose from for each.[2]

Which, by the way, is a fuckton of content to make up.

The other thing you had to make up before, which I’m now putting on as choices, are what your Weapons are. I wasn’t sure how to do that; a couple months of mild thinking about this didn’t answer the question, and since I’m running this in a couple days, I had to just sit down and do it wrong just to have it done.

In doing that, the solution presented itself: the Weapons you choose come from the choices you pick for those questions. Now, that seems obvious, but it wasn’t obvious when I wasn’t sitting down and actually doing the work.

(Why I wasn’t doing the work? Making up 108 answers felt daunting, even though I know the way I should have done it is to do a little at a time. Sometimes, I’m a damned moron. :)

I’ve felt that way project after project, and if I need reminding of it, I’m sure others do to. So, if you’re stuck, and taking a moment hasn’t unstuck you, sit down and just be willing to do it wrong. You’ll discover unexpected answers in that path.

- Ryan

[1] I stumbled upon this old post recently, which I never followed up on with Part II. Or my blog is an ongoing Part II. I’ll go with the latter.

[2] For those who liked filling in the blank, that still exists. It’s now called “Advanced Character Creation,” and the text for that is pretty much “The questions are there. Pick your own answers & Weapons.”

Atlas Games is doing this thing called “Reverb Gamers 2012″, with 31 question prompts to kick off 2012. I’m going to post one up each day, including weekends, throughout January. I invite you to do the same! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #27: If you were an Ent, what kind of Ent would you be? Or, what other NPC creature would you be? Why?

The idea of “NPC Creature” is weird. Again, one of those “yeah, these questions highlight that my hobby is so damned different from other people who also play RPGs” questions.

But I can say that being a Shadowrun-style dragon would be pretty fucking boss.

- Ryan

Atlas Games is doing this thing called “Reverb Gamers 2012″, with 31 question prompts to kick off 2012. I’m going to post one up each day, including weekends, throughout January. I invite you to do the same! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #26: Who or what was the most memorable NPC you’ve ever encountered? Why?

Hmm. So many games.

I can think of one, but it was memorable because it was a really bad GM bit, where the GM had his pet NPC in a convention one-shot, and was talking about him after the game was over. I won’t go in any further, because that’s unkind.

There’s one thing. I was playing in a Sorcerer game run by Jesse Burneko (of the Actual People, Actual Play podcast). It was a Victorian gothic game with a heavy familiar theme, and my demon was my grandfather bound in a pocket watch. The only way the watch could communicate was through normal pocket watch activity. During a tense scene, I was talking with him/it. Jesse delivered a powerful performance of a barely animate object that sticks with me today.

- Ryan

At times, if you’re anything like me, you think: “Man, if only I can get a moment to fucking breathe.” Life seems to come at you from all sides, you’re struggling with this thing or that, and you feel like you can’t really push or get pushed further.

Here’s the thing: life isn’t going to give you those moments. At least, it won’t when you need them. (Frankly, you probably get them more often than you think, and don’t notice them. But that’s a digression.)

I will digress a little further, and make a gaming analogy.[1] In Don’t Rest Your Head, as the GM spends Coins of Despair, they turn into Coins of Hope for the players. The players may, when their characters are in a moment of rest or calm, spend one of those Hope to heal their character.

And as the GM, it’s not my fucking job to give you those moments. You want to heal? You want to breathe? Make that moment happen.

The same with life. You need to make those moments happen when you need them. Sometimes that means pushing to accomplish something pressing harder than you otherwise might. But sometimes it means being honest with your capacity as a human being and carve out a time where you can breathe despite the feeling that the walls are closing in.

I cannot tell you which is right for you, because it’s all situational. I have to deal with a bunch of pressing health stuff right now, which cannot wait long. But once I accomplish the next goal with that, I can give myself a day or two to breathe. On the other hand, sometimes I need to give myself the day off of freelance work, because the pressure causes me to become subpar with the work. And evaluating which is which is a skill that I’ve only started to hone, and am far from mastering.

When these moments happen, I try to ask myself (though the wording is not quite like this in the moment in my mind): What is the most pressing problem? What’s needed to deal with this? Will pushing on it be a detriment to my short-term or long-term sanity?

And when I deem I need to, I force moments in time for me to breathe. Because no one is going to hand those to me.

That I didn’t do this enough in 2010 is why I crashed hard, burning business relationships and some friendships, and why I slowed down in 2011. After all, sometimes the reason we need those moments to breathe, sometimes we feel like we’re being pushed too hard, that’s because we’re doing it to ourselves.

I encourage everyone who works with me on projects to do the same thing, and I try to recognize (when I’m able, like when we’re working in the same office) when people need and aren’t themselves recognizing it or feeling the ability to ask. Because sometimes we need some help from allies to make those moments happen. No one’s an island, etc.

- Ryan

[1] Which breaks my rule for analogies: stick to food, relationships, or sex. Other analogies, including sports, don’t always translate. (Which reminds me of a story that Paul Tevis told me about baseball analogies not translating to his Swiss coworkers.)

Atlas Games is doing this thing called “Reverb Gamers 2012″, with 31 question prompts to kick off 2012. I’m going to post one up each day, including weekends, throughout January. I invite you to do the same! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #25: If you game enough, you’re bound to run into someone being an ass. What’s the most asinine thing someone’s done in a game with you? How did you react? Did that experience change the way you game?

Two stories.

I once told a guy I regularly gamed with to never come back to one of my convention games when he, in two of them, talked shit like “oh, well, when Ryan’s running at home, the game would have already been over” or “oh, Ryan will let me get away with this.”

For the second one… [TRIGGER WARNING: Sexual Assault]

One time, this one gamer in a Montsegur 1244 game (a GM-less one with scene pass-around) had a scene with my character, and he started it by screaming “You raped me!” In, uh, a crowded game store. There wasn’t a person at that table who happily engaged with him after that.

I sort of half-larp sometimes, standing up and exploring the physical space, and I literally walked out of that scene. Paul Tevis talked about this some time ago on Have Games, Will Travel.

The solution that some of us have taken is to just avoid these sorts of people. Sometimes I’ll walk away from a game if I see such a person there. Life is too short to play games that I feel are going to be shat upon by toxic gamers.

- Ryan