There are two broad reasons that people go to convention games: for an experience and to see how a game works. And while that probably gets a “duh” response from a bunch of you, here’s the rub: you can’t predict the mix you’re going to get.

As a convention GM, you’re both crafting an experience for and with these unknown players and demonstrating the game. Most people want both, though to different degrees. But you could just as easily have players who don’t give a damn about the game because they just want to play in a fun story (or worse). You could have players who don’t give a damn about the adventure you’ve prepared because they’re there to finally see how combat or magic or whatever works in this new-to-them game. And you could have those two types show up to the same game.

I call these the Twin Masters of Con GMing. You, as the con GM, need to be ready for a situation where you have all of one or the other, or whatever mix happens at the table.

Players Seeking Experiences

You’re going to get a lot of these, especially if you’re running older games. You write up a fun blurb for the con and people show up jazzed to be a part of it. One of my first con games, a GURPS Horror game set in Disneyland, grew crowd after crowd of people wanting to play in a zombie apocalypse set in the happiest place on earth. They wanted this experience I was billing.

I got lucky during those games, because that’s not the only experience people could be seeking. There are your trouble players who go seeking the experience of frazzling a GM. Or you get the group of friends that swarm a table and want the experience of playing together, which is a very different dynamic than people who don’t know each other before sitting down.

The mindset of this type of player is focused on enjoyment and the moment.

Your job as a con GM is to prepare an experience for the table, but it’s also to be prepared for other experiences the group or individuals might want to push on you. It’s rough, but we’ll talk in future installments about how to be a “Bend Like Reed” GM.

Running a Game Showcase

The more I run “the small press hotness” or other new games, including playtests, the more I get people who are more interested in a game because they haven’t played it before than I do for the adventure pitch. (In fact, many of the indie play cons pitch games simply by saying the title of the system, and that’s what people glom onto.)

When this happens, your job is to have enough mastery of the game to demonstrate it, answer questions, and direct the flow of information for optimal learning. The mindset of this type of player is focused on discovery and understanding.

Column A & Column B

Of course, not everyone is two-dimensional. People want to be entertained and to entertain in return. People want to discover cool stuff. But the mix is where it’s hard, because you, as a GM, likely have your own desire. Sometimes I want to show people the cool shit they’re playing, and sometimes I just want to have a fun light experience.

How do we, as con GMs, deal with this situation we’re constantly throwing ourselves in? That comes in the form of many skills that I’ll want to talk about later:

• Reading people at the table
• Building rapport, both between you & them and with them & each other
• Building up your “reactive GM” muscles
• Retaking control of the table

Next week, a new topic! But here’s where I wanted to start, because understanding the job we’re doing helps highlight the skills we need.

Agree? Disagree? Please add your thoughts in comments!

- Ryan

I was talking about AW with folks at PAX this past weekend[2], and one thing that came up was how I don’t like how History is explained — in that it’s poorly explained and confusing as hell. Things made more sense when John Harper talked about how that was Vincent’s intent, how he sees frustrations a group has to overcome as a bonding experience. (Hopefully someone on the Internet can point me to an actual discussion, as while I totally hear what John’s saying, I’m curious to read Vincent’s own words about it. Thus, the rest of this post is about what John said rather than anything else. EDIT: See the first comment for actual text.) I flippantly replied with something like “Yeah, and Stockholm Syndrome is a great way to meet women.”

That decision to inject frustration there for the point of the experience sort of bothers the fuck out of me, and sort of doesn’t in the least. Yay for ambivalence. I wanted to take a moment to unpack my thoughts on that.

How it doesn’t:

• Shared experience is the heart and soul of RPGs, both in the direct sense (my group did this thing, and we can keep talking about it) and the indirect (my group did the same scenario your group did, and it’s neat to compare/contrast).
• We should admit that game design is mind control. There are tools and techniques at our disposal, and as game designers we play the role of amateur practical psychologists. We already do it with reward mechanics, so why should this feel different?

How it does:

• You can come off looking fucking incompetent — either as a designer or as a writer. Remember, those are different skills. And if you don’t communicate your intent to frustrate in even a roundabout way, well, it just looks like shitty text. I personally give Vincent credit in this arena, but if some designer I was completely unaware of pulled the same trick, I would throw the book across the room and use impolite terms to refer to his or her parentage. So one really only gets a pass if their readers know you enough to, well, give you a pass. (Edit: I should also note that I didn’t realize it was intentional until John said something.)
• It might not work. I’m frequently in unequal states of mastery at a table, and AW is no different. When I ran a con game last month, I walked them through Hx saying “Yeah, it’s confusing. Here’s what you do.” I overcame the frustration for them, because I didn’t have the time to deal with it nor the desire to make my players hostile against the game.
• I see little benefit in turning the players against me and questioning the confidence in my text. Especially as early as character creation. If they get past this frustration without realizing that was the point of the exercise, any later legitimate frustrations they’ll have will be colored by that earlier experience, and could lead to judgement calls that go against the game and break it.

I’m not trying to say that Vincent’s call is bad. Really.[3] It is fucking interesting. And as I always do, I applaud those who try interesting shit because it gives the community more data and more thinking points. Of course, AW is working for a shitton of people, including me and the folks I’m going to keep running it with. But contact with this idea makes me better understand where my own lines as a designer & writer are.[4]

And I’m not against frustration in games per se. Overcoming adversity, including in frustration, is the hallmark of adventure design. Keep on the Borderlands, man. Shoot, it’s a hallmark of much of computer gaming. So I’m not at all knocking that as an idea. But I better understand now why it’s a writing choice that’s alien to me.

Still, I’m glad Vincent did it. I learn more from people who present very different experiences and viewpoints than when I live in a damned echo chamber. And now I’m left wondering how to achieve that effect while minimizing those issues of mine mentioned above.

(Now let’s see how flamey the responses get as people assume the tone of voice I’m using is harsh. Yay for inflectionless text!)

- Ryan

[1] Those who know me know the highest praise I can give a game is “I think I want to use this to play Unknown Armies.”

[2] Doing posts of PAX recaps seem to be all the rage. Perhaps I will as well.

[3] Responses that don’t get this will be deleted. Fair warning.

[4] My lines as an editor are, funnily enough, somewhat different.

The problem is that I tricked myself into this toxic situation because I would see the number of hours I *could* work in a day and the number of things I needed to do both to keep a roof over my head and to achieve the dreams I had, and said “yes, I will work all those hours. how bad can that be?”

Ambition is a demon on your back that makes you feel guilty when you have to tell someone “I would love to work on your project…but I can’t.” It makes you feel guilty when you decide to watch TV for a couple hours instead of working. (It also robs the feeling of awesome from the achievements in your life, but that’s a topic for another time.) Ambition is the thing that told me I should work all those hours.

The other side of the coin is that we aren’t robots.[1] We can’t be on 24/7, even if there’s time in the day for us to do so. Because time is only one part of the equation. It took me until a few months back to realize more of the equation[2]:

Time + Mental Bandwidth = Productivity

Mental bandwidth[3], unlike, time, is not a constant. It’s your ability to focus on an idea, your energy to do something brain-based, like deal with customers, write, edit, produce audio, manage projects, whatever. Of course, mental bandwidth is also consumed by dealing with home maintenance, travel, relationship issues, business meetings, taxes, all that crap. And mental bandwidth isn’t something entirely under your control — both in that the world will throw you crap you have to deal with and that it’s linked as much to your physical condition as anything else.

To plan my life solely around the time I have is an amateur move. I also have to plan around my mental bandwidth. But since I don’t know what that’ll be tomorrow or next week or whatnot, that’s hard to plan for. So I’m starting to take an approach of figuring out how much I could work in a given stretch of time, and committing to only working 70% of that. If a day gives me ten hours of work time, I know I have to work seven. (That doesn’t count breaks and the like. No one pays me for those anymore. But I’m strangely comfortable with that.) That said, I’m planning more weekly than purely daily.

Right after GenCon, I tried to dive back into work at 100%, and crashed a bit. I didn’t really have that mental bandwidth back. Lesson learned and all, but it’s hammered home that I need to be more aware of my mental bandwidth both in the moment and how I can predict it in the near future. To that end, I’m (slowly) reading Getting Things Done (mentioned previously) and am trying to take better care of myself physically & mentally.

This is not an easy thing to do. I can’t tell which activity of all those I need to do in a day will cost more bandwidth at that moment. Sometimes, dealing with customer service is easy, and costs less than writing. Sometimes, the opposite. Shoot, sometimes writing makes me feel like I have more mental energy than before I sat down. It’s all strange and relative and a bit chaotic — enough to make planning difficult. Especially because they all need to be done. I can’t just say “meh, I won’t do X today,” at least not without drastic consequences.

Like many of my “Thoughts on” posts, I am not stating a solution to something. Just putting thoughts to virtual paper on this lovely Seattle day.[4]

- Ryan

[1] Close friends will know the tone of voice I’m using here. And that I’m wincing as I type it.

[2] Math & CompSci nerds will cringe at how basic that equation is. But you get what I mean, which is the point.

[3] A friend of mine calls this Emotional Bandwidth. I used to think of that as something different, but today I’m less sure. I prefer “Mental Bandwidth” as a label, though.

[4] I’m writing this while chilling outside. It’s drizzly. I’m enjoying my pipe & KMFDM. This is heavenly.

One of my many flaws is that I procrastinate in the form of “thinking about what I need to do.” I like to take long walks and muse about shit: story ideas, game mechanics, blog posts, personal stuff, whatever it is that’s on my mind. And there’s a degree to which this is helpful.

That degree is the excuse I use to keep doing it far, far beyond usefulness. Because (and here’s where we get into the original title) thinking, as an act, is pleasurable. Being clever or intelligent or whatever it is we’re doing when we’re thinking to ourselves about something fires off neurons in our–well, at least my–head that reward me for this activity. I find it calming, relaxing to just think about something. For hours. For fucking days.

Only it’s not useful to “just think” that long. After a bit, because nothing is recorded or submitted to others for feedback or anything that would take me beyond “just thinking,” I come around to the same thoughts over and over. Sometimes I realize it and explore new tangents. Sometimes I don’t until much later. Either way, now I’m wasting my time and preventing myself from moving onto the next action I need to do.

Sometimes these thoughts are about worrying about said action. So I analyze over and over what I feel I should do to mitigate a problem. Sometimes these thoughts are about a hard action, like a tough bit of writing or designing or editing that I need to do. So I think about it over and over. There are different reasons I’ll spend time just thinking, and they’re almost all excuses.

(The ones that aren’t excuses, unfortunately, justify this activity for the ones that are.)

I’m started to read, slowly, Getting Things Done. One of the things mentioned early on is to write down on paper things in your mind, so that you can free your mind up from fixating on them. It hit home yesterday, and a little more this morning (when I changed the title of this post) how the ways I’ve already been doing that have helped me, and how I need to do a better job at it still.

Since I got my iPhone a few years back, I have absolutely fallen in love with quickly typing notes and emailing them to myself. Or occasionally doing a voice memo. I told people within two months of having my phone that it changed my life. I would have a quick idea, type a note, email it to myself, and did that so often that I have a tag in GMail called “Notes to Self” that I routinely go back and search through.

Suddenly I could remember small ideas that would hit me minutes after going to bed. And by typing them out, I was suddenly able to sleep better. My mind wasn’t chewing on this idea over and over — it was allowed to set it aside.

Productivity ensued.

Now, I realize I need to get better at this, not just for the “I’m walking and oh that’s a good mechanic idea I should write it down” moments, but for everything. I can “just think” about a short story for a day, at most, but the next day I need to write things down. The act of writing makes an idea concrete, something I can better explore because I have made it tangible, and something I can then put down without fearing losing the idea — the very reason my mind keeps obsessing about overthinking.

That frees up my mind, my mental bandwidth, for other things it needs to work on. And for working on whatever that thing is more efficiently.

I mentioned why I considered “Overthinking is Masturbation” above, with the brain reward cycle element, but here’s why it’s toxic: once you’re done with the initial thinking you need to do, you’re wasting time. Your thoughts will become better once you write them down. And better still once they come into contact with someone else. The move from pure thought to action is profound, sometimes intimidating, but necessary. And the longer we delay that move, well, none of us are getting any younger.

There are so many excuses we do to keep us from acting. I’ll address some of my own past ones now:

• I only have part of an idea. Congrats, that means you have an idea. You’ll have more if you make your brain explore it by writing it down.
• I don’t know where to start. Actually, you do, it’s just not where you want to start. That’s okay. Start in the middle, or wherever words flow best. You needn’t be linear.
• My idea sucks. Then stop thinking about it? Can’t? Probably means that it’s actually your confidence that sucks. And that’s something that takes practice. So, practice by writing this idea down.
• I’m not ready to write it down. You never are really ready to do anything until some time after you’ve done it. Don’t wait to be ready. Make yourself ready by doing it.
• I’m tired now. I’ll do it tomorrow. Really? You can’t just make a few notes right now, before going to bed? You can’t suck it up for ten minutes?
• I don’t think I can hack it. That’s honest. And you might not be able to right now. But if you never act, you’ll never be able to. Yoda was full of shit: there is a “try.”
• I’m afraid of what I’ll write down. Yep. But that fear doesn’t go away if you ignore the action. It just eats at you. So, suck it up and write. And move on. It’s easier to do so if you act than if you don’t.

When we overthink, when we allow our minds to keep us from moving forward, we’re losing precious hours and days that we could spend creating. We’re losing precious time we could spend learning how to be more confident in our efforts, in how to recover from the mistakes we will invariably make, in all those things that it takes to be a creator.

I’m not telling you not to think. But instead of procrastinating, allow yourself to enter an upward spiral of thinking-acting-thinking-acting. You’re allowed to go back to thinking after you’ve acted. I promise you that. And I promise you that in each iteration of that spiral, your thoughts will be even more awesome and more rewarding.

- Ryan

Not that I mind people having fun, playing around at something, whatever, but I feel like if that’s what someone thinks of as a season, they’re missing the point. And it’s a point I’ve been talking about here and there for the last year or so. That seasons can be a good idea, if you understand them.

These days, I don’t enter into new projects without some plan of an exit strategy. Things that sounds like they’ll go over forever tend to end at a point of low energy, which is a violation of one of my podcast rules: “Leave people wanting more, not having wanted less.” Which means that with anything on-going (including this blog), I break my time spend doing that into seasons, and choose whether to renew that project after each season.

I’ve been talking with a friend about starting a new show, something we’re both interested in talking about but want to make separate from our current shows. He was worried about adding another ongoing commitment to his life, and I agreed.

“That’s why podcasts aren’t ongoing commitments to me anymore. I think in seasons. Tell you what, let’s try five-episode seasons. If we like our first season, we’ll renew.”

As I described my thought and the advice I’ve given over the years, he came at me with a new thing I hadn’t considered before. “No. I don’t want to do something episode-based. That doesn’t feel like it has a hard stop.”

This blew me away, because I hadn’t considered something based on time-elapsed before. Or, rather, I had and discarded it. “Yeah, but if we say ‘Let’s try this for two months’ and we only do an episode…I dunno.”

We compromised. Five episodes in fourteen weeks. That’s one episode every two weeks, with an extra four weeks to cover life happening. Not that we’ve started that yet, but then GenCon recovery really only started with me last week, and I have a backlog of life. We should be recording our pilot in September.

Another podcast I might be a part of (holy crap, it’s almost like I’m a media producer again) is taking a similar approach, and it’s smart[1].  Small, agile seasons. It gives us a target to shoot for that’s reachable in the short term, a period when we not only can but must seriously evaluate what’s happened, a time where we can plan to take a break rather than it just happening…and lasting several months. Most importantly, it gives us permission to walk away.

Permission to walk away while you’re at a high point is important to being successful at anything. You’ll be remembered for your last acts on something. If you ride something all the way down to it crashing, that’s what people will remember. People give me shit still for Master Plan podfading rather than properly ending (though I am, slowly, getting back on that horse because I feel like I should finish it right, even if that violates my rule above). And that’s the point of seasons — to give yourself permission to quit something while it’s still good when you think you don’t have another full season in you.

Also, funding. But that’s another topic for another time.

- Ryan

(Not sure if I’m going to stick to “Media Monday” as a blog topic, but I’m playing with the idea. We’ll see if it survives a season!)

[1] Yes, I just said my own idea is smart. I’m a humble guy.

The lovely and badass Jen Dixon of The Walking Eye Podcast did a great job filling in for our traditional One Cool Thing video:

(Look at that handsome bastard.)

Of course, you can get your fix by going over the shows we did as part of This Just In From Gen Con 2010! The post-show wrap-up, a.k.a. Ken Hite’s traditional unpacking of the Gen Con we all just experienced, will be up in the next day or so. (Some news about me will drop on that episode as well.)

But I just did a couple shows every day. There was amazing live coverage this year, thanks to the good folks at NeonCon. If you know me, you know I’ve raved about NeonCon since I was one of their GamesU (now rebranded CreativeU) guests last year. (With all or most of their GamesU seminars up online, you can see me make an ass of myself.) The team there — with folks like Doug and Jules being the faceman/woman for the broadcast — were a joy to work with and to watch produce what was essentially hours of Gen Con for those at home.

You can check out archives of the live stream, like the filming of the ENnie Awards, at http://www.livestream.com/neoncon/

I was really happy to accept on behalf of Jason & Steve at Bully Pulpit the ENnie Fiasco got. Of course, I also feel like a touch of a heel, because that was a moment that I wished I could have admired from the audience, like I got to with Ken Hite & Hal Mangold accepting their gold ENnies for Cthulhu 101 & Day After Ragnarok. But, the point of accepting an award is less for the person accepting and more for the crowd watching. When you’re up there on stage, your job is to say (using completely different language) “Thank you for putting the effort into this award and giving me this opportunity. I will not belittle those efforts.”[1]

In other words, it’s okay to fuck up my own award speech, but I take accepting for someone else seriously, because it’s their moment and the crowd’s moment, and I’m just a stand-in. A stunt-Morningstar or -Segedy, if you will.

Speaking of Fiasco, this was fun:

(Thanks to Travis & Kira Scott for the bourbon pictured in the photo.[2])

Anyway, that’s all right now. Thanks for indulging this non-post.

- Ryan

[1] A non-zero number of you are reading between the lines. Good.

[2] If your comment is “but there’s no bourbon in that picture!” I assure you there is. See those smiles. Yeah.

Canon Puncture hit episode 100! Woo!

The guys over at CP are pretty awesome, and watching them grow into the show they’ve become over the years has been really neat. I wish them the best of luck in enacting their master plans!

I already announced this earlier, but since we just put up the second episode, I’ll announce again!

This Just In…From Gen Con! 2010 edition is up! Pre-show #2 has been released, and we’ve got more coming this Thursday through Sunday!

Chris Hanrahan and Brian Isikoff were foolish enough to have me crash the most recent episode of 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction. We talk about the Dresden Files mini-con at Endgame, the Go Play SF Bay kick-off, ICONs, and #ShitRyanMacklinSays[1].

But, that’s all old news…

Today, August 2nd, 2010, Master Plan has returned from podfading. I give you: Master Plan #54, wherein I’ve interviewed Ken Hite about Setting Creation and Day After Ragnarok. (Right now, I’m having some DNS issues, so you can find it at http://masterplan.libsyn.com/master_plan_54_kenneth_hite_setting_creation_day_after_ragnarok)

This is the first in a series I’m doing where I’m publishing interviews from 2009 that I’ve been sitting on for months. Those who follow me in other spaces know how busy I’ve been and know how long it takes me to produce an episode that I’m happy with, so it’s been something I’ve pushed off again and again. But it felt really good to kick this out, so expect it to continue for a little bit. Whether I keep doing it after I’m out of my old material or not is up in the air.

- Ryan

[1] Which, by the way, Karen has asked that other people take part in — since she can’t be at Gen Con to chronicle me putting my foot in my mouth.

Current hypothesis (and future blog post): pacing mechanics without a place to slot emotional resonance fall apart. Math alone cannot solve.

{hours later}

Emotional resonance = people really (reliably) want to play the “talky” part of an RPG.

As I said yesterday, I needed to talk the idea out in order to figure out what I really meant, and it hooks back into my comments on Adventure Games & Story Games. To do the thing I really hate, I’m going to start my definition with a negative: Emotional Resonance is NOT just emo bullshit.

It’s the part of a game, any game (hell, any media), that make us want to talk about it after we’re done. I want to talk about how amazing Inception is — and it blew me away — because of the emotional resonance I felt for it. But I also love talking about Crank; not because it’s a deep movie with meaning or shit like that, but because the pacing of the movie and the insane action makes me want to geek on it. It’s the same with a game — we need a place to slot in our excitment, interest, nerditry, emo bullshit, whatever it is we’re looking to get out of the game.

I’ve been making games with scene-level pacing mechanics for a few years now, very few of them any good[1]. That’s because I was too focused on modeling an arc or creating cause-effect chains. There was a little bit when Mythender had this, and every time I playtested it I hated the game. I felt nothing.

Know Thyself’s scene setup involved, roughly:

• Play a card from your hand. (And the cards were fucking cool. For the cards, check out this link.)
• Frame a scene for the single PC (was a one-PC/multiple-GM game) using an element of that card. It doesn’t matter what, you’re in a fucking insane psychedelic dream.
• Uh, build to a conflict, please.
• Resolve this conflict by playing high-card.
• Wash, rinse, repeat
• Every three scenes, whichever side won more (PC or GMs) got to define a thing about the PC’s real life.

So, we were kinda interested in the PC’s real life, since the premise of the game was that they were going back in time and self-inducing amnesia in order to change their past. But no one really gave a fuck about the dream scenes, even though winning/losing those are what drove getting to define stuff about the PC. Not giving a fuck = no emotional resonance.

Today, I know I went wrong with the scene setup. The scene setup couldn’t just be random. Nor can it be 100% driven by mechanical choices. Early on in Gun n Fuck, which has a similarly adversarial one-PC/many-GMs setup, the math & random set pieces drove scene choices. As long as the PC had enough of his core stat, Adrenaline, he could keep doing action scenes. When it fell down, he needed to do a scene with his girlfriend. But because there was no reason to deviate from these choices, they didn’t inspire. The game felt bland. Yes, in the heat of the action scenes we were having fun, but I don’t think anyone really cared about the game later. I know I didn’t.

I also know why I went wrong, and that’s probably the most important lesson. See, when you’re playtesting a game with friends, they might cut you some slack on this front accidentally. They’re distracted by analyzing the game, rather than feeling anything about it, so emotional resonance doesn’t happen right away. Thus, their comments are more about structure than about whether it really works. Or, they’ll slot their emotional resonance onto you, as the friend they’re helping out, rather than on the game. So it still doesn’t work, but it looks like it does. That was my problem with Know Thyself, a problem I wasn’t able to recognize in time.

This is also why I think many older games from our tribe don’t work as well unless played via oral tradition. (Learned from the designer or from someone who played with the designer, etc.) They’re tightly-wound and don’t have an obvious place to slot in your excitement or interest that folks are used to.

When I playstormed Gun n Fuck last Tuesday night, I took a step back, explained the procedure, played one of the GMs, and watched the faces of people. We went through twice around the table (for six scenes), and while the scene-choosing mechanic was a little busted, I could tell that there was some excitement sparking when starting a scene off. I saw that being carried into the scene, making the game work.

The key, for this game, was to not base the choice of scene on math, or on whatever bullshit arc I was trying to force. The PC and whichever GM has that turn each made a silent, simultaneous choice:

The PC can: show a red die (this is going to be an action scene), white die (this is going to be a scene about chasing my obsession), or empty hand (this is going to be a moment when I’m going to just re-juice myself because I’m way, way low on adrenaline). And there’s a reason mechanically do to all those things, but…

The GM can: show a red die (this shit’s going to be hostile straight-away) or a white die (this is going to be cagey and defended).  (The empty hand isn’t an option.) And the GM’s job is to show a different color die than the PC, or show a red die if they PC’s going to show nothing.

That scene’s framing and advantage go toward the side that won the showdown, though the choices the PC and GM made are still true. The third or fourth round, Justin Smith, playing the PC, showed a red die when I showed white. He swore, and then grinned. Right then, I could tell he cared a tiny but about that moment. Right there, I had figured out an injection point for emotional resonance.

Primetime Adventures does it with the scene framing questions, especially when you frame that scene’s central question or conflict, getting others excited about either outcome. Fiasco does it when you decide whether you’re framing or resolving a scene, involving everyone else to do the other on your behalf. Excitement and interest are key. You cannot make a high-level pacing mechanic too tactical or too prescribed. This is why you need to weakly model narrative arcs in such story games — to give everyone room to express their excitement & interest. When you do that, other people at the table pick up on that and bring their own in.

That’s emotional resonance. It’ll vary from person to person, which is why not every story gamer like every story game[2]. But it’s utterly crucial, and at this point I’m pretty sure it has to exist at the point of scene-framing in such games.

- Ryan

[1] A rare few of you have Know Thyself, my ashcan from 2007, which is a shitty game. Three years later, I have a great understanding as to why it doesn’t work and how to make it. And maybe I will.

[2] blah blah blah target audience blah blah blah

Say it badly now. Then we’ll work on saying it well.

This comes from my own experiences where trying to state an idea well right away caused me to hesitate, which made me feel like I was a fucking idiot, which in turn killed my confidence in myself and my ideas. I like to tell people that I could have been the person I am today years fucking earlier if I had learned that one lesson sooner.

(Of course, it took those years to learn the lesson concretely/emotionally/to-heart/however you like saying that, rather than just intellectually. So, even that’s bullshit.)

Then I started using this technique a lot as a GM to get players stumbling over an idea to slow down and feel comfortable about saying anything. Works fucking wonders. Only later did I realize the uses outside of the gaming table, and about using it for myself.

We all fear looking like an idiot, especially on the Internet with cockbites around every corner waiting to tear you down, or we’re looking to gain the respect of people we respect, stuff like that. I totally understand the impulse to craft a message well before saying it. Hell, it’s not like I don’t still try myself — we all do. We all should when we can. This rule applies to when we find we can’t.

As social creatures, we are brilliant when we’re feeding off of each other — many minds are better than one and all that jazz. If you have an idea you’re having trouble articulating or making work, get outside of your head. By saying whatever you can to someone else, they can to help you better figure it out. Last night, I was working on trying to explain what I mean by “emotional resonance” to one of my good friends, Justin Smith, and I started with “so, I’m going to talk some dumb shit here, bear with me.” He helped me understand what I was actually talking about, and now I get the concept itself better than I did by thinking about it silently.

Look at my last blog post, Reward Mechanics & Paying Attention. I poorly articulated some shit there that it took others to help me better understand. If I was afraid of looking like a moron on the Internet, I wouldn’t have posted that. I knew I was off on something, but couldn’t entirely figure out what. Now I know (or, at least know better than before).

So if you’re flustered or confused or just can’t quite articulate this thing in your head, stop trying to do it well. Do it poorly. (If you need a safety net, do it poorly with friends, and state up-front that you’re going to do so. Also, if people give you shit for it, I recommend the retort “Fuck off, cockbite.” They’re being the asshole, not you.)

Related: Be unafraid of being wrong, and of admitting that you’re wrong. I have formed and furthered relationships with people that have started by me being wrong in a conversation (not intentionally, of course). No one needs to be right all the damned time. Which is convenient, since no one is.

- Ryan

What if your “good roleplaying” awards in a LARP were medallions that were given from one player to another like Fan Mail.

I suggested that this was not particularly possible, and he asked me to unpack why. Now, I haven’t played in many American LARPs, but I have done enough to feel like I have a sense of those social dynamics. And something like Primetime Adventure’s Fan Mail system wouldn’t carry over.

See, in LARPs, you’re talking about 30 people, give or take, doing a lot of small-group interactions. Rarely (and it happens, but rarely) is the entire room paying attention to the same thing. So, any positive reinforcement mechanism will have to complete with the medium, rather than cooperate as it does with tabletop.

The point of positive reinforcement is two-fold:

• Reward the person for good behavior (whatever that is)
• Demonstrate to others the benefits of said behavior

In a LARP, the first can happen provided those with the ability to grant rewards are paying attention to you. Good luck with that. But the second? Hell no. There’s too much going on. Five people can sit around a game and throw Fan Mail around when people are being, well, whatever we want to reward. (Eric Boyd got Fan Mail for being particularly evil in several scenes of my first attempt at Blockbuster Adventures, the PTA-for-movies hack. Which made me realize the power of Fan Mail to be use in more specific ways to different characters/players rather than general.) But 30 people have 10 different constantly-splitting-off conversations cannot do so with the same effectiveness.

“But Ryan, we could tell everyone why X Dude is totally awesome and deserves this bennie!”

Yes, yes you could. But that’s way, way diminished in value. There’s being demonstrated behavior and its reward in person, and there’s hearing about it. When you hear about it, some of the emotional resonance of that moment are lost. You’re retelling a story whose context was moment-dependent, and while people can intellectually understand why a X Dude got his bennie, there’s much less of a lesson to connect to, if at all.

Furthermore, we can also intellectually re-equate hearing someone else’s tale with something we did. If I hear “X Dude got the Good Roleplaying Award for being true to his character even when his secret of being a necromancer was out and he was beheaded” or whatever, rather than actually see the quality of that moment and the emotional resonance around it, I can re-equate it with “Fuck, man, I did that last week and I didn’t get shit for it.”

(Why, yes, I have worked in a large institution that has given out little certificates of achievement for years and seen how they depress morale in staff that gets little attention. How can you tell?)

This is why I responded to Clyde at the time with the following[2]:

There’s something I tell software people that I feel applies here: be wary of using technology to solve social problems.

Not “don’t” but “be wary of”

And I’m wondering if it’ll end up backfiring due to social dynamics.

Something that works well for five players constantly communicating might not for 30 split up.

Positive reinforcement is a different beast when everyone is able to pay attention to both the act and the reward.

I naysay not to discourage but to make sure you’re armed properly for the attempt I’d like to see.

We’re talking about a social issue that the innovation proposed might be ill-suited for. Granted, I’m all for someone trying. I hope someone proves me the fuck wrong.

- Ryan

[1] For the love of fuck, Internet, it’s a joke. I know, I have to say that upfront. Y’all are a touchy bunch.

[2] I was pretty mouthy that moment on Twitter. Clearly I was bored.