For those who don’t know, A Penny For My Thoughts is a parlor game/story game where you play amnesiacs recovering memories by using a scripted process. You read the text aloud to play. It’s a lot of fun, and really gets one in the mental space of playing one of these characters. The text is all in-character-voice, so reading it doesn’t take you out of playing the game; it’s part of it. If I do say so myself, and I do, it’s pretty fucking awesome.[1]

But we did a couple things that weren’t awesome. First, I’ll show you. Then, I’ll tell you how we could have saved ourselves from “Too Long; Didn’t Listen”.

The Issue

Here’s one really long piece of text that’s meant to be read as a step in the process:

A Penny For My Thoughts, pages 19-20
Click to enlarge

There are two problems:

• The text takes too long to read. I tested myself, and it took me 2 minutes 10 seconds. I haven’t read this page in a year, but I was familiar with it, so after the second paragraph I stopped stumbling as much in my reading it.
• The text requires a page flip in the middle of reading. Luckily, it’s not a page flip where a sentence breaks, but it’s still not good.

Why This Happened

Turning the text into an in-character set of directions was a later part of the process, after a couple playtests I ran where I had problems when that wasn’t the case, and I had smoothness when it was. Paul talks about that more in the designer’s notes chapter. But by then the mechanics are whatnot were mostly tested, so we didn’t keep testing the text. We did do email games, but those didn’t address this situation.

We didn’t test people reading the text aloud. Granted, I’m pretty sure I heard it aloud, but I wasn’t listening for those problems. And that’s on me.

Some Guidelines

Keep any text you’re expecting people to read in the middle of play to around 45 seconds. A minute, tops. Keep from page flips (which, in an age of e-readers, means try to keep it to a page rather than just to a spread.)

Now, sometimes this is hard. In reading that passage, it’s that long because you need to know those things for that section. But if Paul & I were having that in mind when designing the text, we might have found a solution that breaks it up to make it more easily digested. Of the top of my head, I would put in some Stop instructions midway through, since we use that construct in the book:

[STOP] Stop here and ask each patient if they understand what’s just been read. Repeat if it need be. There are further explanations on Page XX in Chapter Three, SECTION TITLE, should you need it. Once everyone is ready, proceed.

Or break that up to:

[STOP] Stop here and ask each patient if they understand what’s just been read. Repeat if it need be. Once everyone is ready, proceed.

There are further explanations on Page XX in Chapter Three, SECTION TITLE, should you need it.

How to Test This

Have some folks over. Have one person, not you, read the text. It’s cool if they’ve read it first, since that’s not an unreasonable expectation. (Though, also test someone who has not yet read the text.) Then watch where the reader and those listening start to lose moment, start to get bored.

Hell, if you get bored reading your own text, that’s an issue. The Mythender intro text I wrote up last year bores me to read aloud about 3/4 the way through. So I need to tighten it.

In testing this, you’ll also see places where reading it to yourself is natural, but speaking it — adopting a vocal rhythm — is problematic. Listen for how people are speaking for ways to make said speaking more natural. Do this even if the text already has the content you want. If there’s stumbling the words around that content, it might not stick as well in the listeners’ minds.

Do this for your inspiring intro text, and for other text you think the GM will read, like parts of character creation, and you’ll be ahead of the class.

- Ryan

[1] Awesome enough to win Indie RPG Most Innovative Game Award in 2010.

Disclaimer:

• Yeah, three years ago I was a rabid cockbite about this book. File that under “actions I regret.”
• His recent works, A Taste for Murder and the just-released Cthulhu Dark (which is free), are brilliant and worth checking out.
• If you’ve absorbed improv jargon and technique by being around story gamers, it’s a good collection of thoughts.

The Issue: “Be” Advice

From page 6 of Play Unsafe, Graham talks about “being average”:

Graham is telling you good advice here. However, as with pretty much every form of “be” advice, he’s not telling you how to do it. This creates one of two situations:

• People who are clued in enough to understand how to do what’s being talked about nod in agreement, and proclaim this to be good advice.
• People who aren’t clued in enough to understand how to do what’s being talked about experience frustration at the book for being unclear or shame with themselves for not getting what is so obvious to the writer.

The core of that is whether or not the reader has the skill you’re talking about — and when you talk about “be” advice, you’re saying “employ this skill.” The author almost always has that skill, and hopefully has it well, so this tends to be natural. Paul Tevis did this quite a bit in drafts of A Penny for my Thoughts, which I’ll talk about in a moment.

Why “Be” Advice is Useful

I’m not saying this form of advice is a crime.[1] There are two places where “be” advice is really useful: when you’re reminding people who already have the skill, and when you’re giving permission to experiment.

We did some of this in Penny:

What this ends up doing is reminding people that being specific is good, and gives permission to do that for those who feel like they need it. Now, folks like me and many of my readers likely don’t need the permission (though the reminder is still handy), but we’re writing to a larger audience.

And even if we today don’t need permission, I recall a time a few years ago when reading something like this would have felt like I had that permission to experiment with a technique. Permission is about table social contract, after all. But that’s probably a bigger topic. Just trust me; it exists and is impacted with such advice text.

How to Make This Better: “Do”

Look at any time you’re telling someone to “be” something. (Especially the dreaded “be creative.” Man, do I want to punch that advice in the face whenever I encounter it.) Ask yourself the following:

• Are you happy talking only to people who possess the skill you’re talking about? If so, don’t change anything. (This, by the way, is not a passive-aggressive question. A lot of one-page or super-short RPGs assume they’re talking to at least one person who possesses skills. Graham’s Cthulhu Dark says “roleplay your fear,” and it doesn’t need to say more because of its intent and target audience.)
• Do you want to give your reader the tools to develop this skill? If so, read on.

For each point, come up with three simple actions — either specific actions or examples of the “do” in action — that back up this “be” advice. If you can’t do that, you might not actually understand what you’re talking about enough to write on it. Enough to do it intuitively, yes, but not enough to convey that to another human being. Especially via text.

Once you have three, work those into your text. Editing will reveal if you have one (or even two) “do” elements too many, or if you need to add one. But start with those three things. In the case of Penny’s Be Specific above, we have one in example-form. In Be Brief, there’s none. I’d probably add something today like “Keep it under twelve words,” but Paul might disagree.[2]

Important: Examples of not employing the advice aren’t “do,” because it doesn’t give the reader a tool to work with, nothing to use to learn a skill. It can be good supporting text, though don’t lead with that.[3]

Maybe there’s a degree to which the complexity of the skill needs more or less “do” support. Maybe Be Brief in Penny doesn’t need anything, and Be Specific needs only one thing.[4] Play Unsafe’s Be Average, though, is in my mind far more complex, enough to where maybe even three “dos” aren’t enough. But that’s what the revision process is for. Start with three.

Exercise for the reader: Can you come up with three actionable items for “Be Average”? Share them in the comments!

A Litmus Test on “Be” Advice

Does it seem hard to come up with “do” advice for something you’re writing “be” advice for? Then that means your “be” advice needs “do” advice to back it up. If it’s hard for you to grasp some elements, imagine how hard it is for someone without that skill.

“Be” conveys why something is important and reminds people to do it.

“Do” tells people who have yet to master a skill how to do it.

Be a great instructor. Do both.

- Ryan

[1] And not just because I’m trying to avoid hyperbole in written form.

[2] For all I know, we actually discussed that back then. It wouldn’t surprise me.

[3] Leading with counters and don’ts will be a future critique. Man alive, it will be.

[4] Yes, this is also critiquing Penny, to a degree. That’ll get a couple of its own posts later.

Last weekend, Paul asked me why I haven’t blogged about Penny, and called bullshit on my reason for not doing so. Thus, this belated post to correct my foolishness.

I want to tell you about this book, and the best way for me to talk about it is to tell you how I became the book’s editor & developer. If what Paul wrote in the Afterword was “designer notes,” these are my “editor notes.”

I was in the very first outside playtest for Penny, at Go Play Northwest 2007. I was the first Traveler. Mike Sugarbaker was my first Guide (which used to be called Psychopomp). The very first question of the session:

“Were you working late that night?”

My response:

“Yes…and I hadn’t had a day off in three hundred years.”

Suddenly, it wasn’t about normal people. It went gonzo. I went gonzo. (And, for those vague in the know, yes, it’s that play that turned my last name into a term for gonzoing out.) Paul had this “huh, I wonder if Penny will survive Ryan” moment. Turns out it did.

The fascinating bit was how the second playtest Paul ran was about normal people in normally-bad situations. There was some compare/contrast there, but we didn’t talk about it much then — I was just this friend of his who tried his Game Chef entry.

At GenCon, we swapped ashcans, and I took Penny home. My home group tried it, and I noticed some interesting things that happened the second time I played Penny — I felt better equipped to play out a normal story. Maybe it was some “get the gonzo out of my system” vibe or experience helping me understand the conceit without resorting to the crutch that is the absurd and extreme — but for whatever reason, that session rocked for me.

(If I remember right, I was a drug dealer who was in love with his priest. It did get just a little absurd, as the other players were new, and one of them in particular makes my gonzo play look boring and middle-of-the-road.)

I dumped all my thoughts hastily into a doc and sent it to Paul, knowing that trying to be more formal in my writing would cause me to forget something, and knowing that Paul could just ask me to clarify something. I fired that off the morning after we played, excited that I got to help with my friend’s awesome game about amnesia that I wish I had written.

Seriously, Paul’s game blew my fuckin’ mind. The means by which it was so utterly procedural was something that half-got from games like The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, whose overarching narrative procedural elements blew my mind while simultaneously confusing me. With The Roach, I felt like I had some habits I needed to unlearn. With Penny, I felt like I was given more tools with which to unlearn them. (As you’ll learn in Master Plan #50 when it comes out next week, certainly not all of the tools.)

But, back to my story. I sent this document off to Paul. Predictably, he & I started talking about those notes, partly to clarify, partly to bounce ideas off of me. It was also around this time that Paul became enamored with the photography work Jeremy Tidwell did for Finis: A Book of Endings, and asked me to introduce each other so Paul could hire him to do work on Penny. By then, Fred Hicks was on board as Paul’s art director & layout guy — over a year before Paul & Fred agreed to turn it into an Evil Hat game and move Fred from that role to being the publisher.

(Another side note: I’m partly responsible for that. I mean, they did the work, I just planted the idea in Paul’s head. You’re welcome, world.)

I was included in their various emails between Paul, Fred & Jeremy — and was frankly bewildered as to why — but other than being a playtester and being the guy who knew the photographer, I wasn’t involved in the project.

Oh, except that in a not-quite-daily basis for a couple weeks, Paul & I would talk about some idea regarding Penny. Those familiar with how I became the officially involved on the Dresden Files RPG will see a pattern here.

One morning, I get an email or IM — I can’t quite recall, I think email — from Paul that said: “I would like to make your involvement official. How much for your editing services?”

I was not expecting that. My only “real” editing experience was from Finis — my own damned anthology — and I didn’t really feel like I had the chops to edit professionally for someone else. I almost turned Paul down due to my own insecure crap.

He & I are both glad I didn’t.

That was in, I think, September of 2007. Over the next twenty months, he & I would go on a journey that we thought would only take few short months. And while my initial story of how I came to be Paul’s cohort is at a close, I will share with you one further anecdote:

I recall stilling silently in our hotel room at Dreamation 2008 (in January) while Rob Bohl of the Independent Insurgency podcast was interviewing him. Paul & I were fairly convinced by then that the game was nearly done. I put a couple games of Penny on the schedule, to get some further outside play in — not because I was the book’s editor (because “leader playtester” isn’t implicit in that), but because I fuckin’ love playing this game and seeing others play it.

Those two playtests would, in fact, cause us to almost completely rewrite the game.  Previously, Paul has been strong about having no “net” for Penny, no sense of baseline expectations. He still prefers to play like that, but the first game I facilitated at Dreamation (which was full of players, so I just read the rules and noted thoughts) crashed and burned because one player disregarded the implicit baselines the other three players had.

This was the infamous “time zepplins and psychic vampires” game.

The second game was the one talked about in the afterword, where rather than summarize the game’s procedures, I just read them straight from the book, inserting my pauses. That game was a massive success.

End result: in our meeting at OrcCon the next month — five months after I came on the project, when we were sure before the Dreamation playtests that the game was near finished — we talked about massively rewriting the book. Making the Facts & Reassurances document (which opened the door to explcitly offering alternate settings), providing an introduction to help deal with player resistance (which was an issue in the one player in the first Dreamation game — don’t get me started), creating the explicit procedural elements to play, all that jazz.

In the process, we pretty much invalidated the interview Rob did with Paul in the hotel room. I recall vaguely making some smart-ass comment about him having to interview Paul again, and there might have been some smart-ass response back. It would not surprise me.

…and that is what I remember.

A penny for my thoughts.

- Ryan