Grimm Studios’ podcast

Two things that stuck out for me from the Grimm Studios’ GM Sessions 2 podcast:

• Story is a goal, not a ingredient
• A character is a player’s vehicle

What every company should know about the web, part 2

The web is a medium in which your customer comes to you. If the customer is coming to you, they are already interested in your company or product. They come because they have a question about you or your product.

The web is a medium in which there is virtually no limit to the depth of information you can supply. You know those technical little details about your product that you’re so proud of? The ones that they told you you couldn’t put in your ads? On the web, customers can drill down through layers of information to find the details that they care about—and that you’ve been dying to share with them.

If those customers, however, come to you web site and find no more information than an ad designed for another medium, your web site has failed.

Go ahead. Put all that information you’d like to share with customers on your web site. The challenge is no longer to distill your message for a limited medium and a general audience. The challenge is merely to organize it well.

D&D 4e—rhetorical questions

Would I like Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons “fourth edition” better if...

...there were more utility powers and rituals and fewer combat powers?

...utility powers and combat powers weren’t “silo’d” so that I could choose the mix of them that I want?

...if PC’s had access to all the powers of their class and level?

What every company should know about the web

When a customer comes to your web site, they are coming to find out something about your company or your product. If they fail to find that information—whether because you didn’t put it on your web site or because you’ve put barriers in front of it—your web site has failed.

Character building

I’d generally rather play a twerp I diced up than an ubermensch I had to buy with points.

—Jeff’s Gameblog: Fantasy in Drag

When I stopped playing AD&D, I started playing GURPS. How great it seemed to be able to build exactly the character I wanted. Yet, the biggest concern in my group was ensuring your character wouldn’t “step on the toes” of another PC. In essence, we spent a lot of time building exactly the sort of niches that AD&D classes handed us preformed.

Oh, that is an oversimplification. There was more to building our GURPS characters than reinventing the AD&D wheels. Yet, after I had a few GURPS PCs, there tended to be a lot of similarities between them.

When I first started playing Wizard’s D&D “third edition”, I loved the fact that rather than limitations or restrictions, it usually gave trade-offs instead. In practice, though, it often amounted to the same thing. Having a choice between two very unequal choices isn’t really much of a choice. Despite the many more choices (versus AD&D), I don’t know that the number of suboptimal choices that I found enjoyable was much greater.

With all the prerequisites and such... Well, there are a few specific Fighter builds that the rules encourage. The archer, the power fighter, the finesse fighter, the mounted fighter. Sometimes I think they should’ve just included more classes rather than make us sift through the specifics of the rules and discover them.

And the designers tried very hard to balance these different builds against one another so that—at least in some sense—it didn’t matter which build you chose. In fact, the options often seem so well balanced to me that I’ll end up using dice to make choices when building 3e PCs.

(I’m intentionally not even touching on what supplements add to the equation, because I’m usually don’t use supplements.)

Ironically, so often when creating a character in a system that seems to promise building whatever character I want, I instead feel like the system is keeping me from building the character I want.

Now, this isn’t meant as a criticism of GURPS or 3e. I enjoy both games, and they have good points that aren’t salient to what I’m trying to get at here.

And what I’m trying to get at is... Why did I enjoy all my AD&D Fighters so much—and felt no two were the same—despite the fact they were all mechanically identical?

I think it is because the things that make a character interesting to me are not mechanical. Adding mechanics for building characters can please the rule mechanic in me, but that is fleeting. In the long run, no mechanic is going to really make much of a difference in how I feel about the character or how much I enjoy playing it.

Communicating expectations

One of my repeated memories from my childhood is how angry I’d get when my mom would ask me to do something moments before I was about to do it. I’d so much wanted to do whatever-it-was without being asked to, and suddenly I didn’t want to do it at all.

It’s so strange how sometimes someone telling me to do something makes me not want to do it. Likewise, it’s strange how it’s so hard sometimes for me to tell others what I want.

I clearly remember realizing during that first year of marriage how silly this was. At best it was childish; at worst, irrational. I should be happy when someone I love tells me what makes them happy. And how can I expect to get what I want if I’m not willing to ask for it?

Well, knowing and doing are two different things.

On the first score, I think I’ve actually done pretty well in my life thus far. I’m usually happy when people tell me what they expect of me.

(Incidentally, this the the best management advice I’ve ever gotten: The most important thing to do as manager is to let your employees know exactly what is expected of them.)

On the second score, I’ve never done as well. My inferiority complex has always led me to just “deal” whenever my own needs, wants, or expectations aren’t met. Instead, I just try to fill them myself whenever I can.

D&D tournaments

I’m probably really out on a limb here because I haven’t played in a tournament, but here goes some thinking out loud anyway.

Quotes come from James Maliszewski’s interview with Tim Kask

We also had other concerns, chief of which was how to conduct fair tournaments. Before the term came into vogue, we were marketing TSR virally; I was a perfect example. I played the game at a con, bought one and took it back to my group and infected them.

(1) Conventional play was a good way to market the game. (2) Tournaments were a good way to market convention play.

As the nature of the game dictated, it was meant to be only loosely bound by the rules as printed; they were originally meant as suggestions and guidelines. Finding 30 DMs to run a tourney for us was a big task in and of itself; finding 30 that played the game the same was impossible as each one ran his own campaigns as he saw fit.

(3) Tournaments required minimizing one of the strengths of the game. (4) It seems to me that marketing that minimizes one of the product’s strength is maybe not the best idea. (5) Furthermore, the adventures created for tournaments were often published as modules, but they were often not good models for non-tournament play.

Later tournaments had the participants vote on which of them had played their role best. This minimizes the need for standardized rules, but it also emphasized one aspect of the game over others.