Category: Longform
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📚🎲 The Monster Overhaul
Read The Monster Overhaul: A Practical Bestiary by Skerples
Highly Recommended
This is the best D20 resource I’ve found. Pair with Trilemma Adventure Compendium and your favorite D20 system, and you can have hundreds of hours of great fun.
“Practical” is a great description. This isn’t just statblocks and pictures, but contains highly-useful information like motivations, variations, and tables. It’s packed with inspiration and flavor (including tasting notes and results for creatures that characters are most likely to try to eat 😆). Wizards come with plenty of magic options. Sphinx comes with riddles. Dragons come with hoards. You get the idea.
Every layout is jam-packed with useful information and tables.
You’re encouraged to mark it up and make it yours. I bought a second copy and I will.
Fixing Micro.blog Integrations using Tapestry?
I just saw Tapestry’s “crosstalk” feature, which attempts to hide duplicate-like posts.
This could be a workaround for micro.blog’s incomplete implementation of Mastodon/Bluesky integration (where it often misses pieces of the post or context).
If I follow an account in both places, maybe I can have:
- complete Bluesky and Mastodon posts visible in Tapestry (with crosstalk hiding the micro.blog attempt to show the post, in favor of the native one)
- ability to reply from the micro.blog account
What I’m not sure about yet is how well crosstalk detection is working, or if it will properly “prefer” the source post, or sometimes hide the “wrong” one.
🎲 Blame Design in Game Design
I suspect you’ve probably had an experience like this at your game table:
GM: “Orcs of the Red Moon Clan have AC 18”
Player: “Ok, wish me luck. Rolling to attack!”
…later…
GM: “Let’s make that pick lock a DC 18 check.”
Player: vents, complains, debates, bickers, argues, or becomes sullen
Why does the player accept AC 18 without issue, but pushes back against DC 18? After all, these are mechanically equivalent!
Because psychologically, they are not. Games are played by humans, and humans react to dynamics, not just mechanics.
The example above is what I would call a shift to “external blaming”. Here you have someone behaving ok when they perceive the system as providing the adversity, but reacting poorly when they perceive the person as making it hard. In both cases, the system and the GM together shape the difficulty—regardless of how it feels. (e.g. the GM could have given that orc different armor, or chosen a different adversary.)
Blame isn’t always directed outward. Sometimes, players turn it inward instead. We might call that “internal blaming”. You’ve probably seen this occur most in systems with “bennies” (where you spend currency to do better on a check) or with “push your luck” mechanics (where you decide how much you want to risk for the result). Maybe the player hoards their bennies, afraid to ever spend them. Or chide themselves when they spend and still fail. Whereas before they blamed the GM (or in some cases other players), in this case, they are hard on themselves.
Both external and internal blaming usually decrease the fun for everyone involved.
“But Todd” you might say “why don’t you just not play with people who aren’t emotionally mature enough to not succumb to these patterns of behavior? Maybe those games just aren’t for them?”
Fair question, hypothetical-responder-person! But I refer you back to the point made earlier that “humans are who play games”. It’s hard enough to schedule a group to play, and most humans have something they are dealing with.
Like the old saying about places of worship, I haven’t found a perfect gaming table, because once I join, it’s no longer perfect.
Perhaps a more useful question is: “what kinds of games do we bring to the table?” In other words, we can select for games that are more resistant to the types of blame that people in the group are prone to. Or maybe in #gamedev we can design for more blame-resistance in general, especially since we don’t always know the people we’ll be playing with.
But how?
It helps to remember that #TTRPGs are not just a game, they are also a conversation. Conversations benefit from affordances or “doorknobs”.
(I’m giving you a moment to go read.)
So we can build in more affordances. A game can design for multiple routes to success (e.g. inventiveness/problem-solving, equipment/tools, skill/system mastery, careful planning, quick-thinking, stat-improvement, NPC-help, etc.) allowing different ways for players to tailor their experience towards the achieving outcomes. A game can have “dials” that can be adjusted to dial up or down the GM/player input on difficulty (e.g. how often are bennies granted). A game can shift more things to have the feel of being “the system” than the GM/players (e.g. roll-under stat vs. roll vs. DC). These, and more, can help mitigate the blame game.
As in most design, this is a spectrum and there are tradeoffs.
Even in the games I’m working on, I have a variety. There’s a card-based RPG that is more susceptible to internal-blame, because players choose the next mode of play and the card(s) they deploy. I also have a troupe LARP, which are notorious for external blame due to downtime-action decisions. I’ll seek to minimize that with clarity around downtime possibilities and resolution processes. I also have a D20 hack that is very blame-resistant due to player-facing rolls, roll-under, and many-modes-to success.
I am mostly wary of games that go very hard in one direction. They can devolve into arguing with (or silently resenting) the GM (i.e. external blame), or to frequently feeling anxious about your choices (i.e. internal blame). In my experience, games designed this way often sound really neat on paper, but are not fun for many groups of humans that you would bring to an actual table.
What about you? Have you experienced this at the table? Has it changed what you play, how you play, or how you design?
📚 A Fever in the Heartland
Highly Recommended
Tells the story of how a grifter and serial abuser manipulated people to gain money and power. Loneliness was turned to belonging. Fear was turned to hate.
Also tells the story of courageous people that helped stop the villainy!
Almost every page has a parallel to current USA politics. A must read in these times.
Getting Unstuck: Routine Postmortems
This is a post is in the Useful Ideas series.
From Reactive to Proactive
Cybersecurity often gets stuck:
- triaging the same types of alerts and events that came yesterday
- gathering the same kind of data to answer questions that were asked for last audit
- finding more of the same classes of security bugs in software
- playing whack-a-mole patching the worst vulnerabilities
- writing up risks similar to ones found during the last business initiative
If you aren’t in cybersecurity, you’ve probably seen a similar predicament in your domain. When a team is constantly in reactive mode, it feels inescapable. I can’t drop any of these required activities. Where would I find the time to change things?" But finding a time to invest in doing less of these activities is the only way to break the cycle.
In my work with organizations, I use a several methods to break this cycle, but I want to share one option with you here: routine postmortems.
You’re likely familiar with a variety of techniques for diagnosing how something went wrong. Five Whys, Root Cause Analysis, Blameless Postmortems, and more. If run well, these can be a very powerful tool for understanding the process, system, and even cultural problems that led to a breakdown. They also level up the organization through knowledge sharing and by implementing changes that stop the same type of problem from resurfacing.
However, if your organization is in reactive mode, you probably don’t feel like you have the bandwidth to perform these analyses for all but the very worst of events, and even when you do, you struggle to find time to implement any changes that would prevent the problem from reoccurring.
Shifting from ineffective formal emergency retrospectives to ongoing proactive analysis requires a cultural shift.
Routine Postmortems allow you to start to build the change into the fabric of your organization.
Implementing
Start small. Select a recurring time for the team to meet (somewhere between weekly and quarterly), or reserve some time in an existing meeting cadence. In preparation for the meeting, the team(s) should bring one reactive event from the last period for each functional area, along with an initial analysis. They should not spend much time on the analysis (less than the meeting itself is booked for). It’s better if these are not full emergency incidents. For example, within cybersecurity, items could include:
- a SOC alert
- an audit or pentest finding
- a vulnerability
- a configuration error
- a design weakness
- an unmitigated risk
Walk through a light version of your chosen diagnostic process, giving extra opportunity for team members to ask questions with nonjudgmental curiosity and to chime in with additional ideas on what upstream changes could have avoided the problem.
Go through as many categories as you have time to go through, but it’s ok if it’s just one! (Simply rotate the focus category next time.)
It’s better if this isn’t heavy with formality, but it’s perfectly fine to jot down takeaways and decisions.
When It’s Working
- preparing for the meeting, and even knowing they will be preparing for the meeting, gets people re-orienting their mindset towards problem prevention over firefighting
- silos of problem-responding are breaking down, people are learning from each other, and solutions (which often require cross-team collaboration) are emerging
- people are seeing that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, and that the effort invested is freeing up time for more strategic work
Failure Modes
Blamestorming: it’s tempting to criticize an initial analysis or to focus on people instead of problems. Use your facilitation skills to align the conversation to the future, not to the past. Practicing this routine will help the team improve at both analysis and problem-solving.
Giving Up on Ops: routine postmortems aren’t an excuse to stop responding entirely. Remember this is a method to carve out a slice of time to turn the ship.
Lack of Follow-Through: if people are having great ideas, but nothing is changing, then you likely have execution problems. That’s another topic, but one thing you can try is picking the quickest win from each session and making sure the right person has ownership to drive that result.
Something Else?: If you’ve tried this and run into other problems that you want to debug, I’m happy to help!
Working in Public
This is a post is in the Useful Ideas series.
“Working in Public” or “Working with the Garage Door Open” or “Working with the Garage Door Up” are related concepts that invoke the idea that for some work, it is better not to toil in secret.
Potential benefits to you: rapid & diverse feedback, getting assistance, finding collaborators, finding people who would benefit from your work
Potential benefits to others: keeping collaborators updated, helping others learn from your mistakes, helping people “not in the room”
🃏 Euchre: Going Under
Like a lot of card games, there are variants depending on where you grew up, who you played with, etc.
Tonight, I learned a somewhat boggling (but also interesting) one: “going under”.
“Going under” means that when it is your term to bid (which is a yes/no or suit declaration in Euchre, rather than a number), you can sacrifice your bid to take three 9s or 10s from your hand and exchange them with the kitty. The extra interesting part of this is that the people I learned it from say you never show the cards you exchange with the kitty. I’m sure many players have taken advantage of that fact.
I grew up with something a little different. If you had all 9s and 10s, you could show them and declare “Farmers Hand” which became a misdeal, and thus, the deal passed to the next player.
Have you used any rules like this? What was your variation?
🃏 Tens
Learned another game this weekend: Tens.
Setup
You need enough decks (without Jokers) for all players to have 19 cards. Shuffle ’em up.
Each player grabs a pile of cards from the deck and makes 4 stacks in front of them, as well as a hand of cards. Each stack has one face-down card on the bottom and one face-up card on the top. The other 11 cards go in their hand. Anyone who grabbed exactly 19 cards, gets -10 points (this is good!) for this round. Any player that didn’t pull exactly 19 cards makes up the difference using the deck.
Play starts with whoever pulled closest to 19 cards, and goes clockwise. The first player is suggested to be whoever had closest to 19 cards.
Eligible Plays
Cards are played into a central pile. A player may play as many cards of a rank as they like, using a combination of their face-up cards and cards in their hand. They may alternatively play an uncovered 1 face down card, and, after seeing what it is, add as many matching face-up or hand cards as they like.
Results of a Play
Any time the count of cards of the current rank on the pile becomes 4 or more (e.g. five Jacks), or a Ten is played, the current player discards the entire pile and takes an additional turn.
If they played at the current rank or lower (and there are still less than 4 of that rank on top), play moves to the next player.
However, if they played a card higher than the current rank (other than a Ten), the player must take the whole pile into their hand and play another turn.
Ending the Round and Scoring
Once a player gets rid of all their cards (stacks and hand), play stops for the round. That player gets 0 points for the round, and everyone else is penalized for all of their remaining cards. Cards are scored by their rank value, with Aces being 1, Jack 11, Queen 12, King 13, and Tens 20. (Don’t forget the -10 for any player that pulled exactly 19 cards when setting up the round.)
Winning
Play more rounds, but one suggestion is to play until someone has hit 100 (ten tens).
Whoever has the fewest points at the end wins!
Have you played this (or something like it)? How did your version differ?
-
because the face-up card on it has already been played ↩︎
📚 2024 Books Review
other 2024 reviews here
I am tracking all my completed books on my reading page and everything on Storygraph. (why Storygraph?) I would like to use micro.blog’s bookshelves, but it’s too buggy and incomplete at this stage.
This was a slow year, so I only completed 42 books. Here’s the summary from Storygraph.
Highly Recommended Books:
Non-Fiction:
- Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Still a relevant diagnosis for many of our current ills. (book) (post)
- The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World… by David Graeber (posthumously). What if things don’t have to be the way they are? (book) (post)
- The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. We are reaping the results from sowing distorted thinking. (book) (post)
Fiction:
- The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (book) (post)
- The Curse of Chalion (World of Five Gods #1) by Lois McMaster Bujold (book) (post)
- The Future by Naomi Alderman (book) (post)
Recommended Books
(Reverse-chronological order)
- Polostan (Bomblight #1) by Neal Stephenson (book)
- Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy (book)
- Midnight Riot (Rivers of London #1) by Ben Aaronovitch (book) (post)
- Mort (Discworld #4) by Terry Pratchett (book)
- The Shape of Joy by Richard Beck (book) (post)
- Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi (book)
- Dopamine Nation by Anna Lemke (book) (post)
- Death of a Cad (Hamish Macbeth #2) by M. C. Beaton (book)
- The Nature of the Beast (Gamache #11) by Louise Penny (book)
- Slow Productivity by Cal Newport (book) (post)
- Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg (book) (post)
- The Rise and Reign of Mammals by Steve Brusatte (book)
- The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist (book) (post)
- Equal Rites (Discworld #3) by Terry Pratchett (book)
- Radical Respect by Kim Scott (book) (post)
- The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne (book) (post)
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (book)
- Assassin’s Quest (Farseer Trilogy #3) by Robin Hobb (book)
- The PARA Method by Tiago Forte (book) (post)
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