An evening with Torchbearer

I mentioned my interest in Torchbearer in my post about goblins and game design, and I was glad to be able to run my first session of it last night. The group consisted of my two older boys and two of their friends. We had a good time, and I want to capture a few thoughts about the experience here. What follows is a mix of a session report together with my reflections on the game.

Background

I cannot remember all the details of how I became aware of Torchbearer, but I can provide a little background about my interest. It goes back to an interest in Burning Wheel, which is always discussed with reverence and respect despite there being a small player base. The Burning Wheel rulebook is a wealth of brilliant and unique ideas for tabletop roleplaying, but it also feels too intimidating to run without some experience. More recently, I have heard amazing things about Mouse Guard RPG, which is rooted in the ideas of Burning Wheel. I tried for a while to get the Mouse Guard RPG box set for my family, but I heard about it after it went out of print. I even ordered one from a reseller who, after a month, acknowledged that they did not have a copy after all and refunded my money. Now Torchbearer is a riff on Mouse Guard RPG with a setting that appeals more to me, so I decided to get a copy of the core books for myself. 

Torchbearer is recognized for having interesting, interlocking systems, and it did not seem too overwhelming for me to run it without having played it. I am grateful that my players accepted that the game might occasionally get choppy. Good DMs know that rulings are more important than rules, but my players understood that one of my goals in running the game was to understand it.

Character Creation and the Call to Adventure

We started with by-the-books character creation. I expected this to take an hour, but it took almost 90 minutes. I did not present a complete rules explanation ahead of time, but instead taught the pieces of the game that we needed as we needed them. We ended up with a Warrior, Outcast, Burglar, and Magician. The players had just a little trouble with articulating beliefs, but reading the ones from the sample characters was helpful. They had more difficulty with instincts because to write these effectively requires some knowledge of how the game works. The instinct format restrictions helped: for example, one player wanted an instinct, "I always know where the exits are," and I was able to help him convert toward something active, like "I always look for the exit." One of the instincts was, "I always strike first," which sounds exciting and appropriate but is not really workable in a game without initiative. (When we got into our only conflict of the evening, I ended up giving him +1s on his first strike as compensation, and I figured we would just change his instinct if we play again.) The players' goals were reasonable given what they knew from the adventure seed, although no one ended up making progress toward them by the end.

The players decided that the characters did not know each other but were in the right place to be recruited for the "Tower of Stars" adventure from the Cartographer's Compendium. It is shorter than the one in the core books, so I thought it might fit better as a one-off. In fact, we only got through about half of it. I modified one of the introductions slightly to get the party headed toward the tower to deliver a letter to the reclusive Beholder of Fates, allowing us to start the adventure at the base of the tower.

The Adventure

Their initial plan was to split the party, half exploring the surrounding area and half climbing into the ruins. This was a good opportunity for me to suggest, especially in this kind of dungeoncrawl, don't split the party. They succeeded at getting inside, which gave me the opportunity to explain the Grind. This is a beautiful aspect of Torchbearer where every four turns, the characters gain negative conditions—and what makes a turn advance is any roll. It made it more clear to them why instincts were powerful and why it's better to have A Good Idea than to rely on skills. 

In the ruined ground level of the tower, while searching for treasure, the Warrior discovered the remains of a broken basalt statue with a magical rune emblazoned on its forehead. The Magician wanted to decipher the rune, but when he pulled together his dice pool, it was clear that he had little chance. At this point, I explained how he could use a trait against himself, reducing further the odds of success but earning a "check" that would be useful in camp. He described how his Quick Witted trait might lead him to jump to the wrong conclusion. Sure enough, he failed the roll, and it provided me a glorious opportunity to deploy one of the adventure's recommended twists. I described how in the back of his mind, he could hear the name of the rune, but as he thought more about it, he realized he was hearing it chanted all around him. This was when the party discovered that some kind of troll rats had emerged from the rubble, and they were chanting in a mysterious ancient language. Once they were recognized, the rats attacked the party, leading us into the evening's conflict.

Here, I explained to the group a few of my favorite pieces of Torchbearer. First, there are different kinds of conflicts depending on the party's goals. In our case, this was a Drive Off conflict since the goal was merely to get rid of the rats, not necessarily to kill or capture them. (In retrospect, I should have left the rats chanting menacingly and given the party the opportunity to take the initiative here, to decide if they wanted to chase them off or leave them as creepy watchers.) Second, I explained how disposition works, that characters don't have "hit points" until they are in a conflict, and these hit points are only relevant to the current goal. Third, I explained the conflict system itself in which the GM and the players each queue up three actions, each of which are then executed simultaneously.

I could not remember, nor quickly find, how to compute the disposition for a group of enemies. I mistakenly thought I would multiply their Drive Off disposition by the number appearing, but this is wrong: I should have used the base disposition and then added one for each extra participant. Because these enchanted troll rats had such low disposition, it was only a four-point difference. Unfortunately, I also could not remember the rules for whether damage would distribute across multiple enemies once one was eliminated. It does, but I treated it as if it didn't, which was unfortunate since the opening attack by the Outcast was a brilliant and brutal success, and it should have taken out at least two of the rats instead of just one. The battle went on a little longer than it should have, and the Burglar's elimination made me take away the party's Fresh condition as a minor compromise. Even though we didn't get all the rules right, the players enjoyed the excitement and narrative structure of the conflict. They could see that this would be a successful conflict from early on, especially given the Might difference between the groups, but they also saw that they could not be overconfident. During the conflict, we also saw the Magician use Beginner's Luck to take an unexpected swipe at the rats, which was much more memorable than watching him roll a d20 and hope for a high roll.

With the rats eliminated, the Outcast proceeded to work his way up to the crack in the ceiling, fail the Dungeoneering test to get through, and got stuck. This happened to trigger the Grind, and everyone became hungry and thirsty. The ceiling was only ten feet high here, and so the Magician decided to try to push the Outcast through with his staff, soliciting the help of the Warrior. I explained that this was a test of pure strength, so it was a Health check. The Magician's player, seeing that his character had only 2 Health, said that if it's a Health check, he won't bother. I explained that he was already doing it and had him roll. Again, this is a case where a simple rule—if you say you're doing it, you're doing it—gives the game a lovely gravitas. Naturally, he failed the roll. Rather than throw a new twist at them, I decided to give a condition. I described how he was grunting and shoving, standing next to the smelly and crude Warrior, looking up at the Outcast's rear end, and so although they got the dwarf out of his predicament, the Magician came away Angry. The table loved it. The Magician's player had earlier expressed how uncomfortable he was with role-playing and talking in character, but here, right away, he picked up on the series of things that compounded to make him angry: the tower is ruined, I don't know these people, the dwarf got stuck, the Warrior burps constantly, we got assaulted by magical rats... It was wonderful. Unfortunately, I forgot to give lesser conditions to the Warrior and Outcast, both of whom helped. I am still learning the ropes.

The part got up into the next room, where there happened to be a decaying corpse. The Warrior was very excited to check it out given his instinct ("Always look for loot.") and his being corpse-wise. He was surprised, and so was I, that his being corpse-wise didn't actually help him in evaluating the corpse: it would have been useful for him to help someone else do it, but in the absence of fate or persona points, it provided no benefit to him. This was an unfortunate bit of ludonarrative dissonance, and it's also where we decided to call it a night after almost four hours together. All the guys thanked me for running the game, and many expressed their being  impressed with Torchbearer. I think they all had come to understand why I was excited to run it, and they came away with some good stories to tell.

Thoughts on Torchbearer

I love the simultaneous actions in Torchbearer; it makes d20-style combat look like a tennis match.  Not only do simultaneous actions provide interesting opportunities for storytelling, but at the table, you get that lovely feeling of flipping over a card to reveal a secret. It's not obvious to me how much of the action selection is really tactical rather than blind choice, but it almost doesn't matter: it's still fun. On the side, I have been working on an OSR-style dungeoncrawl video game inspired by ICRPG and Knave, but witnessing the joys of simultaneous actions makes me waver in my dedication to traditional turn-based combat.

I was nervous about remembering all the moving parts of Torchbearer. I printed up two different cheatsheets, but I'm not sure either one helped as much as I had hoped. One particular thing I was concerned about was how Fate and Persona points work. It wasn't until my prep the day of the session that I realized that new characters don't have these anyway. I share this for other new GMs so they can reduce their cognitive load on the first session. On the flip side, I had forgotten how Nature works, that when a player is facing a situation where they have no skill, they can opt to use their Nature instead. The party may have missed an opportunity to use these in a narratively interesting way.

The Grind is a brilliant system for putting pressure on the party. It presents time dramatically, tying together time and action, rather than in a simulated way. This is another aspect of the game that inspires me to think more about tabletop-videogame crossover. It's easy to run any number of simulations in a computer, but where is it better to deploy a dramatic tool instead? For example, I think it's more engaging to say that a torch lasts for two interesting moments than for sixty simulated minutes.

The Torchbearer books explain that it is designed to produce stories that unfold over ten to twelve sessions. Mine was a one-off learning session with a collection of players that will be hard to reproduce. I had a great experience though, and it makes me want to run a more sustained campaign to see more about how these systems interact.

Notes from Tynan Sylvester's "Designing Games"

I just finished reading Tynan Sylvester's Designing Games. The book was published in 2013, but Sylvester is probably best known as the creator of Rimworld, which came out a few years later and is not mentioned in the book. I have read many game design books, but I still learned a lot from this one. This inspired me to share some of my notes here.

Sylvester's core conceit is that games are artificial systems for generating experiences. He presents a model early in the book that undergirds the rest of the text, that a game provides mechanics wrapped in fiction, which produces events with fictional meaning, which produces emotions, which leads to an experience. I am a collector of definitions for "game," and I think this may be the strongest formalized definition I have encountered. I appreciate that it highlights what makes games different from other media, which is a theme that also comes up frequently in the text.

An early chapter discusses emotions and their role in game design. He uses the term "human values" to refer to anything that is important to humans that can move through multiple states, such as life/death, victory/defeat, and friend/stranger/enemy. I am not keen on his terminology here since it sounds relevant to morals or ethics, but I like the hook for thinking about design. It reminds me of the binary opposites that are essential to imaginative education. Sylvester provides a catalog of emotional triggers that can be used here, each of which is given appropriate exposition in the text: learning, character arcs, challenge, social interaction, acquisition, music, spectacle, beauty, environment, newfangled technology, primal threats, and sexual signals. 

I have long been familiar with the idea that players cannot truly answer what caused different emotions, but that they will construct a narrative to explain the phenomenon to themselves. I was not previously aware of the technical explanation known as misattribution of arousal and the psychological studies around it. Sylvester focuses on the "bridge" studies, and a little searching online finds that this is a robust finding. A related psychological concept he draws upon is the two-factor theory of emotion, which explains that what we call "emotion" is a combination of physiological arousal and a cognitive label. This explains how the same physiological stress response could show up in Tetris and in Doom, but the latter's fiction is what leads us to call it "fear."

I would have preferred that Sylvester give more precise definitions around his use of "elegance" and "emergence" since he does not adequately address Kate Compton's 10,000 bowls of oatmeal problem. It's one of a few chapters where I wondered how Sylvester might approach a second edition. No Man's Sky came out a few years after the book was published, and Sylvester's own work on procedural storytelling undoubtedly gave him new insights into these ideas.

Sylvester uses apophenia to describe how humans find patterns in noise, but I wonder if he uses it a bit too broadly. Apophenia describes phenomena like "lucky streaks" in gambling. Seeing a face in the clouds strikes me as different because our visual cortex is programmed specifically to find faces. Similarly, anthropomorphising a non-human character seems like it appeals to our narrative sense, not to a matter of pattern-matching. I wanted to track this observation from my notebook because it's an area where I think precision matters, but I realize I am not completely confident in my own ability to describe the edges of these concepts.

The need for frequent playtesting also recurs throughout the book. I am glad that it does since it is such fundamental advice. In his discussion of balance, he points out that what we should be gathering from playtesting is experiences and not suggestions. Again, the essence of this advice is the same in any game design text, but Sylvester presents it with admirable clarity and succinctness, especially given that he is working within a specific and explicit definition for "experiences." He points out that each playtest is a story, but you need to playtest until you can see past the stories into the systems. This gives me an interesting heuristic that I plan to share with my game production students.

His chapter on multiplayer games includes a section on game theory. I am no expert in this area, and I appreciate his layman's covering of Nash equilibria. He points out that the structure of rock-paper-scissors is the only elegant symmetric game without pure Nash equilibria and matching pennies is the only elegant asymmetric game without pure Nash equilibria. All other (game theoretic) games add more entries to the decision matrix without fundamentally changing the structure and are therefore inelegant. I don't usually turn to game theory in my designs, but I enjoyed this section for its clarity and perspective.

I was a little surprised to see him adopt the term Yomi from David Sirlin to describe how players "read" each other—how they predict, deceive, and outwit each other in multiplayer games. I used to follow Sirlin more closely, and I recently uncovered my copy of Flash Duel. It was fun to see his name show up, and I see he's working on a second version of the eponymous Yomi.

I am guilty of colloquially referring to dopamine as a pleasure-causing drug, but Sylvester is more careful in the book to distinguish between motivation and pleasure. Dopamine causes motivation, not pleasure. Remove dopamine from rats, and they will do nothing, not even eat, even though they can still enjoy sugar syrup that is fed to them. It is an important distinction and one I should be careful not to blur since this biochemical understanding allows us to talk more clearly about how games can motivate us to play past the point of enjoyment.

The third and final part of the book is devoted to process. I expected a recommended series of steps to create a game as offered by other texts. Instead, Sylvester opens the section by pointing out that a lot of our terms around process and management are actually borrowed from other disciplines: director, preproduction/production/postproduction. Here, he applies a similar perspective to the process design problem as he does to the rest of game design. One needs to recognize assumptions and evaluate them, realistically but not cynically. Although he is right, also later uses terms like "production" as if we all know what they mean, and I found myself wishing he was more prescriptive here like he was in the section on emotions and experience.

His advice on process comes down to the same observation made by the signatories of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development: work in tight iterations with good feedback loops. This appeals to my sense of lean production, that we should only as much management as necessary. When it comes to sequencing, his advice is to figure out the dependencies among needs and then work upward from there. Here, I would augment his advice with some observations from story maps a la Jeff Patton, but I don't disagree with him. Sylvester is explicit about keeping the game as low fidelity (that is, grayboxing) as possible throughout so that time is not wasted re-creating assets. He mentions that working with an artist or level designer is important, but he is mum about what those other folks might be doing while this grayboxing is going on. I would have liked to know his thoughts about this, given that I mentor fixed-staff student teams.

The chapter on authority is beautiful, and I plan to use it as an assigned reading. Although he does not use these terms, what he describes is an approach to creative management rooted in natural law and subsidiarity. In particular, he talks about how a team member has natural authority over their work, and how it is a mistake to arrogate that. (Note: I learned the word "arrogate" from reading this book even though I've been battling arrogators in ISS Vanguard for some time without looking it up.) This chapter dovetails nicely with the next, which is on motivation. It is clear that he believes the only way a team can succeed is in an environment of trust and respect. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that one can only succeed by "getting people you can trust and then trust them." I used to recruit undergraduates for special community-engaged game development projects, but now, any student can elect into the game development track that puts them into the game production sequence; I am not sure what it implies for my teaching if Sylvester is right. 

Speaking of teaching, I am reminded of the essential challenges presented by the need to grade students in creative projects. Grades are an external reward, and we know that external rewards can kill intrinsic motivation. What then is a professor to do? 

One of the final points in the book is that the best way to motivate a creative person is to ensure that they have constant, small, visible progress. This is the progress principle. It turns my mind again toward considering physical task boards to replace the convenient digital ones my teams used the last two years.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and I am grateful for how much I learned from it. I will certainly return to my notes once I start pulling together my plans for the next game production sequence, assuming I get assigned to teach a section or two. The book inspires me to draw more from my own learning to build a process that I believe in, which will be easier after having stepped away from team-teaching for now. I am not sure how much of the book would resonate with beginning designers, who, in my experience, need more structured explanation and exercises to get them into the right mindset. I think it's a valuable reading for someone who has already moved beyond the amateur steps though, once one has come to tacitly understand iteration and the challenges of communciation and motivation.

On Goblins and Game Design

I recently purchased the rulebooks for Torchbearer 2nd Edition. Something reminded me of the project a few weeks ago, and the free introductory chapter captured my imagination. I have not had a chance to play the game yet, but I hope to do so in the coming weeks.

The Scholar's Guide includes a bibliography akin to AD&D's Appendix N and DCC's eponymous homage. I decided that I would add some of the references to my ever-growing pile of books to read. If nothing else, it will give me a good talking point about "remedial fantasy" during my sabbatical presentation. I started with Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter because it was easy to download from Project Gutenberg while I was on vacation. It contains the most poetic description of Elfland I have encountered: it is a place where poetry lives and some places can only be described in song. Yesterday, I finished The Wizard of Earthsea, which I have known about for decades but never took the time to read. It was an enjoyable story even if it was in the tired child-of-prophecy genre.

The Torchbearer Scholar's Guide describes various creatures that a brave adventurer might find lurking in ruins and caves. Many are classics of the TTRPG hobby described with the default setting's Norse flair. The description of the humble goblin blew me away. 

It is questionable whether goblins are alive in the same fashion as humans or halflings. Rather than being born, a goblin springs from the shadows each time a child tells a lie to its mother or a grandchild steals from its grandparent. They age but do not die from senescence or disease. They can be slain or driven off, but soon after they regather on the margins, hungry for more mayhem.

This is wonderfully mythical. Goblins are not just little green people: they are something else entirely. They are fearsome creatures born of sin. They reflect a dark world where evil is not just a privation of good but itself a creative force. It is both poetic and frightening to the core.

I got onto the Burning Wheel Discord server and asked whether Torchbearer's goblins were inspired by any particular work in the bibliography. I got into a discussion with the coauthors, Luke Crane and Thor Olavsrud. Below is Crane's description of how he designed the goblins, quoted with permission.

The inspiration came while editing tb2e and, as it often is for me, it was born of frustration. I have seen so many goblins slaughtered in my time as game master in D&D. Goblins as vulnerable diminutive anthromorphs might make sense from an evolutionary niche perspective, but it’s entirely unsatisfying to me in terms of a supernatural cosmology in a fantastical world.

As Thor points out in his example, categorizing supernatural beings is never easy. By their nature, these beings defy classification. The difference between trolls, giants and ogres, for example, is best left for the academics to debate. Adventurers should be more concerned with more pressing matters.

So for goblins, in the editing process, I needed a way to use Thor’s taxonomy of beings that demonstrated the vibrancy of these Others and gave goblins a reason to be. They needed a supernatural niche, not an ecological one. So I cackled to myself (out loud!) and gleefully muttered: Spirits! What if they’re spirits?

Since we were developing the spirit conflicts in the LMM [Lore Master's Manual] at the same time, I knew this classification would create problems and possibilities for adventurers.

To support this idea with the description, I attempted to reach into tropes found in folklore. What if those warnings to children about not lying and stealing were true? A second cackle emerged as I imagined goblins sprouting like weeds in the shadows of towns and steadings throughout Middarmark, while grandmothers fruitlessly wagged their fingers and plead with their charges to behave.

Even better, this supernatural provenance sketches a supernatural economy. Why should the simple folk of this land tolerate magicians, theurges, shamans and sorcerers? They are the only ones capable of banishing this incessant plague of goblins. Or what of a witch-queen who inveigles children to lie and steal for her, and so creates an army of mischief?

The possibilities are many, and they wear a different mask than that of the fearsome descendants of Azog and Bolg.

I love how his explanation combines mythmaking and systems. To me, that is the essence of good design, where the narrative and the mechanisms support each other, creating an engine for interesting experiences.

The Pyramid Point Games Summit

My family recently completed a lovely road trip around the Great Lakes. One of the most spectacular views was found at Pyramid Point on the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The photograph doesn't do it justice.

When we reached the lookout point, a young couple was just turning to go back down the trail, and an older couple was behind us on their way up. The young man in front me wore a University of Michigan cap with "CSE" emblazoned on it. Upon my inquiry, he confirmed my suspicion that it stood for "Computer Science and Engineering," and he told me that he was a doctoral student there. I told him that I had completed my  Ph.D. at the University at Buffalo's CSE department, and I asked about his specialization. He told me that he studied game theory. I laughed and told him that I worked in game design and development, which was a different kind of "game." At this point, the other couple had caught up, and the gentleman joined us, telling us that he worked for the Michigan Gaming Control Board, working with the certification of electronic gaming (that is, gambling) machines.

And so it happened that we held the Pyramid Point Games Summit, where, by incredible chance, the three men on the top of the dune represented specialists in the three different definitions of "game." We laughed at this unlikely coincidence, enjoyed the view, and then parted ways.

Some thoughts on Fate and Forged in the Dark games

Yesterday, my two older boys and I played a tabletop RPG session with a friend and his two oldest children. We had done a one-off OSR game years ago, and I was surprised when my son reminisced about it and wanted to so something similar again. After some discussions about his hopes and goals, I decided to try a session of Fate, which I haven't done in years. I played Fate once five years ago, and though that was my most recent experience with it, I find myself referencing it frequently as a touchstone in RPGs. I think it would be interesting to play Fate under the direction of a GM who had mastered the system. In the absence of such experience, as with my last play, I felt like I was a little underprepared, despite the system being relatively light.

I settled on Fate Accelerated (FAE) as a ruleset for a one-shot game with our friends, and we had a fun time exploring the work of a secret, elite, international organization in the 1930s that was funded by a mysterious benefactor to pursue justice. It was very pulpy and inspired in part by a cousin's fondness for Doc Savage. 

I looked for some advice online about how best to use FAE for a one-shot, which reminded me to skim the excellent Book of Hanz. An old Reddit thread suggested using the Phase Trio from Fate Core for character creation, and that sounded like so much fun that I decided to try it. It was a lot of fun, being essentially a narrative minigame in itself. It took a while to get everyone involved, in part due to unfamiliarity (mine and theirs), and I think it may have also shown different player's comfort levels with this style of character creation and with tropes of 1930s pulp. If I do it again, I should probably send out some introductory materials and preparation suggestions before the game to help get players in the right mindset.

We ended up with a ragtag team of specialists who had some complications in their backstory. The group played into the idea that character aspects can be strengths and weaknesses, and this was a lot of fun, although it's harder to play this up equitably in an ensemble cast. I tried to spread the spotlight around, but five players is hard to manage (and more than the rulebook's recommended maximum by one). Many scenes took much longer than expected, but one marvelous outcome was that the group discovered a completely unexpected way to resolve the main plot. The climactic ending involved explosions and petty vengeance, which is an excellent way to end pilot episode.

A quick turnaround of events meant that we did not have much time for a debriefing conversation after the game, but in a short chat with my boys, I found myself comparing Fate and the Forged in the Dark games. Both games are designed to give a fiction-first adventure, but they accomplish it in different ways. Fate encourages a cinematic approach, but its mechanisms do not demand it. For example, in our game yesterday, the team received a call that had them flying to Havana. Rather than cutting to the flight, some players wanted to start itemizing what gear they were bringing along in case they need it. Now in a movie, you'd have a Chekov's Gun scenario: if the camera shows a character packing a particular gadget, that gadget better be used later in the show. With player-driven story, though, how is one to know what will be useful later? The instinct is good from a player's point of view, and it's not exactly anticinematic, but it is dull. I pointed out that any player could always spend a Fate Point later to simply declare that they had brought some particular gadget with them, and I realized immediately that I had just turned Fate Points into Blades in the Dark's flashback and load system. This helped the players understand the various uses and robustness of Fate Points, but in reflecting on the experience, it also pointed out how brilliantly Blades ties the flashbacks with Planning and Load. Get the competent characters into a situation with little fanfare and let the details be clarified through play. I like that better than having players trying to lay out the perfect plan and hope it works.

The other piece from Blades in the Dark that I missed was player-facing rolls. In truth, I struggled to remember the distinctions between Fate's Challenges, Contests, and Conflicts, each of which are almost synonomous in English. I had hoped that the players would face one of each, but we never had much of a direct Conflict. Or, put another way, we could have, but I ended up handling it using what feels like a faster player-facing, elective-order system. I find the idea of tallying each side's Speed and then taking turns with each NPC to be tedious. It's the kind of thing that I may have enjoyed in my youth DMing D&D2e, but those games had a more tactical and simulationist bent. Now, I much prefer the rhythm of letting the players act and watching the world react.

Still, one of the most compelling ideas in Fate is the robust aspect system, and I quite like the action of creating advantages. We had only one good example of that, but I think it's because a player could see that there was interesting on-screen ways that his character could lead another character to an exciting spotlight moment. I have not seen any Forged in the Dark games that have something equivalent.

One other criticism that I have of Fate Accelerated in particular is that, after playing through the game, I don't like approaches over skills. I like the idea of describing how characters approach problems, but practically speaking, it was too easy to alter one word of a story to get a systemic boost. If you're in a boat race, are you necessarily driving "speedily"? It seems to me that there's not much difference between saying you're doing it speedily, flashily, cleverly, or even forcefully. What really matters here is that you know how to drive a boat. (Do you "drive" boats? Whatever.) So, one of my takeaways is that I want to take a closer look at Fate Condensed as an alternative. I think it would have really helped some of the players, especially in the large group, to have an obvious spot where their particular skills could be brought to the table—that they can do a thing others cannot do, not just approach something in a way that's essentially the same as their neighbor.

In preparing for the session, I came across the It's Not My Fault! cards, which I have ordered and am excited to try, so this will certainly not be my last experience with the Fate system. I suspect that this set may be a better tool for one-shots, although I have no regrets about exploring the Phase Trio for character creation. However, it also makes me want to get Scum & Villainy back to the table. I want to try running it using the Deep Cuts systems changes to Blades in the Dark. I also want to rewatch Cowboy Bebop, and maybe these things are coupled.

That's my hodgepodge of thoughts collected from an enjoyable game yesterday. My boys have been on an unexpected TTRPG kick lately, and I need to talk to them about whether they want to pick up the Scum & Villainy campaign we started last Autumn. Incidentally, folks who like Blades in the Dark should check out the recently released video game Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, which is obviously inspired by it and draws liberally on its systems.

Stones

My family gave me this lovely collection of stones for Fathers' Day.

They are all stones from Clank!, one of my family's favorite board game series. In reading order, they are sapphire, ruby, emerald, black tourmaline, (Herkimer) diamond, smoky quartz, amethyst, rose quartz, and topaz.

A proposal for the disclosure of the use of generative AI in scholarly writing

I recently encountered a scholarly manuscript in which the author acknowledged ChatGPT as being instrumental in composing the work. This is fraught with similar problems to students' use of such generative AI tools: how is the reader to trust that the author actually means what is written? 

I propose that those who wish to publish such manuscripts must also release their original draft, prior to its being passed through AI tools. This recognizes that the purpose of these tools is to translate between natural language dialects, and so they should be treated like other translations. While I am reading an English translation of Francois Mauriac's Viper's Tangle, I can access the original French in order to distinguish between the connotations of the original and the interpretation of the translator.