A Review of Scotty McFarland's EZD6 RPG

Gareth Barrett publicly claimed that Scotty McFarland's EZD6 is the "greatest RPG ever written." That's quite a claim, and he makes it without equivocation. While it's impossible that he has read all RPGs, I'm sure he has read a lot, and he makes specific comparison to some that I am familiar with, including Dungeon Crawl Classics, Dungeon World, Index Card RPG, and The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen. He is comparing this newcomer to some of the most lauded and recognized fantasy role-playing games, and this was enough for me to pick up a copy of EZD6 for myself.

The rulebook was a breezy read. The rules of the game are simple, and they presented in a mostly straightforward way. However, I was quickly disappointed in the quality of the book itself. The presentation is scattershot, with technical terms used before they are defined. The writing is functional but inelegant. The result is that the book feels like a rough draft that should have gone out to external playtesters. The book is published by Runehammer, whose own ICRPG went through several rounds of significant editing after its initial release. That's a great benefit of digital publishing, but I don't get the impression that EZD6 is due for this kind of maintenance; indeed, perusing YouTube comments, I see instead that McFarland is currently working on supplements for separate sale.

Particular mention should be made of the strained metaphors. The book insists that what other systems call "characters" are, in EZD6, called "Pushers and Shovers." That phrase hardly rolls of the tongue, and throughout the book, they are referenced regularly as "characters." There's a good reason to do this: they are characters, as agents in a story. Similarly, the book insists that what most systems would call a gamemaster is a "Rabble Rouser." This term doesn't have the right connotation and so it comes across as a sloppy attempt at novelty. You have a "hero die" that is not a die at all but a token you exchange for a re-roll. The worst offense is the use of "Strikes" to denote health or hit points. "Three strikes and you're out" is an easy and memorable concept. The problem is that characters have three strikes, and when you get hit, you lose a strike. You're "out" when you have no strikes. The metaphor is upside-down. This might be a pet peeve, but I feel like the icing on the cutesy wordplay is the gratuitous use of "k" in the word "magick." It puts the "ick" in magic.

The unprofessional editing and poor use of language is enough for me to say that this is not the greatest RPG book ever written. (For exemplars of "bookness," check out Paul Czege's The Clay that Woke or the aforementioned Baron Munchhausen by James Wallis.) An RPG book is not just a book, though, and the systems of EZD6 are where it shines.

The core system is clear: roll a d6 and beat a target number, usually 3. Situations may get you a "bane" or a "boon" in a manner similar to D&D 5e's disadvantage and advantage system. The math and adjudication are much simpler here, and it's not clear to me that anything is lost in the coarse grain. That is, I don't think it matters that taking a -2 on a d20 gives a 10% difference in outcome whereas having a +1 target on a d6 is a 16% difference: the human brain is too bad at statistics for this to really matter. The real value here (as Barrett points out) is the karma system. Players start with three karma, and they earn karma on each failed roll. Karma can be spent to improve any die roll on a point-per-pip basis. This works very well with the d6 system: each failure means, in a sense, you're banking a 16% chance to succeed at something later. It's simple, it takes some sting out of failure, and it adds up even in a short adventure. It also feels heroic in the narrative. This kind of system would not work with a d20 system because the opportunities and impact would be diffuse.

Given the elegance of this core system, I was surprised that the magic rules muddied it up. I agree with McFarland's stated design goal that magic should, by definition, feel different. I think D&D has always dropped the ball here but that Dungeon Crawl Classics has a wonderful interpretation. In EZD6, you basically roll some dice against some other dice and get what you want, and you can use your hero die but not your karma, among some other restrictions. This system does succeed at feeling different from the rest of the game, but it falls short of feeling dangerous and mysterious. The best contribution here is not the resolution system but the division of magic into circles of sorcery. A spellcaster can come up with any effect they can imagine, within the gamemaster's adjudication, as long as it is within one of their known circles. This is an important restriction on a free-form magic system, preventing the spellcaster from outshining all the other classes.

One of my greatest disappointments with the EZD6 book is that it does not include any scenarios or characters. There's nothing you can use out of the box. Compare this to ICRPG from the same publisher: it includes "trials," which are small but compelling scenarios designed to expose new players and GMs to the rules, as well as sample adventures. 

For my trial, then, I put together a short three-encounter adventure for my family: my wife and my four sons, ages 7 to 15. Not all of them like tabletop roleplaying games, but they were all willing to join in for a one-shot. My eldest son helped everyone make characters while I designed the quest. I decided to pick something that would highlight some of the miniatures we recently painted together—our first batch of mobs from Massive Darkness 2. (Expect a blog post about that once they're all done.) The party were called upon to eliminate a mysterious evil from a haunted cemetery. This involved battling gargoyles, skeletons, cultists, and a summoned demon. As always, I found myself deploying tricks from ICRPG in designing the scenario, particularly the inclusion of "Timers, Threats, and Treats." Everyone enjoyed the game, especially the karma system. We did not get much experience with the magic(k) system since the lone spellcaster only cast one spell, which was to blind the chanting cultists. This didn't really do anything since they were already in a trance. I have to wonder if his own imagination about how to use magic stunted by his reading too many RPG rulebooks that codify spells.

Is EZD6 the best RPG ever written? No. But it is pretty good. Playing this game with my family was a lot smoother than ICRPG or Dungeon Crawl Classics, and it seemed to be equally enjoyable by both the older and younger crowd. I recommend it as a rules-light game for those who want to emphasize narrative but still be in a GM-crafted D&D-style adventure. Rather than compare it to something crunchy like Apocalypse World, I think it would be better to compare it to FATE, and perhaps that's something I can do later this summer. However, if what you really want is a collection of advice about how to run a game, I maintain that Index Card RPG is still the best resource available, even if you don't ever use the systems it presents.

(Did you know I released a free PbtA tabletop roleplaying game about campy superhero adventures? It's called Kapow! and you can read about it here. I ran into some folks at Origins who have a completely different game out called Kapow!, but I can't blame them. It's a good name.)

My Notes on "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning"

Several weeks ago, I finished reading Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel. It was recommended to me by a good friend with a heart for improving education. The book aims to explain what we know about learning from cognitive science and how this can impact the practices of teaching and learning. I found the book to be inspirational, and I mentioned the book in several recent essays and presentations. I happened to meet local cognitive science and student motivation expert Serena Shim this semester, and she affirmed the findings and value of the text as well.

One of the most important findings that came up throughout the book is that spaced practice is better than massed practice. I think we all recognize that it is true: of course studying throughout the semester is more effective than cramming. However, the science is more nuanced. Massed practice is actually better for short-term recall than spaced practice, but spaced practice is better for long-term recall. This has a fascinating corollary: if our courses contain high-stakes tests, then it is a good tactical decision for students to cram.

This implies to me then that we instructors have to make a real choice between I want students to pass this test and I want students to remember this a year from now. I have a rule of thumb that I have only recently had to articulate, which is that I only want to teach content that I think students should know in five years. My general pedagogic approach favors spaced practice, but perhaps I can do more to support this. However, recent conversations made me realize that this perspective is not universal. I was involved in a somewhat heated discussion about a master syllabus revision with a colleague. The particular syllabus had, in my opinion, too many low-level learning outcomes. I argued that students don't learn these items, and he argued that they do. As evidence, I cited that they could not repeat their achievements a year after taking the class, and as evidence, he cited that they passed the final exam. Here are the loggerheads of higher education: we both believed the other to not just be wrong, but to be holding the wrong value system.

I was reminded by the text of the value of testing as retrieval practice. I had read this before but tried to dismiss it; however, the presentation by Brown et al. makes it hard to ignore. Learning improves through retrieval practice, and testing is perhaps the simplest way to practice retrieval. I mostly gave up on using tests many years ago, favoring instead continuous authentic work. However, I also see my students not remembering to apply fundamental lessons early in the semester into their work later in the semester. I need to review my use of quizzes and tests, as well as how I prepare students to do their own self-testing.

Another theme of the book that knocked my proverbial socks off was that immediate feedback is not always better than delayed feedback. I think that in the educational games community, it is taken for granted that feedback is simply good, and that quicker feedback is better feedback. As the argument goes, if feedback is good for learning, and games are feedback machines, then games can be good for learning. This is not wrong, but it is also superficial. Not all feedback is created equal. The authors cite studies that show that delayed feedback can lead to better learning. As I understand it, the actual reason for this is not understood, but the prevailing hypothesis is that immediate feedback makes the feedback indistinguishable from the task itself; this leads to a result where when the feedback is not present, knowledge of the task breaks down. This sounds an awful lot like "I can do it in the game, but I cannot do it outside the game." I wonder how many empirical educational game research projects have investigated feedback delay as a dependent variable, and if not, how one would construct such a study. After all, a player expects that if they press 'A', Mario should jump right away.

Reading the section on delayed vs. immediate feedback made me think of two other salient examples where immediate feedback may be causing problems. The endemic one is automatic spellcheck and grammar check: we all know that students do not learn to spell or write by letting their word processor do the work, it just builds a reliance on the word processor. The other, related example is IDE for novice programmers. As with automatic spellcheck, the IDE will add red squiggles to invalid code, and students can right-click on it and change it to whatever the IDE wants—often without regard for whether it is what they should want.

Chapter 8 of the book provides a series of helpful summaries that are organized for different reader demographics. It's a valuable chapter, and so I will spend a bit of time on it here describing what caught my attention and where I think it should take me. In the section for teachers, they recommend explaining to students how learning works. The following quotation is a good overview:

• Some kinds of difficulties during learning help to make the learning stronger and better remembered
• When learning is easy, it is often superficial and soon forgotten
• Not all of our intellectual abilities are hardwired. In fact, when learning is effortful, it changes the brain, making new connections and increasing intellectual ability
• You learn better when you wrestle with new problems before being shown the solution, rather than the other way around
• To achieve excellence in any sphere, you must strive to surpass your current level of ability
• Striving, by its nature, often results in setbacks, and setbacks are often what provide the essential information needed to adjust strategies to achieve mastery

Another tip for teachers is to teach students how to study. This has been on my mind quite a bit, along with the question, "Where does the buck stop?" I teach primarily junior and senior undergraduates, and I estimate that 5% of them have any real study tools. Indeed, I think a good description of the Ball State demographic is, "Students who are smart enough to have gotten this far without having developed study skills." Including direct instruction on study habits is an investment in their future learning, but I doubt I would be able to reap it in my own courses, so it's taking away from time on topic. More frustratingly, I have seen for years that I can teach good processes for learning and software development in a course like CS222, only to see that a year later, the students have never touched any of those techniques because other faculty do not expect them to. For example, I can teach the value of pair programming or test-driven development, present the students with research evidence that these increase productivity, and require them to deploy these techniques; but a year later, when I ask them to do these in a follow-up course, they say that they have not used these since CS222. Why should I be more optimistic about study skills, when inertia is powerful and habits are so hard to override?

The section of tips for teachers returns to the theme of "desirable difficulties" that came up throughout the book. Here are some specific desirable difficulties that they recommend:

• Frequent quizzing. Students find it more acceptable when it is predictable and the individual stakes are low.
• Study tools to incorporate retrieval practice: exercises with new kinds of problems before solutions are taught, practice tests, writing exercises reflecting on past material and related to the aspects of their lives; exercises generating short statements that summarize key ideas of recent material from text or lecture.
• Quizzing and practice count toward course grade.
• Quizzing and exercises reach back to concepts and learning covered earlier in the term.

Again, this is a valuable summary. Each of these items is covered in the text with explanation and citation. It's clear what actions can come from this list as well, and it makes me look at opportunities in my upcoming HCI class in a new way. I also recognize in it the value of several things I already do in the class, such as having students connect readings to their experience and writing reflections of development experiences. Given that I tend to divide semesters into a content-oriented first half and project-oriented back half, I need to be more conscientious about designing assignments and quizzes that reach back to the early part of the first half; this should help students deploy these ideas more readily in the second half.

The final bit of advice in Chapter 8 is to be transparent with students about incorporating desirable difficulties into the class. I have always been a fan of white-box pedagogy, although it's not every semester that I see students take interest in why I am teaching the course the way that I am. Student teaching evaluations often reveal quite mistaken models about my intentions as well. Sometimes I get these excellent reflection sessions as I described in Fall's HCI class, but the irony here is that they generally come after students have completed their evaluations.

I highly recommend Make It Stick. It is written clearly and precisely and organized in a way that emphasized the important points. Crucially, it avoids educational fads in favor of empirical research. Chapter 8, as I have said, provides a great synopsis that turns the ideas of the book into potential action items for practice. 

Impressions of Android Wear with the LG G Watch

I attended a GDG Muncie meeting over the Summer where I was lucky enough to win an LG G Android Wear watch. The longer version of the story is that the organizer was trying to determine the best way to generate random numbers for the lottery, and I suggested one of my very favorite sites on the Internet, random.org. He went to the site and generated my number: the system works!

I normally wear a watch—a Skagen titanium watch, to be precise. It is ultralight and quick to don or remove, both of which I consider to be great benefits. This is my second watch of this model, in fact, after having smashed the face of one on vacation several years ago. For those who don't know, I don't have a cell phone plan: the Nexus 4 I carry everywhere is used strictly as a pocket Wi-Fi device. Hence, my watch is not a fashion accessory, it serves an important function, and being so light, it does so innocuously.

My LG G arrived a few weeks after the GDG meeting, and I decided to wear it around the house for a few days. It is clunky and heavy, especially in contrast to my usual watch. I'm not hip to the technical terms for watchbands, but while the band is functional, it is fiddly, so it takes a few moments to put on or take off. Again, I am not interested in the piece as a fashion statement per se, but I think the picture shows how my rather thin hands and wrists are dominated by this piece of black technology.

It was easy enough to set up and sync with my Nexus 4. I like that the watch face can be configured to show the time, the date, and some ambient information, such as the temperature. I was afraid that the notifications system would be distracting, but I find it no less distracting than my pocket device, really. When I want to know whether I have new email, for example, I simply check. When I am in a situation where I don't want to be interrupted, I am not generally checking my watch for the time anyway: I am either in a situation where I don't care about the time (writing) or there's a clock readily available (meetings, teaching).

Given that I'm the type to turn off notifications and avoid distractions anyway, I also haven't found it to be that useful: almost any time I have used it, I could have about as easily used my pocket device instead. Perhaps that's due to immaturity of the platform, but I suspect it has more to do with me not being in the target demographic. All the same, it is kind of fun to check messages on my watch while walking down the hallway to the men's room. It doesn't feel any less isolated or rude than carrying a phone and checking messages in the same situation, but it does leave hands a bit more free. Probably the single-most feature I use on the watch besides time and date is the view of what appointment is coming next.

I do have a major complaint with the email authoring feature. It does feel very futuristic to talk to your wristwatch and have it send a message to someone. However, it is set up so that you narrate your brief message, and then the watch shows you what it recognized and sends it right away. The two times I've tried this, the speech recognition was terrible, but I had no opportunity to stop it before it sent—I was left with that awful feeling of having just sent a nonsensical message. In my opinion, it really needs a 2–3 second confirmation period in which one can stop the process.

Another usability failure on the watch arises from the context in which it is used, and in particular, I wonder if the designers considered users with small children. When my toddler sits on my lap or when I pick him up, his arms reach exactly to my wrists, and he tends to fiddle with whatever is there—a smarthwatch, for example. It's a bad feeling to be sitting happily with a child in lap and then suddenly realize that he may have knocked messages out of your inbox. The device really needs a hardware switch that turns on or off the touch-sensitivity, or it should come with a warning, "Not for parents of young children." I've started wearing it only on days when I am working from campus, and around the house, I stick with my Skagen and pocket-device.

Preliminary conclusion: It's a fun toy with a few good uses and a few usability problems. I would not buy one, but I am happy to tinker with one. I do have an idea for an app that I may experiment with in the next few days, but that depends on how the semester gets rolling.

UPDATE (8/29): A crazy thing happened this morning, the day after I posted my review. I checked my messages while walking down the hallway to work, and a colleague sent me a question that could be answered either "yes" or "no." I figured, how badly could the speech recognition mangle that? I hit "Reply" on my watch, and the voice recognition screen came up with the "Speak now" prompt. Then I swiped or tapped or something... I am not really sure what I did, which itself is interesting... and I got a "Yes/No" dialog. I hit the "Yes" button and an email was sent with exactly that content.

That is neat. I need to wait for someone else to send me an email that I can answer in one word and try that again.