An Afternoon with Mythic Bastionland

Professor Dungeonmaster convinced me to check out Mythic Bastionland, a new tabletop RPG from Chris McDowall. I always appreciate Prof. DM's commentary, and he called it a masterpiece. I splurged on the hardcover edition without doing much more research, and I have no regrets.

The book is beautiful in its form. The entire rules for the game are presented in about twenty pages, followed by a generous collection of random tables. The majority of the book is devoted to 144 pages that describe the 72 knights, the seers who knighted them, and the myths that manifest in the world. The knights seek the myths, and the myths are described with just enough detail that the referee can turn them into compelling vignettes. The book concludes with about thirty two-column pages in which the left side narrates the table experience of three players and the right side provides commentary on it. This is a brilliant way to give examples of play and provide recommendations while keeping brief the initial rules explanation. Generous illustrations by Alec Sorenson push the dark medieval fantasy theme right into your imagination upon opening the book.

My two older boys agreed to try Mythic Bastionland with me yesterday afternoon, and we finished a one-shot session in about three hours. It is clearly a game that benefits from campaign play, but I found several resources that helped me to pull together a one-shot in about two hours of prep, not including reading the rules. There is an extensive list of resources on Reddit, but these are the ones I found most useful for quickly pulling an experimental session together:

• Chris McDowall's post about Mythic One-Shots. I followed his "Speed-Shot" approach, opting for a 6x6 Realm with the recommended myth. I rolled four random Knights and filled out their character sheets with everything except the attribute values, which I left for the players to roll. I came across many praises for McDowall's blog posts and YouTube videos; I am curious to look at some of his other content, but I have not done so yet.
• The official character sheets. The official sheet is dry but effective. There are a lot of fan-made ones, some of which are quite beautiful. I could not get this one to print, otherwise I might have used it, although I fear it would look poor on my black-and-white printer. I love the aesthetic of this other one, but it lacks some of the rules references that I wanted for new players (including me).
• Realm Maker online tool for generating Realms based on the game's heuristics. The interface is a bit awkward and I would have liked more printing and export options, but for what it is, it's a handy free tool. I configured it for a 6x6 Realm with one Myth, one Seer, and one Holding, and it came up with something reasonable enough for me to use. I printed up one for the players, then had to take a screenshot of the referee version. I printed this latter one at a smaller scale so that I could write in my notes around it, which worked well.
• Squire and Holdings tables from the Mythic Canvas. Knowing I would have two players, I took the book's advice to give each a squire, and the tables helped give each a bit of character. Similarly, I rolled a random Holding, which gave me a name and an economic focus for it. This ended up being slightly incongruous with the terrain, but it was adequate for a one-shot.

All this allowed me to pull together a one-shot, which I played with my two older sons yesterday afternoon. For me, there were a lot of firsts.

I had not previously run nor played a hexcrawl, but I really enjoyed it. The Myth's early omens provided simple vignettes that gave a sense of the game's setting. The party went straight for the castle to learn more about the local situation, and they got just enough info to set them in the right direction of the Seer. They did receive a crucial tip from the Seer that ended up being used just in time to save one of them from death, although this was all driven by dice, not my plotting. The one-shot only had one Myth so that the party could have a chance of overcoming it in one session, which they did; this made me curious to see how a larger Realm and multiple Myths would impact the feel of the game. Our game-time played out over the course of about a week, but I understand that a campaign would take place over years or decades. It's an attractive storytelling form that I have never explored.

When I run TTRPGs, which is not very often, I usually try to improvise some environmental conditions that establish a tone, such as the weather or a smell. I had not previously tried to rely on tables for such things, but given the prominent place they have in Mythic Bastionland, I decided to try it. I used random results from the weather table for the first few days' travel, but I quickly found that tedious. It was fun to try it, and I am sure that a better use of the tables is for when one is creatively stuck or desiring an improvisational challenge. Incidentally, I also have a copy of Knave on Professor Dungeonmaster's recommendation, and it is even more chock full of tables---but I have not been able to run that one yet.

I had also not previously run a game without roll-to-hit. Mythic Bastionland has combatants roll damage, and these dice can be manipulated through various player abilities. We all found it to be a lovely minigame of risk management and mitigation. It works well with another novelty of the game, where a player who suffers damage equal to half their remaining health is mortally wounded. Of course, the more damage one takes, the less damage is required to deal such a wound. Our session culminated in an epic battle where Sir John was mortally wounded, and as the enemy creature took wing, Sir Asgerald grabbed Sir John's javelin and hurled it at the fleeing monster. The player rolled exactly what he needed to deal a mortal blow to the enemy, and because of the Seer's advice, they were able to heal Sir John of a deadly poison. It was a beautiful ending to the afternoon, all driven by dice and improvised storytelling.

I found some of the nomenclature used in Mythic Bastionland to be hard to remember. The system of armaments is appropriately simple, yet terms like "hefty" and "slow" are used in a technical sense that doesn't match their colloquial use. Realms have Holdings, which seems right, but one of them is the Seat of Power, which sounds arbitrary to my ear compared to, say, "Capital." Each holding has people in the roles of Steward, Marshal, Sheriff, and Envoy, which are used in a historical sense but don't stick well into my memory. This meant there were some awkward pauses while I made sure I was introducing players to the right terms. I am sure that if I played this particular game more often, or even got into McDowall's content, it would be more natural for me.

Mythic Bastionland is an impressive game, and the physical book is a beautiful addition to my collection. The tabletop experience would benefit from loading screens that highlight Sorenson's evocative illustrations. It's another game that I wish I could run again soon, but that's probably not in the cards. This is one of the reasons I write these reviews: when TTRPGs are few and far between, it's nice to have a place to collect these stories or to return for inspiration.

"What would you do instead?" An Idea for a Reflective Assignment

I have been thinking about how to get students to understand the impact of generative AI on their personal development. Yesterday, as part of a wide-ranging conversation about teaching with a trusted friend, I came up with an assignment format that might be useful.

The idea is to present the students with an assignment that is appropriate for the topic of the class, but they would not be asked to do that assignment. Instead, they would be asked to consider the obvious temptation to simply put that assignment text into ChatGPT and turn in what it spits out. The real assignment then is this: what would you do with the time you would have otherwise worked on the assignment?

The learning objective for this assignment is to reveal to students what they value and challenge them to consider whether that reflects their personal goals.

Team Shirts: A Visual Retrospective

As part of a recent project, I ended up going through my closet and photographing all of my shirts from student teams. These are all from immersive learning projects, where my teams worked with community partners to create original educational games. We wore the shirts when meeting with partners and showing the work at public events. They are shown below in no particular order.

The polo shirts just have the team logo, but the T-shirts have team names on the back.

The Worst Thing about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

The clear worst thing about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is that someone got some game in their movie, but that's not much of a blog post. Instead, I'm going to share a few thoughts about narrative, and along the way, I will include some spoilers about Marvel's Midnight Suns and Clair Obscur. You have been warned.

Years ago, I played Marvel's Midnight Suns. I really enjoyed the gameplay, which brought together a lot of the pieces I enjoy in videogames. There were a few moments in the narrative experience that were frightfully disrespectful, enough that I kept a list on a scrap of paper on my desk with the intention of writing about them later. Unfortunately, I lost that paper, and so I never was able to assemble my player experience into an effective critique. The only part I vividly remember was not the first such part, but it is the one that made me start my list. Tony Stark is stuck in a position where he could save the world by killing his best friend, but he cannot bring himself to do it. It tears him up. He understands that this is about weighing his desires against the greater good. It's a competently designed scene. Immediately on the heels of that experience, my character ran into Tony at base camp, where he happily told me how he was making his grandmother's goulash (or something like that). It's a happy little encounter, a filler, something meant to make the player smile and enjoy the camaraderie. But in my playthrough, it immediately followed Stark's monumental crisis.

I call this disrespectful because it reduces narrative to content. While it's true that no narrative designer intentionally juxtaposed these story beats, they also did not prevent it. Give the player content, regardless of its sensibility, so that they remain engaged. That is the message underlying my experience: the player must be satisfied by feeding them content.

Sorry, that's been pent up in my fingers for years now. Too bad I lost the original notes, since I had more coherent suggestions at the time.

I'm currently in the third act of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. There are many parts of the game that I really enjoy, but there are other aspects that echo all the worst tropes of videogame design. In the latter category are the unforgiving and unwelcome platforming experiences. A reasonable person might ask why I don't simply skip them, and the answer is that the game doesn't want me to. The game is designed to provoke in the player the desire to complete these challenges so that we can get the mysterious reward at the end: maybe it's a hat, but maybe it's a game-changing picto. There's no way to know ahead of time without asking the Internet. Because little treats are scattered in the corners of each map, there is no incentive to ever follow the narratively sensible route—from the entrance to the goal, for example. Instead, the game designers want you to scour the edges of the map lest you miss something you need for the ever more powerful enemies. It's painfully common in RPG level design and always disconnects play from the authored narrative.

I controlled Maelle, the teenage heroine, to complete these platforming challenges, or at least the ones I could stomach, since I have since given up on them. It seemed like it was easier to land precisely with her than with the other characters. A quick search online makes it seem like I'm not the only one who did this. So, in my experience of the world of Clair Obscur, Maelle is the one who climbs across floating obstacles, jumps onto spinning disks, grabs bits of flotsam to pull herself up, and who falls hundreds of feet into the water, only to get up and try again.

In the game's third act, Maelle and company must climb to the top of an enormous structure. At one point, in a cutscene, she mentions off-handedly that she has always suffered from vertigo. 

Vertigo? Where did that come from? You're the one doing these crazy platforming challenges!

Shortly later, the party meets a peculiar Nevron who has crafted for Maelle specifically a set of wings. Wings! Yes, please! That is exactly what I need as a player to get through these awful platforming levels! Maelle gives them a glance then shrugs and says, "Vertigo, remember?" The rest of the party sighs and leaves the wings behind.

We could leave this as an example of ludonarrative dissonance if we were so inclined, but it's actually worse than that. From the very start of the game, we meet Maelle and Gustave on the rooftops, and they run and leap across the city of Lumiere. Maelle is especially pleased that she has acquired the technology that allows her to ninja-rope herself across huge gaps. This is her happy place in her job as a parkour courier.

To this, I can only shrug and say, "Vertigo, remember?"

I know that writing is hard and that managing a staff of writers is even harder, but someone should have noticed that there's a massive story problem with introducing a character trait that is contrary to the core gameplay, and that is only brought up once, and only to reject a thing that serves no purpose anyway. It's like seeing a straw man over the mantel in act one and never speaking of it again.

A short poem about smells

Here is a short poem I improvised this weekend while attending a youth art showcase.

Crayons smell like youth and playfulness
in exactly the same way
that source code doesn't

Algorithmic Authority and the Categorical Imperative

I was reminded yesterday of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative, his lens for thinking about ethics. As I understand it, he suggested that to decide if an action is ethical, one can consider the implications if everyone did it. To determine if one ought to lie, one can consider a world in which everyone is allowed to lie; clearly, that's not a good place to live, so it is better not to lie.

This gives me another way to talk to my students about using generative AI on assignments. Would the world be better if all students fed their assignments as prompts to ChatGPT and turned in what it spat out? It is clear to me that this would be a worse educational system. The question remains whether they would agree with me. One might instead argue that the dose makes the poison and that there is no universal around such tools.

Yet, I cannot help but extend the Kantian perspective. Would it be a better educational system if everyone relied on grammar check to alter their prose into a machine-acceptable format? Would it be a better world if everyone delegated spelling authority to algorithms? The answers are clear to me when one considers the categorical imperative, and the principle underlying these questions is humanism. Will my students agree that it is universal?

Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma

I am going to try to capture some elusive concepts that require me to reach into philosophy and sociology, which are areas outside of my professional specialization. Caveat emptor. If you recognize a mistake or misunderstanding in my arguments, please let me know in the comments or over email.

I have been mulling over the idea that every D&D player knows the difference between Intelligence and Wisdom but few consider that they are engaged in classical epistemology. Aristotle wrote about the distinction between the intellect and the will, although I came across this by way of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas described how the intellect apprehends and abstracts while the will chooses. This is essentially the distinction in D&D and related tabletop roleplaying games. 

It's a fascinating case where players learn philosophy without knowing that they are doing so. I hypothesize that this has a real impact on their lives as well, that when people come to think of the powers of the mind in terms of Intelligence and Wisdom (or intellect and will, or intellectus and voluntas), it gives them a lens to think about life outside the game. If my observations and hypotheses are correct, then if D&D can do it, so can other games.

Yesterday, I listened to a podcast that gave me a different perspective on the matter. In the Conversations podcast, Mark Bauerlein interviewed Molly Worthen about her work on charisma and leadership. She caught my attention when she pointed out that sociologist Max Weber secularized the word "charisma." The word had traditionally only been used in the New Testament sense, where the Pauline epistles refer to spiritual gifts. As I understand it, Weber took this idea and turned it to refer to extraordinary (but not supernatural) leadership capabilities.

This forced me to recognize that I had never really considered the two definitions of "charisma" despite being familiar with both. It was a revelation to me to hear that it was a scholar's intentional appropriation of a term, not a gradual evolution of a concept. It also made me recognize that D&D players would only ever recognize Weber's concept, not Paul's. Here is a case in contrast to Intelligence and Wisdom, where a player comes to understand only half a concept while presuming to understand a whole.

To me, it is a cautionary tale about learning from games, that a designer must choose words carefully. I do not know whether Gygax or Arneson dove into the etymology of the terms they used to describe player characters in D&D. I suspect, like most designers, they simply chose the words that evoked the right sensibility for what their game was trying to communicate. If I am right about this, then this means that they were clearly established in a classical epistemology and a modern secular sociology. That itself is a fascinating thought, for if they were, then what about us?