Creative work passes through phases that have less to do with improvement than exploration. Most people recognize that — it doesn’t get a second glance. But if Pablo Picasso was a game designer we’d read long screeds about how he really wanted to do Blue Period work all along, but the art world made him move on to Rose, or about how Cubist art was an objective advancement. Gamers and game designers are afraid of labelling themselves artists, so it really screws up their ability to recognize creative development as anything other than a technology. RPGs aren’t really engines that you can reliably improve until they work best on your chosen road. You’ll always wander, and you should play and design with the understanding that nothing will ever completely satisfy you. If you treat yourself like an artist you’ll get your feet moving, and you can embrace change with a degree of self-awareness.

My D&D game evolved a whole bunch since I originally vowed to play AD&D1e almost entirely as written and see what happened from there. If I was a typical gaming blowhard I’d talk about objectively improving the game to meet a set agenda, but if you’ve been following along, you know I think that’s pretty stupid. Instead, I’ve moved into a kind of symbiosis with the game, where some elements suggest changes, but these hacks aren’t global improvements that would have made the game better before. I finally dropped Weapon vs. AC not because it was a bad system at any level, but because it starts to become too cumbersome to justify its importance by levels 4-5. I still think it’s awesome at low levels, though. A DM or designer obsessed with gaming as a technical thing would probably try to systematize some compromise for all levels of play, but that strikes me as a waste of effort.

Protecting your mind from the illusion of progress is important at in every role in the hobby. Players need to do it to let go of what bores them and embrace temporary, non-doctrinaire solutions. Designers need to do it to get real insight out of their past designs and design heritage. Certainly, nothing marks creative stagnation in a game company than losing touch with the ideas behind past designs. Whenever you read about designers/developers lamenting that their predecessors sucked, you’re reading something that’s either a sales pitch for a new edition, or the musings of creative folks who have lost their way. I know I’ve been guilty of it — it’s part of the culture of working on established intellectual properties that the generation before you just wasn’t as awesome as you are.

Eventually you get over yourself and realize that the other guys took a different journey, and you learn to respect it unless it was genuinely facile or offensive. So nowadays, I try for a twofold perspective, where I not only judge things based on the values I hold, but I try to imagine the story of the creator and work, and assume they were smart people who did what they meant to do. And I think that’s why my tastes as a gamer and designer have steadily diversified, despite a culture where the tendency is to define your agenda, work within its narrow confines, and assume that without these controls, everybody else is a mindblind sociopath. We have come to not only see a pathology in journeys other than our own, but even in the possibility of having our own blue periods.

Luxury? Compared to what?

I think game designers and some of the most vocal (and least useful) fans have been suckered into the idea that game designers make games happen by developing “core” rules and content, but if you look at the actual practice of roleplaying over the decades, this isn’t true at all. The original rules for Dungeons and Dragons are terminally incoherent, and the most important thing they transmit is a loose structure of ideas — nothing like enough to learn in the way you might learn a board game. But it plays just fine.

Similarly, the biggest real grassroots surge in roleplaying (something we can safely exclude the market-label “indie” and retro-gamers from) comes from online fandom, and they don’t need anything the tabletop community makes. (Yes, lots of them know what we do but they don’t care!)

So asking whether a book or other RPG item is “core,” or “necessary,” is useless. We are all dealing in luxuries when it comes to getting some roleplaying done. Realizing this is remarkably liberating, and frees oneself from various illusions about where different types of content stands. We don’t have the false belief that rules are more necessary and can soberly look at build-and-prep as something other than play, and take a closer look at ad hoc ideas without uselessly asking if they represent “really” playing something.

Basically, when you read anything here, you should assume that we’re not talking about necessities, but just whether something is compelling.

Let me hit you with the bold text:

Creative leadership is intensely self-critical. Creative leaders perform obsessive postpartums/mortems on their projects. They aim to be the most severe but honest judges of their own work. Aside from generating lessons for future projects, severe self-criticism inoculates them against bullshit. If you already know what’s awful about your work it’s easy to dodge unwarranted praise and damnation from the outside. This doesn’t mean you should cloister yourself, but pick and choose your critics from people you trust (not necessarily like), with the yardstick of your own dissatisfaction ready to measure their contributions. Then again, if someone from out of the blue says something really insightful, props to them, and bring them into your trusted circle.

In my own work, I can think of a few things I worked on that received unwarranted praise, and projects where fan criticism missed the real problems. The Prince of 100,000 Leaves idea in Mage: The Awakening’s Boston Unveiled uses monotonous motifs disguised by cheesy Sword and Sorcery metal album language. I made mistakes there that I’ll never make again — but if I had let other people decide, I’d have just left it at the praise.

Creative leadership builds on its own innovations instead of pandering to trends. It’s very easy to get caught up in a climate of ideas and think in terms of trends. Before you know it all of your work concentrates on whatever was popular at the planning stage of the project. These kind of “Me too!” projects that dress up a trendy mechanic to hook it to one’s own work are kind of sad. But even worse, they tend to blind you from your own progress. If you’ve got the potential to lead, you’re going to harsh on yourself a lot, and you might throw away really valuable work. You need to go back to the things you throw out, ask why they’re there, and how parts of them could be rehabilitated.

For instance, in the midst of a heated discussion of metaplot I realized that White Wolf had developed all the tools to implement it properly. They created event books like The Red Sign, metaplot-central adventure paths like The Giovanni Chronicles, and talked openly about functional, structural concerns. But the company abandoned the concept and lost some tasty content — and adventure paths and event books became signature D20 products.

Creative leadership asserts authority over its works. Leaders. Don’t. Pander. I’ve seen many discussions where creators basically say yes or something close to every fan request, and end up with a mess, or nothing at all, as the project gets to complex to finish. In fact I can think of one particular game whose creator I have a lot of respect for, and who I want to see succeed regardless (thus, no names!), who designed a much worse game than s/he was capable of just by skimming popular ideas from the community and jamming those fuckers in.

You must find and defend a creative mission — one that isn’t too closed for others to appreciate, but doesn’t easily yield to social pressures. That’s why I believe the trend toward merging marketing and core creative work in one common engagement with the audience is bad. You risk meandering away from the strengths you want to develop and story you want to build — things your audience don’t necessarily even know are core to its experience.

As I’ve said before, if you do what the audience tells you, you’re doing exactly what it doesn’t need you for. Anything it can conceive of, it can do for itself. This is not about contempt for the fans — it’s about staying out of things they already have well in hand.

Creative leadership is inherently heterodox. Once you critically examine your work and build on it from a personal creative mission, is that you’ll stray from consensus thinking. Fans will punish you for not doing what they want or thinking what they think, and occasionally management will punish you for straying from standard narratives of what the game is, what it does, and where the audience fits in (or where they’d like the audience to think it fits in). Your peers will frequently wonder what the hell you’re talking about, because you’re wandering away from a common school of thought. It looks like a breach of some unspoken trust.

Snap. Crackle. Pop.

For me, losing faith in “toolkit” approaches is an example of my journey away from a consensus. Lots of people, including people I’ve worked for, love them, but I decided I didn’t like them right before I worked on World of Darkness: Mirrors and the Mage Chroniclers Guide — two toolkit books. I think this actually made my work better because I decided I wasn’t going to provide much in the way of standalone “hacks,” or chat much about how you can spin things to X, Y or Z, even though the wisdom floating around was very much that hacky XYZ was the way to go, all the kids love it, and it was worth a fat cheque. So instead of going on and on about how fantasy could be this or this (I warmed up with that, though) I just wrote a goddamned fantasy setting. I designed integrated systems instead of portable hacks. I did it because I believe that ideas best express themselves in defined examples and positions.

Creative leadership respects the project’s medium. One side effect of the hobby’s inferiority complex is that creators throw out hard-won technique for something from another, more popular medium. I’m a great advocate of treating RPGs as a cousin to other arts, with lots of cross-pollination, but not without adapting what we get from other sources and implementing it in the context of what we’ve learned in the hobby.

You don’t import WoW dynamics to D&D. You see what WoW has to offer that enhances (and does not constrict) the experiences D&D creates. Similarly, damning RPGs for not delivering a clichéd story structure is stupid; adapting those patterns to what RPGs do is smart. When you decide to transform a game beyond those strengths, you ought to do it consciously, and not because, in your heart of hearts, you’re afraid you’re some kind of fraud for talking about elves and NPCs and such.

Naturally, you’ll feel tension between the traditions of the form and your increasingly eccentric ideas. In that case, they fight it out in your head; the winner stands, or is transformed enough to live with.

Creative leadership fights for the time, talent and compensation needed to do it properly. Lightboxed art. Shitty editing. Plagiarism. General exploitation. Some of these are moral failures, but more of them are the result of failed discipline. Alone or with a team, a designer, developer, writer and/or manager needs to stay on top of this shit, and if they can’t, they need to change the project until it fits the effort they’re willing to marshal for it.

Time, talent and payment forms the exercises/food/rest relationship of creative work. They need to be wrestled into balance, and it’s too easy to transfer blame from one to the other. Skimp on time, and it’s the talent’s fault for being too slow. Skimp on talent, and you can drone on about budget limitations that prevent you from hiring real editors. In gigs that don’t pay, leadership needs to ensure they’re providing some sort of worthwhile compensation beyond that standards set by an exploitation-friendly community.

(Quick aside: People often think I object to folks working for free. This is untrue; I object to enriching a third party instead of the worker. Got it?)

Anyway, that’s what I think creative leadership is.

In my experience, gamers thick into the hobby love being literary, cinematic, or genre-y because they think (but might not admit) that tabletop RPGs are inferior pastimes, and that they need to redeem them by hitching them to more prestigious art forms — or failing that, to “real games,” defined as either popular games like CCGs or family games like Settlers of Catan or Monopoly. That’s the inferiority complex I talked about in the Suck article, and it’s driven much last two decades of RPG design.

Back in the Suck post I talked about three factors that combine to make RPG play experiences distinctive. Individually, they’re nothing special, but mix ‘em up and they provide the best reasons to play.

Place: Place is the sense of being in a fictional location. It’s the easiest part of the triad to nail. That’s the dungeon and hexes on the map, but it’s also about the relationships between places, such as trade routes, magical gates and war torn borders. Although RPGs focused on place early on, systematic work on place is uncommon, and often leans a bit too much on conceptual translations from video games (“zoning”). I think non-systematic work on place has led to a thick stew of ideas that newer systems fail to pick up — and since new game designers like to basically talk about how terrible what came before was, looking back isn’t usually a priority unless it’s for sentimental, anti-intellectual reasons — y’know, OSR style.

Society: Society could be the dynamics of a clique or a fictional nation — anything that helps us figure out what the fictional moral agents of the game think, do and relate to each other. Vampire: The Masquerade represented a huge step forward in thinking about society by using relationship maps and social rules that were gameable inside the story world, and not just in systems removed a step from the fiction.

The society concept has really degenerated due to systematization. Most social resolution systems aim for a false equivalence with violence, which is both sad and vaguely offensive (do I really “attack” someone to woo them?). This is not to say that social systems are bad, but they say things about the game’s world view.

In system or fiction, society sets expectations about the game’s values. My AD&D game’s social break points make mercy and negotiation central assumptions of the world, and leads to some powerful moments when enemies (like undead) don’t follow them. In Indigo, the anarchist command staff needed to present arguments that went to the mass of the ship’s crew. In Vampire, manipulating the rules of an Elysium or Conclave is a game within the game.

Time: Time — momentum in the story world — is probably the quality most in danger of being sacrificed to the gamer inferiority complex. Time is tricky, because we can let it just happen as something purely attached to character actions, but that leads to a hollow, repetitive play experience. Nowadays, people are so afraid that anything the GM does will make our inferiority-battered players feel even worse that nothing of consequence can be allowed to happen outside of characters’ pond.

Let me use visual metaphors. Conventional story is looking through a microscope. You can’t see much in that little circle, but you can see it exceptionally closely. Creators need to pack information into that tiny field, and imply things about the world beyond it, but rarely get to tell the reader that she’s insignificant because she can only see one tiny, bounded territory. You never want to imply that some microbes 1 mm outside the specimen dish are in the midst of this awesome epic that’s way better that the amoebic drama you get to see.

In RPGs, you stand up from the microscope, get a magnifying glass and look around. It’s impossible to build these contrived tableaux “on dish.” You’ll shove your magnifying glass anywhere! GMs have tried to solve this problem by screaming, “No, look at the fucking dish!” The newer, “indie” method is to create a tautology where looking at the dish is the only permissible form of looking, and didn’t you contractually agree to it, and isn’t asking what’s over there exactly like caning a child? One retro method is to talk about how In Ye Olde Days, Hexe I-10 Didst Hold Paramecia So Fierce,” and then boot everybody into the nearest dungeon, where the GM could constrain your vision again.

A dynamic setting allows things to happen that are not merely backstory, but matter to the world on its own terms — and yes, even letting important things happen to *someone else.* We do not do this to upstage the protagonists. We do it because we want the players to feel less constrained about where they point the spyglass, and so that they have the opportunity to create their *own* sense of importance. A world that’s all hooks is always less interesting.

Power Points

Every time your character gains an encounter or daily power he or she also earns a power point. You no longer expend powers just by using them. Instead, you spend power points to activate a power: 1 power point for encounter powers and 2 power points for daily powers. Your power point total represents the maximum you can possess at any given time along with the amount you possess after a full rest.

If you use the same power more than once during an encounter, increase its cost by 1 (non-cumulative) unless you have selected it for more than one use in a row using the standard rules.

In addition, you may spend power points on powers other than your own. This represents a mix temporary inspiration, cross-training and luck. Doing so incurs additional costs. Add to the cost of such powers as follows:

• Power belongs to your class, but you don’t know it: +1
• Power belongs to a class you have trained in via multiclassing, but you don’t know it: +1
• Power belongs to a different class (that you have not trained in), but the same power source (Martial, Arcane, etc.): +2
• Power belongs to a power source and class you have not trained in (a fighter uses a warlock power): +3 and an in-game rationale.

Recovering Power Points

Power points recover at the rate of one per scene or per two hours in the game world (whichever is slower; notable scenes are assumed to be more taxing than insignificant stretches of time), or completely after a night’s rest.

Power Points and Action Points

You may spend an action point to immediately regain 3 power points, and vice versa. I hate how uninteresting and stingy the game is with action points anyway.

Lending Power Points

You may lend power points to another character that are earmarked to use a power that you know or belongs to your class. For example, a fighter might give a warlock quick advice about hand to hand combat. This uses up your character’s next minor action. You may lend the extra cost the character would incur for using that power.

(Half-Baked) Stunt Points and Item Points

Maybe you can assign extra points to be harvested from the environment if characters succeed at skill challenges. maybe you get points for items that can only be used to fuel item powers.

That’s it. The number of points and values probably need tweaking, but this at least throws the concept down.

Exploding Dice: I resisted it, but it looks like I’ll need it to help characters deal with long odds and can’t-hit scenarios. So if a hit die rolls an unmodified 10, roll another die and add it to the total.

“Kills:” Naturally, the final Kill can represent a nonlethal victory, such as subdual, a knockout a wrestling hold, etc. And no nonsense about declaring intent is necessary.

Mobs and Swarms: You can allow multiple hit dice to represent a bunch of similar creatures. Obviously.

Parrying: You can split some hit dice to parry, or even use all of your hit dice. Make an attack roll; instead of being penalized by armour, you’re penalized by the attacker’s weapon. Each “Kill” removes one Kill from the enemy’s attack. You can always hold dice back to do this, and can announce “parry!” right after the attack roll.

You must devote as many hit dice as the opponent possesses to the sum total of your attack and parry dice each round, or all of your hit dice if you don’t have as many hit dice as your enemy. That’s before any modifiers to dice.

Unarmed Grappling: Grappling ignores armour. Each “Kill” forces the opponent to remain entangled with the opponent for a round so that he can’t move, but inflicts no damage. If an opponent parries your grappling attempt they also inflict damage — 1 Kill per “Kill” of parrying. Optionally, you can shove an opponent 10 feet per “kill”" instead, but you immediately lose control of them next round.

Unarmed Striking: Unarmed striking is standard combat with a weapon modifier of 0, but can considered to be two weapon combat if the attacker chooses.

Unlimited Criticals: This isn’t very OD&D but it is very Chainmail to allow a weaker opponent to smack a stronger one with instant death. So attacks now inflict a number of Kills equal to each die divided by 10, rounded down (1 at 10, 2 at 20, 3 at 30, etc.).

Weapon Load and Shields: Some guys want two weapons. Some guys want shields. Some guys want a two-handed weapon. Some guys want one hand free. Let’s make each option interesting but not overwhelming.

• Two Handed Weapon: Two-handed weapons benefit from 150% of the character’s Strength bonus.
• Two Weapons: You may split dice to attack opponents that you would normally need to use your full hit dice against more than once and you earn a bonus hit die to one of these pools when you attempt multiple attacks, but your attacks suffer a -2 penalty because of lighter weapons or lack of coordination. You can always refuse the benefits to ignore the penalties.
• Weapon and Unarmed Hand: The standard. No adjustments, though you can treat your off hand as a weapon and act as if you have two weapons, above.
• Weapon and Shield: If you split dice to parry, add 1 die to your parry roll. The shield’s type can add up to +4 to your parry if you’re a fighter or cleric, but nothing if you’re a thief.

Weaklings: Some creatures are weaklings with ½ hit die. They suffer a Kill on a 5 or better, and roll 1d5 to attack, but their rolls explode on a 10 on the d10 die face (even though the roll’s value is 5). In a mob, 2 weaklings = 1 hit die.

Hit Dice: Every character has a certain number of d10s (I started with d6es but the modifiers are too big) but no hit points. Fighters get 1 per level, clerics and thieves get 2 per 3 levels and magic users get 1 per 2 levels.

Battle Points: Every class gets a pool of battle points to modify incoming attacks or their own strikes after the dice are rolled. At 1st level, start with 1d5 (half a d10) battle points modified by your Constitution modifier (minimum 1).

• Fighters get 1d2+Con adjustment per level (min 1). Fighters enjoy the special Con adjustment they get in AD&D.
• Magic users get 1d3+Con adjustment (min 1) for each level where they don’t get bonus hit dice. (I tried to find a d10 only way, but they all sucked. You can always divide d10 rolls by 3 and discard 10s instead).
• Other classes get 1d5+Con adjustment (min 1) for each level where they don’t get bonus hit dice.

Battle points compensate for dead levels and add a bit of resource management to the game. You recover 1d5 + Con modifier (min. 0 — you can fail to recover them) battle points at the end of each combat. Reroll your entire pool after a full night’s rest. You might get a second wind or lousy day to come no matter what you rolled at character creation.

Attribute Modifiers: Strength modifies melee attack rolls by -3 to +3. Dexterity modifies ranged attack rolls by -3 to +3, and opponents’ attack rolls by the same amount. Use boxed set D&D tables for reference. These modifiers apply to each die rolled.

Class Equipment Modifiers: Fighters impose up to +4 to each die when they roll to attack due to weapon load, and penalize attacks by up to -4 from armour.  Clerical wargear imposes up to +1 to attack, but -3 against attacks; thieves’ gear applies up to +3/-1. Magic users apply +2/0. Magic gear can add further bonuses.

In this context, equipment is a mixture of gear the character is trained to wear (fighters are comfortable in heavy armour) and the maximum potential a character can get out of a weapon or piece of armour (a magic user with a greatsword isn’t going to get more than a -2 bonus). Really though, this is inspired by Chainmail’s use of troop type to set “to hit” numbers.

Attacking: Apply bonuses and roll your hit dice. Your target number is 10, modified by bonuses and penalties to each die. You may also modify attacks with your battle points — again, adjustments apply to each die.

Every 10+ roll is a Kill — enough to slay a normal human. 20+ inflicts two Kills. Critical hits are there to provide a further inducement to spend battle points.

You may choose to make each Kill equal to a hit die and subtract them when a target suffers Kills, creating a death spiral, or you can track Kills separately. Each character gets 1 Kill per hit die.

Characters die at -1 Kills and defeat monsters when they knock them down to 0 Kills.

Multiple Attacks: You may split your hit dice to attack inferior opponents. You must devote at least as many of your hit dice to attacking an enemy as the enemy has hit dice, to a maximum of your own, current hit dice. That means a 10th level fighter can attack 10 1 hit die goblins, but needs all of his dice against one 12 hit die giant.

That’s the lesson I’ve learned in this phase of developing Knights of the Hidden Sun, Chris Challice’s interstellar fantasy RPG. I got a bit obsessed with the third chapter because it covers runecraft: one of the most distinctive concepts in the game. Runecraft gives cosmopolitan Roaans space opera luxury, telepathy, even immortality. The Gods are dead, destroyed by an exploding star, but they left hints about the secret powers of souls. Later scholars reversed engineered these innate divine powers, developing them like a technology that tore the galaxy from the Dark Age.

The only problem? The galaxy needs souls — billions of souls — to power its industries, starships, data processing across the Star Net. Everything is an ancestral intervention. Ghosts manipulate dream-data and fill hypersonic craft with motive force. Souls burn in the limbs of immortal Golems.

It’s awesome, but I kept asking myself, What is it like to live with this stuff? Runecraft is build by guilds, sold by merchants, used by everyone — but I thought it would be sloppy not to expand Chris’ material into a more involved discussion of what runecrafters do day to day, how the economics of the soul trade work . . . everything. It was just too cool so I started doing too much.

So I got stuck in the chapter. Now I’m crawling out, looking away from heavy immersion in to the world through setting text alone. Thanks to this experience I’ve learned to look at the work holistically, since looking at one part creates the temptation to make it bear burdens that other sections can take up just fine. It’s also taught me to pick my “battles.” Some information is critical and creates the framework of the setting. KotHS is an unusual setting so finding pieces of the frame has been a challenge, particularly when some very cool aspects are presented subtly. At some point you have to trust that the roots — vital information needed to envision the world — have been planted.  I think they’re done for this chapter and I need to finish it off, move on and get to edits, production and all that cool, game making stuff.

Sorry to those of you who’ve been waiting! It’s coming along, it’s cool, it’s taking a bit of time (It’s a much bigger draft than originally anticipated — over double the size!) but we’re moving forward.

Just thought you should know.

Jim took me very seriously and came back with a very detailed rebuttal (each word goes to a different segment of the response). I really appreciate that, so this post follows his with some thoughts about friendship in RPGs, why I emphasize it and what it’s doing to design and culture. I brought up how the decline of friendship might influence RPGs before, and linking to it is a good way to refresh the idea and remind everyone that this is a real social problem, not an off the cuff supposition.

Naturally, veteran readers may wonder where I get off telling anybody about friendship, given the fact that I don’t play well with their pretend-happy communities and just insulted them in this sentence. Here’s what I think:

• Just because you trade big emotional notes with people over the internet doesn’t mean you’re making friends with them.
• Online communities like to model themselves on performance communities (both crave attention over intimacy) but tabletop RPGs aren’t about performing for a third party.
• While low trust groups have always been part of roleplaying, the past decade marks this being considered the best we can aspire to, instead of something to be overcome with practice.
• Friendship rot is pretty embarrassing to status-conscious gamers and geeky folks in general, and the most embarrassed react by attacking the whole project of friendship. These are the guys that quote that Geek Fallacies article all the time. They need procedural rules because they can’t hack an ethos of compassionate friendship.

(I don’t think Jim necessarily fits the bill in all ways, or maybe even any of them. If I named names, he wouldn’t be on the list. This is a general observation.)

People frequently think a relationship is friendship when in my view, it isn’t. So what am I talking about? What are the characteristics of friendship?

A friend is an end, not a means.

This is the granddaddy and heart of “indie” gaming’s failure. Its ethics are corrupt from design up, and destructive to real friendships. It assumes that relationships mutual, egoistic exploitation are the rule, and that the goal of any system is to efficiently regulate selfishness.

True friendship requires you to think of any systems, customs and tools as ways to please your friends first. Even your character exists to further that friendship, not drive an ego trip. Even if you believe that all actions are ultimately selfish, this principle remains true because in that case, a friend is someone for whom you find selfish satisfaction in their enjoyment. They are very nearly one and the same.

Friends trust each other.

This too-obvious point never seems to stick. Players don’t trust GMs, RPG theory types don’t trust game designers and people post complains to RPG boards because they don’t trust their groups to handle an issue. (Yeah, posting behind your group’s back means you fail the trust test in a pretty basic way.)

If your relationships are like this you’ll need systems that are more than toys to play with (and ignore or tweak when the spirit moves you). They have to carry the creative process because your group can’t function without them.

At one point, Jim talks about what Capes “promises” him that GURPS doesn’t. That’s the problem: Games don’t promise. People promise. Friends make promises you can trust. They’re the basis; rules are toys that provide interesting output.

(Naturally, somebody’s going to call this “system doesn’t matter” rhetoric. It isn’t. Toys matter.)

Friends place emotional bonds over ritual relationships.

That brings me to my next point. Friendship thrives in liminal moments where no one has a particularly well-defined obligation, but come through nonetheless. Nobody tells you to pass your friend the spotlight, but you do it because you want her to be happy. Telling that joke might damage focus, but it’s fun, and you want your friends to have fun.

Recent RPG designs target these undefined moments, incorporate them into formal rules of play – the RPG ritual, in other words – and steals them from the dominion of ad hoc judgments based on mutual trust. And no wonder: Without the primacy of an emotional connection, you’ll see these interstices as threats. You’ll bitch about Rule Zero all day along.

A friend sets the example for new relationships.

If you don’t have a selfless, trusting informal relationship with the people you game with they aren’t your friends – not really. You may swear friendship up and down, but your claim lacks substance. And if your self-defined friendships lack these qualities, what about the people you meet online or at conventions? If anything, it’ll be worse. That’s why in my experience, the “indie” table is one of the unhappiest at the con.

I often surprise people by being so affable in face to face interactions, and when I run games at conventions (something I’m generally reluctant to do, by the way – when it happens, it’s to support relationships I value) people usually leave satisfied.

I associate gaming with some great friendships, so my first reflex is to assume that the potential for more of the same exists with anyone I play with. I don’t worry about them being “little bitches” (to refer to Jim’s comment about actors and improve) because it’s not acting – the performance to the third party isn’t adding its unique pressures. Tabletop play is about intimate experiences. It thrives on compassion. It needs friendship, or good faith in friendship to come.

• Distribute a retro cyberpunk RPG this way.
• You’d get an artist to gussy up the hard drive to look like some menacing bit of futuristic technology according to 80s design aesthetics. I’m thinking of early Walkmans with chunky, battered chrome, maybe with an LED readout — actually, especially with an LED readout. I’d probably keep some of the drive’s steel around just because hard drives look agelessly rugged and cool by themselves.
• The game would be written in a user-editable web format (maybe an offline WordPress installation and crosslinked wiki) with the option to print a version or see it in PDF.
• It would of course be graphically rich, with all kinds of art I can’t afford, but it would also include a bunch of tools such as a dice roller, a character creator and sheet, maps and so forth. Of course, if I’m indulging a fantasy maybe an engine for graphical netrunning that automatically implemented skills.
• The offline web format provides the means to port it online as well. Perhaps a hosted chat system should be thrown in there too. Ideally, you should be able to just move the whole thing to a server with minimal tweaking.
• Not many ideas systemwise. It would have a light setting, perhaps with an annex about how to “modernize” it for those who want cell phones, more than three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi, and posthuman pretensions, though I think gripes about the aging tech kind of miss the point.
• It would only be available via hard drive — maybe in cheap old 6GB drives (I was looking through my old Quantum 6GB drive from 1998 when the idea hit me, and looked them up – 5 bucks each on EBay for good ones, 99 cents for maybe-dodgy ones).
• The super crazy and impractical option would be to integrate the game into a dedicated operating system, such as a build of Chromium OS. You would “boot to RPG” when it’s time to play. Chromium is designed to primarily boot from SSD if I’m not mistaken, though, so it’s not my first choice. The *click* *whirr* of battered steel is just too cool.
• . . . and the craziest option of all would be to only ship the game in full computer form — probably an ASUS Keyboard PC because it has the cyberdeck form factor. It would need some case modding to make it look right. Yeah, not gonna happen. But if you’re dreaming, may as well dream big . . .
• There would be some kind of home site for each drive/game to talk to and share resources with.
• Of course, you’d make the game open source, though you’d sell the physical artifact for some outrageous price to cover the costs. In my fantasy I saw one option of using this format to release an official Cyberspace Trilogy RPG (it’s a fantasy, after all) with proceeds going to charity (because of course this would convince William Gibson’s representation to not charge me any money! — and because I am actually considering ideas for a permanent RPG for charity right now) via the inflated price of selling an RPG in an artisan-modified hard drive.

I could actually do 90% of this (not get the license, do the art or do some of the cooler UI mods) if I had a spare self lying around that wasn’t busy, or somebody to pay me a truckload of money to drop everything I’m doing. Maybe a wealthy patron can order it done or a network of nerds can work on it.

Of course, it’s more doable once you scale back expectations, but once you commit to the hard drive format I think you’d need to throw something pretty damned special under the hood.