However, unlike a lot of scenarios like this, Grant has left us with a somewhat longer window before we have to act, which does several interesting things.

First, it creates a sense of looming dread that we’re going to have to live with for a while. Incidentally, Grant seems fond of this – we agreed to an unspecified favor for a water fey earlier in the game and that won’t be coming due any time soon; we’re about two months in the world’s time into the game, which means we have about 10 more months until that favor comes due. The saving of the newborn is going to have to happen at least 2-3 months before that, however, which gives us both time to prepare and time for the situation to get more complicated. There’s also the near certainty that the party is currently no match for Auntie Bloat. Which means we need to gain some levels. Plural. Fast.

Second, speaking of getting more complicated, it’s pushing us to solidify alliances we’ve started forming. The party has sought the aid of Rishi, a Kenku sorcerer and the first friendly NPC we met on the island that didn’t also arrive on our ship. But in order to get that aid, we have to help him secure another teacher for his apprentice should he die in the effort, which means we’re going to be traveling to another nearby island (or perhaps several) in the archipelago on a just-salvaged boat we recovered from some gnolls that had been eaten by giant spiders.

Finally, it’s acting as a mechanism to tie several plot threads together. As mentioned in previous blog posts, the party has been building relationships and a reputation as folks useful to the colony (and to a lesser extent, the Kenku), and as such has been able to call in some favors. The boat itself is a massive favor that Governor Hester Warwick has granted us because while the party is so often the bearer of news of new complications that she gets a headache every time we report in, we’ve also gotten results every time she’s sent us to do something. Rishi is willing to help us because we’ve helped him and the Kenku in a big way once already (in fact, he was the one who sent us to steal the item from Auntie Bloat in the first place). And the colony is starting to expand to the point where the target painted on us for various threats to zero in on is getting bigger and more brightly-colored.

This long-term approach does have a single significant drawback, however: it’s far enough out, there’s a certain risk of losing the sense of dread, and on the other side of the coin there’s also a chance (as killed the Shadowrun game) that the players will become paralyzed with second-guessing and not go anywhere. Do that long enough and even a very good campaign can die.

Still, I think there’s a lot of value in taking this longer view. In a previous campaign of mine, a generally very successful one, we sat down at the end and realized that the player characters had started at level 5 and had wound up at level 21 less than six months of game time later. Their journey had been a constant charge through an unending chain of immediate threats and un-ignorable emergencies. They’d had no time to breathe at all; in the real world, even hardened combat verterans couldn’t keep up the pace they’d kept up, and in retrospect, that had been poor storytelling on my part.

So I think there’s some real value in placing a problem that’s certain and scary on the horizon and letting the players get to it over a longer period of time rather than dropping it on top of them and forcing them to react NOW like so many GMs, including me, have done.

As usual, I’d love to hear your comments on this topic. How have you and your gaming group paced your threats, and how did it work out?

This week’s image is used, unaltered, under creative commons and comes from Schizoform.

On this New Year’s Day, hear the good news that God allows do-overs. God created do-overs. We get a second chance…or a third, or fourth, or fifth…or seventy times seven. -From the January 1 church bulletin of the Marengo United Methodist Church.

A lot of us make resolutions around this time of year – things we want to do better or stop doing, and therefore be better. This has proven difficult throughout human history – in fact, the Bible itself can be boiled down into “stop doing the things!” It doesn’t typically prove to be any better on an individual level. We start the new year full of life and excitement, determined to take on the world and our own bad habits and then life eventually grinds us down until sometime around August, we either have completely forgotten what our resolutions were, or we’re so dispirited that we have trouble seeing the point.

Some of this is just human nature and even human physiology. There’s some pretty compelling science that habits – never mind actual addictions – are so heard to break because the more we repeat something, the more it physically affects our brains. Common behaviors form what are essentially hard-wired neural pathways. This isn’t always a bad thing, mind you. This is also the reason why things like tying your shoes no longer require conscious thought by the time you’ve reached adulthood. But that also means that bad habits get hard-wired in as well. (So in Psalm 139:14 when the word “fearfully” comes up, it’s not hard to see this powerful double-edged psychological sword as part of the fear.)

So what does that mean for someone trying to change as a Christian? Probably lots and lots of things, but several big ones I want to focus on.

The first is that, as you may suspect, games are actually your friend in this!  One of the ways that works well for some people (me very much included) to form better habits is to game-ify the process. (If you doubt this, you really should take the time to watch Jane McGonigal’s TED talk on the subject.) As some of our listeners may already suspect, this is where I bring up Habitica. If you’ve never looked at it, look at it. If nothing else, it’s a fantastic to-do list app, and the RPG elements are obviously a bonus. The free version is more than adequate, though it’s helped me enough that I decided to subscribe at a small monthly amount ($5). That gets you access to… …snazzy-looking cosmetic stuff, mostly. There are other tools out there as well. This Lifehacker Article covers some of them, including Habitica (called Habit RPG back then).

The second is accountability. I’ve had some fairly poor results sticking with an exercise regimen in the past, and since I’m now no longer getting much exercise at work, this is getting more and more important with every passing day. I asked some members of a small, private Facebook group I’m in to periodically check in with me about how it’s going, and Grant’s wife (who is a member of that group) has been pretty diligent about not letting me forget this is a thing I’m supposed to do. The trick, for me at least, is to not have be a beatdown, just a check-in.

The third is that it can be good to keep your ears open. I had a horrible time keeping up any sort of regular prayer schedule until I heard about this prayer that can be said quickly as I step into my morning shower and learned this method of praying through my day that I can do at night. I tried them and they stuck. Don’t be afraid to grab tools where you can find them.

Finally and most important is grace. God is far, far more patient with us than we are with ourselves. The Bible is a continuous loop of screwing up and being forgiven from Genesis all the way to Revelation. (See the link under “stop doing the things!”) God has forgiven, does forgive, and will continue to forgive, and while none of us will ever reach Christ-like perfection this side of eternity, we can get better. There’s also a nugget of wisdom I’d like to share from a close friend of mine. I came to him feeling guilty about how hard it had been for me to resist a habitual sin. I’d managed not to do it this time, but the amount of effort it had required from me had me down. His response was “Just because there was a struggle doesn’t mean you lost, dude.” Now to some folks, that may seem obvious, but to me, that was profound.

I still have a lot to work on this year, but there is something wonderful and enticing about a clean slate, isn’t there?

This week’s image used under Creative Commons comes from Travis Isaacs.

But seriously: Last week, the party wrapped up the first dungeon crawl of the campaign. This was kind of a major milestone for our gaming group, on both sides of the virtual GM’s screen. My wife had never actually explored a proper ‘dungeon’ before, since she’s relatively new to gaming. I’d put maps together for the Savage Shadowrun we played a while back, but those were mostly floor plans I’d filed the serial numbers off and turned into heist scenarios; this was a properly-gridded dungeon, which the players had no foreknowledge of, and that was a first for our group. And for myself, this was a bit of a personal milestone: My previous D&D game was a terrible Eberron game, where I’d focused so heavily on making pretty maps that I completely neglected to put together a coherent plot. So just by virtue of entering a dungeon at all, we were off to a good start.

Good thing, too.

Recap

Monastery on the Shore – Floor 1

As mentioned previously, the shipwrecked and battered colonists had taken refuge at the entrance of a large structure built into the shore-ward cliffs to defend themselves against further sahuagin attacks. I mentioned a few things that the colonists were short on and in immediate need of, making sure to include fresh water in that list for … well, you’ll see why.

The governor—one Baroness Hester Warwick—asked the player characters to explore the structure and make sure there weren’t any nasty surprises lurking inside, behind the colonists. They waited until morning, loaded up on supplies—in particular, Garm (the human fighter) grabbed a sturdy club and Lambert (the human cleric) cast a light spell on it to act as a torch. A few other light spells were cast—it’s a cantrip in 5th Edition, so any party with a cleric should never be hurting for light in a dungeon—and in they went.

The vestibule (A) and long hallway were quite weather-worn, as you’d expect from an ancient structure carved from sandstone next to a hurricane-prone ocean. Few details were gleaned from the long hallway, though some evidence of bas-relief carvings remained and a few nature scenes were legible. Centuries of sand and natural debris, blown up the stairs by storms over time, made the entrance hallways messy, but passable. At the other end of this hallway stood chamber (B), apparently a sort of ‘hub’ for traffic, with a balcony, stairs and several exits.

The players quickly explored the space the northeast of this chamber, revealing it to be an empty store-room devoid of everything except pottery shards. They then went southeast to (D), which turned up a lot of trash, oversized snake pellets (uh-oh), oversized snake skins (uh-oh), and a rather prettily-carved bone bracelet (uh… okay?) which Aster (the half-elven thief) claimed for her own. These rooms appeared to have once been very plain living quarters, with a slab to sleep on—rather like cells. The larger room (C) right at the cliff face, however, had a window and seemed rather nicer, except for the giant poisonous snake. This struck at Aster and knocked her unconscious, but Garm and Lambert quickly dealt with it, and Lambert’s cure wounds put Aster back on her feet immediately.

Naturally, the next step was to dump the giant snake out the window onto the colonists below, which occasioned some comment later and some screaming almost immediately.

Heading back, the party crossed over to (E), where Lambert began to get a vague feeling that he’d been somewhere like this before. Nothing immediately came to mind; but this room, with a raised dais, bookshelves (whose contents had long since rotted away), and stone benches and tables, was the first space that looked reasonably habitable.

Monastery On The Shore – Floor 2

Heading up the stairs north of (E), with Aster (and her darkvision) scouting ahead, the characters noticed a flickering glow around the corner. This turned out to be coming from a number of giant fire beetles living in (F). The party made a bit of noise in the hall, which attracted the fire beetles, and what I’d planned to be a sort of centerpiece fight around rough terrain (along with a nasty surprise) turned into a simple matter of luring beetles into the hallway and dealing with them one or two at a time. Garm and Lambert did most of the work, and Aster eventually snuck into (F), climbed some of the large debris (fallen from the ceiling over time) and picked off the last one with her shortbow. She did trigger that “nasty surprise” I mentioned on her way back, but the violet fungus whiffed its surprise attack and was easily dealt with afterwards. The party was covered with bioluminescent goop, but otherwise completely unharmed!

On examining this largest room (F), Lambert could finally hazard a reasonable guess as to what this complex had once been: A monastery of some sort. The rooms below were for visitors, including a nicer room for an occasional VIP, and the gathering room was potentially something like a chapter house. The damp, fungus-covered room the party currently stood in could have been a refectory; and that supposition was strengthened by the discovery of a kitchen in the next room (G). Attached to that through a narrow hallway was a washroom (H), probably used for hot baths and laundry depending on what was needed. (The party found a small, corroded statue of Lisopheth, the goddess of fresh water, in an alcove in this room.) While the way up near (G) and (H) was blocked by dirt and limbs, water and a breeze were clearly leaking through, indicating that this passageway probably lead outside to the top of the cliff at one time.

East of the refectory was a spiral staircase leading down; another ramp leading up into darkness; and a pair of rooms (I) and (J) which had apparently once been dormitories. Lambert and Garm estimated that, judging by the space and scattered remnants of simple bedframes, there were probably no more than a dozen monks in this space at any given time. A definite stink filled this space, and Aster discovered a small iron dagger with a bird’s beak as its pommel next to a variety of unrecognizable bones and a few large, black feathers. The three giant rats in (J) explained the stink and remnants. Once again, the party dealt with the problem rather cleverly: Garm and Lambert marched rather noisily around to the west side of (J), drawing their attention so Aster could sneak up on the rats and dispatch them from the northern entrance to the room. It worked so well that after the first two rats were down, I stopped combat, narrating the third rat’s demise rather than wasting time rolling. A search afterwards turned up a small box of unrecognizable and likely ancient gold coins stuffed into a crack in the wall.

At this point, we wrapped up the session, and it turned out everyone had rather conveniently just hit level 2. (No, I didn’t actually plan that—it was providential.) The players decided their characters would take a short rest in the hallway north of (I), to get away from the fetid stench of the giant rats’ nest. A few Hit Dice were spent to heal up, and in between sessions everyone did the minimal book-keeping required to level up in 5th Edition.

After their rest, the party decided to go down the spiral staircase to the east. I hadn’t mapped this part of the dungeon, partly because I wanted the players’ imaginations to fill in, partly because there wasn’t going to be any combat down here, and—well, partly because I’d run out of time prepping for the session. A flooded hallway with flickering white light shining through the semi-salt water confronted the party. Garm took some of Aster’s rope, a piton, and his club and dove in, using the weight of his chainmail to walk as far as he could before having to turn around and return for air. He’d just about reached his limit—a very impressive thirty feet underwater in heavy armor—when he felt steps and was able to climb up into surprisingly fresh air beyond. After tacking down the rope, the other two could cross more easily, and everyone made it through that obstacle unscathed.

The light turned out to be coming from a continual flame spell over a large arched doorway; but of more immediate interest to a party of treasure-hunting PCs was the storeroom next to them. This turned out to contain an old stone chest filled with copper, gold, silver, a magical gem, an obviously magical cloak, and a magical rod of some sort. (More on these later.)

The larger chamber, oddly enough, contained nothing but a large pool of fresh water filled by a spring flowing from a crack in the wall. The party was just about to leave when a naiad (a water fey, rather like a dryad) rose up from the pool. She answered a few questions—most notably, she confirmed that this had been a monastery for worshipers of powerful fey, whom she also served and who had bound her to this pool a very long time before. (Turns out fey aren’t good at keeping time, especially when they can’t see the sun, moon or stars.) She confirmed that the flooded hallway would drain over the next day or so, and agreed to let the colonists draw water from her pool on three conditions: First, that the colonists did not defile or dirty her pool; second, that the party deal with the trapped spirit of a monk trapped in undeath within the monastery; and third, that in a year and a day the three party members would return to perform a service for the naiad. This last was a bit worrisome—no one clever likes to owe a fey creature favors or services—but given how desperately the colony needed fresh water, the party agreed.

Back upstairs, the party carefully approached the final room of the monastery, which turned out to be the abbot’s quarters. This too wasn’t mapped, because I’d (again) not had time, but also because leaving it a bit vague made this part rather creepier. The room turned out to have a private chapel of sorts attached to it, and the skeletal remains of the abbot were still on the floor there, where he’d clearly met some sort of violent end. After that discovery, the shadow I’d had lurking in the room, making furtive movements, finally attacked. Unfortunately, its attacks were pretty much ineffective—I just couldn’t roll well, Lambert had just acquired his turn undead class feature after leveling up, and everyone else cleverly used their lights to keep track of the shadow and prevent it from hiding. It only managed one successful attack on Garm before being defeated.

That pretty much wrapped things up—the monastery had been explored, treasure had been found, and an inconvenient but inexhaustible supply of fresh water had been acquired for the colony. The naiad’s spring won’t serve the colony forever, but it definitely solves a major, immediate need. The party also got to keep most of their treasure—taxation is an interesting little wrinkle I threw into this game, and something I’ll have to talk about soon—and the magic items turned out to be an elemental gem of water (which summons a water elemental when smashed), a cloak of the manta ray (which lets its wearer swim easily and breathe underwater), and an immovable rod (a classic D&D item, and one with an infinite variety of uses for a clever group of PCs.) All in all, not bad for two sessions of work!

GM’s Notes

My roleplaying career started with D&D Third Edition, and the wacky old dungeons of earlier editions had been relegated to history by that time. The D&D CRPGs I played before I ever picked up dice—Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Planescape: Torment—hinted at those just a little bit, but they mostly presented dungeons which fit well into the setting and whose construction mostly made sense. No truly weird features, like White Plume Mountain’s hovering river, no Tomb of Horrors‘s demon mouth of annihilation, nor Undermountain’s … everything. As a result, I’ve always believed a “good” dungeon should have a clear purpose and a sensible history in within its setting, and that fantastic features likewise need to suit the setting and need to exist for reasons which made good sense to their creators. Certainly this ancient, ruined monastery fits that mold; it had an ecosystem of sorts, and its history mattered a great deal (and will hopefully continue to matter going forward.)

On a personal note, I managed to spend minimal time on these maps, and that’s great. I’ve mentioned on the podcast before that my Eberron game failed in part because I spent so much time making pretty maps in MapTool, with all sorts of layers and dynamic lighting and visibility and pretty special effects, that the plot never developed. That didn’t happen this time—hallelujah!—and the game was much improved for it.

I don’t have much else to say about this dungeon crawl, in part because dungeon crawls are sort of their own reward. A good dungeon serves the same purpose as any other location in a RPG—they’re places where the game’s story is developed both procedurally and dramatically. What makes a dungeon crawl special is the challenges—done right, they’re a series of puzzles, whether those be combat-related or not. These encounters were mostly combats, but I hope to change that in the future. (I do tend to struggle with non-combat encounters a bit.)

We likely won’t be doing too many dungeon crawls in this game. There’s too much overworld exploration, colonial social development, and external diplomacy (hint hint!) to do in this game for that. But there will be a few more, and while I’ve got plenty of room to improve, I think I’ve set the bar reasonably high for those future dungeons.

(Well, okay, just one quick ado. A word from Grant on stats: We rolled stats since that “felt more like D&D”, using the “4d6, drop lowest” method. Since I don’t mind characters actually being competent, if anyone had two stats less than 10 to start with, I let them re-roll one of those bad stats once more. Dealing with one “bad” stat is a fun little challenge, and it can give a D&D character something unique to remember them by. Dealing with more than that just gets frustrating.)

Lambert

Lambert is my PC. He’s a Neutral Good cleric of a benevolent nature goddess, and he’s part of a clerical order called the Oaken Scales (as in “scales of justice”) that exists to cultivate mutually-beneficial harmony between civilization and the natural world. I made him with the Hermit background and the Nature cleric domain. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve played a lot of kind of hard-edged, zealous, avenging divine magic users before, and Lambert represents a conscious effort to move away from that. While he is both capable of violence and reasonably skilled at it, he is better described as a peaceful person who knows how to fight than as a warrior. He is empathetic, measured in his speech, kindhearted, friendly, and helpful. When I was rolling his stats up, I wound up with a single 8 which I put into Dexterity, explaining it in-character as some nerve damage from an old accidental injury. He has the worst stats of anyone in the party (though with a 16 in strength and a 17 in Wisdom, he’s still no slouch!), but that’s handily compensated for by the fact that he’s a primary spellcaster. He joined the colony as both a spiritual guide and because as a member of his order, he knows about wilderness survival, agriculture, herbalism, and medicine, which makes him a very useful person to have around when you’re months of ocean sailing away from your homeland. He compensates for his low DEX with a shield and some chain mail and fights with a warhammer (though I’m hoping to change that out for a sword soon).

Asterales (Aster)

Aster is Grant’s wife’s PC, and she is an interesting and well-developed twist on the “street rat rogue” archetype. The illegitimate child of a barmaid and a wealthy, influential elf in the old world, she was basically left to her own devices growing up and as a result, she is tough. (She was built with the Urchin background.) She’s also fortunate to have 18s in both Dexterity and Intelligence, which makes her exceedingly good at roguey things. Her backstory is already having some effects on the campaign; our last player’s PC is her bodyguard (but more about him in his own entry). For my money, at least, one of Aster’s most interesting traits is the particular spin she’s put on the Chaotic Neutral alignment. She will steal, but not out of simple greed or for the fun of it – her ethics are best described as “who needs it more?” She’ll steal things if she perceives herself as needing them more than whoever is in possession of them currently. This particular outlook makes her both more useful in a party and more interesting than the standard “chaotic neutral rogue.” She has a bit of an independent streak and isn’t used to working as part of a team yet (though she’s taking to it very quickly.) In play, she is proving to be a shrewd tactician, a very capable scout, and an absolutely lethal threat to anything she can flank or get the drop on. She fights with a bow and a short sword, and has a few daggers and a whip for when the situation calls for them.

Garm

The other full human in the party. Garm’s player decided he wanted a challenge in character creation, and set out to turn the “generic fighter” archetype into something more engaging. A Chaotic Neutral fighter with an 18 Strength and the Entertainer background, Garm is a recently-freed slave gladiator who was sold into the pits at such a young age he has no memories predating his life as a guy who kills for the entertainment of others. Such a background has made for many a brooding, gloomy PC over the many years of tabletop RPGs, but Garm’s player has taken an entirely different tack. One of Garm’s defining characteristics is his whole “I’m really new to this” attitude. He’s never been free. He’s never been part of a society. He’s never had actual friends or people depending on him, but ever since Aster’s father purchased him as a bodyguard for his daughter as he shipped her off to the new world (where she can’t embarrass him) he’s been actively learning how the real world works. The other thing that makes Garm work as a character is that he’s smart. His Intelligence is right behind his strength, statistically-speaking, and he is a quick (and dramatic!) problem solver. This is the guy who, in the very first fight of the entire campaign, ripped a shark off his own leg and attempted to beat a sahuagin with it! When he’s not bludgeoning enemies with live aquatic predators, he uses a greataxe in combat.

And that’s the party! They’ve proven to be fun and effective so far, and the relational dynamics are already starting to develop. It’ll be fun to see how this goes.

I’m not going to give a rundown of the characters in this session, except a very basic race-and-class. I’ll save character writeups for another time, because they deserve a post all their own.

Recap

I started things off with a bit of narration to set the scene: A colony ship laden with people and goods, about fifteen weeks at sea. It’s en route to a distant archipelago believed to be rich in land, goods, and magic—the last being a rare thing indeed in the “old world”. Unfortunately, this vessel (which I still need to name!) has been separated from its sister ship, and has been driven before a hurricane for several days. It’s just run aground, and the morning light and clearing weather shows that its hull is badly damaged, and that the storm surge and winds have grounded the ship on a low barrier island.

After deliberation and a little scouting, the settlement’s governor and captain decide to unload the ship and, using her longboats and manpower, move to the “mainland” across the lagoon created by the barrier island. There’s a series of sandbars that protect the space between the barrier island and the larger landmass beyond—shallow enough that a man could walk across it in water up to his chest, and with several places only ankle-deep (at least, at low tide.)

I’m leaving out a lot of detail, of course, but that should be enough to set the scene. Enough talk—time for action!

The PCs are hauling goods across this line of sandbars and shallows—unarmored, though they each had a weapon on them just in case—when a reef shark latches onto the fighter’s leg and a pair of spear-wielding sahuagin rise up from the waters in front of them. They aren’t alone—I described screams and shouts erupting all along the line of laboring colonists—but these three were the PCs’ encounter.

Naturally, the players immediately surprised me. Their characters had no idea what these sahuagin were (none being found in the waters off their homelands), so my wife’s half-elf rogue (“Aster”) immediately makes a Persuasion check to wordlessly convince the sahuagin they’re no threat, and they can be friends! She rolls an 18, which is actually quite good. This gives one of the sahuagin pause, and it doesn’t attack as it considers what Aster’s lowered dagger and extended other hand mean. Unfortunately, the other one snarls and throws its spear at her, rejecting her peaceful overture. It hits, dropping Aster to about half HP. (First-level characters are pretty lacking in hit points!) The human nature cleric (“Lambert”, played by Peter) is not fond of this turn of events, and casts a cantrip spell to pull the attacking sahuagin towards him and deal a bit of damage. That puts the sahuagin between Aster and Lambert.

And it’s at that moment I’m reminded why I love playing with this particular group—aside from being married to one and podcasting buddies with another.

The human fighter (“Garm”) reaches down, grabs the shark, rips it off his leg and out of the water … and attempts to hit the sahuagin with it. And this partially works! I ask for a Strength check to grab the shark (basically a grapple), and he succeeds. I then decide that because the shark is writhing around, Garm’s definitely attacking with disadvantage. That results in a missed attack roll, but attempting to beat a sahuagin with its own reef shark ends up being the definitive highlight of the whole night. This should probably have been two separate actions over two rounds, but I was caught up in the action and the moment turned out to be well worth it. (Garm’s player mentioned after the game that “sure, you can try to hit him with the shark” was the best moment of his entire gaming career. That’s the power of saying ‘yes’.)

Note that in the first combat round of the campaign, two of the three players have used something other than an attack roll, and neutralized two of their three opponents for at least a round. Back at the top of the initative chart, the shark fails his own Strength check to escape the hold. It’s still up in the air, which is not typically where sharks are found.

Aster attacks the sahuagin Lambert dragged towards them earlier—and crits! Because she’s flanking her target, that means sneak attack damage—and in 5th Edition, sneak attack dice are doubled along with damage dice on a crit. This sahuagin was at 17 HP after Lambert’s spell, and she does 20 points of damage, wrecking it with a nasty backstab. Quite a lot of cheering ensues on the Google Hangout!

At this point, the remaining sahuagin assesses the situation (in part because it’s his turn.) He’s seen the tiny half-elf lady try to make a peaceful overture to him, and when that was rejected she drove a dagger through his hunting partner’s spine. The big guy is currently menacing him with the very shark they’d gone hunting with. The third is clearly a spellcaster of some sort. All in all, this has not been a good hunt. He turns tail and runs—or swims, anyway—blowing a call to retreat on a conch shell horn. All along the line of colonists, cheers go up as the other sahuagin and sharks flee. Garm tossed the still-struggling reef shark onto a nearby sandbar, where it was unceremoniously brained for its efforts.

Lambert tends to the wounded colonists and the other PCs, and unloading resumes, although much more slowly and under guard from archers in the ship’s longboats. A scout reports that there’s a crumbling, if imposing, ruin just around the bend, built into the tall cliff faces rising up just a little bit inland. The colony’s governor decides to set up the first night’s camp there; there’s a sort of portico in front of what seems like an ancient temple or shrine, and the raised vantage point is more defensible than an open beach. However, he asks the party members to rest up (and eat their fill of broiled reef shark!) because he’s got a special task for them: Exploring the ruin and making sure there aren’t any more surprises waiting for them inside.

Trust me—there will be. I’ve got two pages of graph paper already filled with a map…

GM’s Notes

All in all, I was very happy with how this first session went down. We only actually played for about an hour and a half, but I feel like we got a good bit accomplished for the start of a new game and new system. Combat was very quick—twenty minutes if you include all the time looking up combat rules for the first time. That was a huge help. As a GM, I rarely end a game thinking it went well—I’m often quite harsh on myself—and I couldn’t help but be pleased at the end of the evening.

I do want to break that combat encounter down a bit. By the book, two sahuagin and a reef shark are a very dangerous encounter for a first-level party. That’s a 450 XP encounter: Three CR 1/2 monsters, which are normally 100 XP each, and a multiplier for a combat with multiple creatures since that’s more actions for the PCs to defend against. A hard encounter for three first-level PCs is budgeted at 225 XP, and 300 XP is a deadly encounter! A lethal encounter as the very first combat is, according to all conventional GMing wisdom, a terrible idea.

However, I had several features in place to mitigate the difficulty of the combat while still making sure the players felt they’d earned a significant victory. While the PCs started at a bit of a disadvantage—their tanky PCs weren’t armored—they could quickly move into water too shallow for the reef shark. That gave them the opportunity to “beat” the shark just through movement actions. The sahuagin were also going to throw their spears, which reduced their damage somewhat after their first attack. Most importantly, they were cowards. I kept track not only of the damage done to each individual monster, but to the whole group of monsters. When the total amount of damage done to the monsters was half their total HP or more, they would decide their “easy prey” wasn’t worth the trouble, and flee. Since these monsters have 22 HP each, that meant they’d flee when the party did 33 damage. I also counted anything creative as damage; the rogue’s Persuasion check not only ‘stunned’ one sahuagin for a round, it also did half that sahuagin’s hit points in damage. (Fun fact: You don’t have to describe all hit point loss as physical damage.) The fight looked dangerous, and it certainly could have been if it had gone longer, but everything was set up to make sure it wouldn’t go that long. It worked out quite well, too—the last sahuagin was clearly at a disadvantage at the time he decided to flee.

I do want to talk more about that Persuasion check. My first instinct was to say “no, that doesn’t do anything.” After all, these are vicious creatures, and I definitely didn’t want these sahuagin (who make great low-level coastal villains) befriended! For the first time in my gaming career, however, I consciously applied the “yes-and” rule when GMing. The player had done something creative and interesting; my job was to make that work within my plan, not reject it as contrary to how I’d planned the game to go. I had to think about it for a moment, but having the Persuasion check effectively ‘stun’ one of the opponents worked out very well. It rewarded that player for being creative in a combat encounter—and in fact for trying to not have the fight at all, which is one of those things we’ve constantly talked about on this show!—without drastically changing the story.

Finally, that wonderful shark moment. This was another “yes-and” moment, and I had to think about that one too. In this case, the character’s mechanical attributes swayed me towards saying ‘yes’—Garm has the “Tavern Brawler” feat, which makes him exceptionally good with improvised weapons. That was reason enough to get out of the way and let that player be cool; and even though it didn’t work—probably due to the mechanical penalty I imposed, which everyone agreed was completely reasonable—it was an awesome moment that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

So yeah—after one session, I’m feeling really good about this game. I have a lot of prep work to do still: None of the NPCs have names yet, and I need to think beyond the upcoming dungeon crawl and determine what else is going to happen in the first arc of this campaign. But I’m extremely happy with how things have gone so far, and how promising the game is!

As you read this, our Patreon is live! If you’re interested in backing us, we’d love for you to do so, but I need to stress this up front: If we don’t get a single penny of Patreon backing, the show will continue to come out every two weeks like it has been for the last four years. We’ll continue to maintain our social media presence, and these bi-weekly blog posts will also continue. We are not in need of funds to maintain the status quo, and if all you can do to help us out is listen – that’s awesome, we thank you, and that is more than enough. Your listening support and the occasional bit of contact via our website or social media presences is plenty to keep us going indefinitely.

However, if you are so inclined, you can now support us financially, too. “But Peter,” you might say, “you at Saving the Game have always resisted taking money from listeners. Why now? What’s changed?” The short answer to that is “my mind.” You see I, Peter, have been the major road block on the road to taking donations.

On some level, I’ve always equated taking money for anything but traditional employment with opening the door to the corrupting influence of money which is, frankly, an extreme position that’s more than a little bonkers. The modern economy is full of freelancers and entrepreneurs that just don’t draw a traditional paycheck (my wife’s crafting business among them), and that’s without considering that charities and ministries operate almost entirely on donations (we’re not a charity, certainly, but we’re kind of a ministry). There’s doubtless a certain element of Pride (as in, the sin) in there, I’m sure. Also: Taking money in and of itself isn’t bad – it’s a matter of who you take it from, and under what circumstances. Taking money from podcast listeners that are chipping in small amount of resources to enable something they like to grow and expand is radically different from, say, taking money from a massive campaign donor with the implication they can use it to call in favors later. As we’ve said many, many times – we have wonderful listeners, and it occurred to me as Grant and I were talking that, by barring the donations door, one of the things I was doing (without intending to, I hasten to add!) was sending the implied message that I didn’t trust those same wonderful listeners for some reason.

Another objection I had was the idea that setting up donations capability sends the message that we’re getting ready to go to a “paid content only” model. Time has dealt with that objection. Podcasts with voluntary listener support are the norm now – most of the podcasts I listen to (or listened to – I miss you, 30+ hours a week of listening time) have a voluntary Patreon or other donation vector, and nobody (or almost nobody) is concerned that they’re going to paid-only.

The last significant objection that we both had was “what would we even do with it?” As Grant and I have mentioned, we’re both gainfully employed, and we didn’t want the funds we collected to go to our car payments or grocery bills. That would have felt very weird and somewhat exploitative. However, as the podcast has continued, we’ve started answering that question naturally. We’d like to be able to hire an editor so we can do this weekly instead of biweekly. We’d like to get better cameras so when we do things like Game to Grow, we’re not grainy and suffering from frame rate issues. We’d like to make it to more cons so we can get more content ideas and touch base with other podcasters (the podcaster meetup at Fear the Con has been incredibly valuable for us every time one or both of us has made it). It’d be really nice if our research materials (gaming and theology books, mostly) didn’t have to come out of the same budgets that our groceries and housing are coming out of. And, possibly most importantly, it would be great to get a little “push” to keep striving to make the podcast better. But almost all of that costs more than we can currently afford to put into the podcast. So if you want to help us with those things, we’ll be happy to accept, and we’re going to be pretty transparent with where it all goes.

So with all of that to consider, Grant was finally able to convince me to give the idea a chance.

P.S. One fun little bit of trivia to leave you with: as Grant mentions in the video, one of the patron rewards is a question that goes into a random pool that gets selected from at the beginning of the episode. We got that idea at least in part from how Loading Ready Run does their crack-a-pack segment at the beginning of their Tap Tap Concede videos. (Incidentally, if you play Magic and are stressed, Tap Tap Concede is second only to Bob Ross videos for relaxing content.)

Save

Save

Save

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.
—Mark 9:24 (KJV)

As we mentioned recently on the podcast, I started a new job a little under a month ago. And as often happens to me in new situations, that newness brought a fair bit of anxiety with it. One day in particular felt especially bad after a bunch of random things went wrong (in retrospect, most of them completely out of my control) and had me seriously questioning whether I should have made the transition at all. The next day, I casually asked my new boss if I was doing okay, and the swiftness and enthusiasm of his assurance that I was was a huge relief.

I suffer from “Impostor Syndrome,” a fairly common mental/emotional problem that isn’t an actual mental illness, but nonetheless manages to keep me up at night on occasion. (For those unfamiliar with it, this page veers close to being “too true to be funny.”) My particular flavor of it comes with a little extra wariness of authority figures and a strong inclination to disavow my expertise on virtually anything. If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’ll probably come to notice that I pepper both my writing and speech with a lot of qualifiers. Some of this is a desire to be clear in my communication, but oftentimes the message I’m trying to be clear about is “I don’t claim to know more than I do, please don’t be angry with me.” It has led to feeling intimidated by exceptionally kind, decent people like some of the folks we’re participating in Game to Grow with – and that is completely absurd. But this is a normal part of my life. I manage it, I try to leaven it with self-awareness, I get encouragement from good friends, and I try to work around it. And credit where credit is due – during my latest and most intense bout with impostor syndrome, Grant was the one with the fastest and most valuable advice for me. I never really considered it in a theological context.

At least, I didn’t until a couple of my friends on Facebook shared an article called The Faceless White Giant that dealt with, among other things, the writing of none other than Jack Chick of Dark Dungeons fame. That, combined with me catching up on my COR sermon listening, particularly the one from April 17, and the concept of Christ as a colander, resulted in something that may or may not have actually been an epiphany, but it sure felt like one.

At times in my life, I have done what can be described as “clinging to my faith with bloody fingernails.” My faith is not something I want to give up, but even as a practicing Christian, sometimes I can find it hard to believe. Love and forgiveness for me – knowing what I’ve done in my life and just how it has hurt people – seems a little “out there.” (Although the concept of Hell can be all too easy to accept in my darker moments, in those same moments, the very concept of Heaven can seem absurd.) At least some of the “Angry God Theology” out there (and certainly my own struggles with it) is at least partially a form of spiritual impostor syndrome.  Just as I sometimes find it hard to believe that my boss at work is satisfied with or even willing to tolerate my performance, I can run into a similar trap with God. It is hard to imagine (for me) a God who is willing to forgive and embrace, but in Jesus’s character, that’s exactly what we see.

Which is, somewhat ironically, one of the things that enables me to hold onto my faith. The God I believe in is every bit as alien and unknowable in His nature as some of the creations of people like H.P. Lovecraft (stay with me!) – it is so easy for us as humans to envision cosmic forces as being malevolent or callously indifferent to us. God as He is described in scripture is vast and cosmic beyond our ability to perceive or conceptualize. When Moses asked the burning bush who was sending him, God’s reply was to tell them that “I AM” was. One interpretation of that statement is “I am existence itself.” Not everything, not the universe, but the very concept of existence. Talk about cosmic and incomprehensible.

And yet the essential nature of this incomprehensibly vast, powerful being is one of tender love and compassion for the lowly and the broken. We as humans tend to imagine powerful and vast things as nasty and dangerous. Lovecraft and his ilk are popular in part because even though what they write about is awful and terrifying, it feels like it’s probably accurate on some level. The idea that the primal cosmic force out there not only cares about us, but is willing to sacrifice so deeply to show it – that strains the limits of believability. It seems far-fetched, too good to be true. And the fact that it’s so hard to believe is one of many things that convinces me that it’s worth believing. It is not something we humans would come up with – it is outside of our frame of reference.

This will not, I’m sure, convince anyone who has lost their faith to take it up again, and I’m even more certain that it won’t convince those who never had it in the first place to develop it now. But if you’ve struggled to hang onto a faith that can be hard to grasp at times like I have, and particularly if your own guilt has been making your grip falter, it’s my sincere hope that this gives you another handle. We need to accept the good, despite how unlikely it seems.

Truth, as they say, can be stranger than fiction.

Deliver what you promise

That right there? That’s the most important piece of podcasting advice I’ll give you throughout this entire series.

Since most aspiring podcasters enjoy listening to podcasts too, I want you to take a minute and think about the podcasts you used to listen to regularly. A few of them—a very few—wrapped everything up neatly, announced that they were ending, and gave you links to the hosts’ new projects and a fond farewell. The rest did one of two things: Either they changed their content so much that you weren’t interested anymore; or began updating erratically, maybe even to the point where you couldn’t tell if they’d podfaded or not.

Be a reliable source of content

Here’s a fun fact: If I’m twelve hours late posting a Saving the Game episode, that episode loses twenty-five to fifty percent of its listening audience. Permanently.

Podcast listeners are creatures of habit. If your episodes consistently drop on particular days of the week, that gets incorporated into your audience’s listening schedules. Podcasts that update irregularly don’t fit into that schedule. Update too irregularly, and many listeners will assume you just don’t update anymore, dropping your show entirely from their podcatcher app.

The ubiquity of smartphones and podcatcher apps makes keeping up with irregularly-updating podcasts a little easier, but browsers and desktop apps are still commonly used to listen to podcasts. Here’s a chart of the top ten clients used to download/stream Saving the Game episodes over the past 90 days:

It’s not the best pie chart in the world (Podbean’s built-in charts and my Excel powers are both weak) but just over 35% of our listeners use Firefox, Chrome, or iTunes. Internet Explorer’s probably included in the ‘Others’ category. Thing is, these listeners are looking for Saving the Game‘s content manually. Some of that’s likely driven by social media, but user interaction is still required to see that a new episode is available. If a new episode isn’t there when these users check in at their usual time, many won’t come back to check again. You’ve lost them that week—and if this becomes the norm for you, many will get out of the habit of checking your feed altogether.

It’s not just your audience you’re disappointing, either. No one wants to collaborate with unprofessional people who over-promise and under-deliver. Podcasts and podcasters develop reputations, and believe me: When you invite someone onto your show, they will research you. If you don’t have a good reputation (whether because you can’t tell your guests when their episode will actually drop, or for other reasons we’ll talk about in subsequent posts), they won’t want to go out of their way to record a show with you. Reputation and content go hand-in-hand.

Frequency is less important than consistency

The up-front answer to this is pretty simple: Produce content at a regular pace, and plan to release episodes on a schedule you can keep up with. Everyone loves a weekly—or even daily!—podcast, but if your personal life, editing speed, and recording schedule mean you can’t keep that pace up, don’t try. Aim for every other week, or even once per month. That’s absolutely fine. If your listeners can anticipate a new episode when you promised to put one out, and you deliver, you’re in good shape—you’ve rewarded their faith in you, and they will be back for more next time.

If you start to slip, take a hard look at why you slipped. Did you procrastinate and not get this week’s editing done? Did you not leave any room in your production schedule for life’s inevitable interruptions? Did something big legitimately come up, making this a one-time problem? Have you simply over-committed time to your podcast, and the rest of your family hasn’t bought in along with you? Some of that can be fixed the next time around, but you might also have to re-evaluate just how frequently you can reliably put out an episode. That won’t feel great, but it’s better than watching your listener numbers decline because you aren’t producing the content you promised!

Produce content relevant to your audience

Every successful podcast creates content for a particular niche audience, whether that’s “Christian tabletop gamers” or “politics geeks who want so-and-so’s take on the last week’s news” or “Walking Dead fans” or whatever. That’s great, for all the reasons we talked about last time. That’s rarely the only thing in a podcast episode, though—a little bit about what’s been going on in the hosts’ personal lives, or a bit of banter in moderation, creates a sense of a personal connection and doesn’t detract from your audience’s enjoyment. There’s also a natural sort of penumbra around your core topic of related material. (For example, our core topic is “Christianity and tabletop RPGs”, but it makes total sense for us to talk about “Christianity and hobby board games” or “Christianity at RPG conventions“.) Those “expanded” topics are actually quite valuable: They reach out to new audiences, keep your core topic from becoming stale, and bring new insights with them back to your core topic.

It’s possible, though, to drift away from the core topic you promised your listeners you’d talk about and never come back. Sometimes this is planned—you feel like you’ve said all you can on your topic in your current format, and you’re revamping your show to talk about something new. (Our friends over at The Gameable Disney Podcast did this when they ran out of major Disney animated releases to discuss, for example. They transformed into The Gameable Pixar Podcast, and they’re about to do it again now that they’ve run out of Pixar films.) You’re essentially trading in your existing audience for a new audience, with (hopefully) some overlap and a larger starting audience.

However, this isn’t always planned. Sometimes your focus slips, and you never talk about the thing you meant to talk about. More and more of your show is taken up by something else you really want to talk about instead. You’ve promised your audience content you aren’t delivering on—and those listeners who really wanted that content will go somewhere else to get it instead. We’ve had this happen to us when we focus too much on the “tabletop RPGs” half of our core topic, and don’t deliver on the “Christianity” half.

Staying on topic

This doesn’t require “a solution” so much as “regular maintenance”. Check yourself occasionally—did your last couple of episodes stick to your core topic? Are you spending a lot of time on unrelated topics? Are the jokes and digressions crowding out the actual discussion? Are there things you keep wishing you’d removed in editing in the final release? These are things you can discover for yourself just by listening to your own podcast when episodes drop.

Audience feedback is invaluable here. If you’ve got a solid social media presence, or other ways to communicate with your listeners directly, they’ll tell you when they’re dissatisfied. Reviews and ratings are another channel for listeners to give feedback and help keep you on track. Keep an eye on your listenership statistics, too; don’t obsess over them, but if there’s a noticeable drop (or spike!) that doesn’t have an obvious cause, think about whether or not you’re actually producing content your audience wanted to hear.

There are a couple of things you might try to get yourself back on track. If you use an outline, make sure you’re sticking to it; if you don’t, try using one, so everyone knows what you’re going to talk about. Try to aim to keep banter and off-topic discussions to a certain small timeframe, or do one quick trip around the table for everyone to say something personal before you get into your main topic. A little structure goes a long way. You can be flexible here, and you should to meet the needs of individual episodes, but you do want to actually get around to that main topic sooner rather than later!

Professionalism, cont.

Next time—whenever that may be; see how frustrating irregular updates are?—I’ll talk about being a professional behind the scenes. Look forward to that, folks, and if you have any feedback please leave a comment!

I ran into an interesting roadblock recently while playing Wolfenstein: The New Order. At the end of the first chapter of the game, you’re presented with a sadistic choice by the villain and the game is pretty insistent that you actually make it. Failing to choose gets your entire squad killed and when you reload the save, you’re right back at the decision point. I watched that scene where you stare down the villain and he kills your squad a half-dozen times and almost stopped playing entirely at that point. I was ultimately talked out of that decision by some of the other folks on the Gamers With Jobs forums, and while the material that follows is surprisingly rich for a FPS game, there’s still a nagging metaphorical splinter in my brain about how I really shouldn’t have betrayed that squad member just to continue the story. It seems that playing Spec Ops: The Line back in the day had more of a lasting impact on me than I’d given it credit for.

Spec Ops: The Line escalates the misfortune, chaos, and suffering caused by its hard-charging, hot-tempered protagonist steadily over the course of its story and eventually (mostly via loading screens) starts telling the player that they can make the awful things stop happening if they quit playing the game. That idea resurfaced in my mind as I was looking at the sadistic choice sequence in Wolfenstein.

I have a hard time with stories that require me to be treacherous or duplicitous to move forward. I actually stopped playing Fallout 4 before the end because I could see that was the way the story was headed, and I don’t like betraying the trust of even really bad people. I don’t like having to compromise morally to get to the rest of a story.

Yet even the stories central to my Christian faith include some treachery and betrayal. The infamous example is Judas Iscariot, of course, but the Biblical figure my parents named me after certainly had his share of less-than-stellar moments where loyalty was concerned. From trying to escalate Jesus’s mostly-peaceful arrest (that Jesus was cooperating with) into violence in John 18:10 over Jesus’s objections to his denial that he even knew Jesus in Luke 22, he demonstrated that, under enough stress, even his loyalty could crack.

And here’s the thing: Jesus forgave him. In John 21, Jesus not only forgives Peter, but also puts him to work. Once again, God shows his ability to work through and with human frailty to accomplish his purposes. Peter’s story continued beyond the act of betrayal.

And that brings me to a realization that I had only after I started writing this blog post. A lot of my supposed virtue in games (and in life, if I’m going to be at all honest) comes from a well of pride. “I’ll defy the villain even if he kills an entire squad instead of just one of them. My integrity is worth more than those lives.” No, actually, it’s not. And it’s further not necessarily doing anyone any good to insist on always playing the good guy in everything. Now, it may not be harming anything either, and certainly playing upstanding characters can be a lot of fun, but when my internal narrative is such that I’ve convinced myself that I can’t play someone with major character flaws in a fictional context because that would reflect poorly on me, then perhaps it’s time to stretch a bit, especially because I have a nasty streak that I sometimes subconsciously feel I can let out as long as it’s fueled by “a good cause.” Like a lot of people of faith over the years, I have a problem with wanting to cultivate an image of outward purity when the truth is that on some essential level, I have the potential to be absolutely monstrous.

Fortunately, at times like this, I have my co-host. Grant has been running a Rogue Trader game for us, and as many of you are no doubt aware, the Warhammer 40k universe is a little thin on people of flawless virtue. My aloof, toaster-obsessed, pipe-smoking Explorator may be a humorous and strange character, but he’s not anyone’s role model. In fact, he’s even a poor example by the warped standards of his own society. But he’s also not a channel for sadism and cruelty – he’s just a self-interested, socially inept guy who is also a little weird. And while playing him isn’t as comfortable as playing some of my previous characters, at least he’s getting me to remove at least a few inches of the self-righteous stick I have lodged in my hindquarters, or to put it another way, it’s allowing me to start sawing off parts of the log I have in my eye so I can start getting rid of it. Unfortunately, that’s a long log. I have a feeling I’m going to be sawing for quite some time.

The first one is Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast. I just discovered this recently after having been kind of tangentially aware of it for a while, and it has pushed just about everything else out of my listening rotation. Even other podcasts that I absolutely love have been fighting for my listening time with this. Mr. Carlin has a way of presenting historical narratives that is absolutely riveting and if your brain works anything at all like mine does, you won’t be able to stop the gaming ideas from coming. In particular, he focuses a lot on the human side of things and first-hand accounts; there’s a strong emphasis toward “putting the listener there” as much as possible. He also shows a great deal of respect and charity toward a wide variety of different world views and cultures, which I really appreciate as a listener; he’s more one to ask you to think about why horrible things happened and how people got through them than one to rant about how awful things were or sneer from a modern moral pedestal at “backwards” people from ages past. He also references other, fictional works, which makes putting stuff in a gaming context easier. Lord of the Rings actually gets referenced a lot during the WWI series.

As I just hinted at, I particularly recommend the six-part series “A Blueprint for Armageddon” which focuses on the first world war, and currently has me ruminating on ideas for a low-fantasy setting that resembles pre-WWI Europe.  I haven’t listened to anywhere near everything he’s put out so far, but I only have one or two more pieces of audio before I have to start buying his older stuff, which I will be doing happily and without hesitation. His current series, King of Kings, is also excellent, and it deals with the events (going all the way back to the founding of the Persian empire) that eventually lead up to the Battle of Thermopylae (the infamous stand of the 300 Spartans).

A few words of caution, though: this series is not for the faint of heart. Carlin gets pretty graphic at times as he describes, for example, just how terrible a WWI battlefield was or just what they did to the leaders of the Anabaptists that took over the city of Muenster when they caught them. Hardcore history has helped me understand and appreciate the value of horror about as much as talking to Kenneth Hite and Greg Stolze did, and that is high praise indeed.

The second one is much lighter in tone, and is more specifically gaming-focused. I had to go back and check to make sure we hadn’t included it in one of the previous podcasts or blog posts in this series, and I’m still not 100% sure we haven’t even after checking just now. Rich Burlew’s Order of the Stick webcomic (the link goes to the first strip) is wonderful gaming inspiration for anyone in the hobby, but especially those running D&D games. It starts out as just a silly webcomic about a D&D adventuring party (complete with breaks in the fourth wall) and succeeds fairly well as just a humorous thing to read, but as the story goes on, the story gets more serious, more complex, and more interesting, and while Burlew’s setting is kind of generic by necessity, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in it once the story starts scratching below the surface. Reading it will teach you interesting lessons about dealing with various problem characters (Elan, Belkar, and Vaarsuvius all represent different problematic PC archetypes, though that is far from all they are, and they have important roles to play in the story), developing a world as you go, heroism, villainy, storytelling, and so forth, but I think one of the more interesting and subtle lessons it teaches (perhaps without even meaning to) is how much you can get across with some fairly spare descriptions. The characters in Order of the stick aren’t quite traditional stick figures, but neither are they particularly detailed, yet the simple, clean art conveys a great deal.

Unlike Hardcore History, this one is probably fine for anyone over the age of 12 or so; while there’s some mild language, a fair bit of violence and the occasional sexual reference, nothing is particularly graphic, and the good guys are clearly marked and in most cases, pretty clearly heroic.

As usual, I’d love to hear if you get anything out of either of these, and I’d also love to hear any recommendations you might have.

Crossover Nexus: Both an occasional crossover project (Grant and I have both been on episodes) and an aggregated list of geeky faith projects. Start your search here; it’s not exhaustive, but it’s definitely a solid place to start.

Game Church: One of the older and more polished geeky faith projects out there, and full of interesting content. They focus mostly on video games and have a podcast of their own.

Geekdom House: We had Kyle Rudge, the man behind this amazing site on with us for episode 68. Kyle himself is a great guy – we really enjoyed talking with him and were impressed by both his warmth and his intelligence. Geekdom house has plenty of those qualities as well, and while you won’t find much in the way of podcast content here, there’s plenty of great stuff to read.

Innroads Ministries: If you’re aware of us, but not them at this point, I’m honestly not sure how that works as they’re one of the places we’re syndicated through and we’ve had Mike Perna, the man behind it on with us on two separate occasions. (Episode 66 and Episode 33. We really should get him back for episode 99…) They focus mostly on board games, but there’s a bit of tabletop RPG content (that doesn’t come from us) in there as well. You find both their main podcast (Game Store Prophets) and The MacGuffin Factory, the monthly-ish podcast Mike Perna and Grant do that centers around story hooks there.

See you next week with an episode as usual. If you know of other geeky faith projects that I didn’t include in this list, let us know in the comments. Putting together a reference document of them is on our to-do list.

Now before I go any further, I should reiterate that I think there’s tremendous value in taking hobbies and interests (gaming especially) to a deeper-than-surface level. I love the work of Jack Berkenstock and Sarah Lynne Bowman a great deal and I really get into symbolism in my media (when I catch it, anyway). I just about jumped out of my chair cheering at the cleansing metaphor of the rain at the end of the fourth episode of Season 2 of Daredevil when I watched it, and while I’m not as good at articulating it as Grant is, I’m very much in favor of the gaming table as a way of exploring moral, psychological, philosophical, and theological concepts, as well as a place for building interpersonal skills. In short, I am an enthusiastic, happy believer in using fun for good and thinking below the surface of the media we consume.

There’s a very real risk if we’re not careful of falling into the infamous “high school English teacher” trap of over-analyzing something to the point where it loses all meaning, or at least the intended or original meaning, but there’s also the problem of thinking one’s fun has to “work” (as in “toil” not as in “function”) all the time.

Because of that, I find it useful (if a bit frustratingly difficult at times) to remind myself on occasion that fun for its own sake is perfectly okay and beneficial in its own right. The Beginners Guide did a fairly jarring and harsh job of reminding me of this as I played it this past weekend. Note: for those who haven’t played it, The Beginner’s Guide is only about 90 minutes long, so it’s quick to get through but also almost impossible to talk about without spoiling to some degree. So I’m going to spoil it a bit – you’ve been warned. Anyway, in The Beginner’s Guide, one character over-interprets his friend’s work and invents a need for help where none exists, which then leads to a betrayal of trust and the loss of a friendship. In effect (to swipe rather irreverently from Tolkien), he dug SO deep that he unearthed a Balrog. He tried to make the projects of his friend Coda work as an insight into his friend’s inner struggles and saw a call for help when one wasn’t there – in effect he fell into the “English teacher trap” and the “fun needs to be more than fun” trap at the same time.

While I haven’t shared work I wasn’t entitled to share with people it was never intended to be shared with like the narrator in The Beginner’s Guide, there have been times where I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that I really shouldn’t be having fun with my hobbies unless they were also serving some other purpose. I needed to be generating content, or having some philosophical revelation, or even just practicing my critical analysis skills (which admittedly CAN use some more development) or I should stop. I was digging down past the point where it was fun and missing some of the inherent worth of recreation: stress relief, rest, and joy. (Also: don’t let the word “was” make you think this is some long-defeated character flaw and that I now have perfect perspective. I did this to myself last week.) However, like so many of these more introspective posts, I’m not always entirely sure where those lines are. The Beginner’s Guide, for example, is clearly supposed to be thought about and analyzed even as it cautions about the perils of over-thinking and over-analysis.

At times like this, I think back to our conversation with Kyle Rudge of Geekdom House on episode 68, and try to remember that art has worth of its own and that consuming it can be edifying in its own right. A lot of the time there’s good stuff below the surface of our entertainment, but sometimes it’s worth taking the time to appreciate the surface itself and just let that be enough.

“That’s nice for you, Peter, but what does this have to do with gaming?” you may ask. The real answer is probably “not much” but it does bring up some interesting thoughts about character advancement. Most of the time, character advancement in an RPG has some kind of “ding” to it. You collect XP or character points and eventually buy a measurable improvement in something. You used to have no ability to pick locks but now, all of a sudden, now you can pick them half the time. There are a few games out there that base advancement on usage (Burning Wheel in particular springs to mind) but they’re rare.

On a mechanical level, it makes sense – real people learning skills do so gradually. My own knowledge of computers started out with a virus infection back on 2009, led to me building a PC for the first time, listening to a security podcast to avoid having it happen again, and then led to classes and more self-teaching that have brought me up to the level of competence that should be sufficient for an entry-level IT job at some point in the near future. However, most of the time, the process is gradual. I didn’t jump from complete ignorance to low-level professional knowledge in a sudden spasm of development – I picked up a few facts here, a few more there, learned how those facts work together, and slowly it came together. I no longer have any trepidation at all installing software (or even operating systems) poking around in the guts of a computer, swapping cables, etc. I have the beginnings of some instincts as to why systems behave the way they do when something goes wrong, but if you asked me to point to a specific date when that transition occurred, I couldn’t do it. The lines between ignorance and knowledge, trepidation and confidence, are fuzzy and ill-defined. And, for that matter, exactly how much I know (and how much I don’t know) is similarly hard to nail down because of the way the human mind works.

While clarity is often more important than flavor in an RPG context, I wonder if there’s some value in taking the time to describe what each level of competence means in terms of a character’s own perceptions and those of the people around them. This can lead to complicated feelings around one’s own knowledge and skill sets. For example, I feel pretty good about my computer skills when I’m talking to family, friends, and coworkers, but I feel considerably less at ease when talking to folks who actually work in IT, because I know they have more “ranks” than I do, and I worry about getting a job in the field even after I graduate because I feel like I’ll never “catch up” to the entry requirements. This strikes me as something that could be really interesting in games, but I’m not sure I’d want to attach more numbers to an already-crowded character sheet. I do, however, feel like some notes in a character’s backstory about how they feel about their skills could be an interesting bit of character development. Does the guy with a lot of ranks in lockpicking feel awesome when he pops a locked door open, or does he feel like knowing how says bad things about who he is as a person? Does the wizard cast her spells with flair, or does she try to avoid using magic for fear of looking foolish and “doing it wrong?” How do these people feel about what they can do, and how do they feel about how they got there? Do they think that because they learned gradually that most of their knowledge is out-of-date, or do they feel more confident for the practice? We seldom do much to explore how characters feel about different aspects of themselves in a gaming context, but I think there’s probably a lot of interesting and fun material to be found there.

As usual, I’d love to hear your opinions on this stuff, both the real-world and in-game bits.

One of the things that I discovered when I started listening to RPG podcasts way back in the day with Sons of Kryos was the idea that people think about gaming on a much deeper level than I’d previously even considered they would. Further years of podcast listening (and eventual involvement in podcasting myself) has shown me what a monumental understatement that was. There are some very interesting people out there doing some very interesting work of how the games we play affect us. Some of those people are folks like Grant and me – enthusiastic hobbyists who enjoy unpacking the various aspects of the things we enjoy. Others, however, are more serious academics. We reference Jack Berkenstock of the Bodhana Group and their focus on using tabletop RPGs as a therapeutic tool on a fairly regular basis, but if you’re into this more “meta” thinking, there’s another name you should know: Sarah Lynna Bowman, PhD. She is the author of one of many books I really, really need to get around to reading one of these days: The Functions of Role-Playing Games. She has also written a number of interesting articles and blog posts, but the one I’m going to focus on with this blog post is on the concept of bleed. (She’s also, as one might expect from someone who has chosen this particular field of study, a really interesting and approachable person. I’ve had very limited interaction with her, but I’ve always come away impressed.)

The original blog post that I’ll be referring back to can be found here. I would heartily recommend reading the entire thing (it’s very readable) but a quick TL;DR is this: bleed is basically the place where player and character meet. She describes two separate types of bleed in the blog post: bleed in, where the emotions, relationships, and even physical state of a player affect the state of their character and bleed out, the opposite process. Dr. Bowman also mentions that the existence of the phenomenon is something a lot of gamers don’t willingly accept, as it runs parallel in some ways to the ideas of gamers learning real magic and calling up real demons that were part of the Satanic panic back in the 80s and 90s.

Bleed is one of those things that happens in gaming that can be good or bad. It can lead to greater investment and enjoyment, or it can lead to unhealthy behaviors and pain. People sometimes seek it out and sometimes seek to avoid it. And I think it’s one of the reasons why, as a Christian, I’m a little hesitant to play certain kinds of character. I’m fairly susceptible to bleed – a former gaming group of mine (not the one Grant and I are in now!) formed an in-game clique and ostracized my PC somewhat. I didn’t deal with it very well at all and was ultimately told that the gaming group was a poor fit for me (something that was true, but that I also didn’t deal with particularly well). On the flip side, in the Shadowrun game Grant ran for a while, our player characters wound up being nearly as close of friends as the group itself was, and it was almost like hanging out with more friends than I actually was. In-jokes developed and experiences were shared. The experience was richer for my level of immersion and, yes, bleed.

Because I’m so susceptible to bleed and have actually come to see it as a core part of my gaming experience, I find it hard to play against “type” – playing a character radically different from me, particularly one with very different values from my own, feels wrong or dishonest on some level. This limits my “range” as a gamer and tends to lead to Grant lamenting that he’s always dealing with some re-skinned version of me when we game together.  (By the way: if you experience more bleed than you want to, there are some thoughts on how to manage that in the original article.) To make matters even murkier, that’s not a thing I particularly want to change. I don’t mind being a little boring in service to being consistent. It also bears mentioning that I don’t experience much bleed at all when I’m GMing – that process feels more like a series of writing prompts to me than acting.

As is usual, I’m very interested to hear what you all have to say on this topic.

-Peter

What I didn’t tell him (though I’m pretty sure he’s figured out in the meantime – Grant is, as I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, a pretty smart guy) was that the idea scared me out of my mind. I tend to be a fairly risk-averse person, and I also tend to view new tasks as more difficult than they ultimately turn out to be. Still, it was something that needed to be done, and I’d been doing the podcast for over 3 years without ever touching the editing side of things, so I figured it was time to give it a try. In my defense, my trepidation wasn’t completely unwarranted – editing is about as critical as tasks get for a podcast, and I need to be done a week from the day this blog post drops.

Have no fear, I’ve got a releasable (though not quite perfect) version done already. It actually went better than I expected, which is a fairly standard experience when I try something new I’m worried about. However, it didn’t go perfectly, but that’s okay, because I got some interesting food for thought out of the experience. (And also some sound editing advice.)

A large part of the editing process for a podcast is going through and pulling out long stretches of silence. A lot of the time when we humans are talking, we pause for a couple of seconds mid-sentence to collect our thoughts. This is a normal part of conversation as it happens, particularly if you’re talking about a conversation that requires thought, or if the person talking tends to be a little more introverted or introspective (so the two of us, both introverts and talking about gaming and theology tend to generate a lot of silence). However, when you’re listening to a podcast, the flow can be a bit jarring if… … …someone… … …pauses… … …for a bit too long in the middle of a sentence. So naturally in editing, you go through and cut large portions of this silence out. (You also cut out a metric truckload of “Umms,” “Uhhs,” “Ahhhs,” and “Y’knows,” lots of Darth Vader breathing, the occasional cough or sneeze, Blarey the Podcast Train, and a conversation about whether or not you’d remembered to use the right microphone. For the record: I had and I hadn’t – at the same time. I was using the right mic in the recording software and the wrong one in our VOIP call).

Cutting a lot of that silence is good, but as I learned from talking to Grant after my first pass over the episode, you don’t want to cut too much of it, either. Some pausing (and even the occasional “um” or “uh”) actually makes the flow of a conversation sound more natural. There’s also a heck of a metaphor there for the way we live our lives and run our games. It can be good to try and make things more efficient up to a point, but cram too much in – in any number of contexts – and the breakneck pace you’ve created will carry you past stuff you wanted to appreciate before you really got the chance to enjoy it. This can be equally true in games where we rip past enjoyable role-playing interludes or even some enjoyable table talk in the hope of “moving the ball” just a little bit more in terms of plot or even combat, and it can be true in life when we over-book ourselves out of the fear of “missing out” or even favor the efficient over the enjoyable without really considering the alternative. (One time I’m really glad I didn’t do that was when my wife and I went to visit Grant and his wife last fall. I’d never been to the South before, and driving through the mountains while the leaves were changing is an experience I’m really glad I didn’t miss by flying instead of driving.)

So the next time you’re planning something, be sure not to cut all the silence. You might find that leaving some of it in lets you appreciate things more.

Okay, that’s a huge understatement. I’ve been going nearly crazy with anticipation, and it’s only intensifying as the date gets closer. It’s understandable, I suppose. My first real memory of getting into a digital game in a big way was Julian Gollop’s Laser Squad on the Commodore 64 back in the late 80s (yes, I’m old). Not so coincidentally, Mr. Gollop also was the creator of the original X-Com back in 1994, but I somehow missed that one when it was new. I did not, however, miss Jagged Alliance 2, Silent Storm, the UFO After[word] series, or a number of other games in the genre. Including, of course, the new XCOM released by Firaxis a few years back which, despite a Steam library that’s bloated with bundle games, I have put right around 200 hours into. XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within is one of my favorite games of all time, and the sequel looks to be more of the same with further levels of Firaxis polish on it, so yeah, I’m really stoked about it. I have purchased the deluxe version of the game on pre-order, and I have requested vacation time around the release date (postponing a traditional post-holiday week of vacation in the process). I’ve spent a bunch of time watching lets play videos (something I virtually never do) and have scoured the website for information. I’m trying to get as much of the experience as I possibly can before I get the game for real.

I go through something similar, albeit on a much less intense level whenever a new Magic: the Gathering set comes out. Once spoiler season starts for the new set, I eagerly check to see what new cards were revealed on my lunch break at work and start thinking about what decks those would go into or what new decks they’d suggest. By the time the prerelease rolls around, I’m pretty excited. And the same is almost always true when I get to start a new RPG campaign (especially if I’m GMing and get to share the world I’ve made with my players).

There are people who will will say that the anticipation is more fun than actually getting the thing, but I’m not one of them. When the waiting period ends and I get The Thing (whatever it is), the anticipation often seems to intensify the enjoyment I get out of it, but usually the fun of digging into all of the complexities and possibilities of The Thing far outweigh the fun of imagining what it’ll be like. The stuff that really grabs me is almost always something I have to dig into and interact with in a major way – I used to feel the same way about Lego sets when I was a kid.

Oh, by the way, I’m 37, married, and have a full-time job, a car payment, and I serve on two volunteer boards. I’m in management at my job. I have responsibilities and obligations – adulthood has happened to me, with all of its freedom and all of its shackles and all of the paradoxes that those two concepts imply, and I do take it very seriously.

In a lot of ways, new games give me a way, however briefly, to reconnect with the excitement of being a child, and I think that’s extremely valuable. Adulthood can be a grinding experience, as many (if not most) of you reading this will know. When the various things from the last paragraph start stacking up, I can get some satisfaction out of doing them well or handling them efficiently, but oftentimes there’s not much in the way of joy or excitement to it. I go to work, pay my bills, and otherwise handle my obligations because it’s the right thing to do on my good days and because I know that there will be consequences if I don’t on my bad ones, but I seldom get the same giddy “I can’t wait!” feeling except for when my hobbies are involved, and that in and of itself is one of the best arguments for having them that I could think of.

As always, I’d love to hear what any of you have to say – I’d love to hear about the stuff that gets you all giddy with excitement, and (of course) if any of the rest of you are going to be playing XCOM 2, I’m certain I’ll be plenty excited to talk about that after Friday.

-Peter

Standing out in crowded spaces

Here’s the bad news: Statistically speaking, when you start your podcast, it’s a good bet I won’t care about it.

I keep a close eye on /r/podcasts, and that particular subreddit is constantly barraged with “We just recorded our first episode, tell us what you think” requests. I’ve never found any of those podcasts interesting, and after thinking about it, the fundamental problem is that they don’t have a unique voice. I call this the “two guys talking about stuff” problem. So many podcasts are two people with no particular expertise and an unoriginal approach to their topic or topics, which appeals to basically nobody. Many don’t even have a particular subject to podcast about, instead talking about “whatever”—and I can hear the same irrelevant chatter waiting in line to place my lunch order, without cluttering up my phone.

Nailing down that unique voice requires you to think hard about two related components of your podcast’s identity: What are you talking about? And what differentiates you from other podcasts in your niche?

What are you talking about?

Podcasting is all about finding your niche and specializing in that area. Listeners want podcasts which appeal to their interests, and they want consistent perspectives and reliable information. That doesn’t mean you need to be industry professionals to podcast—I’ll talk about that in a moment—but it does mean you need to pick a niche and focus on it.

Those niche subjects vary in scope and audience, of course. Radio dramas like Serial have a much larger natural audience than, say, a podcast about tabletop RPGs and Christian theology. But after three and a half years of podcasting, Saving the Game is still the only podcast approaching tabletop roleplaying games from a Christian perspective. We occasionally branch out, but our core competency is the intersection of faith and roleplaying. When someone finds us (maybe because they were looking for that specifically, or because they were looking for one or the other of those core elements), they know what they’ve found and they know whether or not our show interests them.

If you haven’t nailed down your core subject, no one will know what they’ll get from your show—and that means no one will listen, because you’re not providing the content they want on a regular basis.

What differentiates you from other podcasts in your niche?

I’ll admit this can be tricky. For a podcast (or any other production) to stand out, it needs to provide something no one else provides.

Expertise is a good start. Peter and I both listen to Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff (we had Kenneth Hite on a while back, and I think we both fanboy’d over him a bit.) Kenneth Hite and Robin Laws are long-time professionals in the RPG industry, and they both know their subject matters—cinema, storytelling, game design, industry practices, food, horror, literature, history, paranormal nonsense, and occult weirdness—exceptionally well. Of course, you don’t need to be an industry professional to have this sort of expertise. Plenty of hobbyists put in the time and effort to become well-versed in their field, and that’s more than enough.

If you aren’t starting off with that sort of expertise, don’t worry: We didn’t either, and neither have many other successful podcasts. Practice and repetition grant familiarity and expertise over time. Dan at Fear the Boot—one of the longest-running tabletop RPG podcasts out there—has repeatedly called FTB “a monument to their failures”. Those ‘failures’, however, are all problems and situations which arose from their gaming experiences; and ten years of podcasting about their games has given them plenty of material and enough expertise to offer meaningful advice from multiple perspectives.

Perspectives do make a difference, by the way, and they can be a great starting point for your show. If you’ve got a perspective that’s naturally unique—a woman and/or a person of color in a hobby traditionally dominated by white males, for example, or a foreigner in a new country—that’s an immediate differentiator. It’s not sufficient for a good podcast, but it stakes out a challenging, interesting ground and promises originality, and that’s a great beginning. Likewise, gathering multiple perspectives around the mics will help ensure your podcast never seems stale, and will help you reach a larger audience—after all, with multiple distinct voices, listeners are more likely to hear someone they immediately connect with!

Finding a new way to approach a common subject is difficult, but it may well be the most rewarding way to stand out from other podcasts. System Mastery is one of my favorite (NSFW) podcasts about tabletop RPGs. It could have been two guys complaining about things they hate in roleplaying games and praising the things they like; and that would have been generic and boring. Instead, they approached the same subject by breaking down specific individual games, one per episode, in a way nobody else does. They still talk about the same things—what makes a game good or bad, how to be a good player or game master, what game design elements fail or succeed, etc.. Their framing device is unique, however, and they stand out as a result. (Their sense of humor certainly helps, but humor alone usually won’t carry a discussion show very far.) Similarly, Happy Jacks RPG Podcast (again, NSFW) stands out by having two segments: Roughly an hour of roundtable discussion, followed by about an hour of reading and replying to listener emails and questions—something few other podcasts focus on. The Gameable Pixar Podcast (neé The Gameable Disney Podcast) breaks down animated films into their fundamental story elements, and looks at how to use those in tabletop games. Those unique approaches keep me coming back to these shows every week.

Both of my podcasts aim to stand out by approaching their subject in unique ways. Saving the Game has an obvious, naturally unique framing device: No one else (that we know of!) discusses tabletop roleplaying games and collaborative storytelling within a Christian context. (There are plenty of “geeky Christian” podcasts out there, of course—we’ve had several on as guests, and The Crossover Nexus combines even more of those voices.) We also make an effort to acquire expertise—we’ve joked about our nine-page outlines before, but that level of research and detail makes us a resource as much as entertainment. The MacGuffin Factory, on the other hand, is in a crowded field of writing podcasts. It stands out by focusing on writing hooks, framed by a given sort of macguffin and/or plot device each episode, delivered rapid-fire and designed to inspire other storytellers.

One final trap I want to warn you about: Shock value. Many “two dudes talking about stuff” podcasts try to lean on crude humor and an ‘Explicit’ iTunes tag to attract attention. That worked in the ’90s for rock and rap albums, when the “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” sticker was shorthand for “this music will annoy your parents and mark you out as a cool kid”. Problem is, the Internet’s too full of NSFW material for that trick to matter anymore; it’s lost its punch. A few people will titter over crude jokes and stick around for a bit, but if you don’t have anything to say between those jokes, your podcast won’t go especially far. If your natural voice lends itself to an ‘Explicit’ tag, that’s absolutely fine—I listen to several excellent NSFW podcasts, and linked to two above!—but don’t depend on being grosser than everyone else to stand out and seem interesting (or worse, ‘edgy’.) Trust me: There’s always someone more disgusting on the Internet.

Moving forward

That’ll do it for this post—I wrote a lot more than I expected, to be honest! I’ve got more coming, so stay tuned for discussion of consistency; professionalism; engaging listeners; listener self-identification (and why politics and religion are so dangerous); passion vs. statistics; and more. I’ll also make sure to write up some practical advice on recording and editing using Audacity, screenshotting the episode I’m currently editing and demonstrating why I do what I do.

If there’s anything else you want to have me or Peter weigh in on, please let us know about it in the comments, or via Twitter, Facebook or email. And if you’ve happened across this post because you’re looking for podcasting advice, take a minute to listen to our show—if it’s a topic you’re interested in, of course!

I’m about 3 years late to the Diablo III party. I’m about 16 years late to the Dresden Files party. Ah well. Better late than never. In starting to consume both at the same time, however, I noticed something: Diablo III has a fair bit to say about Paladins, and I think some of it is really useful for making an oft-maligned class actually fun and interesting in games.

First some quick background, though. The self-righteous, overly-zealous, utterly inflexible, or otherwise just plain insufferable paladin is a stereotype as old as the proverbial hills in gaming. A lot of the time, paladins in fantasy games act a bit like Space Marines in the Warhammer 40k universe: violent, loud, and constantly spouting terms like “heretic,” “smite,” and “cleanse.” While this can be fun for a certain type of game, the perception has crept in that this is the “right” or even only way to play holy warriors, and, well, that’s just not true.

Diablo III, of all things, quietly hangs a lampshade on this. I played my first run through the game as a Crusader, the “Paladin” class of the game – a big brawny guy encased in armor and using a shield and an enormous weapon. Early in the game, you recruit a Templar as a companion – and at that point, the contrasts become evident. The crusader comes from an order that revolves around mentoring a single apprentice who takes everything from the mentor – including their name – when they die. In addition, the Crusader is a fairly calm, soft-spoken, and even-handed sort. The Templar, on the other hand, is more the Space Marine archetype. Loud, wrathful, zealous, and a little unstable. Where the Crusader seems to look at all the fighting he has to do with a kind of patient resignation, the Templar revels in violence and seems to be constantly chomping at the bit to get back into the fight. And his order took him as a criminal and basically tortured him until he forgot his past life, then rebuilt him as they saw fit. The Crusader is audibly disturbed by this and tells the Templar “they left you empty, friend.” And then there’s Michael Carpenter, the Knight of the Cross from The Dresden Files. Michael is a family man – a married father of several children – who still goes out and risks his life fighting supernatural evil because it’s the right thing to do. He is kind, patient, and when tries to correct the behavior of others (particularly Harry) it’s done in such a way that makes it obvious that he’s saying something because he cares – not just about the ambient moral purity of the world, but about the life of his friend and the quality thereof. He prompts Harry to be a better person at least in part to make Harry’s life fuller and more meaningful.

Two other fictional characters also go well into the mix: Nick Valentine, the detective from Fallout 4, who in the middle of a pitched battle will shout things like “Are you sure this is the last mug you want to see?” and “This doesn’t have to be the day you die!” even as he’s ducking for cover and returning fire (and so many other things that I won’t spoil), and the Paragon variant of Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect trilogy, who despite being a person with an unbelievable amount of responsibility piled on him, still finds time to talk a distraught former slave down from hurting herself, comfort a grieving mother in a lawless slum, and heal a criminal dying of a terminal disease who just seconds before had cursed him and waved a gun in his face. These kinds of multi-faceted good people who actually embody the description of love Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 not only are more tolerable for other players at the table, but they’re ultimately more interesting characters. They’re also much more authentic and believable paragons of virtue than a lot of people play paladins as.

I’ve kind of taken a break from playing outright holy warriors for a bit – but some of these new examples make me want to pick the archetype back up again. In the meantime, if you’ve seen any particularly good or bad paladins in your gaming history ad want to share, please comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Production Phase:

This is where you’ll finish making your behind-the-scenes decisions, record an episode, and get it out there for the world to enjoy.

• Determine Editing Standards [R]: This is more of a decision than you might initially think. Some podcasts go for an ultra-produced, slick presentation where every long pause, “um” or “uh” and every digression or verbal flub is edited away, leaving nothing but a silky-smooth stream of highly-refined content. This certainly has its advantages, but it can also lead to content that sounds inauthentic, and it increases editing time by a substantial degree. Still, some editing is good. You’ll want to take the edges off of certain things like Blarey the Podcast Train or other, less in-jokey background noise, and when you have one of those moments where you completely trip over your own tongue, it’s useful to be able to say it over again and edit in the usable version for clarity, if not for pride.
• Determine Editing Staff [S] and Determine Editing Schedule [T]: This also varies. Some podcasts have one of their hosts edit (like Grant does with ours or Dan does with Fear the Boot) and some use an outside producer (like Gamers With Jobs and The Command Zone). In any case, you’ll want to determine who is doing the editing, and how much time they’ll have to do it before the episode drops. It bears mentioning that audio editing is a non-trivial task. To be even more explicit, it will take you between four and eight times as long to edit something as it did to record it. This is why Saving the Game is on a two-week release schedule, by the way. I suspect it’s also a major source of “podfade.” Getting together and recording a conversation is easy. Doing post-production work is substantially less so and is also a lot less fun. However, it’s manageable – that there are plenty of podcasts that have been around for years should be all the indication you need that editing is manageable, it’s just something you have to account for properly.
• Set up Recording Environment [U]: As I alluded to earlier, this doesn’t need to be anything fancy. You just want a place that’s as quiet and free of interruptions as you can make it and you want to be able to sit comfortably and still talk into your microphone properly at the same time. In addition:
  • You really want to wear headphones if you’re podcasting with somebody who isn’t in the same room, and you want to make sure they don’t “leak” much sound. The “echo” effect is nigh unto impossible to get rid of in editing and is really distracting to listen to.
  • Consider plugging your headphones into your mic if you can. Apparently this helps get rid of certain verbal tics and makes for a more comfortable recording experience. You probably won’t even notice the difference, but it will help your audio quality.
  • Some kind of articulating mic stand will come in handier than you think.
  • Buy windscreens and pop filters for your mics and use them. They don’t cost much, but they help a lot.
• Set up Home Page [V]: Get your web presence set up and ready to go. Specific technical advice for this is beyond the scope of this blog post, but if your web hosting provider is worth their salt, they should have some good documentation for you to use.
• Determine Release Schedule [W]: Figure out how often you’re going to release your podcast. As a guide, record an “episode zero” (you are going to be horribly nervous and awkward, and that’s completely fine) and edit it. Then Extrapolate from there how long it’ll take you to record and release a typical episode and then take a very clear-eyed look at the rest of your life. From there you should be able to get some idea of how often you can release.
• Record Episode [X]: This is it! Your first episode! Pick an interesting topic and get to it!
• Edit Episode [Y]: Specific editing advice is beyond the scope of this blog post (though I’m hoping to talk Grant into writing a post or two about editing at some point) but the podcasting community is generally pretty friendly. IF you really get stuck, send a polite email to a veteran podcaster and they can probably get you un-stuck.
• Release Episode [Z] and Post to Social Media [AA]: Put that edited episode out there for people to enjoy, and don’t forget to promote it on social media!

And that’s it for part 3: Production. I hope this series has been useful to you. As usual, feel free to ping us with questions or comments.

Preparation Phase:
This is where you’ll set up the necessary hardware and software for your podcast. It’s also where you’ll make some decisions about procedures and logistics.

• Select Recording Software [H] and Acquire  Recording Software [O]: Over the years we and our guest hosts have used a number of different programs to get audio files for episodes, including the WIndows Sound Recorder app. You can use basically any program that allows you to record sound files, but that’s not to say they’re all equal. The RPG segment of the podcasting community, at least, has more or less standardized on Audacity. There are several reasons for this: it handles both recording and editing, it’s relatively easy to use, it has a decent number of features, and (perhaps most importantly) it’s free. If you are going to use Audacity (and after almost four years of using it, I’m pretty confident saying you should) you’ll want to get the LAME codec (it’s actual name, not a quality judgment) so you can encode your audio files in MP3 format. The reason it’s a separate codec and not part of audacity has to do with open-source licensing and file formats. It’s a legal issue, not a technical one, but you’ll only need to take care of it once when you install
• Set up File Hosting [I]: You’ll need a place to host the audio you’re going to be producing. We actually found out the hard way early on in our podcasting career that you definitely want to use a hosting provider that specializes in podcasts. (If you don’t you may find that the first time one of your episodes takes off, there’s a very real possibility that you’ll be scrambling to get your feed back instead of celebrating.) The two big names in the business right now are Podbean and Libsyn. Either one of these services will work fine, but Libsyn is generally regarded as being a bit better; they tend to be slightly more reliable and have been talking about Spotify integration, though that seems to still be “early days” as of this writing.
• Set up Social Media Presence [J]: As notoriously lousy as I am at social media, even I can acknowledge that these days, your podcast needs a social media presence. At a bare minimum, set up a twitter account, but also think about Facebook, Google+, etc. In addition, if you’re part of the community of another podcast (and if you’re thinking about starting one, you probably are) it’s worth putting the word out to that community about your venture.
• Select Editing Software [K] and Acquire Editing Software [N]: As previously mentioned, the ideal is to have your recording and editing software be the same program. If they’re not, you may want to reconsider Audacity unless you have a compelling reason not to.
• Select Recording Hardware [H] and Acquire  Recording Hardware [O]: This is one of the places where aspiring podcasters tend to get stuck, which is a shame, because this really isn’t that big of a deal. Let me set the record straight: you don’t need a mixer, you don’t need a mic that costs hundreds of dollars, and you don’t  need a recording studio. A decent-quality USB mic is just fine; Grant uses a podcasting standard, the Blue Snowball and I use an Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB. It IS worth getting a windscreen and a pop filter for your mic, and you will find it a lot more comfortable to record if you mount it on something that doesn’t require you to loom/hunch over your desk like a podcasting vulture.
• Establish Recording Procedures [M]: For Saving the Game, we set up our outline’s “bones” ahead of time, and then finish it off either right before or in the first few minutes after we get on a VOIP call and open up Audacity. We typically both record 10 seconds or so of random chatter just to make sure we’re getting good waveforms, then delete that from the project. When it comes time to record the episode proper, we do a countdown from 3 and hit “record” more or less  at the same time, then acknowledge verbally that we’re recording. After that, we sit quietly for 30 seconds for “room tone” and then typically launch into the episode. You may want to do something similar or different, but work it out ahead of time.
• Set up File Sharing Resources [Q]: If you’re able to record in the same physical space with the other folks on your podcast, this isn’t all that important. If you’re remote like we are on Saving the Game, however, it is absolutely critical (audio files are typically way too big to be emailed, and you need to get everyone’s track to the editor). Once again, this needn’t be something expensive or time consuming; Grant and I use Google Drive and have been very happy with it. I know of several other podcasts that use DropBox. Once again, there’s no one “right” solution, just find something that works for everybody involved and use it consistently.

And that’s it for Part 2: Preparation. Look for Part 3 on Saturday.

I listen to a lot of podcasts in addition to being on one, and one of the most common questions that every podcast gets asked is “how do you start a podcast?” While I can’t speak for everybody else out there, this is the process Grant and I went through. The chart at the top is a piece of recycled homework from my intro to business class last semester – it shows, from left to right, the rough order things need to be done in and which things need to be done more or less together. In addition, it’s color-coded; after determining what the podcast is (light gray) you’re going to have staff (blue), podcasting hardware and software (yellow) and your internet presence (pink). (Click on the graphic to blow it up to a size you can actually read.) Processes that use more than one of these are in colors formed by mixing two of the colors (green or purple) or all three (brown). The diagram flows from left to right. Hopefully it’s not too hard to follow. In addition to the chart above, I’m going to break the steps down into three phases: Conception, Preparation, and Production. Each one of those phases will form a separate blog post.

Conception Phase:

This is where you’ll need to figure out what your podcast is going to be about, who your hosts are going to be, and what you’ll call yourselves.

• Determine Podcast Niche [A]: Spend some time figuring out exactly what you want your show to be about and what kind of topics you’ll discuss. This doesn’t have to be completely etched in stone, but the more specific you can be, the better. For Saving the Game, we decided that we wanted to do an explicitly-Christian tabletop RPG podcast and talk about ways that gaming and faith intersect and interact. Over the years, we’ve also added some focus on storytelling technique and using games as a means by which to do good works.
• Recruit Hosting Staff [B]: This may take place at the same time as determining the podcast niche, or somebody may get an idea and then recruit co-hosts later. Figure out who you’re going to be recording with and whether you’ll have a more-or-less fixed group of hosts like us, KARTAS, and the Gameable Podcasts, or a rotating pool of hosts like Fear the Boot and Gamers With Jobs. You’ll want to select people that it’s easy for you to have a conversation with, that you’ll actually want to talk to for a few hours on a regular basis, and that can be trusted to show up. How many people you have is going to vary from podcast to podcast, but you should have at least two. Monologue podcasts are notoriously very hard to keep going, and having at least one other brain to pick generally tends to make the process easier, richer, and more fun.
• Select Podcast Name [C]: This is a surprisingly brain-bendy activity, or at least it was for us. You want something that conveys what you do and/or who you are, is memorable, and that has an indicative URL available for registration. We picked Saving the Game because it had the dual connotations of fixing a game that’s going awry and the obvious Christian connotations that go with the word “save” and its variants.
• Register Domain Name [D]: Take the name you just picked and figure out a URL that’s memorable that goes with it. Then register that domain name before somebody else does.
• Establish a Recording Schedule [E]: Pick a time when you and the other host(s) can reliably sit down and record. For Saving the Game, we typically record on Thursday evenings, but I think over the years we’ve been doing the podcast, we’ve recorded at least once on every day of the week for one reason or another. As you can tell from that last sentence, some flexibility is good, because something is going to happen that messes with one of your voices, computers, or schedules at some point.
• Select Communication Tools [F]: If you’re fortunate enough to be able to sit down in the same physical location with the other folks on your podcast, this will be less of an issue for you than it is for us, but you should be able to reach your fellow podcasters in at least three different ways and at least two of those should be in real time. It’s also useful to have a set place to communicate various official business about the podcast, and if you’re recording remotely, you need a good, solid VOIP connection. Grant and I used Skype for a while, but it hated one of his prior computers, so we switched to Google Hangouts a while back and have stayed there.
• Establish Show Format [G]: Figure out what kind of structure you want your show to have. We have always had a pretty tightly-structured show – we do our announcements and a quick greeting and check-in, and then move on to scripture and then to our topic. We also make extensive use of outlines, something that other podcasts don’t always do and that we get a bit of ribbing for on Game Store Prophets. In any case, figure out what kind of format you want to do and how much – or how little – structure works for you.

And that’s it for Part 1: Conception. Check back on Thursday for the next part of this series.

I’m not sure why I feel like I shouldn’t do this (maybe because I worry that my teachers will think anything related to something I do for fun if too frivolous for academic discussion?), but it doesn’t stop me from doing it at least once in almost every class I have to write for. I’ve got several reasons: I would love it if a teacher asked me about some game I’d mentioned in a paper (or indicated they already played it), I’ve found other gaming students to talk with that way, and I already know a fair bit about gaming, so research tends to be easier and new information I uncover tends to stay useful after the class is over. I’ve also met a decent number of other gamers in school settings (in fact, until I discovered podcasts, that was my primary source for meeting other gamers) so my academic life and my gaming life are kind of tied in my mind that way. The biggest reason though, is that I think over 20 years of hobby gaming in various forms has kind of rewired my brain.

If I don’t seem particularly upset about that last statement: I’m not. Gaming has given me a variety of useful tools for interacting with and describing the world around me, and I don’t even mean “gamifying” aspects of my life in the traditional “life hacking” way. D&D alignments provide useful analogies for describing personalities and behaviors of characters in fiction (and occasionally jokingly doing so with real people). Things like levels and character points provide a useful analogy for talking about things like competency or even privilege.

And then there’s all of the stuff that those of us that are apologists for the hobby always talk about: math, social skills, and especially problem solving are all part & parcel of the gaming experience. Gaming may not have taught me everything I know about working with a team, managing different personality types, and thinking on the fly, but it has supplied a lot of those lessons, and unlike the ones learned at work or in school, they have tended to be enjoyable rather than aggravating or even painful.

It’s not even just tabletop RPGs, although I do think they’re probably the single most beneficial type of gaming – I’ve learned teamwork in cooperative board games like Pandemic and especially when I was playing Left 4 Dead 2 with some friends on Steam. I’ve learned more than I’d ever have been able to tolerate learning in other ways about efficiency and system optimization (especially taking unnecessary components out) building Magic: The Gathering decks. (And while I’m talking about Magic, I’ve learned to manage disappointment and stress through it, too. Getting mana screwed in magic isn’t fun, but being able to tell your opponent they beat you fair & square after it happened to you is a valuable skill.) Play can be very beneficial when it stretches you – especially when you don’t realize it until after you’re done and decide to think about it.

School feeds back into gaming, too: the critical thinking skills you learn in particular are a handy tactical resource, and the “three ‘R’s” help a lot too. You need good reading and math skills just to play a game, and some writing practice helps keep your character’s backstory from being bland. In addition, I took a course in high school that dealt with etymology and root words. That may have been the single most valuable class of my entire primary educational career. The skills and knowledge I got in that class have been useful in every aspect of my life, but especially in gaming – science fiction and fantasy use a lot of esoteric terminology, and being able to crack it with root words rather than Google is really nice.

So maybe it’s not so odd that I keep pulling in references to gaming at school. After all, they compliment each other nicely.

Happy Thanksgiving!

-Peter

I’ve really enjoyed every prior game in the series that released for the PC, and with the one exception of Fallout Tactics (which fell victim to a late, game-breaking bug), I’ve finished all of them at least twice. It is probably my favorite video game series of all time, and news of a new installment still has the ability to turn me from a relatively sober and mature 37-year-old back into an excitable teenager, at least for a little while. My attitude about this aspect of my personality varies with my mood. At times, I think it’s cool that I can enjoy things enough that a new release can excite me before it even arrives. Other times, it bugs me that I can’t just rein it in until the thing arrives. And then, on a bit of a tangential note, I find myself lamenting the fact that I won’t get much time with the game until Wednesday evening, thanks to a church meeting I have to be at about an hour after I get home from work on Tuesday (and no, as much as I would like to, I will not be playing hooky from either work or the meeting).

It’s not just video games that can have this effect on me, either. I generally watch new Magic sets with at least some interest, and I’m actually not at all ashamed to admit that when we get a really good guest host lined up for one of the podcast episodes, that tends to psych me up, too. (Incidentally, we’ve got a returning guest for the episode we’ll record in two days and a really cool topic, to boot. I can’t wait to record this one!) And the start of a new campaign or adventure with my RPG group is way, way up there, too. My acceptance of my own enthusiasm seems to scale proportionately with how appropriate I judge it to be, but I feel it nonetheless. And in my introspective moments (which are frequent enough to provide a lot of blog fodder), I wonder why I can’t summon up this same level of excitement for the stuff I have to, or at least should do rather than just recreational activities.

The answer, I think, is novelty. Grant once said on either our podcast or another one that he appeared on that he felt bad for people who only live one life, and I can’t help but agree. Games allow us to inhabit whole other worlds in a way that even the best movies or books don’t. I remember Skyrim ads that read “live another life in another world” and I think that’s the effect that the best gaming experiences, whether digital or tabletop, create.

That brings up another question, though, one that I still don’t have an answer to: what moral responsibilities do our fictional selves in these fictional worlds have, and how much of that responsibility transfers back to us in the real world? The obvious temptation is to answer both questions with “none” and end the conversation there, but I think that may be too easy of an answer. At the same time, the standards are clearly different, and the context is wildly different, and it galls me to no end when I hear some of the more radical elements of my own faith insisting that there is no such thing as fiction or pretend. (I mean, for crying out loud – Jesus taught in parables. There is fiction authored by Christ Himself in the Bible.)

However, at the same time, my conscience does nag at me just a bit when one of my characters does something bad in a virtual world. I do occasionally wonder where the line between fantasy and reality gets blurry, and where the capacity to simply think of this or that course of action starts to paint a picture of my character – my real, personal moral character, not my fictional avatar in the game world. I know there can be some value in exploring, or at least revealing, the dark corners of my soul, but at the same time, I think it’s probably possible to dive to deeply in those dark waters.

Or maybe I just like feeling heroic. Or maybe I’m just a softy. Or maybe all of the above. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but neither do I want to stop asking questions. I will tell you this, though: getting a new world to ask them in still excites me like nothing else.

I also know that, as a guy who is starting to see glimpses of 40 on the horizon, that the likelihood of me going out and gaming with strangers when I can do a little work and game with close friends instead is pretty low. I figured for this week’s blog post, I’d share a few thoughts and lessons collected from 3 years of regular VOIP gaming, because while nothing beats getting together with your group in meat space, sometimes that’s just not practical, or even possible.

1. If you’re going to go to the trouble of coordinating an online game with people, make sure it’s a group you really want to game with. One of the advantages our gaming group enjoys is that we can actually game with people spread out over 1200+ miles of territory (and if we ever get our player in Colorado back, it’ll be even more than that). Put together your dream team – the really close friends who you gel with well socially and really enjoy interacting with.
2. Set yourselves up some kind of permanent hub. We use a secret Facebook group, but there are all kinds of tools for making a private community online. Pick one that works for your group and use it – being able to work around last-minute scheduling issues and having a central repository for character sheets and reference documents is really useful.
3. Have at least three ways to get in touch with everybody in the group. You should have the VOIP service itself, email addresses, and some type of real-time communication. Texting works well for this, but so does social media like Facebook or Twitter if the person checks it regularly. Nothing makes you suddenly worry if your friend is okay like them being 10 minutes late for a VOIP game.
4. Be ready for some fluidity in starting times. Adult lives – they interfere, especially if the adults in question are students, parents, or in some way on-call professionally.
5. Find a single VOIP client that works and stick with it. We’ve personally found that Google Hangouts work the best – Grant and I use them while recording Saving the Game episodes, too. Some folks are more comfortable with another option like Skype, though, and that can also work fine. The biggest trick is getting one that doesn’t crash anyone’s system. Once you’ve got that handled, you are, as they say, golden.
6. Video can be nice, but it’s really not all that important. Being able to hear each other clearly is much more critical. If you’ve got to turn video off in the name of audio quality, do it and don’t look back. This is especially important if somebody is on a weak-to-moderate wifi signal. Along those same lines, if you can use a computer with a physical, wired connection to the router, do it. Finally, do what you need to to make sure everyone can hear everyone else. If you can hear someone fine but they can’t hear you, take the time to remedy the problem instead of trying to work around it.
7. Figure out how you’re going to roll dice. We’ve rolled physical dice on the honor system and we’ve used online dice rollers. Both work fine, but give some thought to how you’ll handle this.
8. Plan on shorter sessions. Two to four hours is probably all you’ll realistically get. Wearing even a comfortable headset can get a little chafing after a while.
9. Stick with lighter systems. It’s easier to run them when you aren’t physically present to pass books around than crunchier systems. Savage Worlds works a lot better over VOIP than GURPS.
10. Immersion can be both easier and more difficult. On the one hand, you’re in front of a box of distractions. On the other hand, if you can leave just the VOIP window or something relevant to the game up on screen, the screen itself can pull your eyes away from distractions. A headset helps too.

And that’s all I’ve got. As usual, I’d love to hear from anyone else who has experience with VOIP gaming. Do you agree or disagree with me? Did I miss something important? I’d love to hear in the comments.

I was really intense as a younger gamer. I collected gaming books at a dizzying speed – enough to fill two bookcases, and I read them voraciously. My characters tended to be hard-as-nails, steely-eyed crusading types, often slightly ruthless and utterly inflexible. I wouldn’t dream of playing any alignment except Lawful Good (or maybe Lawful Neutral if I really wanted to give the bad guys what-for). My systems of choice were extremely crunchy and had lots of room for optimization, and I hung out on RPG forums a lot – first the old Pyramid boards, then the D&D forums over at Wizards of the Coast. Gaming consumed my life and defined me a great deal. Similarly, I was also a very intense and sadly very self-righteous Christian despite the knowledge of the planks in my own eye. I was quick to condemn the actions of others without context and without sympathy. My young man’s eyes flicked around constantly for some evil to smite whether I was in a fictional world or the real one, and it seemed like I never had to look far. With pretty much the singular exception of geekiness, I lived almost entirely in the “Christian bubble” and it’s not hard to picture my younger self standing there, arms crossed, scowling out at the outside world.

I was a pharisee. Truth be told, I still struggle with that aspect of myself. There is a part of me that wants to pass judgment and dispense justice. And while I now know that the Christian life is a call to compassion and mercy, there is a little part of me that would have probably been a distressingly-zealous Templar if I’d been born a few centuries ago. God (and other Christians) continue to work on me and I continue to get better little by little, though I still have a long way to go before I get even close to catching up to my role models.

Gaming, on the other hand, has been a much easier transition. I’ve discovered that black-and-white morality and hack-and-slash game play, while fun in moderate amounts, can make a game stale if that’s all it is, and my involvement in the larger community of gamers has introduced me to a lot of new systems and concepts that I’ve really come to enjoy. Back in my youth, I think I’d have balked at a system like Savage Worlds, because it doesn’t have the granularity and detail that my system of choice at the time, GURPS, has. I still like GURPS as a resource, by the way – my old GURPS books are some of the most frequently-referenced volumes on my gaming bookshelves, but I’ve also come to realize that the system definitely has some limits to it in play. Some of those limitations are accentuated by my adult life – I have a full-time job, a wife, and an assortment of other responsibilities (including this blog post) to fulfill, and I also have a broader range of interests than I had when I was younger, so not having to dump quite so much time into the prep work of gaming is really nice. Similarly, faster, less-granular systems with fewer fiddly bits actually get out of the way creatively and allow for more interesting decisions at the table rather than just in character creation. Gaming with other adults is also wonderful, if less-frequent and shorter in session length. As I’ve gotten older it’s also become more apparent how gaming and faith compliment and inform each other.

I think it’s funny that sometimes there’s a pressure to “grow out of” hobbies like gaming, because I think tabletop RPGs, more than any other hobby I have, have previously had, or can imagine having, benefit from the mellowing that comes with age and the the relationships adults make with each other. If you’re just starting out on your journey – in faith or in gaming – know that you have a lot to look forward to on the road ahead. Some things really do get better with age.

If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. – Romans 12:18

I did something new for me this past weekend: I went to a prerelease event for the new Magic: The Gathering set. Because I’m an introvert and a bit of a homebody besides, I went in with a little trepidation and got there fairly early so I could check with the owner of the hosting store about any etiquette or procedures I needed to observe.  (In the event that you’re wondering, there’s not much – you need a DCI number, which is very easy to get signed up for at the store, and then you’ll play four best-of-three matches with a deck you make from six packs of the new set. Buy in was $20.) I went 2-2 overall, blowing out my first opponent, being blown out by my next two, and finally winning 2-1 against my final opponent. Folks were fairly nice, and I really enjoyed the experience, but I was nervous going in, and I’ve experienced a similar phenomenon at cons and when I’ve joined a new gaming group, so here’s what I’ve learned about making yourself a welcome presence in an unfamiliar gaming environment, whether it’s a CCG event, a con game, or the first few sessions with a new gaming group.

• Be helpful: I carry a multitool and a couple of good-quality ballpoint pens with me, primarily out of habit (I use both at work on at least a semi-regular basis) so when we got the prerelease kits handed out and people were fighting with the shrinkwrap, I opened the knife in the multitool and passed it around to folks near me. I did similar things with the pens all day. Whenever somebody near me asked if somebody had one, I lent them one of mine. I brought a lot more dice than I needed for tokens and counters and cheerfully lent them to my opponents if they needed them.
• Be prepared: It’s definitely easier to be helpful if you’ve got the tools to be. Bring writing utensils, dice, and scratch paper when you go to an unfamiliar gaming event and be ready to share them.
• Ask questions: If you’re at an unfamiliar event, ask the other participants if they’re more familiar with the goings-on than you, and if the answer is “yes” and they don’t seem eager to break off the conversation, ask them for advice. Most people like to demonstrate and share their knowledge, and most folks will be happy to assist in matters of gaming you if you ask. I find it’s best to start this early on before things really get rolling, but it’s generally better to ask than guess and do something that can cause problems if you’re unsure.
• Be humble: If you make a mistake, apologize and correct it, but also try to let it go as fast as possible. Getting gunshy after an accidental faux pas or play error is going to ruin the experience for you and will probably make others feel bad.
• Be presentable: Show up clean and groomed in clothes that are clean and in good condition. (And if you’ve got a cool geeky t-shirt you want to show off, this is most definitely the time!)
• Be a good sport: If what you’re playing is competitive, it is highly unlikely you’re going to win more than half the time. If it’s cooperative or collaborative like most RPGs, something will probably go wrong in the game. You’re going to blow an important die roll, miss a clue, etc. Taking setbacks graciously immediately makes you less threatening and more pleasant to game with. Likewise, if somebody else does something really good, acknowledge it and congratulate them! If you’re at a CCG event and somebody gets something really expensive or powerful in their pulls, suppress your envy and congratulate them, too. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to keep up a constant stream of conversation or be charming, but being gracious and polite goes a long way.
• Remember who you’re representing: If you’re a Christian, this has obvious implications: you want to model love, grace, and charity in an appropriate way at the event, but even if you’re not a person of faith, it’s worth remembering that your behavior helps contribute to the overall perception of gamers inside the community itself and potentially outside it.
• Have as much fun as you can wring out of the event without ruining anybody else’s: Regardless of the reason you’re there, whether you sought it out on your own or went with a friend, it’d be silly not to do all you can to enjoy yourself. If a hobby’s no fun, it’s not much of a hobby.
• And finally: Don’t talk yourself out of something you’ll enjoy just because you’re nervous!

Good luck out there folks! As always, I’d be interested in additions to this list, supporting or conflicting anecdotes, etc. I love reading your comments, so please, don’t hesitate to post them!

-Peter

Wikipedia: This one is so obvious that I almost didn’t include it on the list, but it’s also so useful that I felt like leaving it off the list would leave the list incomplete. WIkipedia has at least a little bit of information on just about everything, and is a solid jumping-off point for any sort of research you feel like doing. While it’s not always the most accurate source for serious research, that’s less of a concern for gaming purposes. If the author(s) of a given article have, for example, decided to print the legend rather than the history, as it were, that may even be better for gaming purposes. The other thing that’s great about Wikipedia is that it’s cross-linked, which means that following up on specific aspects of whatever it is that you’re researching is really easy.

Tvtropes: When Branden was still on the podcast, he would reference this website a lot, and with good reason. It’s a collection of tropes (defined on the site as: “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations”) that is organized in a similar way to Wikipedia – cross-linked and separated by subject. Unlike Wikipedia, the tone of the writing is much less formal, but that doesn’t make the site any less wonderful as a resource. Simply looking up a favorite work (TV show, movie, or video game) from the front age will usually yield an entertaining firehose of content to drink from.

SCP Foundation: A site of fictional batches of weirdness, sort of similar to the old Warehouse 23 basement site that Steve Jackson Games used to have back in the day, but much, much larger. If you’re running any sort of campaign that needs weirdness of any sort and find yourself short on inspiration, it’s worth wandering over to SCP and browsing around for a bit. I have to give Grant credit for this one; he was the one who pointed me to the site in the first place.

Google Maps: If you’re running a game set in the modern world (+/- 50 years or so) Google Maps is your friend. The street view and satellite view options in particular are handy for finding interesting adventure locations and it’s useful to be able to find things like airports, natural wonders, major historical sites and so on when you’re running a modern game. Heck, it can even be handy to know where the railways are if you’ve got PCs who like to sneak onto trains in an urban fantasy game.

Online retailers: A lot of the time in modern or near-future games, I find that I want specific things that aren’t in the game books. Specialized tools, clothing, and electronics all have specs and costs associated with them, and place where you can buy those things will generally have that information in an easy-to reference format. Amazon is the big kahuna, but don’t overlook Galls (a company that supplies emergency services), American Science and Surplus (a company that sells little bits of everything and whose item descriptions are among the most delightfully-readable on the web) and Maker Shed (a site aimed at the Maker movement) for neat stuff PCs (particularly gadgetteers) will want.

System Resource Documents: The SRDs for Pathfinder, D&D 3.5, D20 Modern, and FATE are available online for your perusal. The Pathfinder and FATE ones in particular are really well-laid-out and easy to navigate.

And that’s it for this week’s reference library update. If you’ve got resources of your own that you use in your gaming, we’d love to hear about them in the comments.

-Peter

“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” -Revelation 21:4

“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” -Wesley, The Princess Bride

It’s often said that the two certainties in life are death and taxes, but I’d humbly suggest that we’ll all become acquainted with pain long before we’re aware of the tax man. Pain is varied, it is all too common, and it is all too often ignored in our gaming experiences.

So much of the pain that colors our lives is relatively undramatic. A stubbed toe, a small disappointment, even the crushing blow of the sudden loss of a loved one or the nagging ache as you realize that your life will never be quite what you’d hoped – very few of these moments turn up in heroic fiction, and when they do, they are often tangential to the plot. This is not, however, true in our lives. A staggering number of us come from broken families,we all have regrets, disappointments, and illnesses. It is a part of the human condition that we will suffer in a multitude of ways, great and small, between the time when we enter this world and the time when we leave it, and often that pain changes us and shapes us in a variety of ways, and as with so many things, what defines us (and our characters) is not so much that we have pain, but what we do with it.

Some folks are crushed by their pain, retreating into bitterness or madness to escape it – in fact, this is a semi-canonical explanation for where The Joker came from. Crushed beneath the weight of “one bad day” he becomes a sadistic, insane madman, anxious and eager to share his pain with others. Others retreat from the world entirely, becoming hermits or even catatonic.

Others deny it or brush it off with exaggerated indifference. “It’s nothing to me.” Oftentimes this is a trap the immature fall into – seeing the very experience of pain as a weakness to be excised, or if that is impossible, at least denied or ignored. The problem with this approach is that pain is very persistent. It will eventually make itself known, and will reach a point where it can no longer be ignored.

Still others wallow in their pain, allowing it to define their experience. A lot of really good art gets made this way (everything from paintings to poetry to music) but being defined by misery and suffering this way robs people of happiness they could otherwise experience and strains relationships.

Finally, there are some who acknowledge their pain, but push through it. This is one of the better responses, and covers everything from working out to the artist pushing through rejection, to forging new relationships after the loss of a loved one. People treating their pain this way will often seek help with it, which is also healthy and can lead to a lot of growth. (For an interesting treatment of this concept, check out this TED Talk by Jane Mcgonigal.) It should probably go without saying that this last approach (and helping others with their pain) is the way we’re ideally expected to behave as Christians. The Apostle Paul tells us to “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep,” in Romans (Romans 12:15) and scripture is thick with admonitions to help the poor, the sick, the needy, and those suffering (and there’s that word again: suffering) from all sorts of trouble.

Narratively, I think we leave a lot on the table when we boil our adventures down to a series of tactical puzzles (and this from somebody who would be unamimously voted “most tactically-minded” by at least his current gaming group and probably several previous ones). One of the things that made Grant’s successful Shadowrun game so great was that the PC group was very empathetic (at least by the standards of shadowrunners) – they were careful about the amount of pain they caused to innocent people, and seeing those same people in bad situations moved them to do something about it. Now in fairness – they also caused a fair amount of pain to those they felt deserved it, which was often the in-game manifestation of one of my real-world character flaws: a streak of viciousness that can pop out when I’ve conned myself into thinking it’s justified.

Pain, and our response to it, defines our character and our stories, and it should define our characters and their stories as well. The next time you sit down to make a character or play one, give some thought to how they respond to the hurt in their life and the lives around them, why they feel and act that way, and how that affects the story. And, if you’re anything like me, it may also be a good idea to repeat that exercise with yourself in the real world from time to time.

Crossover:

First and foremost, we just recently wrapped up an exciting project with Kris and Katrina over at the Gameable Disney/Gameable Pixar podcast. We’ve crossed over with other podcasts before, but those have typically taken the form of a pair of one-episode “host loans” where one of us (usually Grant) does an episode of another podcast and one of them does an episode with us. Our most recent collaboration with the gameable podcast folks went a bit more in-depth than that. For starters, all four of us appeared on both of the crossover episodes, and the discussion centers around The Prince of Egypt by Dreamworks. The episodes of both podcasts are intended as companion pieces to each other and reference each other a bit. Be sure to catch both! As an additional aside, Kris and Katrina are both a pleasure to work with and just to associate with. We had Katrina on to talk about prophecy back in Episode 58, and we hit it off with her well. The interaction with both her and Kris was, if anything, even better. They’re both really great folks – friendly, smart, and full of both insights and humor. I’ve recommended their work so much by this point that some of you are probably tired of hearing it from me, but – tough. They do a really fantastic podcast, and especially if you like our tight, topical focus, you are doing yourself a legitimate disservice if you’re not listening to them, too.

CCGs and a Possible Event:

After our episode last week on collectible card games, we were contacted by a listener named Justin Lowmaster who expressed interest in setting up a StG community Hearthstone tournament. If you’re unfamiliar with Hearthstone, it’s Blizzard’s free-to-play digital CCG, available on most non-console platforms (including mobile devices.) More information on it is available here. Since Justin has done the work of coming up with the idea in the first place (something that neither Grant nor I did) I thought it was only fair to use the blog to gauge interest. So, how about it folks? Anybody interested in claiming a bracket slot in a Hearthstone tournament? I can promise that anyone who plays me will probably have a very easy go of it. I’m neither very good, nor very experienced, nor do I have much of a card collection in Hearthstone. Grant, on the other hand, is a very different story. Watch out for him, no matter how much he downplays his skill and resources. He’s humble, but he is also wily.

In other CCG-related topics – is anyone else out there excited for any of the upcoming Magic: the Gathering releases? I know I’m pretty stoked about both the Battle for Zendikar set coming out in October and the new Commander decks being launched in November. I talk about Magic fairly regularly on Facebook and have even entertained the idea of doing a series of posts about it over on my personal blog, so keep an eye out for news of that if I ever manage to get it started.

And that’s all I’ve got this week. As usual, please comment on this if anything strikes your interest, especialy that Hearthstone tournament. If we can get a decent-sized group of folks together to do that, it would be a fun community bonding exercise.

For example, I’m not terribly interested in anything that prominently features vampires, will need some serious convincing to play in a Star Wars or Star Trek game, and I also very strongly prefer my games to have what Ken and Robin refer to as “nerd tropes” in them – that is to say elements of science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror. I have no interest at all in my PC having a romantic relationship with another character in the world, and perhaps most importantly, I really don’t want to play a bad guy.

I know of other players that prefer their character have thick swaths of darkness, who don’t like Westerns (which makes me sad), and who prefer not (or even refuse) to play anything that isn’t their preferred edition of D&D or Pathfinder.

Once you get a group together, it can be challenging to get all of these “holes” lined up in such a way that you have a game that isn’t a deal-breaker for somebody at the table, and occasionally you hear of situation where people stop trying and form new groups because some player or group of players has a set of deal-breakers that the rest of the group can’t work around. And while this can sometimes be a shame and a monument to stubbornness, I’m going to go a little “out there” and suggest that it might not always be so negative. That will not, however, from suggesting that perhaps some of our dealbreakers (including mine) couldn’t benefit from a little bit of re-evaluation from time to time. Am I really that against anything involving vampires, or did I just need a breather? My recent acquisition of several Night’s Black Agents products, including backing the recent Kickstarter for the Dracula Dossier suggests otherwise. I’ve certainly enjoyed stuff in the Star Wars and Star Trek universes, and my objections there are mostly grounded in fears that, as a fairly casual fan of both properties, I’ll have insufficient “setting cred” to participate well. And I’m sure a game set during a sufficiently interesting time and place could overcome my ravenous craving for the fantastic in my gaming experiences. I could probably use to “stretch” a bit on these ones.

On the other hand, ask me to play a romantic lead or a villain as a PC, and it’s going to kill my buy-in. At best, I’ll be bored. At worst, I’ll be uncomfortable, and either will make the game awkward or otherwise un-fun for other folks who want these elements in their gaming. That isn’t to say that nobody I game with ever gets to do these things again, though – just that they needn’t invite me. And that, I think, is where the balance needs to be struck. Sometimes you need to stretch and flex a bit, but if you can’t or won’t and the rest of the group really wants to do something you have no interest in, it’s very much okay for them to proceed without you, and both you and they should be okay with that. This set of circumstances should also NOT spell the end of your friendship or contact with the old group, either! And this is where, by the way, the positive comes in. A lot of the time, events like this can create new gamers or groups as players or GMs find themselves a little short of the number of people they’d like for a given campaign. It also can create a loose network of gaming groups in a region after a while that will freely swap players around, which leads to cross-pollination  of ideas and storytelling techniques, which is ultimately good for the hobby. If some of my older gaming groups had never broken up, it’s unlikely that I’d be writing this blog post today. So be flexible, but if you can’t bend any further, don’t make everyone miserable – start something new.

I’d be interested to hear what your “deal breakers” are and how much wiggle room you’ve got in there, as well as any stories that have arisen out of a group splitting over different creative desires. Let me know in the comments!

First and foremost, I have definitely decided on FATE. I snagged the FATE Core System from my friendly but sadly not-very local game store, Games Plus in Mt. Prospect, IL. I’ve also ordered a set of FATE dice and the toolkit book online. I feel a little bad not having grabbed those at the store too, but it’s over an hour’s drive and I wasn’t as sure that I’d be using FATE when I bought the core book as I am now.

Here’s what FATE has that’s making it more attractive than GURPS right now:

• It’s simple. While I love GURPS (it was what got me into the hobby in the first place, after all!) and I especially love the newest edition now that I’ve invested in it a bit, you would be hard-pressed to find a playable game system with more pages of rules text. The core book is actually a 2-volume set that clocks in at just under 600 pages, and with the exception of about 50 pages, the entire thing is rules and examples of those rules being implemented. A lot of it boils down to simple concepts, but that is still an impressive corpus of material. And that’s before you get into magic and powers, before you get into advanced technology, before you get deep into the martial arts system – you get the idea. In order to get everything I wanted into the GURPS version of the setting, I was referencing something like twenty separate books. I’m going to be using two books for FATE, and they’re smaller – both in terms of page count and page size. The FATE books are about the same size as a novel, whereas GURPS books use the more traditional RPG form factor.
• That simplicity translates into a shallower learning curve. A FATE character sheet fits on one side of about a half-sheet of paper. If your write small like I do, you could probably fit it on a 3×5 card. By contrast, the GURPS character sheets for the play group filled 3-4 full sheets of paper. This means there is a lot less to keep track of in play, a lot fewer systems to teach, and a generally shallower learning curve. It also knocks GM prep time down dramatically.
• Aspects. I don’t think there’s a rules concept that’s been stolen for homebrewing more than aspects. For those unfamiliar with them, Aspects are a bit of descriptive text such as “Foppish Minstrel” that can be either Invoked (used for the PC’s benefit by spending a fate point) or Compelled (used to their detriment to make the game interesting with a Fate point given as compensation). They’re a really interesting facet of FATE’s game design, and I look forward to seeing the ones my PCs come up with.
• Versatility. It’s going to look different than GURPS, but I’m pretty sure everybody will make the transition. This is a really good thing, because, as I’ve described previously, my player group contains both an artificial intelligence and a wizard. In addition, the world has supernatural monsters, aliens, advanced technology, and so forth. Versatility isn’t just nice or useful, it’s essential.
• Speed of play. There’s not a lot to keep track of in FATE, and it leans heavily on story rather than mechanics. That should allow us to get the most out of our sessions.
• SRD: I have a copy of the rules in print, as does Grant, but the rest of our group can access them for free online without resorting to piracy.

That’s all to the good. There have been some unforeseen consequences, though: FATE is extremely collaborative, to the point where coming up with certain aspects of the world is intended to be a group activity. This is very different from GURPS, which is a more traditional “the GM makes up everything and the players discover it” type of game. To be honest, even though I wasn’t expecting that and could probably work around it, I’m actually looking forward to see how it goes. The other one is that even though I’m not going to be using GURPS for the campaign’s rules per se, I’m probably going to keep a few of those books handy for ideas for story elements, technology, etc.

I know from comments on the prior blog post a few of you out there have had the experience of switching systems on the fly. I’d love to hear how it went and what went into the transition. In the meantime, I’m pretty excited to see what Grant cooks up in his Unknown Armies game.

Recording Episode 64: Matching System and Story got me thinking about the topic referenced in the episode title, but I kept mulling it over for a long time after we finished recording the audio for the episode. As I’ve referenced on the podcast, I’ve been GMing a GURPS game for the gaming group that Grant and I are in. There’s been some good player buy-in and our gaming group’s inter-player dynamics are good enough to make many groups green with envy, but despite all of that, I put the game on what’s hopefully a short hiatus last week.

The reason was, of all things, prep time. GURPS is a really neat, really useful system, and it’s capable of having an AI that operates remotely in the same party as a ninja, a wrecking machine with a combat exoskeleton and a heavy assault rifle, and a wizard/field scientist. However, at the power levels my PC group is operating at (800 points), all of that awesome requires awesome challenges, and often awesome foes, and when a goon takes you 45 minutes to an hour to stat up properly with the aid of character generation software, something has to give. GURPS’s simulationist mechanics also tend to move slowly in combat, and it’s really, really easy for someone to take a rifle round and die. None of this is to say GURPS is a bad system – I’ve used it before and enjoyed it, but it wasn’t fitting quite right with the feel I wanted – my intention was something closer to an action movie – and even if that was going perfectly, the prep time was more than I could handle.

I entertained a number of different system ideas – I have a fairly substantial library of generic and semi-generic systems, but as it turns out, this was a thorny one.

• Feng Shui 2 just came out, and as a Kickstarter backer, I have a copy. It is specifically geared for action movie style roleplaying to boot. But there’s no way to model Grant’s really interesting artificial intelligence PC. Egeria (the PC) is a massive supercomputer/data center in the bowels of the Intrigue, the warship the PC group is based out of. None of her abilities are physical in any way – she operates by accessing things remotely, hacking, piloting small drones (or larger ones), and receiving A/V feeds from the other PCs. There’s nothing at all like that in there. Dang it. Scratch that one.
• GUMSHOE is a system I’ve really been wanting to try running for a while, and I have a good selection of different products that could be hacked together in different ways. However, none of them really cover the AI or the science-y wizard. No dice on that one, either.
• Mutants & Masterminds would probably allow a pretty clean PC translation, but the four-color nature of the artwork and writing was causing me cognitive dissonance as I read it, and the prep time would likely be only slightly less intensive than GURPS, though it would probably work in a pinch.
• D20 Modern has the same prep time issues as Mutants & Masterminds, and also couldn’t handle Egeria.
• Savage Worlds is a fantastic system, but we just used it for our last campaign, and it too would have some trouble with the AI and the wizard.

Finally, in frustration, I did what I should have done first: asked my gaming group for suggestions. Grant suggested the FATE system, which is ultimately going to be what I’m going to try converting to. It’s both generic enough and narrative enough that it can handle the PCs and an interesting assortment of bad guys, the rules are available free online, which is useful to both me and my players, and it’s flexible enough to handle the specific tone I’m trying to set. I’ve got some time off this week, so I’m going to start the conversion process.

The take-away from my whole ordeal is this: If you find yourself in a situation like this and get stuck, make sure you ask for ideas from other folks as as soon as possible. If you’re stuck, there’s nothing like another person’s brain to get you UN-stuck. Other roleplayers, particularly ones that have played and/or read a lot of different systems, are your best resource for clearing the mental logjam. It’s also not a bad idea to diversify yourself a bit. One of those systems sitting on your bookshelf might be just what you need some day.

Everyone with something to say about gaming has made the same suggestions over the years: carve out the time, obligate yourself, come up with pick-up games or a separate, lightweight game that can allow for a partial group. Those suggestions are good as far as they go, but sometimes even those pieces of advice don’t work, and it can get disheartening when someone other than the usual busy people can’t make it, which usually leaves you with no pre-planned fallback. So I humbly submit the following advice for when a few too many members of your gaming group need to tend to various other irons in life’s fire.

1. If your gaming group is made up of your friends (and I hope it is – gaming with friends is wonderful), see if you can at least hang out with a few of them and socialize. If you’re lucky enough to live close by, go to dinner, go do something else fun together, hang out and play video games if possible. if, like my gaming group, you’re spread out over three time zones in four different states, see if you can at least get an hour or two on Skype or a Google Hangout with at least one of them. Not being able to game is unfortunate. Not maintaining your friendships can eventually become tragic. Not to be melodramatic or a downer, but losing track of one’s friends is one of the top five regrets of the dying. It’s worth it to let some other, less-important things slide in the service of having worthwhile relationships in your life.

2. If the perfect storm has happened and you’re by yourself but really wanting to game, do some kind of prep that’ll be useful next time. Look over your character sheet (or draw up a clean one if you’ve been putting that off), watch something similar to your game or play a video game that reminds you of it. Sometimes the best you can manage is doing something that keeps you in the same creative or thematic space as the game. It is, however, worth doing a little out-of-the-box thinking if you’re in this predicament. For example, when Grant’s Savage Shadowrun game was going on, instead of just looking for cyberpunk stuff to watch, read, or play, I’d probably have been more apt to watch episodes of White Collar or Leverage for heist ideas. Along these same lines, it can be good to intentionally consume some media outside of your usual genres for ideas. I’ve beaten this drum plenty, but I recommend espionage and crime thrillers in particular for gamers. The characters in those movies are almost always player character types, and you’ll get some fun ideas for things to do at the table watching or reading them.

3. If, on the other hand, you’re experiencing some gaming burnout, take the opportunity to do something completely different. Organize something around your residence, go for a walk, watch something totally unlike the game you’re in, etc. It can be nice to have a palette cleanser every now and then, and it baffles me that we in this hobby are so reluctant to suggest taking a break now and then. There are a lot of things I really enjoy in life, but there’s nothing, literally nothing at all, in my life that I don’t occasionally need a break from. There’s some evidence that variety of experience can help with depression, too, so it pays to switch things up a bit now and again. (If you’re interested in hearing at least a little bit more about that, give a listen to episode #113 of The Art of Manliness Podcast).

4. Most importantly: don’t give up and don’t get bitter about the situation. Once you’re out of your early twenties, responsibility has the disturbing tendency to chase you down and eat your free time. Children, jobs, volunteer obligations, church, illness, and so forth will interfere with your gaming schedule, and more importantly, they will almost certainly interfere with the gaming schedules of everybody in your group. It’s absolutely critical to be mature about these ups and downs, because it is inevitable that even if your life is stable with big chunks of free time, at some point, it will be your turn to be the reason for cancellation.

The more precise part of me wishes there were more specific terms, but then I hear Galatians 3:28 (“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”) spoken in Derek “The Geekpreacher” White’s voice in my head and I reconsider. I think maybe having just one banner of “gamer” to sit under is like having one of “Christian” to sit under; it has the potential to unify, rather than dividing.

Still, like “Christian,” the label of “gamer” will give you some basics, but there is a tremendous amount of interesting specificity to tease out when talking to individual gamers. Before I continue, I’d like to call for comments on this one in particular. I’ve met a number of our listeners (mostly at Fear the Con) which has been a great experience, and I’d like to get to know our audience better. So in the spirit of sharing, here’s what it means to me:

Tabletop RPGs: We just put Grant’s Shadowrun game using Savage Worlds rules on hold, and I have started running a GURPS game, but I’ve also played a bunch of d20 variants, FATE, In a Wicked Age, The Trouble With Rose, Ragnarok: Fate of the Norns, and probably more than a few I’m forgetting in my day. I’ve gotten small entries published in two GURPS books and a couple of PDF d20 modern books that were made to raise money for charity after Hurricane Katrina. Most of my gaming these days is via Google Hangouts, and I’d really like to get a regular tabletop gaming group together again at some point, but for the time being, the current situation is what works with my schedule, and I also have an absolutely fantastic group, so I can’t complain too much.

Digital: I am one of those smug “PC master race” guys (no, not really – I just like tinkering and don’t have a traditional living room set-up with a TV, so console gaming would be a serious pain and is also more of an investment than I feel like making). I’ve built my own gaming PC from components several times over and I despair of even making a dent in my game library before I die, much less finishing it all. I enjoy a lot of smaller indie games and “second-tier” titles from companies like Klei. I’m a sucker for game bundles and sales, and I really enjoy games that let me take my time and think about my next move. I’m also a huge fan of story-driven RPGs like Bioware makes. The Mass Effect games are my favorite game series of all time, and I gave almost an entire weekend of vacation to Divinity: Original Sin when it came out. Most of the stuff I play is fairly “serious,” but I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ll play a round of Peggle or Bejeweled every now and then, and I’ll also fire up War of Omens and Card Hunter in my browser from time to time.

Non-RPG tabletop gaming: I played Magic: The Gathering a bunch back in high school (though never competitively) and got out for a long time. I recently got sucked back in by the Duels of the Planeswalkers computer games, and now I exclusively play the Commander/EDH format (though not nearly as often as I’d like). I enjoy board games when I get the chance to play them, but unfortunately, I almost never do. (Though I have convinced my wife and parents to play Dominion with me a few times, which is a lot of fun.)

Okay. That’s me. How about you? What does “gamer” mean to you, and how do you game?

Longmire: An interesting and very well-written cop drama set in modern Wyoming. Sherriff Walt Longmire deals with murders, corruption and limited resources. This show is worth watching for its treatment of small-town dynamics, its characters, and its interesting take on police work. You wouldn’t have to change much to make the setting a post-apocalyptic one instead, and it does a good job of portraying characters that have various levels of respect and affection for each other working together in spite of their differences or failing to work together despite their positive relationship. The books are also supposed to be excellent, but I haven’t tried them, at least not yet.

Anthologies: I’ve plugged the Sojourn series that I’ve been published in a number of times, but any anthology that interests you is going to have at least a few ideas that you can use. I’ve pulled monsters, NPCs, setting elements, and plots from examples I’ve seen in anthologies before, and because the works in an anthology are short, they tend to be dense. Furthermore, if one doesn’t work for you, there’s probably something else in the same book that does.

And that’s going to do it for this week. Next time I’ll be back with a more typical blog post. Good luck to any of you reading this that are also in finals season. May your studies go well and pay off handsomely.

Kingdom of Heaven – I like this movie for its treatment of religion and morality, specifically because it treats religious fervor and personal virtue as two entirely separate axes instead of ends of the same continuum. There are good people of various faiths, bad people of various faiths, and people who don’t have particularly strong faith at all of various moral colors. There are also some really good character archetypes to be explored in here.

Wanted – I’m referring specifically to the movie and not the graphic novel that inspired it. The film has a bunch of intriguing ideas about bullet-curving supernatural marksmen, Fate as an active entity in the world that communicates through a mystical fabric loom, and all kind of other juicy, gameable bits. The graphic novel turned my stomach in the initial set-up of the story and I never finished it.

Night Watch – Really interesting Urban Fantasy from Russia, in either film or book form. Light and Dark exist in an enforced stalemate with each keeping an eye on the other through its own police force, dark mages use video games as divination devices, characters step into a sub-layer of reality called The Gloom, and more. There are so many neat ideas in here, I’m genuinely disappointed that nobody ever made a licensed RPG from it. If you’re running a modern game with any fantastic elements at all, it’s very much worth a watch or read. I haven’t read all the way through the series, but what I have read of it has been good.

Brotherhood of the Wolf – An incredibly stylish movie about the hunt for the Beast of Gévaudan. Lots of juicy setting and character ideas, a really interesting monster, and one of the coolest weapons I’ve seen in a movie.

God’s Demon – Paradise Lost, but backwards. One of the princes of Hell decides that he’s done being on the side of evil and wants to go home, and resolves to take anyone who wants to come with him, demon or damned soul, in his quest for redemption. An interesting companion piece to In Nomine, Frank Peretti’s Darkness books, and The Great Divorce if you want to play with Judeo-Christian spiritual warfare tropes in your gaming.

Security Now – A surprisingly-entertaining podcast about computer security. Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte cover a lot of ground, and in the initial “banter” segment will talk about science fiction, coffee, nutrition and other various things. The various hacks, breaches, and exploits covered in the main part of the show are where a lot of the material germane to gaming comes in, and for something so firmly grounded in reality, it’s amazing how much there is that’s gameable.

Lost – While it does come off the rails at some point (what point that is is the subject of much debate) the show is a cornucopia of interesting characters, plot elements, and setting details. There’s also a fantastic redemption arc for one of the characters (Sawyer) that takes place over multiple seasons and really feels natural.

The Art of Intrusion – Kevin Mitnick’s collection of hacker tales is actually more accurately described as an oral history of several modern heists. Great inspiration for any campaign that includes covert action.

As with the episode, if you’ve got stuff to add, please leave it in the comments. This is a discussion Grant and I would both love to have with you folks.

-Peter

“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” -John 13:35

“[Dedicated to] the Booters, who laugh and cry with each other” -from the Dedication to Volume 1 of the Sojourn anthology

I first started listening to podcasts sometime back in 2008. I’d just started my current job, and music was starting to get repetitive. In an effort to bring a little extra mental stimulation to my days of processing freight, I gave podcasts a try.

The first one was the long-since podfaded Sons of Kryos podcast. If you can find the audio somewhere, it’s still very much worth listening to, but unfortunately, those episodes appear to be lost. The important thing for me now, though, is that once I finished with them, I started looking for other podcasts to listen to. That led me to Fear the Boot.

I’ve said, probably on air or in this blog, that one of the most defining decisions in my life was deciding to pick up an old, beat-up copy of the GURPS third edition basic set from a used bookstore back in my hometown. It was finals week for the semester, and the way my high school structured things, that meant extra-long periods and extra-long lunch hours. During one of these times, I found the book, purchased it, brought it home and started reading it. It led to a lifelong love of tabletop RPGs. Almost as defining, however, was my decision to sign up for the Fear the Boot message boards in April of 2009.

I’ve never been all that good at making friends or maintaining friendships. Some of it is the usual pressures of adult life – you make friends and then life starts pulling on everyone involved and before you know what’s happened, it has been a year since you talked to someone. Some of it is just personality – while I can be very chatty and goofy with folks I’m comfortable with (sometimes to their consternation), I don’t typically assume folks actually want to interact with me a lot of the time, which leads to a lot of letting other people reach out to me for contact. Couple this with general introversion and a mild case of impostor syndrome and you have a perfect recipe for social isolation.

None of that seemed to matter much when I joined the Fear the Boot community. I introduced myself and started contributing to threads on the forums. People were friendly and welcoming. I participated more and relationships started to form. When Fear the Con 3 rolled around, I lamented not being able to go for financial reasons on the forums and Dan gave me a nudge, saying that there were folks that still had room space they’d be willing to share. I decided to drive down to St. Louis on a Friday night, and when I got there, one of the other Booters put me up in his room – free of charge, even though I tried to give him a few bucks. I put faces with forum handles and even made it onto the live recording briefly. (My first, painfully awkward podcast appearance.) People knew who I was – cared who I was, and despite only knowing me as a forum handle, were genuinely glad to see me. It was several years until I made it back for Fear the Con 6, but I’d stayed active on the forums and Grant and I had started Saving the Game by then. That was the first time anyone called me “Timespike” (my forum handle) to my face. That experience was a little surreal. I made it back again last year, and this year will be my third year of attendance. Some of the folks I know through the forums have never made it to the con, or they were there different years than I was, and these days, social media (particularly Facebook) has largely supplanted my involvement on the forums, which is something I keep meaning to fix. The friendships, however, have persisted and grown like no others in my adult life have.

It would be easy to dismiss this phenomenon as my own luck, were it not for the fact that I know my experience is nowhere near unique. Last year one of the community’s more reclusive members ventured out to the con, and folks bent over backwards to make them feel welcomed and accepted, just like they did for me back at Fear the Con 3.

There is no “Booter template.” The folks I know through the community and consider friends have little to nothing in common when taken as a whole except for the enjoyment of tabletop gaming. There are people all over the political spectrum, of all sorts of religious beliefs (and plenty with none), men and women, and variety of races and nationalities. Some are charming and some are abrasive, awkward, or painfully shy. Some are working-class and some are quite wealthy. The age range spans from high school students up to folks on the verge of retirement. But at the Con, and on the forums, it doesn’t seem to matter. Community members give space for each others’ eccentricities, and as the dedication indicates, laugh and cry together. Or, to put it another way – they actually do all of the stuff the empty church-speak you hear so often points to. I “do life” with other Booters. If something is good or bad, I go tell them right after my own wife. There are several atheist Booters who became some of Saving the Game’s first listeners because they cared about Grant, Branden, and me. I think some of them still listen.

Some of this is because we’ve taken the time to humanize each other. Leonard Sweet is absolutely right when he talks about bringing back the table. At Fear the Con, you spend your life across tables from people. Sometimes they are covered in gaming supplies and sometimes it’s food. (And sometimes it’s both.)

The Booter community looks an awful lot like the Kingdom of God as it’s described by Jesus, and I do not say that lightly. You want to know what “radical acceptance” looks like? You want to experience it? Go to Fear the Con.

They may not be the first thing that comes to mind around Easter, but that doesn’t mean the story isn’t rife with them. Plotting villains, treacherous villains, cruelly opportunistic villains, apathetic villains – virtually every form of human evil and moral failing is on display in the last week of Jesus’s earthly life. It’s worth examining this, not only for how it may affect us directly, but how it may affect our stories at the game table and elsewhere.

Then the chief priests and the elders of the people assembled in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, and they plotted to arrest Jesus in some sly way and kill him. “But not during the Feast,” they said, “or there may be a riot among the people.-Matthew 26:3-5

Premeditated Villainy: The most stereotypical form of villainy is on display with the elders and religious leaders. They’ve determined that Jesus is a threat to their power base, and that simply cannot be allowed to continue. In their minds, He is dangerous, and in such a way and to such an extent that not only must the threat be removed, but an example must be made. We can be guilty of this when we engineer the downfall of others for our own gain, and in our stories, these villains tend to be powerful masterminds at the center of a spider’s web. However, this kind of scheming, premeditated villainy can also be the purview of lone bad actors. A lot of armed robberies, whether of a bank or a gas station, are planned out in at least some detail up front. It’s also worth noting that this sort of villainy can easily spawn more, drawing others into the plot to play a role that they may have never intended to play.

Then one of the Twelve—the one called Judas Iscariot—went to the chief priests and asked, “What are you willing to give me if I deliver him over to you?” So they counted out for him thirty pieces of silver. From then on Judas watched for an opportunity to hand him over. -Matthew 26: 14-16

Treacherous Villainy:  The most painful form of villainy is treason. Being betrayed by a friend hurts and it also often comes a surprise, which amplifies the pain. The motivations of the betrayer can span the entire spectrum of sympathetic or utterly reprehensible. People have been betrayed in both reality and fiction for everything from sport all the way up to grave threats on the betrayer’s own life or family. In Judas Iscariot’s case, it’s likely that his disappointment in Jesus’s lack of violent political overthrow of the Roman oppressors led him to betray Jesus.

For the third time he spoke to them: “Why? What crime has this man committed? I have found in him no grounds for the death penalty. Therefore I will have him punished and then release him.” But with loud shouts they insistently demanded that he be crucified, and their shouts prevailed. So Pilate decided to grant their demand. He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder, the one they asked for, and surrendered Jesus to their will. -Luke 23:22-25

Passive Villainy: Pontius Pilate didn’t set out to torture and execute an innocent man, but he succumbed to pressure to do so. In his mind, the consequences of continuing to defy the mob were too high and too dangerous, politically and personally. He may have even been right. So in the end, he did something he knew was wrong in order to maintain his own position. Given the ruthlessness and cruelty of the Roman empire, it’s relatively easy to forgive Pilate, if only because his misdeeds feel so familiar. The failure to take a stand and do the right thing and the rationalization that failing to stop something bad from happening isn’t our problem or our fault are familiar paths that many, I suspect all, of us have walked down before. In stories, these villains, if they’re even seen that way, are often the most sympathetic and are certainly the most petty. The guard that takes a bribe to look the other way, the merchant who owes a favor the local crime boss calls in, and countless others who do “little things” are the foundation many an evil plot, both in fiction and in reality, has been built upon. The famous Edmund Burke quote “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” references this phenomenon.

Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand. Then they knelt in front of him and mocked him. “Hail, king of the Jews!” they said. They spit on him, and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again. After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him. -Matthew 27:27-31

Opportunistic Villainy:  I doubt any of the soldiers in that company woke up that morning planning to cruelly beat and humiliate an innocent man, but when the opportunity presented itself, they took to it with gusto. The casual cruelty of a child pulling the legs or wings off of an insect, the driver that blocks a lane change before an exit out of spite, the person humiliating another with an embarrassing story in front of an audience – these are all familiar scenes. People can be vicious, and sometimes the reason isn’t clear, even to the person doing it. Humanity is an apex predator, and I think some of that wiring is in all of us. In fiction, these villains can be hard to pull off properly, because they often don’t have much in the way of understandable motivation for what they do, other than that sometimes people get satisfaction out of hurting each other. This sort of villainy is best used in fiction as a complication. Someone is feeling petty today, so now the obvious solution to whatever problem is at hand won’t work. This is a strong narrative spice and should be used sparingly, or the players will begin to suspect the GM of being this way toward them.

When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. “I have sinned,” he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.” “What is that to us?” they replied. “That’s your responsibility.” So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself. -Matthew 27:3-5

 

Now Peter was sitting out in the courtyard, and a servant girl came to him. “You also were with Jesus of Galilee,” she said. But he denied it before them all. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. Then he went out to the gateway, where another servant girl saw him and said to the people there, “This fellow was with Jesus of Nazareth.” He denied it again, with an oath: “I don’t know the man!” After a little while, those standing there went up to Peter and said, “Surely you are one of them; your accent gives you away.” Then he began to call down curses, and he swore to them, “I don’t know the man!” Immediately a rooster crowed. Then Peter remembered the word Jesus had spoken: “Before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.” And he went outside and wept bitterly.- Matthew 26:69-75

 

When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!”-Matthew 27:24

Despair and Repentance: People who knowingly do evil seldom get out of the experience without some remorse. People have varying levels of empathy, but most have some sort of internal moral compass, and even when we deny to others that what we’ve done is wrong, oftentimes we know or at least wonder differently.  This is an often-forgotten element in fiction, even if it is all too real in our lives, and I think by making every evildoer into an unrepentant monster, we pull a lot of gravity, texture, and useful symbolic weight out of our stories in the process.

When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, along with the criminals—one on his right, the other on his left. Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.-Luke 23:33-34

Forgiveness and Grace: It is important to remember that the end game for all of this is that God forgives us our sins, which is a very, very good thing, because I know that I have been the villain many more times than I’d like, and as much as I hate to admit it, as long as I’m alive and human, it will almost certainly happen again.

Moses said to the Lord, “Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.” -Exodus 4:10

“Nobody’s Perfect,” the saying goes, and truer words were never spoken. Even the saints of scripture had some impressive flaws. Moses stuttered and had a violent temper. David committed, depending on your reading, either rape or adultery and covered it up with a murder, bloodying not only his own hands, but the hands of those who reported to him in the process. Paul persecuted the church before his encounter on the road to Damascus. Peter denied Jesus three times. Thomas wouldn’t believe in the resurrection until he’d touched the risen Christ. And those are some of the less-scandalous flaws of the apostles. To say that they came from rough backgrounds would be an understatement. They were such a shifty bunch of ne’er do wells that it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say they resembled an adventuring party. We know these flaws because they’re in the Bible – the biblical authors felt it was important that we know them.

There are no flawless heroes in this world. And yet, despite these flaws, some of them disturbing in their seriousness, we still admire these folks because they were used by God to advance His purposes. Being flawed disqualified nobody in scripture from being used by God, despite some of them thinking it was so.

I recently spent some time recording some bonus content about the game Darkest Dungeon with Mike Perna of Game Store Prophets and Innroads Ministries. One of the things that really sucked both of us into the game was that the heroes you send down to flush out mutated swine, malevolent skeletons, bloodthirsty cultists and worse are themselves flawed, imperfect people. They get stressed out, sometimes to the point of becoming irrational, hopeless, abusive, or selfish. They become diseased by dirty knives and become claustrophobic when investigating abandoned torture implements. The experience of trekking through darkness and fighting things that shouldn’t even exist wears on them, and it takes a spectacular amount of time and treatment to get them fully out from under the effects of what they’ve seen and done.

Heroes in Darkest Dungeon pick up a wide range of problems in play.

Heroes from film and comics fare little better. Iron Man is arrogant and has a drinking problem. Batman is nuts. Captain America is struggling to keep up after waking up in a world very different from the one he lost consciousness in. Neal from White Collar has a weakness for pretty women and priceless works of art. The cops in Flashpoint have family and personal issues

And yet, all of those folks despite being imperfect are still heroic. There was a time in my life that I would have found all of this distressing – that it couldn’t be that these people, real and fictional, were both looking up to and possessed of flaws of various types. Something had to give. Either these people were flawed, or they were heroic.

It turns out the thing that needed to give was my own perspective. People become heroic not because they don’t have flaws, but because they refuse to let those flaws cripple them. Flaws also lend a certain believability to fictional characters – in fact characters without them tend to feel fake and cheesy. Terms like “Mary Sue” exist to describe such characters.

It’s easy to forget this when creating a character in an RPG. Many of us gamers, myself included, tend to want to make a character that resembles an alabaster statue: smooth, flawless and untouchable, with no points of weakness or vulnerability to snag unpleasantly on the protrusions of the adventuring life. Those characters, however, tend to feel flat in a story. In fact, paradoxically, the flaw of such a PC will rapidly become the fact that they have no other flaws! Flaws give a character something to work against and overcome even when they aren’t fighting the minions of the campaign’s Big Bad, but they also reinforce that the hero is a person, because people struggle. We struggle with things as simple as trying to lose weight and as profound as faith and doubt. We struggle alone and together, in tandem and in opposition. None of us will get out of this life without having to wrestle with something, and for many of us, it’s quite a few things. (And if we don’t think we’re struggling with anything, the things we struggle against are a crippling lack of self-awareness and the sin of Pride.)

So the next time you’re building a character, give some thought to the ways that they’re less than perfect, and if nothing comes to mind at that point, keep an eye out as the game progresses. My current PC in Grant’s game’s biggest flaw – that he can be vicious despite a sincere desire to do the right thing – developed in play.

With any luck, you’ll find that as you work through the struggles of your fictional self, you may find it easier to cut some slack to people in the real world.