The Fall of the King of Sota: Chapter Thirteen

October 18th

It is amazing how this game still throws me, years in. Two players show up, in totally different places, and manage to still produce gold. 

A thanks to Abbadon for showing up and trying! Traveling is a bitch!

The ending of this session had me and Kredo speculating as to what may have actually happened. I started drawing in my journal because I produced three different creatures in the space of an hour, and I wanted to know what they looked like.

Golden, you're getting to me.

Even this late in the Book, there's still that's gonna throw me. The butterfly at the end... what the heck is that? I've got some ideas now, but at the time? That's just what the tea leaves said, and that's what I ran with. We think it's a thematic closing of the loop; all sorts of crazy stuff has dropped out of the sky these last few months, and it's the first time something dropped out of the sky that The Outsider literally noped out of existence.

What was it?

And what was it doing that made God Himself say "Absolutely not"?

I shudder to think. And then chuckle evilly. We're going to find out.

Crescendo Demo for a Bunch of Friends!

 

The Fall of the King of Sota: Chapter Twelve

 

I Wrote the Following Before the Chapter Session

I'm generally a pretty laidback GM. I run the procedures, and wait. And wait. And wait.  I just let the players through down whatever track they like, and then when I think thinigs are wrapping up, I start pulling on their threads and snapping them. Hard.

I started doing that. Crescendo is organized into "Books": (at least) three Storysteins, with a Capstone to force things to close out, and then you're done. I could push for a fourth Storystein, but I don't think I will. So we're in the last bit of this Book. I'm really good at ending things. And it's time to start doing that.

October 5th through October 10th

With King Lucien returned, he wastes no time: scouts are sent from @Lady Marie 's forces to Montport.

Seren finds a young girl who was being used terribly by someone in the cathedral; she was being chained up and used. The culprit turns out to be the quartermaster of the cathedral: Fr. Elliot, who had total command of the whole place.

Silvanus and Abbadon take over the new elves, and begin to train them. The elves keep to themselves, but there's still something about them that the townsfolk find disturbing.

October 11th through October 15th

On October 11th, King Lucien left for Montport with three platoons.

Lady Marie and Pierre La Forge instigated a movement against the newly arrived elves, preventing them from trading, gambling, or really doing anything other than lying down in a gutter.

Don't think this makes them allies: La Forge increased the price of all forged items for all New Sota City refugees by 100% to make up for the imposition they had made upon his city. Tension  begins to build within Newport.

October 16th- Chapter Twelve

The ending is a direct reference to Chapter Two, and the journaling of Lillian's player, Golden. What he thought was a ghost haunting him was an agent of Telvra. He was human. He had messed himself up past recognition, but human. 

That means there's a human civilization so magically advanced that the long-lived elves, who are natively good at magic, couldn't even detect them.

What the players should have heard was the trap snapping shut. I don't know if they did, but there's an inference they should have drawn.

I'M TELLING THEM TO DRAW IT!

Do you know how much work I put into that twist? Almost nothing. I had a general idea of what was going on in the area, I made a Setting Bible, and as time went on, I just naturally went "Okay, this is what's actually going on". I didn't write anything down. I just noted the shape.

And the players filled in everything else.

Fuckit, I'm Going Back to Torchbearer

Some things just stick with you.

Torchbearer and I have had a contentious relationship, as recorded previously. At the time I logged my issues with the super-focus on dungeoncrawling, the advancement system, and the Grind. Ironically enough, these are the reasons I'm going back. After trying some old school stuff and spending some years learning a bit more about why I play games, I'm going back.

Dungeoncrawling

This is probably the most unexpected change, at least for me. As I stated in that previous post (it's linked above, go read it) I generally don't like being told what to run. At the time I wanted a more open and general system, within a genre.

Well, guess what?

I made Crescendo. I run it four times a month.

I don't particularly need a "general" game. And, having spent years looking into old school stuff and dungeon crawling, I've come to a different appreciation for dungeons, specifically. My appreciation has changed from "running Zelda puzzles" to "Oh cool, a mythic underworld that can do things that the overworld can't!". It's a shift in what I want, and it's the least rational of my reasons, but it's fundamentally the most important one.

Advancement System

Five years ago, the advancement system of Torchbearer really bothered me. A number of passes and fails that you have to take to advance? Why??? That's a lot of tracking. And it is, don't get me wrong. That's a lot to put on players. But, years later, I've learned these are the kinds of things you just have to trust people with. You help when you can, but you leave the systems at their fingertips, and they either play or they don't.

And if they don't, it's no skin off my nose.

I like the system. It leaves things completely under player control, and makes them need to learn the Trait system, so that they can leverage it fully. Is it clunky? Sure. Does it force engagement? Yes.

It's not my favorite part of the system, but it sure does ensure play that I care about more, as I get older.

Play or get out.

The Grind

This may be the biggest turnaround from the original post. I have done a total 180. At the time, I was very much in the school of “narrate till the GM calls for a roll”. In that framework, I came to hate what Torchbearer was doing: why have all these rules if narration was expected to be the primary method of play?

I have since come to disagree with this manner of playing, to a degree that almost excises me from storygaming. For awhile I thought it did, so I looked rather extensively into the oldschool. And I almost thought I was one of them.

Almost. But Not Quite.

See, the thing that I found was that, ultimately, the oldschool was too tactical for me. The oldschool, as a movement, are quite tactical. Which makes sense! The rules are derived from Chainmail, all told. ODnD calls itself a wargame. The goal of the rules is not to impart an emotion, but to create a tactical situation you have to navigate. You can create emotional connections to what you’re doing, but the OSR stories are (shockingly!) going to create the effect of a Tony Bath campaign, if you are if you are running the systems as written

The theme of the OSR is war.

And that realization came about because of seeing the OSR at its best: ACKSII. Macris’s magnum opus is a serious work, and pretending there’s any modern contender for its scale is silly. If there’s any modern example of Tony Bath personified, it’s ACKSII. And I played twelve glorious sessions of it… and then stopped.

But why?

The Need to Return to a Moment

At the time, I couldn’t have been able to say. My emotional impulses have been much harder for me to read post-2016, so I accepted this was where I was at, and moved on. 

And then this moment happened in The Fall of the King of Sota, where the Sword of Uriel was drawn and used.

This little moment set off some major fireworks in my mind and heart. It wasn’t the only moment this had happened, but this time the moment woke up something different within me.

See, over the last five years one moment from that last Torchbearer game had been living in my head.

Stephanie’s “Jedi” had been lowered down a rope to the top of an enormous stalagmite. She stood in a sea of black. She had no way of knowing how far it was to the bottom; her torch simply didn’t reach that far. They were on turn 2 of The Grind: not so far as to get worried, but far enough to where if something happened Stephanie was gonna feel it. 

So of course I dropped The Big Bad of the dungeon right on her head… and they had a talk. Turns out he hadn’t meant to cause all the problems that had occasioned the dungeon delve in the first place. He had woken up and started burrowing up. 

Oh, and he was a creature of plague and pestilence. 

And he liked Stephanie’s Jedi. 

What made this moment stick out, years later, 

was the history up to it and the ludonarrative coherence around it. Torchbearer’s language is one of exhaustion. If your narration is less than perfect, it costs. Hurts. Cripples. But it also is why advancement happens, why Fate and Persona points are handed out. You are constantly looking at the how limited your time is. You measure the world in time passing. Not even literal hours, the feeling that time has been pressing on you until you collapse.

So when something totally unknown comes out of the dark, the first thing that pops into your head is "Oh God, I'm so tired already". There was a dread. "If she gets hurt, her exhaustion may kill her before she ever gets back to us." Everyone knew exactly what was at stake, and they were absolutely terrified for Stephanie.

For the last five year I haven't been able to find that feeling anywhere else. Anywhere. And what I thought of as the annoying parts of that experience was the reason why I was able to have it in the first place.

I spent five years running away from Torchbearer's friction, only to realize the friction was the engine of the exact feeling I'd been searching for.

Oops.

"Over-Mechanizing" RPGs

 

This post is attempting to kill two birds with one stone. We'll see how it works.

Both Daniel from Driving and Dragons and Lex/aka Squid Lord have been in something of a conversation with me over the past few days. 

I posted Always Winter, Never Christmas, where I pissed and moaned about the lack of mechanical direction in RPG campaigns.

A conversation, however indirect, has spun out of this one post. Lex and I have been going back and forth (my replies and his original posts can be found here), and he posted a new response here. I have thoroughly enjoyed these correspondences, told Lex as such, and told him I would post a response as soon as I could. He told me to sit on it. And I did! I kinda had a way forward that was plotted out, and I was really excited to sit down and bang out my response.

And then Daniel posted the video below about some dumbass arguing with me on Twitter (for once, I wasn't the dumbass, sorry Lex). 

Daniel's musings before rightfully roasting my idiot of an interlocutor sparked off my plans, and I decided "to hell with it", and resolved to address them both, because my position on design doesn't seem entirely understood.

I'm not sure how that could be, I'm an absolutely clear and concise person! Ross from Mythic Mountain has never spent hours trying to decode my rantings and musings to see if I'm crazy or secretly brilliant! Somehow he got more out of what I was saying than I did. Figures.

I've never been called out for being unclear! Or grandiose! Or just downright weird in my views! The abovementioned Ross has never pointed this out to me!.. or my wife... or my brother... or anyone else.

Anyone who says this hasn't seen me debate about the Star Wars sequels with ten people, at once. No, really, that happened. That's on some random Discord. I can't remember which one, not anymore.

The first step to fixing a problem is admitting there's a problem? Hopefully?

The way to explain my view of design that most amuses me as of this moment is to show the following picture, and then explain it.

Why?

Because I like Medieval labyrinths, I like talking about menticide/brainwashing, and I love being absolutely clear in everything I write.

Assumptions Make an Ass...

First, we gotta get our assumptions out of the way. I'm pretty sure Daniel and I share more than a few assumptions, given that he's a Roman Catholic with seemingly tradional leanings, but Lex is a Randian Objectivist, best of my knowledge, and that means I gotta try and say the unsaid.

As an Orthodox  Christian, I don't think the natural state of man actually works that well. Humans need help to operate in a way that doesn't just naturally destroy them. You have to guide human behavior.

Not control it.

Not stifle it.

Guide.

The word is deliberate.

Human Nature Needs Help

Light correctives are to applied to most human behavior, so that way it doesn't do what it always does: degenerate. You can't stop degeneration, and you can't fix stupid, but you can help the willing, for a time. You either agree with this, or you don't. I'm not going to defend something I find obvious.  But I will state it so that way you don't have to ask what I'm up to.

Lex Wanted a Statement...

... in his latest reply. Lex wanted me to, and here's the quote:

In what way do you want to see storygaming philosophy concretized?

Sure! In Crescendo-

No, you don't get to turn this into an opportunity to talk about promoting your own work, because goddammit, every third post that people make in the TRPG hobby these days seems like it's about self-promotion and pushing their own work. It feels like an advertising seminar rather than a high-minded discussion of philosophies, opportunities, and methodologies.

Goddamnit, Lex! Fine. You're right. I take issue with the following statement you made, which Daniel indirectly agreed with in the above video:

... what I really mean is carrot-and-stick rewards, because I don't think those are legitimately part of storygaming, either as a philosophy or as a mechanical hook that you can hang a similarity between wargames and story game RPGs on.

That would be a bit of an anti-hook. Most of the mechanical manifestation of the storygaming philosophy is purely[10] carrot, not stick. When there are visible and deterministic negatives, they are generally carried in the form of resource management (a real element of both historical and modern wargaming), and not carrot-and-stick operations.

To be fair, Daniel called it an "attitude problem". I don't know if he meant what Lex meant, but I have a feeling if the two of them started talking they'd agree. If I'm wrong, they're both more than welcome to comment otherwise.

An Example

Let's go back to faerie tales. If we were to use the whole friction idea, there's a really obvious place to do it.

Whether or not humans listen when being told what to do. This is a central point of friction in enough faerie tales that making it a central mechanic wouldn't go amiss. 

So, let's say you have a Stat called Humility. We'll rate it from 1-5. When you must act upon information and/or advice that was given you, roll d6: if you roll equal to or under your Humility, you must choose something else to do. Something you know won't work. And then further complications are chosen for you by the table.

What's more, we can have it to where pleasant things (like sudden fortunes, accolades, or success in marriage) in the story have a chance to decrease your Humility, while unpleasant things (like losing your wife, being betrayed by your friend, or going to war) have a chance to increase it. 

And then, yes, pretty much stick to "we know how to make a faerie tale, we know what faerie tales are".  I would argue that one piece of friction will go a long way to making it feel authentic.

Humans Need Friction

My issue with your statement, Lex, is that human nature requires sticks so they think to look for (or return to) carrots. 

And, on top of that, stories require friction in order to work. Friction is at the heart of stories! And from just a basic knowledge of human nature, people don't like using sticks, even if they're necessary as a funnel. Asking people to be masochistic is wrong. Mechanics are necessary to help to supply the stick, so that way people aren't thinking of ways to hurt each other. Because, yes, people perseverating on how to hurt each other is a bad thing.

Stories need friction. Humans are bad at friction. Mechanics help take the burden of making friction off of humans.

Humans Need Nudging

Now, Daniel may be wondering why he's in this article, because so far, it's probably not terribly clear. See, in his commentary, Daniel said he wasn't sure there was a mechanical solution to an attitude problem.

Now, he's partly correct. You can't fix the unwilling, and you can't fix stupid. But you can help the willing and weak. Which, for the record, all of us are weak from time to time.

Remember that bit about the Medieval labyrinth, from earlier? We're back to it. The concept of a labyrinth in Christianity was a pilgrimage and/or meditative process. You go on a walk, in a predetermine way, and your experience the same labyrinth differently because you are different this time.  It's the same basic concept of the Rosary or the Jesus Prayer, just when it comes to walking. 

The structure frees you from your own exhaustion, carrying you just far enough to where you can get started. The repetition enables you to stop repeating yourself.

An Example

My favorite example is the game Misspent Youth. At the beginning of every session each player asks and answers a question from the standpoint of their characters. These short conversations are used during the session, in a pre-determined "flow":

1. What’s Up: Sets up the episode's initial conflict or threat. Establishes the setting, the daily life of the PCs, and how the Authority’s System of Control is currently encroaching on their world.

2. Fighting Back: The PCs take the initiative and push back against the Authority's threat.

3. Heating Up: the conflict is escalated. The Authority reacts to the PC's resistance, upping the stakes and forcing the clique to commit further.   

4. We Won:  A moment of tactical victory or good fortune for the PCs. The scene ends with a reveal or twist that sets up the downfall in the next scene.   

5. We’re Fucked: The floor falls out. The Reversal hits. The Authority strikes back with overwhelming force, complications multiply, and the PCs are pushed to their limit.

6. Who Wins: the climax of the episode.  The central Question posed in Scene 1 is answered. The final high-stakes conflict resolves whether the YOs triumph or suffer defeat.   

7. Dust Settles: The epilogue, the aftermath, emotional fallout, and how the world and the characters have changed after the dust has cleared.

This little structure is not a railroad, but a series of thematic links that let you plug in whatever you want, in an order that you  can rely upon. Things do not get old, but instead you can riff and trust that you're going to go somewhere good because you have the structure. Now, granted, that's a very specific structure, and it's going to limit what you can achieve, but what it takes away it gives a lot more, if that's what you're going for.

A more open example is the Trait Vote or Winter Sessions from the Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard/Torchbearer games. Every 6-12 sessions the story is paused for a session .Everyone tweaks their characters a little bit, talks about where things are going, and sets new leads down for the next few sessions. This simple reset does tons for the experience: characters are made more accurate to how they're being played, stuff that's no longer fun is wrapped up, and new plot threads can be thrown down. Nothing is dictated, other than taking a quick second to get your breath. This little momentary jolt goes stupidly far.

So when Daniel wonders 

if mechanics can fix an "attitude problem," my answer is: no, but they can support fragile intent. They give willing players a path to walk when their own creative willpower runs out. And everyone's runs out from time to time.

And when Lex argues 

that storygaming is purely about carrots and self-directed motivation, he's assuming human beings don't need external friction to generate genuine drama. But we do. We need the stick—not as a punishment, but as a lens. We need the labyrinth floor beneath our feet so we don't wander off into the mud.

Good mechanics 

don't force you to go anywhere you don't want to go. They simply ensure that when you take the walk, you don't have to reinvent the path every single step of the way.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go see if Ross has finished decoding this post yet.

The Fall of the King of Sota: Storystein 2 (6-11)

 

Before the Storystein, Ocobtober 2nd:

It's interesting. We're coming up to being two-thirds through the first Book, and it's really starting to feel like the equivalent of reading a real book. You can tell stuff's starting to resolve, but there's still time to go before the "final form" of the story has taken place. It's hard to put into words, but I've never felt quite like this during an RPG. I've had the "we're coming up on the end" in the last few sessions of an epic, but I've never had this specific "Act two is over", with such clarity.

It's one thing to design the thing, it's another to see it working. This works like a real story. It's happening naturally, with no work from me to manage the flow of the story, at all. 

It's a game that makes a story. Play the game. Get a story.

September 14th through 19th

On the 14th is the feast of the Discovery of the Temple of Time. The elven high priest Korkori, when landing on Heranyt, was told to find the Temple and to live there, to avoid Death, until the Apocalypse Ship of Sota was ready to fly. It is a great and solemn day. He is now there, waiting for the destruction of the Temple of Time  by the prophets Vaiher and Soututay. Everyone NOT a Monster gets a Favor. The doors of all buildings are blessed, every year. Normally, this isn't done in Newport, but there's a revival of religious fervor, and the doors are blessed everywhere... the farms as well.

When the blessing happened, a lot of the violence stopped. It was very marked. So, on September 15th and 16th, Lady Marie rounded up the bishop and priests, and they spent two days going to all the farms, praying over and cleansing anyone who will come.

And then, on the night of the 15th, Seren, the wielder of the Blade of Uriel, bumped into something at the edge of one of the farms. He held the Blade aloft, and the thing SHRIEKED and ran. There was a flash of blue light so overwhelming that everyone saw it.

Everyone went to a priest in a hurry.

September 20th through 26th

This was the quietest week in the epic so far. Well, openly, anyways. There was a ton of smaller maneuevering going on, and it all promised to blow up the next week. But, speaking as someone who processed the orders... the amount of near misses that happened was uncanny. 1:1 time produced a series of near misses (literally hours apart), ships passing through the night. What could have been a  bloodbath was instead a quiet week. I was biting my nails the whole time... and for everyone else it was crickets.

But next week? I knew it was gonna pop off.

September 27th through October 2nd

And boy, it did!

On September 29th, Lady Marie and Seren instigated setting up Flame Stones around Newport: if something is inimicai (anti-Flame), its profane purple flame blazes out and can be seen for possibly miles away.

On October 1st, 100 were-crocodiles show up from Montport, only to find that Seren was already out. He drew the Blade of Uriel, and began turning them to dust. Lady Marie's military came running, and helped Seren literally decimate the werecrocodiles.Only ten got away, at most. Montport is now empty. RIGHT after that, Silvy and Lillianna show up with 40 elves they claim to be fluent in only Old Elvish. Seeing one elf is strange. Two elves are weird for humans to see. There's now 42, in total, living in Newport. And they do indeed appear to be speaking a totally different dialect than Silvy and Lillianna.

Storystein 2 (October 4th)

So the actual session only took about an hour, which is what I'd expected for a Storystein. And then... we just kept talking. I forgot to end the stream at first, and then realized I was capturing something that needed to be shown, because this is part of why Crescendo exists.

The actual session was incredible! Everyone got shaken up, and Silvy, the actual winner of the Storystein, may have won in only the barest possible definition of the word, given what she got off-camera. The goal of a Storystein is to push the players into a new and unexpected direction, emulating the feel of different "acts" in a story. The first Storystein didn't feel all the fair, so this time I had everyone roll at the same time, which actually felt much closer. There were three people tied for second place, which was pretty awesome! It didn't feel like the shutout that the first one was. I may tweak it in the future, but at this point I think the formula is pretty on-point, especially the heavy incentive to change Beliefs.

The conversation afterward, however, was completely unexpected. It was a pretty amazing thing to have happen, and the fact that I forgot to end the stream at first should tell you how I was affected by it. I was really moved by the fact that it happened at all. This is the kind of stuff that Crescendo should be enabling. And it happened.

That's a really humbling thing. I'm so grateful for it.

What IS Storygaming?: Weeds, and Being Amongst Them

 

Lex, as is his wont, fired off another blog post in response to the last one. Which is awesome! I'm going to respond to it! And here's the post, so you can read it yourself!

This is going to be an interesting blog post. On the one hand, I think Lex made some actual criticism of what I did that I think are appropriate. I'm more than happy to cop to them here. On the other, there's just some basic temperament stuff I think we're dealing with that could stand to be called out. And on a third, mysteriously-appearing hand... I think he's wrong in a few spots.

But first, this, which I definitely wanna call out as a good thing.

You guys remember blog rings? I remember blog rings. They were one of my favorite things of the ancient era.

People with a particular passion would write about that particular passion on their blog, and they would find other people who shared it through various means, either meeting them in person or hanging out on the same online forums. They would shake hands and make a gentleman's agreement to link to one another in a little sidebar and refer to one another's posts when it became useful to do so in the course of one of their own.

We used to have relatively long-form communication then. People would write out their ideas in more complete forms and toss them back and forth. Things happened. Ideas had their rough edges polished off. Concepts were refined.

It was a better day than this of the 280-character pithy reply. Maybe we should go back to those days.

Anyway, Spyder got around to writing a reply this morning to the What IS Storygaming? response I had to his video. You know what that means.

Once more into the trenches, my fellows.

Am I going to use old-school quote response style? Maybe! It kind of feels appropriate. Let's roll back the days to blogrolls and Usenet.

Yeah, this is unironically something I want to see happen again. So, far as I'm concerned, regardless of whether I "win" or "lose" the argument, what is occurring right now is a win. And I like that. I didn't get to this, back in the day. I was very effectively removed from those days for all kinds of reasons that we won't get into here, but this, to me, is a ton of fun.

Let's start here because it seems like the right place to begin, mainly because it undercuts the whole point of the previous process altogether. It also misses the fact that my previous response was way nicer than my natural inclination is, because I wanted it to actually stand as a potential reference.

This caught my attention, so for the moment I'm just gonna keep reading and see what he does with it. "Undercutting the point" is an interesting claim, and I want to know what he means.

But more importantly, I don't care about the camp metaphor. The essential question was, what is a thing? I talk about what is a thing. I don't need to dress it up. I don't need to make it colorful and do a little dance.

And this is where that first "Our goals do not align", comes in. An essential part of how I do things is to allow people to come to a conclusion. What you're calling dressing it up and dancing is saying that a trail already exists, and that maybe Weirth can find it.

You don't have to like it. But it is how I operate. I have no intention on stopping.

 Here's the thing. I'm not trying to do anything per se in terms of persuasion, because that is lost effort. I don't need to persuade someone that story gaming is better than the mode of play that they're already engaged in, because either it is or it isn't. But just as importantly, that's what the OSR dickheads do three quarters of the time online, and I don't want to be one of those guys.

I'm not trying to persuade Weirth, or anyone, beyond attempting to communicate the concept in a way that allows for actual understanding, which is really hard to do. You talk to people, and try to figure out how you best communicate to them. 

I, on the other hand, am going to point out something that Spyder seems to have forgotten here, and it's something that's kind of critical when writing this sort of thing and publishing it online. That's that the one person that you're talking to is not the one person that you're talking to.

Your audience is everyone who reads it. In order to reach out and communicate with all the people who are reading it, and in fact, most of the people who are going to be reading it, you have to talk about the things that they know and their attitudes, and not just the single point of contact, because you chose to make that not the case when you decided to go wide with the publication and make it public.

You've invited the public in, so even the guys in the cheap seats get an opportunity to be seen from the stage. Give them a chance. Talk to them.

Here I'm addressing the inevitable group of people who are going to read this from outside, many of whom are going to be coming over from OSR lines because a search turns it up at some point, or they hear it talked about in a conversation.

This, right here, is one of the most interesting things Lex says. It's not that I disagree. I am posting this on a blog. It's public. Yes. Talking to one person seems counterproductive, on first blush. It is a reasonable point, and I want to give it its due.

The problem is that I very rarely see Lex's point actually work. Most of the stuff I've read on the web that's convinced me to change my mind are conversations between individuals. There's unspoken history I don't know, context I don't have, rough edges that never get hashed out, the gaps are the things that somehow pulled me in. I'm attempting to provide the thing that got me in the first place.

So, I did think about tomorrow, it's that what I think may be valuable  for someone is just hearing the name "Tony Bath" and not getting much more context on what that means unless they go hunting. If they don't want to hunt? Fine. No skin off my nose.

Now this is just wrong, and not only wrong, but an underhanded jab. A mistake did not lead to the creation of the Forge. An intentional choice, grounded in the experience in the TRPG hobby of the time, driven by men of both ego and capacity,[4] led to the creation of the Forge.

The Forge itself led directly to what is a significant backbone of the theory and practice that is responsible for the modern indie RPG hobby as the cottage industry that it is.

Note the careful evasion of actually defining what that "mistake" was. If you're going to call it out, you've got to call it out. If you're going to evoke it, you've got to evoke it.

Now, this is just silly .I was very clear. And also, quoted out of order, if I may add? That doesn't read well. But, here, earlier in the post you're quoting:

Lex. Lex. Mechanics are a concretization of philosophy. And I know you know this. Pitting philosophy against mechanics is the thing that the Forge was reacting against, which is at the heart of modern DnD! One of the old guard shouldn't be making this mistake. And yet, here we are.

Here's the error, which compounded in the 3.5 days. System matters because philosophy and mechanics must be aligned, with mechanics flowing from philosophy. Men of great ego and capacity, driven by widsespread ludonarrative dissonance, created the Forge. I was certainly not trying to jab at anyone, and I wish you'd just asked for clarification instead of assuming I meant an under-handed jab.

Perhaps the largest mistake here is to think that this is a personal message. What's the title on this particular growth in my digital garden? "What is story gaming?" That's not about a particular conversation or a particular person or even a particular story.

That title is consciously chosen, along with the cover that goes with it. I specifically picked up the idea of the fairy tale, the quote "fairy story," as central, an illustration, because it's universal. I want to talk about universal themes, not of stories necessarily, but of design.

And yet, here you are, writing to me. Calling me by my username: Spyder Openly. Hell, if you wanted to you could just call me Nathan. I wouldn't care.

But, if this wasn't a personal address... why personally address? Like, on paper I understand what you're saying, but in the practical, we're writing this blog posts to each other, with Weirth as an implied part of the conversation. Because, as it turns out, it's far more fun to write to people, and to address their context. You attempt to not leave out too many gaps, but you and I and even Weirth have been doing that as we have gone on.

And that's actually okay, for the record. Gaps have a way of getting people moving.

The problem for this paragraph of yours, this penultimate point, is that you didn't actually provide a practical demonstration of the philosophy of story gaming. You talked a lot of hype about how it could happen, but you didn't show how it does happen. You never grounded it. You never landed the plane.

You could have easily done it from the beginning. Your 24-minute walk could have been a 10-minute distillation, especially given the "he already knows that" bits, which really are the actual explication of the process and thinking of story gaming.

If he already knows all that, then you didn't need to have that conversation in the first place, and you certainly didn't need to make it public. If he didn't know all that, then my approach of explaining the philosophy and the grounding motivations followed by more literal examples is far superior to your hype-man approach. That's before we even talk about the failure of the Count of Monte Cristo illustration. That was just a dud across the board.

I don't convince a wargamer by doing anything. I don't need to convince a wargamer, especially if they're asking questions about what it is. I don't need to persuade them. They're already doing it.

All I have to do is say, "Hey, the same methods that you're using to think about tactical gaming, if you apply those to think about how the story moves and why the story moves —maybe with some mechanics that help you with that along the way — you're golden. Keep doing what you're doing."

That doesn't make for much of a discussion.

Except that there's one problem, which I feel like isn't being addressed. If you do exactly what you said, you will hit so many branches on the way down that you'll practically look like a candy cane. Communication sometimes has to be succint, but I don't believe it to be one of those times.  Could I have been more concrete in drawing forward from the wargaming experience to the storygaming one? 

Absolutely. I'll cop to that. Sure. 

I won't pretend that I wasn't talking off the cuff, while walking around. It's a flawed video, a first attempt that I don't think is perfect (particularly with discovering not one but two deadzones right outside my house), but I think I like the format and want to improve on it.

But my basic read was to provide elucidate on the common ground between wargaming and storygaming by showing that I knew their processes, understood them, and liked them, and then try and say something like what you said:

"Hey, the same methods that you're using to think about tactical gaming, if you apply those to think about how the story moves and why the story moves —maybe with some mechanics that help you with that along the way — you're golden."

But  I would add a bit to it, and I tried to, and I fucked it up. So here's hopefully me doing that last part better. 

"Those methods that you've learned: systemic generation, carrot and stick rewards, and committing to the overarching narrative as it proceeds, can be applied in ways you wouldn't expect. You can take all of these methods and apply them to a deeply psychological game."

And then I would end with a question

"Do you want to know how to do that?"

Because, contrary to what you may think, Lex, I am not trying to convince Weirth, or even win him over. And if, at that point, it had been established that Weirth understood me but didn't wish to go any further than that, cool! Communication was achieved.

But communication is a two-way street.  He has to know that I can understand him. And that's what I tried for, well done or not.

As I close, I'm posting this next one out of order, but I think it's fitting that it's put here, so I hope Lex agrees to the appropriateness. If not... well I did it and we'll just have to make sure I don't do it again.

For the record, I essentially disagree that mechanics are a concretization of philosophy. Mechanics can be guided by your philosophy, but they aren't strict reifications. The philosophy has to come first. It's what motivates and grounds, so we have to talk about the philosophy absent mechanics first.

 I didn't say mechanics are always a successful implementation of your philosophy, but mechanics always express a philosophy. But, given how you were just busting my balls about not providing concrete examples of the storygaming philosophy... well the chuckle you got out of me was at least somewhat warranted. Concreteness for me, but not for thee?