Start to Finish

I stopped writing here when I decided to go back to a place I hadn’t been in a long time. While I did enjoy my time there, a lot of the reasons why I left in the first time – tone, certain folks, general imposter syndrome, generally not feeling welcome – came back to me, and I think I’m going to limit my time there again. So, back to here for the majority of my things. I’d rather write than debate anyway.

*****

Writing’s been difficult to get going. I have ideas. Ideas have never been the problem. Taking the time to put them down is the problem. I am fully aware that this is primarily a problem of my own choosing, and that the solution to this problem is within my grasp. But I’ll complain first!

As one would expect, most of my ideas come in the shower. I’ve done a better job spending shower time thinking about creative things to do versus just replaying earlier conversations in my head. Unfortunately, I take my shower at night, and then I go to bed, so I don’t get to then go write after that. I should maybe give that a shot.

I think I’m going to end up writing a love story. I didn’t intend that when I started sketching out rough drafts and notes for this story, but chemistry came out of nowhere and has me thinking that these two characters will at least spark.

I’ve determined the most important thing about my three primary characters, in that I’ve figured out what their worst fears are, and I’m then going to make those happen. Being a writer is like being a GM – you do terrible things to good people in the name of making a good story.

*****

I’m in a tabletop RPG campaign! It’s nice. My GM is the only person I know that is reading this. You’re doing a good job, GM! Please post the log for session five so my friend who didn’t get to join can see it! I’m sorry I forget all of my character’s abilities other than breaking windows and running away!

*****

I read three books in a week. Claudia Gray’s Firebird trilogy, which I liked a tremendous amount. The library does wonderful things for my ability to read books quickly. I’m working on Kat Howard’s An Unkindness of Magicians which, three chapters in, is full of magicians and distinctly lacking in kindness.

*****

I’m starting to sketch out a challenging video. I want to do something about the joy of traveling in video games. Not the act of undertaking a journey, of getting to Point A to Point B, but one that’s just about how much fun it can be, and how rewarding it can be, to just travel in a game. The idea came to me when I thought about the massive size of the world in Assassin’s Creed Origins, and how my chief interaction with 95% of that world is screaming by it on a camel going half the speed of sound. So far I have eight different games to take footage from to highlight here. If this works out, I think it will be a lot of fun! 

I have a few writing projects I want to do on here. I want to rank my board and card games because that's a fun project, I want to talk more about writing in hopes that it gets me writing more, I want to write more thoughts about Blades in the Dark and how it would have worked for that old game I ran, and I want to write about music and what it means to me. But I want to capture something first.

Last night my wife and I cooked dinner, because we didn't on Sunday. She had a busy day at work and work can beat her down on the best days, so I had the soundtrack from the game Journey on, and it's lovely. We then listened to CHVRCHES and veered off around into the rest of the musical world while the soup cooked on the stovetop, and then something wonderful happened.

My wife and I jumped and danced around the kitchen of our little house, singing along to "Move Along" by the All-American Rejects, and for the length of the song we were back in our early twenties, barely a couple, barely on our own, singing along to the radio and watching the other sing when we thought the other wouldn't see.  For the length of the song, we were magic.

So! Fantasy Flight released the beta rules for their upcoming Legend of the Five Rings RPG setting. In a nice gesture, the beta rules are free. I don't know if they did this for their Star Wars system or not. The rules are available here, and I read through them a bit, enough to make a few snap judgments, which means that with my hour of reading, little history with the subject, and white maleness, I am uniquely qualified to comment on this, or at least vote to take away health care in Congress.

Write your Congressfolks, people.

As I covered here, I really like the L5R system, listing it as my favorite system in which I have yet to play. I love the roll-and-keep system, I think it makes intuitive sense, I think it meshes with the setting itself very well, it allows for better odds of success for a skilled samurai but also offers the chance for surprising success or inopportune failure, and it's incredibly easy to understand.

To recap!

Souji Okita wants to Cut That Guy. What is the Attribute best used for cutting? It's Dexterity. What is the Skill best used for cutting? It's Melee. So Okita rolls the number of dice he has in Dexterity (we'll call that four) and the number of dice he has in Melee (we'll call that 5). Nine dice! Roll 9d10, and keep 5, because of your Melee skill being 5 (NOTE: I do not recall if Keep is based on Skill or Attribute. I think it's Skill, because it rewards a physically-weak master of the blade versus a giant with a toothpick he's never seen). 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 8, 8, 10. That's really good! Add up the best five, 6+6+8+8+10. 38! You got a roll of 38. Maybe Okita has ways to boost that further -- exploding dice that reroll on a 10, called shots that adjust the difficulty, etc. But that's simple! Roll 9k5. And the way you get those rolls makes perfect sense, I think.

The new system?

I honestly don't know where to begin.

Dice! Let's start with dice!

In L5R 4th Edition, the dice were d10s. Lovely, lovely ten-sided dice. They're happy! They go 1 through 0, and when you see a zero you'll be confused because you think the dice are 0-9, but hahahahaha, they're actually 1-10! That 0 is a ten. Don't worry! It's okay. Anyway, d10s are great and have been used for everything ever. If you play RPGs, you may have some around! World of Darkness games use them exclusively, unless stuff's really changed lately.

In L5R FFG, you have two types of dice, d6s and d12s. These are called Ring Dice and Skill Dice, respectively. They don't have numbers, though, since these are custom dice.

Let's diverge. I've griped about custom dice before, right? Only a little. Let's fix that.

Custom dice are INTELLECTUALLY BANKRUPT.

Custom dice are a naked cash grab in a hobby full of $100 board games, $60 RPG books, and buy-in LCG models and release waves of plastic spaceships designed to make you pay $15-60 PER MONTH to keep current with your friend who has the new TIE Fighter sf/0/x/14/xo9, the one that Darth Buttdawg walked in front of in the eighth issue of the crossover comic from 1989, but it has a new plasma torpedo card that will rescue the original Millennium Falcon ship you got when you got into X-Wing because it's the coolest ship in the world, only FFG has to keep the tournament scene healthy by releasing more and more powerful ships every time so people always spend that sweet cash, so if you want to play the Star Wars ship in the Star Wars tournament in the Star Wars league with your Star Wars friends, you need to buy the TIE Fighter sf/0/x/14/xo9, but if you REALLY want to make the Falcon better, there's that new $120 Epic ship, the SS This Was Never In A Movie, that has C-3P0's brother on it who synergizes really well with your Han crew card -- oh, you didn't think Han was going to FLY the Falcon? No one has Han fly the Falcon anymore.

AND I KIND OF LIKE X-WING

But here's the thing about custom dice. Custom dice are a gate. Custom dice stand in the way of people playing your games. It's like how soccer is the biggest thing in the world, and that's because anyone can play it. All you need is a ball. I played Ultimate Frisbee in high school, and all we needed was a Frisbee and a field. "Okay, that hill dropoff is one goal, and past the tree is the other." X-Wing and Armada both use custom dice, because FFG wants to include blank sides and results with multiple tags -- and we'll get to that -- but all it does is put another barrier to entry for you, especially -- especially! -- in a role-playing setup, where prior to now all you've needed is a book and whatever dice are under glass at the gaming store that are like $3. I have a bag FULL of multicolored dice, and I can trace most of them to specific places in my life. If I want to play an RPG, I just dig into that bag and get dice out. I already have dice. I don't need more dice. I've got the whole dice thing figured out. I have enough dice for everyone.

"But Matt!" you say, desperate to get me back on track. "You can just use existing dice and just have the numbers equal the custom sides! It's not that hard!"

Do you really want to check ANOTHER chart every time you make a roll? Because you'll be doing enough of that already.

Standard Face	Symbols
1	(blank)
2	@
3	@#
4	&#
5	?
6	?#

Standard Face	Symbols
1	(blank)
2	(blank)
3	@
4	@
5	@?
6	@#
7	@#
8	&
9	&#
10	?
11	?
12	?

Simple, right?

The beta rules include little cutouts for you to paste over your existing dice, or you can download the $5 L5R dice app from your app store of choice. Oh, and if you thought this was a preview for the upcoming FFG Genesys system, the dice used there are COMPLETELY different, but also custom, so no, you can't get dice and expect them to work for the FFG systems. You have to spend extra money to get dice to work with each system you want to play. I'm honestly surprised they haven't sold specific Star Wars dice for the individual Star Wars RPG settings, like Edge of Empire using different dice from The One What's Got The Jedi In.

So what do those symbols mean? What is in here that makes it better than normal dice? Is the tradeoff worth it?

@ = Success. YOU DID IT

& = Explosive Success. YOU DID IT AND THEN EXPLODED YOU'RE 'SPLOSION MAN. What this actually does is let you count this as a Success, and also reroll the die to try and get more symbols to add to your check. Functionally similar to the "dice explode on a 10" rule in 4th.

? = Opportunity. Let me quote. The Opportunity symbol represents secondary options available to the character thanks to the check. It does not contribute directly to success, but it lets the character do or notice something useful that is unrelated to their goal at the outset, or enhance their success with an additional effect or story detail.

# = Strife. This represents a rush of emotion in the character, which is a bad thing for samurai who are supposed to always keep their emotions in check. A nice touch is that this symbol never appears alone -- it's always accompanying something else. If you get too much Strife, you Emote, which in nerd circles is a bad thing unless someone said something mean about Rick & Morty.

So those are the custom dice! I hate them but okay. I'm going to try my best to not get off track here, because this is going to take some explaining.

Souji Okita! CUT THAT GUY

Step 1: Declare Intention.

"I, Souji Okita, do solemnly declare that I intend to cut that guy."

Step 2: Determine Skill, Ring, and Target Number of Successes.

Okay, so what Skill Group is this? We have five. 

• Artisan Skill Group
• Martial Skill Group
• Scholar Skill Group
• Social Skill Group
• Trade Skill Group

This is a Martial Skill, because I'm going to Martial that guy to death.

Okay, now we need the Skill. Inside the Martial Skill Group, we have

• Fitness
• Martial Arts [Melee]
• Martial Arts [Ranged]
• Martial Arts [Unarmed]
• Meditation
• Tactics

It's a melee attack! I'm going to Martially Melee that guy to death.

Now, we consider the Approach.

• Air: The Air Ring represents grace, perceptiveness, cunning, and precision.
• Earth: The Earth Ring represents resilience, memory, patience, and discipline.
• Fire: The Fire Ring represents passion, invention, candor, and ferocity.
• Water: The Water Ring represents adaptability, awareness, gregariousness, and power.
• Void: The Void Ring represents mysticism, wisdom, intuition, and instinct.

ah shit.

Okay, uh, let's go to page 81 to see some examples.

Martial Approaches (choose one)

• Withstand opposing force to wear it down (Earth)
• Shift opposing force to work against itself or for you (Water)
• Overwhelm opposing force with a quick burst of power (Fire)
• Feint to lure opposing force into a position of vulnerability (Air)
• Sacrifice to let opposing force score a victory so that you can achieve a greater end (Void)

Okay, um. I think I want Fire, because it says "overwhelm opposing force with a quick burst of power," but up at the top it says that Water represents power, so do I want that? I just want to cut that guy. I'll put Fire, because ferocity is an accurate descriptor of the energies churning within me. Martially Melee Fire that dude to death.

Determine Target Number of Successes

christ

OKAY WE HAVE A CHART Is this an average difficulty, a TN 2, like jumping a ten-foot ditch or recognizing someone in disguise? Or is this a difficult task, a TN 3, such as scaling a cliff without a rope or finding a well-hidden object?

Honestly, I bet there are specific rules for this later in the book. But I'll pretend it's a TN 3, for the sake of moving this along. 

Step 3: Assemble and Roll Dice Pool

So we take Skill dice equal to our Skill and Ring dice equal to the Ring for the Approach we picked, and we roll them. Then we apply any modifiers we may have, like from our Advantages and Disadvantages. I'm not going to do that last point because it's fine. Let's roll dice! DICE ARE BEING ROLLED LET'S GET HYPE

Step 4: Apply Advantages and Disadvantages (If Applicable)

IT'S OKAY WE'RE SKIPPING THIS STEP though if anyone had an advantage built around murder it'd be Okita.

Step 5: Choose Kept Dice

It was at this point, when I first read the rules, that I exclaimed aloud, "You have got to be kidding me."

So despite having custom dice, non-additive mechanics, and this new three-to-four stage action selection system, FFG's L5R has still grafted the roll-and-keep system onto their own machine, like a Frankenstein's monster with a sewing machine inexplicably stitched into its shoulder. You choose a number of kept dice from one to the ring value for the approach you used for this roll. 

Step 6: Resolve Symbols of Kept Dice

So now you do your thing. For each Explosion, you roll another die and decide if you want to keep it or drop it (which makes this worse than the original system, since you may roll a blank and then not keep it. Maybe that's not any better than rolling a 1 or a 2, but increasing a 38 to a 40 still feels like progress, even if it wasn't enough to succeed). For each Strife, you get a Strife. For each Opportunity, you resolve an Opportunity effect, and you know, I wanted to keep this simple, but it's not going to let me, is it?

Opportunities

They have types, determined by your approach.

• Air = subtle, precise, cunning
• Earth = defensive, reassuring, thorough
• Fire = Flashy, creative, inspiring
• Water = Intuitive, flexible, gregarious
• Void = Mystical, wise, instinctive

And then there are suggested examples of how each of these work, including some that only come into play on a failed check, and some that come into play on a successful check, and mechanical implementations of all of these as well. I'll do one element because formatting these is ridiculous. Again, this is a free beta rule document available on FFG's website, I'm not giving stuff away here for free!

Element	Narrative Uses	Mechanical Uses
Water Opp.	Water Opp: You spot an interesting physical detail present in your environment not directly related to your check. At the GM’s discretion, you may use this to add a (previously unnoticed) piece of terrain or a mundane object to your environment. Water Success Opp: You perform the task very efficiently, completing the task more quickly or saving supplies in the process. Additional Water Opp. dice spent this way further reduces the time or materials required	Water Success Opp: Remove 2 of your strife per Water Opp. dice spent this way. Water Opp: Choose an Air or Earth opportunity from this or another table and resolve it. The cost of this opportunity is double its normal cost.

There's a bit in the text here that says "The whole group is excited to see how the characters will react, all thanks to one simple Opportunity die," which really feels like someone stamping their foot and justifying its inclusion, too.

There's also a threat of more tables with more options for opportunity dice expenditure, which seems cruel.

STRIFE

NO WE ARE DONE

If you get too much Strife you have an emotional outburst. I know it's based around what kind of ring you're using for your approach, I'm sure there are charts, I cannot handle this anymore.

OH GOD CLOSE THE SYSTEMS CHAPTER

Okay, look. I know I left stuff out of the core L5R section. I know the system is not that easy. But at its core, I really feel that it is. It's roll-and-keep. You have a number between 1-40ish to hit, and you roll dice, keep the high ones, add them up, and there you go. There are Raises, if you want to do something difficult, like shoot a sword out of someone's hand, so you Raise the difficulty up a number of steps, each step being an increase of 5. Some things give you Free Raises, and then I'm getting to the part where I'm getting a little frustrated and want to simplify it. But at its core, it's roll 5k2, and you can have some sort of idea of what that means. 

All this stuff up here is covered in the very first chapter. This is the core of how the system works -- a multi-stage action selection, intent assignment from five options with different attributes, four separate symbols across two separate types of dice, and then this opportunity thing. It all feels like bloat.

Two stories.

One, I worked on a full system overhaul for Final Fantasy Omega, right up to the end. I was going to move the system to use L5R. As the characters were in the past, I had characters IN the past using the roll-and-keep system as I worked the kinks out of it, while our protagonists were still on the d20 system they were used to. I like weird mechanics showing up in gameplay like that. I detailed out attributes and attacks, wrote 5,000 words of skills and some 15,000 words of notes for myself, using in-game characters that my players knew as examples. I transferred one character to the new system completely. I poured a ton of work into this and I was really proud of it. I still am!

It was too complicated. 

I defined too many things. I wrote out too many rules. Even stripping aspects of L5R out of the system, I introduced too many pauses to the system. I slowed it down. The system got in the way. The game's disintegration kept me from having to solve the bloat issue, and I never managed to solve the bloat issue, but it wouldn't have worked for our group. Not how we played. 

Two, I play Star Wars Armada with my friend Nate from time to time. I'm really bad at it, but it's fun! It's an FFG joint, this miniature-based naval-style game of Star Wars battlecruisers drifting across the spacesea and shooting each other. And a core memory I have of it is how resolving attacks works.

I roll a handful of dice for Home One unloading a broadside into a Star Destroyer. 5 red dice and five black dice, let's say. Each color of die has its own distribution of different icons on its faces, and all of these are d8s. I take my results and group them into categories, finding my Hits, my Crits, and my Targets. For each Target I roll, I can block one of his Defensive Actions. But maybe I have a tiny little card assigned to my ship that represents an Ion Battery or a Targeting Turbolaser Array that will let me spend those Targets to use a card effect instead. And my Crits can be used for a standard Crit effect, but maybe I have an Armament card that lets me use a Proton Torpedo instead. And maybe I have a Crew card or something that limits what Nate can use on his Star Destroyer, or maybe Nate has a card on his Star Destroyer that cancels one of my dice, or, or or or or or or or or.

Every roll in Armada means we're poring over my cards, his cards, and our standard abilities, spending and applying and canceling and countering. And while this can be fun, it also brings the action to a complete stop. It's like if the Death Star fired its megalaser at Alderaan but Alderaan had to run three minutes of calculations to figure out how much damage it took. It's like Peter Fox mumbling "this game makes real fighting look attractive" while his brother Jason unfolds a flowchart showing how to kick, while they try to learn their Mortal Kombat analog. It's missing the forest for cataloging every tree.

And if that was the game, then great! But it's not! It's naval ships moving and fighters, it's positioning and action selection, it's jockeying and it's jousting. The Legend of the Five Rings LCG that just came out, which has this same thrust-parry-sidestep-reveal-betray-DOING, that's the whole game! You finish that step and you're into upkeep and then you put a new card down and you go into that whole exchange again. There isn't anything else, and that's great, because that's the whole point. But if it's not the whole point, or at least like half the point, then you're spending a lot of time in a spreadsheet.

YOU HAVE ROLLED MULTIPLE OPPORTUNITY DICE FOR NARRATION WOULD YOU LIKE TO SPEND THEM

I think I get what FFG is trying here, once we're inside the dollar defenses provided by the custom dice. 

Games can be so much more than Dungeons & Dragons. By applying narrative payoff to rules and adding the opportunity symbols for failed rolls, FFG is trying to limit how often these combat-heavy games can be just a win-or-lose thing, and trying to promote games that aren't just combat-heavy. The old L5R setting spent a considerable amount of time and attention on the political maneuvering of the era, holding courtiers in the same light as bushi. But by codifying these systems so strictly, they restrain creativity rather than free it. Every roll brings with it a chart, every opportunity symbol just as much of an obstacle as an actual opportunity.

There's a term in video games, the "gameplay loop," that means what you spend most of your time doing. If the gameplay loop for a game doesn't center around the actual stated appeal and purpose of a game, there may be something wrong. In a game ostensibly about exploration, discovery, and freedom, much of the moment-to-moment gameplay in No Man's Sky when it shipped was managing inventory in menus. I can go hours between real-time battles in Total War games, building and upgrading buildings in a rarely-satisfying overworld instead of clashing Romans against Huns in thrilling open-field warfare, the loop going too far into administration instead of action. Compare the gameplay loop of Life is Strange, alternating between tense what-do-I-do-what-do-I-do anxiety and location exploration, never spending so much time in one that the game drags or pushes too hard. 

All those custom dice, the symbols, the Opportunities, applying advantages and disadvantages, rolling and keeping and rolling more and keeping more, that's the system getting in the way. The gameplay loop in an RPG should be the series of interesting decisions, the actions and the consequences, the narrative and the payoff. All this stuff? All this stuff that's in the How To Play section, not in the additional rules and the edge cases and the weird stuff? That's administration.

I do enough of that already.

I get a copy of Blades in the Dark in three days. I can't wait to read it and report back.

There's this tendency, among people I follow on Twitter (not you, Fade!) and people I've known elsewhere, to take glory in how different we are from racists and bad people. I don't understand it. For my own peace of mind, I've gone dark around everything recently, because social media has a net negative impact on my life, serving to make me lonelier and more upset. But every now and then I try to check things, because Mara Wilson curates the funniest people on the internet, it's a great way to keep up with basketball news, and some of my friends online are good folks. But this... this shithead flagellation, this is something I don't understand. Like, I get that Ann Coulter is a goblin, but not one of those cool goblins in The Goblin Emperor. But why in the world do I need to see what she says, broken down and refuted and dissected, by multiple people, across multiple days? Why are we only boosting the negativity and the takedowns of that? Why is Twitter unusable? Is it because Twitter is a terrible website that boosts immediate reactions and profits off of harassment? I mean, probably? But why do we -- and this is a general "we" -- why do we want to dive into what terrible people are thinking and surface it for everyone else to see? There's a line between Megyn Kelly bringing Alex Jones onto her show so he can spout his bullshit for everyone to see and between @bringindaboomdrop_xx-420-xx_ reposting some sick burn video making fun of Alex Jones, but somewhere in there you're still making sure more people see Alex Jones. No one needs to see Alex Jones! My mother doesn't know who Alex Jones is, and she's a better person for it. 

The internet's really dumb and I'm happier the less I'm on it. That kind of sucks. Dreamwidth is safe! It's mostly books. I need to read more books. Tell me what you're reading and what you're writing! And what you're listening to. And what you're fighting and what you're resisting -- I'm not saying don't talk about those important things. But maybe don't go diving into the deep end of the shitposts to then rise up out of it in some elaborate musical number about how much better than them we are. We don't all need to see every racist screed to fight them.

Next time I'll say something interesting. Oh! Here's something interesting -- this seems like the raddest possible RPG and I'd love to play or run (probably run) it sometime. https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/rpg-review-blades-in-the-dark/

I've spent a few days now in a MUSH full of people I don't know using a typing format I don't really understand playing games I'm not in, with me watching like Ebenezer Scrooge staring through a window at a life long forgotten, and it's showed me a few things. One, when I don't know anyone and all of the other people know each other, I'm going to hang out on my own and get lost in my own head. I'm trying! But I'm really bad at it! Two, it reminds me that I haven't been involved in anything tabletop for years now, not since Final Fantasy Omega basically ran out, and getting back in could be incredibly difficult for me. To explain why will take some time. Let's give it a shot.

I moved to Kansas City roughly ten thousand years ago with two friends of mine, the players in almost all of my high school RPGs. We all decided we would run a game when we arrived, so we'd have that constant in our lives while we all attempted to adjust to a new city, new living arrangements, new friends, new jobs, no college, no fallbacks, no plan B. This failed catastrophically! SPOILER ALERT: We all ended up okay. But the game I decided to run was going to be something fully home-brewed from the d20 system, and would be a Final Fantasy game. It would be set in a modern world, styled a lot after Final Fantasy VIII, and the player characters would be part of a mercenary group, they'd be young, and they would know each other. One of my two players moved away from KC a year later, but we kept the game going online in IRC. Shortly after that, another friend and my girlfriend joined a separate game in the same universe, and we shifted between a two-player in-person game and a two-player online game, with occasional four-player online games, and eventually the player that moved had to leave full-time, and we went three-player online up through the game's ending. So the format changed a lot!

My pitch for the game ended up being this, in Session 7; that the world of Damocles, the world in which the player characters lived and fought, was the fifth world in a series of worlds, worlds that had been created and subsequently destroyed in an attempt to create a perfect world. In my setting, an otherworldly force came to the Planet when Meteor was called in Final Fantasy VII, disappearing into the Planet, regaining its strength, and then wiping it out hundreds of years later. It then created the worlds of Final Fantasy VIII, IX, and X, each one failing its ridiculous standards of perfection until the world had to be destroyed. There were parts of those destroyed worlds that could not be fully deleted -- fragments of a power beyond our intruder's power, so they had to be secreted away into a side pocket so they could not interfere with the actual perfect world process. That side pocket would be called Kingdom Hearts. The otherworldly force itself? EDEN, a hidden GF in Final Fantasy VIII that has no in-game explanation. I made the final boss of the entire Final Fantasy universe a hidden power-up in a game not enough people like.

I HAVE A WHOLE TIMELINE WRITTEN FOR THIS. I just don't have it open right now, and I'm not going to write ten thousand words on fanfiction.

...I did that already.

But enough about setting! Let's talk about what made Final Fantasy Omega weird and different, and why I may have a hard time playing or running in anything ever again, despite desperately wanting to.

MUSIC

I don't know about you guys, but when I think about Final Fantasy, I think about the music. I've been to either four or five Distant Worlds: Final Fantasy concerts. I was in the audience for the first-ever symphonic performance of Dancing Mad, Final Fantasy VI's operatic final boss theme. When I recently played Final Fantasy XV on the internet and discovered that you could buy soundtrack discs of past FF games and listen to them in the Regalia, I would put that on, a song would come on, and I would not only point out what it was, but when it played in its game, its overall significance to the series, and then launch into a discussion of the part of the game it played in. Musical memory is incredibly important to me, and it is a huge part of Final Fantasy for me. Clearly, this would have to be represented in the game.

It started easily enough. I asked my players to all pick music for their Limit Break, music that would play when they did a cool thing that was all about that player. I picked the rest of it. We'd have some background music that played during sessions -- usually music from a past Final Fantasy game or Kingdom Hearts game, appropriate for the setting. I had a selection of battle music, and the main enemy had his own music. When we shifted to playing online, we played in IRC because I could make sure we all had the same sound files in the same folder, and I'd type "/sound opening.mp3" to play the opening music, and it would open and play that file on all of our computers. 

Simple!

There are 926 files in my Omega Sounds folder.

At the end, let's... okay, let's take a look at Naoko Kyuudou, my girlfriend/fiancee/wife's character in the game. At the end of the game, Naoko had:

• Her main Limit Break music, a mix of Ryoshima Plains I & II from Okami, with drums added at the beginning from a bonus CD.
• Her Omega Limit Break music, which is that same opening drumbeat from before into The Sun Rises from Okami.
• A quiet theme, music that would play in a Naoko-important scene that didn't involve punching people. This is an acoustic guitar/Japanese flute version of an Ayumi Hamasaki song, which was chosen to link together Naoko's original Ayumi Hamasaki theme and her new traditionally-Japanese-instrumentation Okami music.
• A version of that on piano, for reasons that will be important later.
• A symphonic version of that theme, which I was saving for a dramatic moment later on.
• An electric guitar version of her main theme, which tied into her boyfriend's musical theme!
• A theme shared between her and her first boyfriend, party member Champ Justice, which combined her hopefulness and his militaristic drumbeat in a really cool remix of a song from Super Mario 64 (?!).
• A vocal piece from The Ordeal (see that section)
• Another vocal piece from The Ordeal

And then her Aeons (Naoko's a summoner) all had their own themes, and then her family members have their own themes, and on and on and on.

See that emphasis on Okami up there? That was on purpose. After we settled on Naoko's new theme, I started going through music from Okami and then music from that same composer for similar instrumentation and styles, and all of Naoko's family members and plot-important events and things tied to her would get music in that same mode. I kept this up with all of the characters; they had their own musical styling, so I kept drawing from those styles for the characters and those close to them. One character has an emphasis on drums! Another, acoustic guitar. Another, screaming guitars. Another, ethereal timelessness. Another, pop! It's exhaustive and exhausting.

And then there was the music editing. In Session 14, I decided to make good on a few hints I'd thrown at the controller of our other summoner, Darien Reinholder, and his personal Aeon, Logos. Logos was a fragment of Alexander, which is basically a giant holy city that shoots lasers. Alexander is my favorite Aeon. In a dramatic moment, Darien activated his Limit Break, and Darien's player even queued me up, saying "Maestro, please," ready for his limit break to play.

It did, only it was a new version of the song, because earlier that week I loaded up that song in Wavepad, cut everything past the intro, and put another song after it, as Darien's call to Logos was instead answered by Alexander, massively changing the way the battle was going to go. It started a long-running trend of me sneaking music into the shared folder without letting anyone know what it was. 

The BEST version of music editing I ever did was cutting the classic Final Fantasy victory fanfare, that thing Prompto sings, short with a gunshot that threw both of my players into terrified silence, then bringing up a dreaded villain's theme straight into a battle theme. They didn't trust the victory music ever again.

But see, that's using music to tell a story in a tabletop RPG in a way that you can't do with just words or actions. It's not necessarily better -- I like it better because it speaks to who I am as a person -- but it's different, and I don't know how to play without that.

WRITING

In a game with three player characters and three GM-controlled PCs (each game had one to round out the party, and then when Darien's player retired he handed Darien to me), I never wanted the GMPCs to dominate too much screentime. So instead, I wrote the occasional short story about them, and then posted them on Google Drive for our characters. Sometimes it was to do something offscreen, sometimes it was building on an in-session moment, and sometimes I just wanted to make a dumb joke. These were usually around 2000 words. I started writing enough of these where they got session numbers -- Omega Session 211.5, for instance, so they could be found if you read the sessions in order. (We saved the logs of the sessions, and I posted them later that day.) Occasionally, my players would also write their own, because all of my players were writers. This was fun! 

Then I wrote a piece of interactive fiction over the course of many months that ended up creating a new GMPC. 

Inspired by Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossom, a visual novel/dating simulator set in the Meiji Restoration era of Japan, I wrote a story with Mist Walker being chosen by Kalil (one of our PCs) to infiltrate a mysterious organization he encountered called the Boryokudan. Across four parts, each of which had at least 30,000 words (and one of which had an entirely new protagonist), I would write a story, put up about three decisions, and then make him make the decision, writing the next scene based on that decision. The best compliment I got at this point was that I had to post these new entries at a time when all three players could read them, as everyone rushed to read it as soon as it went up. 

After finishing Let's Play Boryokudan, I topped it by taking all of the GMPCs and putting them in their own Let's Play Omega series, where the party could send the GMPCs off to do things they wanted to do, but didn't want to devote a whole session to. Each player got to make decisions for one of the four, with me always controlling the fourth (for important story reasons). 

I once wrote four interludes in a week. I really, really loved it.

GARAMONDE

Do you know how each Final Fantasy game has an arena, where you can go battle lots of people in order for great prizes? We did that. It was the Garamonde Tournament of Champions.

We did it twice! The first year had 8-fighter tournaments in Swordplay, Fisticuffs, Summoning, Spellcraft, a 16-team Tag Team Tournament, and then the main event, the 32-fighter No Limits Tournament. They all had weird rules, it was great.

Each fighter had a recorded intro, and by recorded I mean I recorded myself shouting into a microphone, then mixed it over music. 

We did it again an in-game year later, this time with Swordplay, Melee, Spellcraft, Summoning, Tag Team, and No Limits, but we doubled the number of entries in each tournament (yes, that means I had to write intros for 64 people for No Limits), plus I wrote multiple interludes for each in-game day, there was a concert and an animal show, and I designed championship belts using WWE Smackdown vs. Raw for the Playstation 2 and posted pictures of them for each tournament. The second tournament featured cameo appearances by characters we'd all designed in other games -- two World of Warcraft characters, an Eberron character, and a character my wife made for a game that I never ran and instead became a character in the novel that is sitting pre-editing on my hard drive. 

A WEDDING

Two beloved NPCs got married! My wife went through wedding magazines and websites to design the entire wedding theme and apparel, I put together a playlist, one character gave a speech, and one character performed the ceremony. I revealed this was going to happen by using an online tool to make an actual wedding invitation. We had this be an actual session. Everyone really, really enjoyed it. 

Tabletop roleplaying y'all.

THE ORDEAL

This is the thing I am proudest of, as a GM.

After clearing the idea with my players -- because I had to ask all of them, because this was going to be the single meanest thing I ever did to them, though I did not tell them how this was happening, just that it would, would that be okay -- I broke the party into solo sessions only, starting at Session 260. In those sessions, I was the cruelest I have ever been. 

Cruelty as a GM isn't the Tomb of Horrors, or a total party kill. It's not instant-death traps or unbeatable enemies. It's about a decision that you don't ever want to make. It's the middle section of Life is Strange, Episode 4. It's Toriel. It's the worst. I was the worst.

Each character was put into a perfect world, one that existed outside of the real world -- and one that they would never actually want to leave. One of the main villains managed to do this, so no one would be there to oppose him doing the things he wanted to do, and all of the PCs vanished from Damocles.

Naoko, whose parents died in a car accident when she was five years old, was transported back in time to the age of 19, the same age as her actual opening session (and I used the original session opening music, which was a small touch I was inordinately proud of), into a world where not only had her parents survived, but also had three more kids. Naoko was not going to join a military organization and become a fighter -- she had a college visit to make, and a little brother to take to the library, and two little sisters to care for, and a whole normal life that she didn't know she could have.

Kogel, who spent so much of his time convinced that he had no future, zipped ahead some ten or so years into the future, where he'd restored his island, married his girlfriend, and had a son, with another on the way. He'd made peace with everything. He'd saved his brother. He'd saved the world. Everything and everyone would be fine. 

I made them give it all up to come back.

Each of these pocket worlds had about ten sessions of just role-playing. Time to try to figure out the puzzle, time to try and understand what had happened, time to get used to living there, time to not want to actually leave. 

The pocket worlds were when I first started dabbling with vocal tracks for music, too. Normally I stuck with instrumentals, thinking that the music would be distracting if it had words, but here I picked particular scenes to have a 'regular' song play. Each character had two queued up and ready, though Kogel only hit a story beat for one of his, leaving the other to be one of those Japan-only bonus tracks, I guess. Naoko's tracks were Vienna Teng's "Nothing Without You" and Angels & Airwaves' "The Adventure," while Kogel had "The Cave" by Mumford & Sons. 

"But Matt," you say, "you have three players! What was the third doing?"

The Ordeal began with Kalil being dragged out of his Ordeal by the Aeons and folks that were linked to him, where he had been a nice and obedient member of the Army of Chaos (it's fine don't worry about it). Once he came back to the world proper, he found out that everyone had been missing for six weeks, everything had gone very bad, and there were a lot of problems that were coming up all over the world. But Kalil could use the vast network of allies and friends the party had made over 260 sessions to try and fight it all while still looking for his friends... but there would always be too many things to go fight. He would have four missions to pick from, and he could, at most, cover three, because they only had two airships plus his own method of traveling. Somewhere would always be ignored.

I gave every city in the world a Panic rating, and missions he couldn't cover would go up 2. Missions he sent a ship to, with a party on it, would go up 1. Missions he went to himself, which would then be that session's activity, would stay unchanged if he did well.

While the others were dealing with never wanting to leave a perfect world, I made Kalil deal with a world trying to shake itself to pieces, and he was the only one that could stop it. 

I gave him XCOM.

The Ordeal ended in a massive, multi-hour boss fight in Session 300 against the villain responsible, with Kalil breaking down the barrier between worlds so everyone could come back together, all set to Florence + The Machine's "No Light No Light."

No one rolled a single die for thirty-nine sessions. It was all role-playing and decisions. It was the finest thing I have ever done as a GM. I could never have done anything like it if not for 250+ sessions of incredible storytelling, acting, and emoting from my players and I leading up to it, and clearly this only works with players who love roleplaying. I'm incredibly fortunate, and I know I'll never have anything like that again.

HORIZON

This is the finest thing I have done as a creator.

I created Horizon as a challenge to myself. I wanted to do something special for my players, so I had a musical performance at a theater in the city of Night's Run. A pianist, Julia Tilmitt, would play a piano concerto that transported its viewers to somewhere magical, but she used these performances to tell the story of a certain set of people in the Old World, a time over a thousand years ago. The events were incredibly plot-important, but I wanted a fun way to tell them, so I did this.

I picked a series of piano-only pieces of music, cut them so they flowed into each other, and I narrated over top of them. I had a stopwatch next to me, and I had timestamps on my printed sheets of paper, so I tried to hit the narration in time with the music, because I wrote it in time with the music. I did four of these in-person.

The fifth had to be online (and we were up to roughly 25 minutes per performance now), so instead I pre-typed the entire thing in Excel, then copy-pasted each line in rhythm with the music. This meant I was no longer trapped by how quickly I could read! It was good! This happened at a Garamonde, and then ended with a massive battle and then followed by a vocal performance of "Watershed" by Vienna Teng, with Julia being the singer, because *gasp* JULIA WAS ACTUALLY PART OF EDEN ALL ALONG AND WATERSHED WAS EDEN'S SONG.

There were two more performances during The Ordeal, one for Naoko and one for Kogel, done in the same style.

But then I decided there was going to be a sixth (the fifth was supposed to be the last one, and said as much in-game), and I put it on the calendar because I knew I had to have a deadline if I was going to do it, and it was going to be the greatest thing I'd ever done. I worked on it for three actual real-world months.

I made it a video.

Working in absolute secret for those three months -- during my lunch break, using my laptop when my wife couldn't see it -- I picked out five pieces of music, wrote the script, selected a hundred photos or so, learned Photoshop to change the ones that I needed to change, learned how to use Premiere Pro to make a video and how to make text fade in and out and learning how to make effects and how to move images on a screen, made a video, tested it a few dozen times, uploaded it to Youtube and made it private (due to copyright I had to put it on a new account and give them the credentials), and then when the time came, in-session, I gave them all the credentials, put the video on the TV in my actual house so my wife could watch it, and I sat on the far side of the room, on the floor, my back on the wall, watching it and trying not to watch my wife because it was also the scariest thing I'd ever done.

When it ended, she turned to me and said, in this tiny voice, "So can I watch this any time that I want?" and it remains the best compliment I've ever received in my life.

IN CLOSING

 Tabletop roleplaying! Allegedly! And that's just the big stuff! A few other things:

• I made a wiki!
• I made an actual working calendar with links to sessions taking place on that in-game date. This meant I had to make up months for this fictional world, and then get images for the calendar so I had to go find images that represented in-world locations, and put all of the characters' birthdates on the calendar...
• We had multiple character birthday parties.
• I wrote multiple poems for in-game events and then one for a school assignment.
• There is a file with music and voicework from Sephiroth, with lines pulled from Dissidia 012 duodecim, so it's actually Sephiroth's voice actor, recorded from a PSP onto my laptop.
• My wife sings on a piece of music, words that I wrote, over a guitar line that a friend played, as an in-game character.
• A voice recording featuring my original two players playing the roles I designed to be like them in real life, plus me as both a villain and a supporting character.
• Multiple Moogle Memos
• Entire sessions designed in the service of one joke
• A character ability that required me to have an actual tarot deck on hand and also to learn what tarot was
• A homemade airship battle system
• A Google Sheet with shop inventory for multiple shops, all of which I had to make up, so there's a bunch of items that are designed after things I like, including something modeled after every party member from Persona 3 and 4. 
  • For instance, the Hat of Shirogane, modeled after Naoto from P4:
  • Description: This blue and black cap looks like the kind of thing a detective might wear in some old serial, and wearing it fills you with the willing and eager spirit of investigation.
  • Power: Daily: Investigation Team GO! For the duration of the scene, all alies share the wearer's Gather Information, Observation, and Sense Motive skills.
• Tonberries all named after NFL wide receivers.
• Somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 characters, all of whom I can detail if given the name.

I miss it, massive, unwieldy beast that it became. But when this is all I've done for the last decade-plus, how in the world can I do anything else? How can I care about how many hit dice something has when I gave Bahamut four separate musical themes? How do I come back from this?

I'm honestly asking, because I do think I want to game again! Just... goodness.

 And now, a collection of thoughts on life enrichment.

I've been playing Final Fantasy XIV again, which has been a lovely way to spend a month. Returning to the game after nearly three years away, I finished A Realm Reborn, ARR's level 50 material, Heavensward, Heavensward's level 60 material, and 30-odd quests into Stormblood in thirty days. I know it was thirty days, because I just got my emailed receipt on the subscription renewal. FF14 is really fun! It's the first time I've enjoyed group content in an MMO, and I've spent time in World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and I think that might be it. While my character's original concept, Mist Walker, was that of a dancing archer, I've mained White Mage with Mist because that's how you get into dungeons. (That, and playing as a tank seems terrifying.)

FF14, while lovely, is perhaps not the best way to spend my days. MMOs can be tremendous timesinks, and now that I'm level 63, in Kugane, and ready to explore all the Asian-themed areas, I think I'm going to slow it down with story progression and play around with the other jobs you can play as in there. But more than than, I need to diversify.

I am dealing with depression. I think a few years ago I would have treated that with a little more... respect is not the word. Trepidation? Importance? Secrecy? Whatever. Everyone is depressed. Be open about your mental health, if you are comfortable being open about aspects of your life! As a guy, I find it's more important for me to do that, because there's a stigma about us just 'manning up' and powering through it, like that's ever helped anyone. It doesn't! Trust me, I've tried that.

Depression for me manifests itself in a lot of habit-forming activities. While MMORPGs can really take advantage of that, I play a lot of games that reward that kind of behavior. I've spent 120 hours in The Witcher III without finishing it, and I know I've spent entire evenings just hitting the "End Turn" button in Civilization VI. And since things are legitimately bothering me in my life right now, I need to not just sink into the eternal ditch of the Science Victory and instead figure out what in the world I am going to do with my life.

My wife is getting her Master's degree. That's wonderful! I could not be happier! Meanwhile, I don't even know if it's spelled Masters or Master's in this specific case, because I don't have a degree of any capacity. Which is fine! I work at a very good job, I work from home with this very good job so I'm around my cats and can play my music loud, we own a lovely house, etc etc etc. But that means she has direction (and is very busy), and I do not. And this has not turned into resentment or anything -- I am one hundred percent behind her in everything she does -- but it has turned into "I conquered Sumer and China, but you learned about copyright law, and I'm not dumb enough to think what I've done is anywhere near as important or interesting."

So what am I doing to fight this?

WRITING

I've always wanted to be a novelist. I've written the first draft of a novel that isn't going to go anywhere, called Popular Anarchy, best described as "what if Final Fantasy XII but with two people who think they are witty" and while there is some promise there, and I think I came up with a kind of neat world, it's got at least two characters too many and I would want to completely scrap it and start over. I think there will be aspects of it that live in later books, and I'm still optimistic enough to talk about "later books."

What I am doing currently is creating a new world, and I'm doing that by taking the world I created for my Final Fantasy-themed tabletop RPG, filing all the serial numbers off of it, and then writing it down, making changes, and then asking questions about those changes and answering them. It's all in a Word document and incredibly disjointed, but it is how I get started. And -- okay, this will take a moment, and I'm going to do a thing that I hate because I am proud of this thing that I normally hate, and then I'm going to talk about why that is in the next section.

I do really like an idea I had for my world! I wanted to do something with magic, and while I'm not going to say that "magic is predictable and static and reliable in cities, but wild and untamed and unpredictable in nature" is original, but the concept I'm batting around is that it's because over years and years and years, people have studied, used, manipulated, and programmed this magic so much that it has taken on a lot of the actual personality of humans, and actually wants to help. Kind of like a dog, maybe? We've personified magic to the point that it thinks it's people, and as the people of this world build and spread out and settle and expand, bringing this magic with them to this newer, further-flung areas, the magic still wants to help. But there's a finite amount of magical energy in the world, and as it further collects in these occupied areas it stretches itself thin across the rest of the land, and I don't know about you but when I feel stretched thin I get really tense and anxious, and so we have a natural force that exists through the world, that human civilization relies on, and it is stressed the fuck out. And I like that, because I am stressed the fuck out.

So I'm writing a fantasy novel!

But

I don't actually like fantasy novels.

Uh-oh.

I don't hate fantasy novels! I've read many fantasy novels and liked some of them! But let's talk about why that is and what I'd like to do to fix it (in my incredibly specific, self-serving way).

I get my books from the library now, with few exceptions, thanks to a tight budget. The great thing about the library is that I can grab a book, start to read it, hate it, and then throw it over my head with a 'pfffffffffft' and feel absolutely no remorse for doing so, because I'm not out any money. And when I read a book that I just adore and cannot live without, I am then going to go buy that book, put it on my shelf, and love it forever. 

I find that the books I throw over my head are increasingly from the sci-fi/fantasy section of my library, and the books that I love and keep are from the regular fiction section. Why, my favorite series of the last fifteen years was in the regular fiction section! It's by Marie Brennan and it's about a woman who has incredible adventures learning about the science behind dragons, how they fly, how they breathe their unique breath, and--

Okay, bad example. How about the book about the magical library and the dimension-hopping Librarians within--

Okay okay, how about our half-dragon musician who--

Forget that, let's talk about the incredible love story between two magicians who--

Huh.

Okay, so the Johnson County Public Library has a filing system that I do not understand, but I have considerably more luck getting a book from the Fiction section with magic or wizards or dragons or whatever on it than I do the SF/F section. And that's weird! I do not understand this! But I can at least point to what makes a difference for me, personally.

In all of the above examples, it's about character. And it could just be luck, and it probably is luck, but the books I grab out of SF/F are about setting, and the books I find in fiction are about characters. I have a rule about fantasy books, and it has been broken at least once and I LOVED what I read instead, but that rule is this: if my introduction to your book is you spitting a creation myth at me, or about Ye Olde Gods And Goddesses, I am throwing your book over my head with a "pffffffffffft" and moving on.

(I have read and adore NK Jemisin and I think she does something like this, but what she does with it is like woah)

I treat setting creation the same way I do in an RPG, which is that it's a backdrop for an interesting story or an interesting character. Take that Magic idea up there -- so we have pockets of strict magic around cities for instant communication, all that. Basically magitech. City-states! Can the networks communicate from city to city? No, there's too much wilderness around. So communication is done by having special folks travel between cities, braving the wilderness to take this canister of digital messages from city to city, essentially uploading them into the city's magical network when they arrive. That's a character! And what if one of those messages was designed to bring down the network? That's a plot! I can do something with that. 

And then those ideas will naturally spark more questions -- how does the mailman travel? How different are these networks? Who are these cities? Answering those gives me more ideas for setting creation, but I'm not going to dive into things that aren't important. Not until they are.

I just want to stop writing this post and get back to world design. That's good! But that's not all I'm doing to try and give myself direction.

Like most of the country, I'm a bit overweight. I'm not that bad, but when I bought jeans recently I had to go up a belt size, and that was a bad day for me. So I'm trying to get more in shape. How am I doing this? Two things! One, I'm trying to walk at least two miles a day. This is not always feasible, as the heat index here is getting to be around 110 degrees, though when the weather is nicer I know I'm capable of 3-4 miles per day. I'm also using the rowing machine we have here at the house that I bought a year ago. I am currently at 500 reps a day (usually in 3-4 chunks), and this week I'm moving up to 555. I find it's really easy to get into a rhythm on the rower if I'm watching something fun on TV, and since TV is bad I'm watching Matt Lees's playthrough of The Swindle on Youtube instead. We are also trying to eat better, and while we don't eat terribly now, I need to have my snacking be a salad, not something with carbs. I miss my teenage metabolism, when I weighed 108 pounds as a high school senior.

As someone whose sense of style is "I have three polo shirts," I'm also experimenting with Stitch Fix for a little bit, to try and get clothes that have been made in the last decade and also look decent. Working from home means I am wearing basketball shorts and a t-shirt most of the time (the better to use the rower!), but I cycle through the same outfits literally every week, and I don't like that. I want to take better care of myself physically, and that covers all the appearance stuff. 

I'm also considering teaching myself how to play piano? We have an untuned reclamation piano, which is nice but doesn't work for this, but I have a keyboard that I bought years ago when I thought I was going to teach myself how to play piano. It's not starting exactly from the bottom, as I can read music and was a pretty good trumpet player as a kid, but I don't know how to play the piano. But I'd like to. I don't know if I'm willing to commit the time yet, which makes me a little sad.

An addendum to an earlier point -- if your book starts with a woman dying for no reason other than to set up your grim world or your even grimmer hero, I am throwing your book clear over my head and straight into the garbage. That's lazy and dumb and you should be ashamed of yourself.

And I think that's it! That is how one betters a life. In theory. I've had the best of plans before, after all. 

I adore roleplaying. I have not had the opportunity to play in as many games as I have wanted, because if I had I would in a game right now, rolling a die with my heart in my throat and a character sheet in my other hand, incomplete, for the next game I would be playing. I also own a lot of RPG sourcebooks. Possibly... too many? It will definitely be too many when I have to put them in a box and move them. 


Not pictured: The special Numenera box, a box of RPG books my friend Nate gave me instead of throwing away, probably more books hiding somewhere.

I thought I'd make a list of RPG settings I've had the opportunity to either play or read, and I will do so chronologically in the order in which I played them, because that's difficult. I will also write a bunch of text to go with each one because I do not respect your time.

Vampire: The Masquerade
When: High school
Play, Run, Read: All three! 
Pros: Vampires, masquerades, frilly coats, 'miserable pile of secrets' references
Cons: no one has any idea how combat works, Ravnos perhaps not the most respectful thing ever
Lasting Quote: "I don't see that you CAN'T turn into a crossbow with Vicissitude 5, but you're going to have to spend at least two Willpower."

I have no idea what the actual, intended tone of Vampire is. I don't think the intended tone is one of rollicking cross-country adventure with a hillbilly Gangrel and a slightly overweight Disciple of Set, and I don't think it includes a flamboyant Toreador with maxed out Presence named Hi-Fi Superstar who just wants to be a glam rocker, and it probably doesn't include turning into a crossbow, but we certainly didn't mind. But I want to talk about the Storyteller system, and how much I love it, and how we'll see that same idea reflected again later on in my gaming life.

The Storyteller system, as I understand it, centers around Attribute + Skill.
"I want to be the master of unlocking and unlock this door!"
"Okay, roll your Dexterity dice and your Subterfuge dice."
"Success!"
"A very large man inside stands up, alarmed at your entrance. 'What are you doing here?' he shouts, hand going to his hip."
"Oh, crap."
"Is that what you say?"
"No! Um... 'Sir, I'm here with the exterminators about your bloodfly infestation!'"
"Okay, since that is most certainly a lie, you'll need to roll Wits plus Subterfuge."
"Why not Charisma?"
"Because you're clearly thinking on the fly. You did not rehearse this story ahead of time."
"That's fair."
"Also, that's from Dishonored."
"...that's also fair."

I never had any trouble thinking of what kind of roll to give my players, because it all followed that logical pattern. There are nine attributes, and I will try to remember them from memory. Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, Perception, Manipulation, Appearance, Wits, Intelligence, Charisma. I bet I'm right! And then there are a bunch of skills after that, stuff like Academics, Drive, Firearms, Subterfuge, Streetwise, and Void Travel. One of those might be a skill that I made up.

We played Vampire as goofy fun, with a focus on cinematic combat and flashy showdowns, though at the time we didn't use those words. But since this was the first game I ever played, it really informed how I would come to see roleplaying in the following years.

This is the only game I have ever LARPed. I was very bad at rock-paper-scissors, but very good at running past the police office and declaring that gargoyles had descended upon us from the heavens. 

Kult
When: Also high school
Play, Run, Read: Played
Pros: Horror! Unspeakable atrocities! A good reason to have Nine Inch Nails or Tool on in the background.
Cons: the exact thing parents thought D&D was about during the Satanic panic
Lasting Quote: "I'm spending my action sobbing behind that overturned table." "Understood."

My friend Billy ran this in an upstairs bedroom with eight other people crowded around the table in the summer, in a house without air conditioning. That doesn't really factor in, here, but it's worth mentioning. Kult has its origins somewhere outside of the US, and I don't know where, and my memory of it was that it was legitimately unsettling in a lot of ways. Lots of demons-are-real-and-they-are-in-your-bathroom, and most of those demons are the sort of thing you can't fight, a la Call of Cthulhu. Billy was on a mailing list of people who liked this game, and in recapping his stories to them, he got a little flack for letting us, the players, have access to weapons like firearms, because that could lessen the terror and make the demons seem like Diablo demons, and not the aforementioned bathroom terrors. He replied, proudly, that we all fled from the room willingly without even trying to fight. He was a very good GM. We played a published scenario, and I think it lasted for four or five sessions.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
When: Also high school
Play, Run, Read: Read
Pros: All the cultural cachet of the Satanic Panic, none of the satanism!
Cons: Scientists still struggle to calculate THAC0 past the 11th level
Lasting Quote: "You must gather your party before venturing forth."

I have never played AD&D in a tabletop setting. I never got into Dungeons & Dragons early on! Ours was a Storyteller game setting, so I never experienced the joy of beholders and balors, the rejected name for D&D. I did read a few sourcebooks, borrowed from friends, and I think I flipped through a monster manual or two. My primary experience with AD&D came from the Baldur's Gate CRPG games, from which I remember nothing about the mechanics but everything about the banter and the story. I played as a kensai with a rapier wit to go with his rapier, fell madly in love with Nalia, had a mad fling with Haer'Dalis, became very invested in getting a keep, and then never played Throne of Bhaal because the Nalia Romance mod had no content for that expansion and therefore I didn't care. Sorry, Interplay folks! I'm sure you worked very hard.

Planescape
When: 1999.
Play, Run, Read: Played, read.
Pros: I bought an art book of the artist who did Planescape.
Cons: No one ever wanted to play in a game with me.
Lasting Quote: "Updated my journal."

Planescape Torment is REALLY GOOD and I like to call people berks. I also like that the Lady of Pain didn't have stats because eff anyone trying to mess with her. 

Mage: The Ascension
When: Also high school
Play, Run, Read: Played, run, and read
Pros: All of the beautiful Storyteller stuff from Vampire, none of the overwrought Vampire angst
Cons: I have no idea how you put a Verbena and a Virtual Adept in the same game
Lasting Quote: "I'm going to roll my Intelligence plus Instruction and teach you a lesson!"

I think Mage is my favorite game system. Coming to Mage from the Vancian spell system in D&D RPGs, where you have Magic Missile and Shield and you know what they do and that's all they have, was enlightening. Mage has that beautiful Storyteller system, but then what it does with magic is unreal. Let's see what Matt remembers from a big purple book he read in 1998!

There are nine spheres in Mage, ranging from Correspondence for anything involving space to Time for anything involving Time. Matter, Mind, Life, Entropy?, most of these make some sense as far as overall concepts go. Prime is the one that doesn't make immediate sense, but it's about the things that make magic MAGIC. And the whole system made itself so intuitive and creative when you started mixing spheres. Telepathy for a small group over a wide range, for a heist or something? Correspondence plus Mind -- levels of those dependent on how far you're going. Spend Quintessence, whatever THAT is, to boost spells to make them stronger or last longer. But bending reality like this can be a problem -- reality's only going to bend so far until it snaps back to correct itself. Thus, Paradox, an affliction that hits magi hard for twisting reality to suit their own needs. Since the Mage stuff has to exist in our world, in modern day, this explains why people aren't throwing fireballs. But instead of throwing a fireball, what if you use your magic to induce that generator to explode, as if it were just overloaded from too much power draw? Yeah, that makes more sense... and the world will more easily allow it.

I played in a Mage game where I played Chris Brucato, a Cultist of Ecstasy who lived for the thrill of impossible feats of agility and derring-do... which is why he worked as a sharpshooter and rodeo clown in one of the Dakotas. While I did build him with max-level combat stuff, Dexterity 5/Firearms 5, he so rarely shot at people that it became a running gag. Need someone to pop a quarter into a soda machine from 600 feet? Chris Brucato. Throughout the entire game, I never missed one of those rolls, and I kept trying to make it more challenging for myself each time. That game featured Lucius, a mage from a colony on Io who ended up on Earth in a mishap, and Lucius had no concept for what OUR reality was.  Our GM kept track of Lucius's Paradox throughout the game, deciding that at a certain number, Lucius would just explode. At the end of the game, he shared that Lucius came three Paradox points short.

Mage is great. I'd play it right now. RIGHT. NOW. I used to make characters for literally no reason. Let's play Mage. You and me. Right now.

Call of Cthulhu
When: Also high school! I played a LOT of games in high school.
Play, Run, Read: Played, read.
Pros: Horror! Unspeakable atrocities! Like a tenth of the racism!
Cons: The drawing of Yog-Shoggoth is really silly.
Lasting Quote: "You have skill points in cigarette smoking?" "It's a really elaborate lighting process."

I played in exactly one session of one Call of Cthulhu game and remember next to nothing about it. I do own the blue Chaosium CoC book, and it has something in the back that I absolutely adore, and that is a list of occult, criminal, and otherwise notable events, by year, for over a hundred years. I don't know if these are all real! I don't know if someone of them are just made up, but some of them are things that happened. They can be delightfully creepy, too! Here's what happened in 1955, to pick a year at random:


Wraith: The Oblivion
When: Also high school! I played a LOT of games in high school.
Play, Run, Read: Played.
Pros: Do you believe in life after love? Wait. I mean death. I don't think Cher is a Wraith.
Cons: If Cher is a Wraith, that farewell tour is never going to end.
Lasting Quote: "(just a car ride in silence)"

Nathan's idea was a good one! Taylor and I would play ourselves, except we would play ourselves as wraiths! Spectres of the past, tied to the living world by our fetters, unable to move on until we put matters to rest. Wraith probably has entire systems and worlds and cities and stuff, but we did not see it, because Nathan did his job entirely too well. He started when we were living, and we played through our own deaths, a car accident on a rain-slick street.

...except we had a fake-out or two during the living part, which gave us a reason to really not want to die, so when we DID die, Taylor and I took off at a dead (har) sprint in the opposite direction of Nathan's plot, trying to find a way to return to life so everyone wouldn't be sad. The car ride back from his place, normally a time of chatter and laughter, instead had Taylor and I just sit there in the car, silently, tentatively, and being downright timid about intersections. Unfortunately, Nathan was too good at his job for this to work. We never played Wraith again, which certainly isn't fair to Wraith, and we never played ourselves again, which was probably for the best.

Hunter: The Reckoning
When: Also high school! I played a LOT of games in high school.
Play, Run, Read: Read, might have run?
Pros: Turns out in a World of Darkness full of vampires, werewolves, changelings, wraiths, mummies, demons, orpheii, and all the things that aren't player characters, you can still fit in like six normal humans.
Cons: As the least powerful force in this entire world... nope, I can't think of any. This game is rad.
Lasting Quote: "I'm seriously not sure if I ever ran this!"

I LOVE HUNTER. So every other WoD setting that I've seen or vaguely heard of centers around keeping this mad occult world in the shadows of the regular one, so as not to freak out the norms or whatever. Hunter is what happens when that fails. Hunter is what happens when someone sees the true face of fear, and instead of running or freaking out, refuses to close her eyes and instead takes up arms against those forces. Hunters may only have one or two powers alongside their ingenuity and grit, and these may be impossible odds, but never tell me the odds. Hunter is like Dynasty Warriors if you're playing one mook against a thousand Zhao Yuns, but you still have a chance.

I have the main setting and the player's guide, and I honestly think I ran a game in this, however briefly, but I don't remember anything else. If I didn't, it is a huge regret. Hunter is so good!

Dungeons & Dragons: 3rd Edition
When: Early 2000s.
Play, Run, Read: Played, read.
Pros: THAC0's gone!
Cons: In the grim dark future of adventuring, there is only war.
Lasting Quote: "He ran into an accident. *drops a spiked flail on the table* This is Accident."

Ah, D&D. The 800-pound bugbear in the room. I have spent a lot of time playing you, and I don't think I actually like you at all. Let's unpack this, eh?

I've owned a lot of D&D books, and I've played in a few D&D campaigns. And the d20 system ended up being the core building block of something that dominated my life for nearly fifteen years! In the same way that you shouldn't pay too much attention to a negative Steam review of a game from a guy who played it for 2000 hours, some of these problems are only going to come into play from me having spent so much time with it. With that in mind, let's dig into my three primary complaints.

1) D&D is a setting built to simulate combat first and nothing else after. Dungeons & Dragons sprang out of wargaming, and I don't know enough about the history to know if that's why it is covered in statistics, modifiers, penalties, and movement rules, but it makes sense to me. Dungeons & Dragons has probably 150 pages devoted to how best to murder a dragon, with attributes, weapons, armor, feats, spells, magic items, and level advancement, and it has like four skills for interacting with other humans, and only one of those doesn't revolve around lying or menacing. One of those skills, Diplomacy, can't figure out if it's the most potent mind control possible, or just a thing to move an NPC's attitude toward you around on a slider, like that Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Speechcraft game where you make faces at an NPC like you're trying to make your baby nephew burst out laughing.

2) D&D is about random generation of events over procedural generation of events. That is a very poorly-constructed sentence and doesn't quite sum up what I mean, but here goes. D&D, and the d20 system at large, presents a very wide range of rolls. Every attack and skill check is made with a d20, which means that your modifier has a tremendous range attached to it. Setting aside that you have a five percent chance of instantly failing and a five percent change of instantly succeeding, your given rolls could have wild variance, and that wide variance largely cannot be overcome. It's like -- I'm really having trouble describing this!

Okay, here's an example. There's another game on this list that changes the way the d20 system does hit points. Take the Ranger class, which has a d8 for HP. Every level, you roll a d8 and add that to your HP. Oh, you rolled a 2. That sucks. Oh, next level you rolled a 1. That sucks. Oh, next level you rolled a 3. Bummer! You're level four and you have 14 HP. A solid hit with an axe will still kill you. Your wizard friend with the +1 Con modifier rolled nothing but 3s on his HP rolls, so he's got 17 hit points, and he also shoots fire from his hands and can lob ice bullets at people. Have fun! 

But this other class changes that d8 hit die to a d4+4 hit die. So your range isn't 1-8 new HP, it's 5-8 HP. It's lowering that variance. Stretch that over 1d20, where you've got just as much of a shot of rolling a 1 as you do a 20, and there's nothing stopping you from rolling under a 10 all night. Twenty point of variation on every roll that matters is way too much, and does a lot to ignore player strategy, planning, and preparation. Especially because within that variation, you have...

3) D&D has overwhelmingly harsh pass/fail mechanics. So! This is it. This is your showdown. You stand opposite the mighty warlord who's been in your base, killing your mans. You've studied for this. You've planned for this. You've researched his people, you've met with his family, you've communed with his gods, you have the words ready that will stop this senseless bloodshed. You parley. You say your piece. He hesitates. The DM has you roll your Diplomacy. You roll a 14. You needed a 15. 

Had you rolled one more, you would have succeeded, and you would have held him as he sobbed, as he broke down, the weight of unreasonable expectations bursting forth from his chest. Things wouldn't have been okay -- things are never just simply okay -- but you could have moved on, together, with hopes of building a better future, a future that doesn't end in a tattered flag being raised on the tip of a broken spear.

"That's a fail. He bellows a battle-cry. Roll initiative!"

D&D hinges everything on a single die roll. You hit or you miss. You pass or you fail. It goes exactly as you wanted or it goes exactly how you couldn't bear for it to go. You lined up the perfect shot, and you missed, for no reason. He didn't dodge, he didn't summon up another power, you just fucked it, mate. I hope you weren't invested in doing well or anything. Oh, you built your character for that? You had as many ancillary bonuses as you could have gotten? You had the high ground, Anakin? Don't roll a 2 next time. 

Oh, right, there isn't a next time. 

I think the designers knew this was bullshit somewhere when they were making the game, because a bunch of skills have "if you fail by 5 or more" attached to them, like you're bad but you're not shit. And those are things like Climb, Swim, and other physical ones where if you have to make that roll, you're trying to defy death and you have some severe penalties for missing. But with those, you can just keep rolling, right? Just keep doing it. Do it more. Climb again in a minute. Swing again in a minute. But for all those skills, where you're bluffing, you're talking, you're scheming, you're intimidating, where you only get one shot, oh, you just missed your one shot, you blow. Back to reality! And roll initiative.

d20 Modern
When: 2002ish.
Play, Run, Read: Played, read, run.
Pros: Like D&D, but in modern day!
Cons: Like D&D, but in modern day!
Lasting Quote: nothing worth mentioning, honestly.

The only thing I remember from d20 Modern was how it handled Wealth, which I think no one but me liked. Instead of tracking individual money, it assigned everything a value from like 1-30. Characters had a Wealth Level. Let's say mine is 8. At 8, I can buy anything 5 and under without adjusting my wealth, because it's just money I have -- it doesn't really hit me. But going higher than that, like a 6 or a 7, means that I'm having to either liquidate assets or make major changes to my standard of living to afford it, so my Wealth Level drops a point to a 7. And I think that's really clever. Like, I can buy some stuff in the Steam sale, maybe that's a 4 and I'm at Wealth 7. But if I suddenly had to go buy a new car, that's going to drop my Wealth a level because then I have to deal with car payments and a down payment and all that, so my Wealth is a 6. Then that Steam sale hits and I've got to decide if I can really cut myself short again, because now that 4 is a lot compared to where I was before. See? Clever! Under this system, avocado toast is clearly a 27.

Iron Kingdoms
When: I think like 2003.
Play, Run, Read: Read.
Pros: It's got Monte Cook's name on it! 
Cons: I think every gaming book released from 2003-2012 had Monte Cook's name on it.
Lasting Quote: "Oh, this book."

This has no magic and is the book that has the d4+4 hit dice. It also had a neat idea for giving martial classes techniques and the like, with each of them having their own resources that generated when they did rad stuff, like Aim tokens for archers, Block tokens for guys in heavy armor, and I don't remember any of the others. It seems like it could be a really neat low-fantasy combat-heavy thing, if that's ever a thing I was interested in. It seems fine.

Eberron
When: 2004ish.
Play, Run, Read: Played, read.
Pros: My friend made a shit warforged named Botch and he was immediately the best Eberron character of all time.
Cons: A bunch of people with no joy in their hearts hated the setting for being interesting.
Lasting Quote: "Surrender or die! That's pretty much how it's going to be!"

Eberron did a lot of really neat stuff, like taking D&D and wedging it into a steampunk hole with airships, robots, and lightning trains. The lightning rail is maybe my most favorite thing to come out of a D&D setting that isn't Sigil. Eberron is the last setting where I was a player for more than one session at a time, and I had a lot of fun, even if both scenarios ended pretty rough for us as players. In the GM's defense, Nathan and I are very hard to run games for, because we are weird and creative and will come up with our own ways of solving problems that center around stealing as many horses as possible and also having pet dinosaurs.

It's still D&D, though.

World of Warcraft: The RPG
When: I think around when the game came out, so probably 1870.
Play, Run, Read: Read.
Pros: They made the Paladin Seals a gameplay mechanic!
Cons: Maybe they shouldn't have!
Lasting Quote: "BRANN BRONZEBEARD IS IN IRONFORGE I'm gonna see if he'll sign my tabard."

It's fine? It's probably fine. I think it was d20 based, as you probably were too in the mid-2000s. It had two big exploration books, though, done in the voice of Dwarven Explorer Brann Bronzebeard, who is great. Lore books! I love lore books. It was also fun to read the one of those that came out BEFORE World of Warcraft and how I could predict what would happen in later expansions to the MMO, back before I realized that the MMO's idea of storytelling was "Remember this beloved character from Warcraft III? They're back! And evil, so you'll need to kill them." Brann's the best! NOTE: I have not played WoW since Brann was added so I hope he's remained good and fun. Also Jaina Proudmoore is the best and I'm really unhappy with how they've treated her but it's best not to care about Warcraft lore.

Pathfinder
When: The last decade or so
Play, Run, Read: Read.
Pros: Just like the Dungeons & Dragons you loved, and not like an MMO grafted onto a character sheet!
Cons: Paizo's website is really, really bad.
Lasting Quote: "One of the things I really like about Pathfinder is how it better represents women YES I HAVE SEEN SEONI'S APPEARANCE THANK YOU."

I really like Pathfinder! NEXT

Legend of the Five Rings
When: you're not getting out of this one that easily

Oh all right. Pathfinder!

Pathfinder is D&D for people who didn't like the direction D&D went in 4th Edition. I am one of them. And I really like Pathfinder! Does it fix all of D&D's problems? Probably not, because that seems like an impossible task. But it probably tried really hard, and it's got heart, and creativity, and fun. 

I love Golarion. I love the Inner Sea. The first Pathfinder book I got was the Inner Sea World Guide, and I spent fifty dollars on that at a Barnes & Noble, and I read it cover to cover. It's a huge hardcover book with four pages per country in this huge world, and it's just full of lore. It's full of adventures. There aren't any stat blocks. There aren't any huge lists of magic items or monsters. There are a few things in the back, but that is a book that wants to show off a world full of so many different countries, and so many different types of game. Do you want to explore crashed alien spaceships? Do you want to rage against the dying of the Holy Light? Do you want to climb ziggurats? Do you want to steel yourself against terrible winds? Do you want to be a pirate? Do you want to serve as guards for a nomadic tribe of merchants? Do you want to have high-wire kung fu fights? You can do that! It's all in this book! And this book is full of IDEAS. 

Pathfinder does something that I forgot D&D could do, and that's bring back the beauty and the wonder. It's great.

The Adventure Card Game's also good! Pathfinder! It's nice. 

Legend of the Five Rings
When: The last five years
Play, Run, Read: Read.
Pros: ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod
Cons: ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod
Lasting Quote: "ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod"

I have never wanted so badly to play a game and tell them I love everything that they're doing. I already have a thing about Japanese history in that I think it's rad and fell in love with the Meiji Restoration era thanks to dating simulator Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossom, and the Sengoku Jidai era is fascinating, and this covers all kinds of stuff and also mixes in Japanese myth like Okami which I ALSO love. The artwork is beautiful, the characterization fascinating, the respectful approach of another culture is great, and the system I adore.

L5R uses a dice pool system similar to Vampire in that you're rolling dice equal to an Attribute and Skill, but it's the Roll-and-Keep system, where you roll X dice and keep Y. I don't remember what dictates everything there. But you roll 7, keep 2, or 7k2. So you roll 9, 7, 6, 6, 4, 3, 2, 2. Keep 9 and 7, 16. You rolled a 16! But if you roll a 10 that die EXPLODES and you get to KEEP rolling it and add those totals and if it rolls another 10 it KEEPS EXPLODING like you're Rico in Just Cause 3 and everything's coming up Chaos. And that mitigates so much of the stupid randomness, you know? 2k2 and 7k2 -- both people have a chance to do well, but the samurai with more dice is going to do better because she gets to roll MULTIPLE dice and keep the BEST. THIS IS NOT HARD. I love it. I love it I love it I love it. 

And the books! The BOOKS. My word, I should just have hearts in my eyes. L5R has my two favorite gaming books ever. Imperial Histories  and Imperial Histories 2. These books cover multiple eras in the world of Rokugan, with breakdowns of what happened, who the important players were, what each of the many clans were doing during that time, and then seeds them with adventuring ideas, including points where you could pivot from the expected histories. And THEN there are what-if scenarios, like what if Fu Leng actually won, what if Togashi became the first emperor, what if the Meiji Restoration were happening and rails were being laid across Rokugan, what if the isolationist tendency was broken down, what if they all went to SPACE. It's just so creative and so lovely, and I love everything about it.

And it's coming back! Fantasy Flight Games picked up the L5R license and the card game is returning this fall, and I am in day one and probably going to make videos about it and write about it and buy expensive binders and then realize I'm collecting two living card games oh god. But the RPG could also return! Isn't THAT exciting?

Isn't it?

Star Wars: Age of Rebellion
When: Right after I fell in love with Oscar Isaac
Play, Run, Read: Read.
Pros: You can hear the music all the time in your head!
Cons: scruffy nerfherders
Lasting Quote: "How are there only six pages for planets?!"

I don't know if it's exciting.

I picked this up because I like Star Wars and I like RPGs, and on my first read I liked it a lot! Custom dice! But wait, that's my first steer back out of this. Custom dice? Why? And the answer is simple -- it's that it's more money. FFG make a lot of games with custom dice and tokens and things, and I like a lot of their games! I'm heavily bought into Lord of the Rings LCG and X-Wing and Netrunner. But I don't want every game I get to have its own built-in restrictions to how I play it. And how would I adapt this to play online, which is kind of how my life seems to work anymore? But should custom dice throw me out of a game? I mean, sure, everyone's got their own things. This doesn't have to be mine. What DID knock me out of this, though?

The talent trees. Each class has its own progression trees, following these spec-like unlock paths. And when I first saw this, I honestly thought it was really cool! It's like the Sphere Grid in Final Fantasy X! Hooray! But there's a reason that works well in a video game and not in a tabletop RPG, and that's because it restricts your options. Every fighter is going to be one of these few types, strictly defined. It didn't feel customizable, not how I want, and it felt pigeonholing. 

Custom dice, preset character paths -- this is all from one and a half reads of a book. I could very well be wrong! But it kept that setting and system from singing to me, and that bums me out. And I've never played it! I could be one hundred percent wrong. But I hope that L5R remains its own thing.

Numenera
When: 2013ish?
Play, Run, Read: Read.
Pros: Hey it's Monte Cook again! It's UNCOMMONLY beautiful, and uncommonly weird.
Cons: ...which makes it so hard to get a finger on what it is.
Lasting Quote: "That is a really beautiful box for a game you're never going to run." "I know!"

I haven't played it! It's so weird! It's so weird that I can't figure out WHAT it is, where to start, or how I'd run a game in the setting. But boy, it's pretty, and it's so much fun to read! It's a very simple and fascinating system, too, even if Effort's a bit confusing. But I'm into the GM Intrusion ideas, and would love to play in this. I don't know if I'd want to run -- I don't think I understand it enough. I have the big collector's box, which is probably the nicest gaming-related thing that I own. Shame that Torment game left me ice cold.

The One Ring
When: 2015
Play, Run, Read: Read, but only barely.
Pros: I like Lord of the Rings!
Cons: So why haven't I read this book?
Lasting Quote: "That still only counts as one!"

Yeah, I haven't read this. I really like Tolkien's Middle Earth! I bought this two years ago with birthday money! The hell's wrong with me? I think I got so deep into Lord of the Rings Online that I built this up into something it probably can't be. I should read it.

Exalted
When: wait
Play, Run, Read: how did this get here
Pros: what even is this
Cons: let me go see
Lasting Quote: well this might be neat!

Seriously, I don't know what Exalted is or why I own a book. Well, I DIDN'T, but there's a Half-Price Books sticker on the front, so clearly I got it because it looked interesting. It does look interesting! I should read it.

I'm sure I've missed something somewhere. But that's a thing about games and games systems! Soon, I'll talk about creating a Frankenstein's monster of my own game system, and what I'd like to do if I ever ran a game again.