I’ve noticed something. Of those wonderful people who think up horrifying monsters for players to encounter during a tabletop role-playing session, many of them struggle with originality.

They strive to create thoughtful histories and almost complete ecologies for their creatures, in the attempt to create a monster that’s not just another vicious humanoid.

I’d like to take a moment to say: They don’t need to.

If I’m questing through a dark, eldritch forest, and something leaps out at me, I want to know how to react. Do I swing my katar at it? Do I make threatening moves? Do I very much not make threatening moves? Do I close in or keep my distance?

If I’m fighting a completely original creature, I’ve no idea how to react to the thing. So I usually have to resort to careful investigation (“Does it seem particularly muscular?”), trial and error (“I poke it.”), or having fun with it (“I rush in and stab it, screaming the whole time!”).

How much fun is that? Not much (for me, anyway). And certainly not if the same scenario occurs for creature in an adventure. I need some facts I can grab on to.

If, on the other hand, I encounter a bear with lizard-like skin, I know roughly how to react. It may spring plenty of surprises on me, but at least I have a framework within which to act.

Which is fundamental to role-playing. One reason for D&D’s popularity is its medieval universe, which is familiar to all of us from reading The Hobbit under the covers as children. We know how to react to most environments in the world, at least basically. The challenge lies in keeping our characters alive and achieving their goals, which usually have nothing to do with the originality of the random creature that drops on their heads as they creep through the Sapphire Caverns.

Now, I love a well-thought-out, unusual creature. I applaud it. But if creature #5 is basically a wolf, don’t worry. It’ll still be fun.

My Christmases have always been quiet. I may spend more time than usual shopping or baking, but I’m able to keep up with everything.

Not this year. A perfect storm kept me busy every hour of every day for the past several weeks. I was left breathless.

After several wonderful, quiet days at home this past weekend, I’ve recharged. I’m back to “normal,” whatever that is.

I’m analyzing these busy weeks. I’ve since re-negotiated several things that were holding me back, such as teaching, which I don’t need to do as much of now. I’ve also looked at my work. I made a lot of cookies, which were great, but did I really need to make that many? Could I have made fewer, and still delighted people? Yes, and I would have better managed my time had I looked at that more closely.

Because time is precious. There are so many things left in my life that I want to accomplish and experience, and do so fully. Not rush through so I can tick them off a list, but deeply experience an autumn in Maine or a week in Japan or an afternoon at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

And one key to achieving that is constant re-appraisal of your life. Trivial things constantly battle for our attention. We must fight them. And live.

I’m back from my first trip to New York City. Briefly: It was very cold, I saw The 39 Steps, and I took a lot of pictures.

Less briefly: I’m glad I went; it’s worth seeing New York at least once in your life, if just for the change of pace. It’s breathtakingly diverse; there’s always something to do or see. One could spend the rest of one’s life just sampling restaurants.

And the people are…hurried. Not rude, though that depends on your definition. They just expect everyone to keep moving. Sit down and talk with an average New Yorker, and you’ll find someone as nice as anyone else.

And, to my surprise, New Yorkers stick together. Everyone in New York feels like a native, much more so than in other places I’ve visited.

It’s a city of movement: people moving, lights moving, taxis and bicycles moving.

I’d like to go back when it’s warm, and I can take a couple of days to explore some neat parts of the city. I don’t think one needs a week to appreciate New York City, but one needs more than a day or two.

As with so many things.

I’m conflicted about whether I should write about the Digital Archive Project here. I don’t want to get it into trouble.

See, despite TV’s bad reputation, there have been a few great shows over the decades. Many of them were canceled early; others left the airwaves and have never received any other release. The only exist on a master tape in a vault somewhere in New York City, and on dusty VHS tapes scattered around the world.

Then there are shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which every single episode requires license wrangling for the original movie rights.

Enter the Digital Archive Project. Its goal is to put every episode of these great shows (except those that have had a legitimate DVD release) online. Essentially forever. All in one place, using BitTorrent technology.

If you go to the site and create a free account, then click on the Categories link in the left-hand navigation pane, you’re presented with a list of great old shows. MST3K. Freaks and Geeks. Max Headroom. Cartoon Planet. Brimstone.

All of them downloadable, most in high quality. Until there’s a DVD release.

Now that you know about it, go forth and watch some great TV.

Okay, so you’ve signed up for a Twitter account, and maybe posted a few times. How do you move to the next level?

Here are some suggestions for improving your Twitter experience:

• Go to the Everyone stream. See who’s talking, and about what.
• More importantly, see what catches your attention. Observe effective use of 140 characters, so you’ll know how to tweet more effectively.
• Look at who’s popular on Twitter (via Twitterholic). Read their tweets. You probably won’t want to follow all of them, but they are popular for a reason. I follow about half of them, for whatever that’s worth.
• Get on Twitter frequently. It’s really most effective when you can check it several times a day, at least. Fortunately, this doesn’t take long.
• Check your @Replies often. While you’re away, someone might reply to you about something you tweeted yesterday, and you may not see it in your regular stream.
• Check your DMs (direct messages) often. See above. Also, DMs function more like email, and they’re very easy to miss.
• Post original content. This is a personal peeve; I see folks whose stream consists entirely of “@gozo Yeah, and you know what that means” and “@hiroyuki Oh, I know it!” Little real content. Instead, as you’re browsing the web, tweet about the websites you’re reading. And as you sit down to your computer and load up Twitter, think about what you’ve been doing, and tweet about that.
• Look into an aggregator application, like Twhirl, TweetDeck, or PeopleBrowsr. These will show all your feeds (including @Replies and DMs) on one screen, making it much easier to notice important topics.

But above all, don’t go too nuts. Twitter’s fun and useful, but it’s not a place to spend your entire day. It’s only Ones and 0s.

Hope this helps.

I believe that speed is essential to good role-playing. Think of a good action movie or an engrossing book; the story rockets from revelation to revelation, leaving you breathless. Not that a GM should rush from one plot point to the next, but there’s no point in taking a plot slowly.

Unfortunately, many of the rules and resolution mechanisms in role-playing systems slow down the game as players roll dice and compare numbers. They’re necessary, sure, but the time they consume needs to be minimized.

Enter initiative cards. This one of those little tricks that drastically speed up a game.

Imagine a 3×5″ card that contains the following information:

• Character Name
• Initiative score
• Max HP
• Current HP
• Standard attack
• Vulnerabilities

Imagine writing up one of these for each character (player and non-player). When a battle begins, write down the initiative scores, and order the cards by that score.

Boom. You call out the name of the player on the first card. The player attacks an NPC. You pull out the NPC’s card, note any damage, and slip it back in. You then flip to the next card and announce that player’s turn.

And battle zips from one player to the next. No need to write down a temporary initiative list, and all vital stats are in one place.

Even better, on subsequent battles you just sort in the appropriate NPC cards. Takes about ten seconds to set up for a battle.

It’s greatly sped up my games. I’d prefer to just do away with initiative altogether, but that’s another blog post.

A few weeks ago, I watched The King of Kong, a documentary about competitive Donkey Kong players. Which sounds geeky, until you watch it.

It’s about guys who take on these classic arcade games as a challenge. A test of skill. Those old games, like Pac-Man, Q-Bert, and Donkey Kong, were very hard; one group claims that the average Donkey Kong player will never progress past the third level (out of 22).

It’s fascinating to watch grown men—very smart grown men—take on that sort of challenge. Sure, it takes a certain kind of person, but not the introverted nerd you might expect. The documentary focuses on two men, one of whom is a successful independent business man, and the other who looks like a middle manager at Microsoft. They each have a full-time job (well, one got inerested in Donkey Kong during a period between jobs), and a wife (and, in one case, kids).

They’re just fascinated. It’s a puzzle. A very hard puzzle that requires quick reflexes as well as a quick mind; the enemies move according to both complex patterns and random directions. Plus, the game has only four different screens; higher levels repeat the same screen, with more enemies that move faster and in more complicated patterns.

Not only is there nothing wrong with their fascination, it’s noble. They’re bettering themselves: their brains, their hand-eye coordination. They actively seek out new challenges and new frontiers to explore.

May we all do the same.

Every so often, a book comes along that not only follows a great premise, it fulfills that premise completely.

Legends of Literature is a collection of essays written by contributors to Writer’s Digest. Famous contributors, like Stephen King, H.G. Wells, Jack Kerouac, and Ray Bradbury. There are good interviews with Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Sandburg, and George Bernard Shaw.

Much of it is writing advice, yes, but it’s also a window into the minds of these great writers. We get to see their approaches to fiction, and their opinions on the writing business. Bradbury, for example, is breezy but pragmatic about the need to just sit down in front of the page and write, good or bad.

It’s certainly an excellent book for writers, but it’s also worth a look for bibliophiles who just want to know how writers think.

If you like Twitter, you may benefit from a more powerful interface. Some solve this through use of TweetDeck, a desktop application that shows multiple Twitter streams (your stream, replies to you, direct messages, etc.) in columns.

The new service PeopleBrowsr is a web-based application that works like TweetDeck. You enter your Twitter account information, and PeopleBrowsr displays columns of streams. You can easily add more streams, and re-arrange them, right in your browser. The interface is a little busy but highly functional, and provides a lot of information at once. Even better, it’s written almost entirely in JavaScript, so it doesn’t depend on heavyweight frameworks like Flash.

Why use this instead of TweetDeck? Because you can use PeopleBrowsr from any computer, anywhere. It goes with you; if you have ‘net access, you can use PeopleBrowsr and manage a huge array of Twitter conversations.

Very, very handy.

All right, I admit it: I play Dungeons & Dragons. This may horrify some of my evangelical friends, but trust me: there’s nothing wrong with it.

You may ask, why play D&D when it has so many negative connotations? Why not use one of the hundreds of other role-playing systems out there, like FUDGE or GURPS?

First, I’ll use Saalon‘s metaphor: D&D is like Microsoft Windows. Everyone uses it and it works okay, though it’s kinda bloated and sometimes confusing.

I contend that World of Darkness is like the Mac, and FUDGE/GURPS are like Linux, but those are different subjects.

So, I play D&D because it’s a standard. It provides a common context for discussing role-playing with others, and if I’m playing with a bunch of folks I don’t know, D&D’s a convenient default.

But that shouldn’t be the only reasons. I play D&D because it’s fun. It’s exciting and adventurous; it feels like a big, epic fantasy action/adventure movie.

Well, the current 4^th edition feels that way. I also played 3.5 Edition, which felt more like an overly-long series of fantasy novels.

4^th Edition D&D provides a huge world, brimming with possibility. There are dozens of fascinating races, all scrambling over an ever-evolving world of good, evil, conflict, and flashing steel. You can throw yourself into combat, or negotiate with merchants, or haggle with kings.

(Can you tell that I love setting?)

The system works quite well, too. It’s a heavy system, compared to all the others out there, but it works. You choose values for six core attributes, such as Strength and Intelligence. Your race and class (profession, like cleric or warlord) may improve those numbers, and will give you access to a menu of powers. Some powers can be used as often as desired, others only once per battle, and others once per day. You then choose from a set of skills, which are all affected by your attributes (a high Strength score makes you better at Acrobatics).

I’m not as crazy about the two-step combat mechanic, where you roll a 20-sided die to see if you hit, then another die (number of sides depending on the weapon) to determine how much damage you do. Combat can grind to nearly a standstill as half a dozen players roll their dice in turn.

But even that has its charm, with players picking out a shiny d8 or d10 to roll their damage.

It works. D&D is fun. It’s goofy, and overly complex at times, but it’s a fine way to spend a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, romping through a huge fantasy world and baring your teeth at dragons.

There are worse ways to spend a Saturday.