RPG players are conditioned to view PC conflict as an absolute bad. So how can I describe the fun of an RPG that assumes players will attempt to kill each other at every session?

Paranoia is set in a 1980′s dystopia where Friend Computer directs humanity with a scented iron fist. It’s 1984 crossed with Discworld.

The player-characters are all troubleshooters (“tasked to find trouble and shoot it”), given a job by Friend Computer to resolve some minor problem. Of course, failure to comply is treason and subject to immediate death. Your job is typically to track down commies, mutants, or traitors.

Unfortunately, you’re also secretly a commie, mutant, or traitor. Or all three.

Fortunately for you and unfortunately for your comrades, they’re all probably commies, mutants, and/or traitors, and you’ll get points with Friend Computer if you expose them and eliminate them before they do the same to you.

Your character gets a large array of interesting and goofy stats, and to use them, you roll a d20 in hopes of rolling at or under your stat’s score. There’s little in the way of damage; the weapons with which Friend Computer provides you rarely leave much residue.

Our group didn’t roll much; we were too busy dealing with an unfamiliar sewer transport, a surprise loyalty test, and of course, accusing each other of treason. The GM handled most of the rolls.

I had great fun playing Paranoia, but it was a very particular kind of fun. I felt “inside the action” more than I do in a typical beer-and-pretzels game, but I wasn’t taking any of it seriously.

It’s an odd game. A memorable, weird, hilarious, crazy, fun, odd game.

'Kindle3 Kindle Fire "on" button' by kodomut on Flickr

It’s hardest to see the future when the present is shifting so much. However, we can see clearly if we look at fundamentals and clearly understand the nature of change.

There are 3 major individuals or groups involved in book publishing:

• Authors (usually one person, the creator)
• Publishers (which include a long chain of people, which all process the author’s work)
• Distributors (who get processed books to readers)

Electronic publishing is changing that. People assume that it’s killing publishers. That’s wrong. It’s killing distributors.

It’s obvious when you unpack the publication process. What do publishers do?

1. Copyediting — Fixing typos and grammar mistakes, and re-arranging sentences so they flow better.
2. Editing — Suggesting changes to the flow of information in the text, to improve the story’s speed, comprehension, etc.
3. Layout — Choosing typefaces, deciding on the layout of chapter headings, etc.
4. Cover art — Still important; books need an encapsulating image to catch a reader’s eye.
5. Printing — Physically producing the finished books.
6. Advertising — Buying ads in magazines and newspapers, sending review copies to reviewers, pushing on social media, etc.
7. Broader marketing — Very different depending on the author and book, but can include arranging book tours, producing online videos, etc.

Electronic publishing affects one of those seven activities (with minor effects on some others).

Electronic publishing on Amazon’s Digital Text Platform, Barnes & Noble’s PubIt!, and others allow an author to bypass the publisher’s process. This does not make those steps worthless; it makes them optional.

So: publishers will not be primary gatekeepers. They will still have a place.

To see the future of electronic publishing, think about The New Yorker. Even in a world of free publishing, it would still mean something to be published in The New Yorker.

So a publisher’s value will lie in its exclusivity and taste. People today will follow a blogger for recommendations; so will people 20 years from now follow publishers for their catalog.

Let’s imagine the website for an electronic publisher named Clio, 20 years in the future. Their main page lists the titles that they have available. The first thing of note is the relatively slow publication schedule. Clio intentionally releases only a few books a month, all of very high quality.

But now let’s click on their “Why Publish With Clio?” tab. We see a page explaining that Clio offers a full range of copyediting, editing, layout, artistic, and marketing services.

If you submit your manuscript to Clio (right from their website, of course) you’re sent to a web page that shows your manuscript’s exact place in the review queue, and estimates the number of days until your manuscript is reviewed. If your manuscript makes it through the review process, editors and marketers will polish it (with your input and acceptance, of course). All these services will be paid back by a small commission from sales of your book; once they’re paid back, you only pay a trivial amount for ongoing hosting fees.

You also select a marketing plan. You can do all the marketing yourself and pocket all the rest of your books’ profit, or you can have the publisher market for another small, ongoing commission. You can even change the marketing agreement later.

It’s all do-able, and it provides all the advantages of a traditional publisher with few of the drawbacks. It not only gives publishers a place in the market, it gives them a clear place.

You are a space marine, a heavily armored and incredibly powerful warrior searching an abandoned ship for deadly, xenophobic aliens. Unfortunately, they will find you.

This is represented in a card game.

And that’s the yin and yang of Space Hulk: Death Angel. The basic idea–marines assaulted by aliens as they traverse a space ship–captures the imagination, but it’s complex and awkward to represent with cards.

The players each control a couple of marines, all of which are in the same squad. Other cards represent the ship corridors that the marines are exploring, and the aliens attacking them. Special dice are rolled when marines attack; each marine attacks in his own way.

Explaining the mechanics in detail would be dull and futile. It took me and a friend over an hour to understand the rules, and he’d played the game before. In particular, we scratched our heads over the rules for navigating through the ship and finishing the mission.

That said, Death Angel captures the claustrophobic terror of its premise. Several moments drew apprehensive groans from us both. I felt myself breathe stale air, smell fear, and feel the butt of my rifle jam into my shoulder.

I just wish I could figure out where I was on the damned ship.

Bottom line up-front: I ordered a bunch of candy from Munchies Sweets and Treats, only received half, and they’ve ignored my requests for the rest of the candy I paid for.

This past Halloween, I wanted to buy a bunch of full-size candy bars for the trick-or-treaters. It’s always fun to see their eyes bug out when I offer them a pail full of big candy bars. And I figured I could buy them in bulk.

After an hour of Googling, I found Munchies Sweets and Treats <munchiessweetsandtreats.com>. They had low prices and a large selection. Perfect! I ordered my bars, plus about a dozen unusual candies I can’t get in my area. The total came to a little over a hundred dollars. I gulped, and clicked “submit” on my order.

A week later, a large box arrived. I hauled it into the kitchen, split it open, and found most of the full-size candy bars, but none of the unusual candies. Inside was a packing slip, with all the candies I’d ordered listed.

I though, Well, maybe they’re shipping in two boxes. I waited a couple of days. No second box arrived.

:sigh: Okay, well, their materials listed a phone number. This was undoubtedly a mistake; I’d just call them and get the rest of my order. I dialed their number, and the call went straight to their voiccemail.

Which was full.

Now that’s an ominous sign.

I returned to their website. They had no live chat, but they did have a contact form. I filled that out, explaining that half my candy was missing from my order.

Need I say more?

Image from 'Mosue Guard,' copyright David Petersen

My game group played Fudged Mouse Guard a few weeks ago. It takes the excellent Mouse Guard RPG–a game of intelligent mice with medieval-level technology–and converts the system to Fudge (every stat is a score from -4 to +4, and you roll dice that modify your score up or down for a final result, which is compared to a target difficulty).

The original Mouse Guard system is a simplified and heavily modified version of the odd Burning Wheel system. The conversion to Fudge can’t be exact.

It isn’t, but Fudged Mouse Guard fits the world well, and converts all the important statistics. We were able to play in the Mouse Guard world effectively, using skills and abilities, and combat involved simply trading blows. It works.

I did encounter one problem: The Fudged Mouse Guard document lists no example enemies, and provides no guidelines for enemies’ power level. I guessed at the stats for enemies, which turned out to be low. The PCs defeated all their enemies within three rounds. The original RPG’s unique combat system doesn’t translate directly to a traditional RPG’s mechanic of trading blows, so more direction there would be helpful.

Overall, though, the game went smoothly and we had fun. You can view our character sheets to see the stats used in the system.

Schemer.com screenshot

The peerless Trey Ratcliff was kind enough to offer invites to Schemer, a new Google service, and I was lucky enough to win one. Thanks, +Trey!

Jennifer Van Grove emphasized Schemer’s similarities to Foursquare in her VentureBeat article, but I see Schemer as more of a location-sensitive bucket list.

Foursquare is about visiting places; Schemer is about doing things.

Ignoring the home dashboard, Schemer’s biggest attraction is its “Find Stuff To Do” page. Here, you’ll find a list of projects (“schemes”). All of these projects were made by (or marked by) people in your Google+ Circles, or who live or work near you. It’s not creepy; it doesn’t suggest that you do the same things as your next-door neighbors. But if you live in Seattle, most of the projects listed for you will be either based in Seattle or not location-specific (e.g., “Knit a sweater”).

So, you can create a project (“Make my grandmother’s fudge cheesecake recipe”), or mark an existing one as ”I want to do it” or ”Already done it.”

You can also leave comments on projects (sorry, “schemes”), and this is one of the site’s most exciting features. If it can collate advice from people who’ve already done something, it could be a powerful way to help people achieve their goals.

There’s already an Android app available, with an iPhone app “coming soon.” I have no Android phone, so I can’t comment on that.

So, the big question: Is Schemer worth using? As a bucket list, yes. This is a fine way of tracking larger concrete life goals.

If you’d like an invite to Schemer, leave a comment and I’ll give ‘em out as long as I’ve got ‘em.

'CatacombsOfTheWizard' by orkboi on Flickr

Dungeon World is another sword-and-sorcery tabletop RPG system aiming to recapture the purity of classic Dungeons & Dragons. The surface looks the same, including the four classes of Cleric, Fighter, Thief, and Wizard. The mechanics and approach, however, are quite different.

Player-character attributes mirror D&D, except for the addition of Bond, which is used to indicate how well each character knows each other character. Moreover, at the beginning of each session, two attributes are “highlighted” by other players and the GM. If a player uses those attributes during the session, the PC gets extra XP.

The basic die mechanic is 2d6, added together, plus any modifiers. 10 or higher is a full success; 7–9 is a success with a complication; 6 or lower is a failure.

The ”move,” which is the core procedure of the system, is a rule that lists a trigger (the thing in the game that activates the move), possibly a roll, and a set of possible results.

Interestingly, moves are not optional. If any character action satisfies the trigger condition for a move, the character must immediately use that move.

Moreover, moves are always responses to character actions. A player can’t say “I use the Defy Danger move;” the player must narrate a character action which triggers the Defy Danger move.

This is central to the system. Players must narrate. The mechanics must flow from that narration.

There are also mechanics that allow for results to be held for the next turn, for the next use of a move, until a condition is met, or using a currency called “hold.” The move specifies the uses of ”hold.” For example, if you stand in defense of a person, item, or location under attack and succeed fully, you get 3 hold. You can later spend that hold to redirect an attack from the defended item to yourself, or halve the damage of an attack against the defended item, or deal extra damage to anything attacking the defended item.

In a reversal from traditional D&D, most weapons deal no damage themselves. Damage is dealt by rolling a certain sized die for your class, and in some cases adding +1 for a particularly powerful weapon. The system justifies this by pointing out that your class’s training determines your ability to hurt people. Thieves are not build to deal damage; they have moves that make them useful in many other ways.

Unfortunately, the rules are written with often-tortured grammar, making many sentences hard to parse. Here’s an example, and I’ve even corrected two typos: “When the doom you show signs of is an onslaught of goblin arrows, if the players don’t do something to get out of the way, you can follow through with damage as a hard move.” This is frequent enough that I needed to re-read many passages to fully understand them.

I wouldn’t mind this in a supplement, but these are the core rules.

The term “move” compounds the issue. It’s such a generic word that I often felt confused by a particular turn of phrase. When a rule tells you to ”make your move,” is that meant colloquially or mechanically?

When we sat down to play it, the game progressed smoothly. I spent much of the time prompting players with “What do you do?”, as the rules demanded, which non-plussed a few players. Dungeon World expects focus, an admirable quality.

much as I’m complaining about it, I found Dungeon World‘s rules and approach refreshing and effective. We had a classic hack-and-slash adventure. It did exactly what it claimed it would do.

Just found ifttt (If This, Then That), a site which lets you easily build a two-step workflow such as ”When a news item is posted on this site, add it to my news reader” or ”When I upload a post to Flickr, post it to Picasa too.”

A full decade ago, a CEO was telling me that the future was in ”programming for the masses,” that certain elements of programming would get easier and easier for normal people to do. He pointed towards  scheduling apps as the sorts of things that should be easily extended to this. Imagine sending out an invite with a poll of available times, then setting a time after a certain number of people voted, such that people who check later only get that time.

(To be clear, he wasn’t suggesting that programming would become easy, just that end-user tools would get increasingly powerful workflow-style tools that remained simple.)

'Construction Signs' by jphilipg on Flickr

In truth, I hate “tip culture,” the idea that you can achieve balance, harmony, and rightness in life with a few painless steps in 5 minutes a day. It’s never that easy.

Also, I don’t want to tell you what to do. Who am I?

So, these aren’t tips as much as they’re pieces of advice that I’ve taken, which have powerfully affected my productivity and efficiency.

1. Keep a list of projects

A project consists of work towards a specific goal. I keep a separate text file of all my projects.

This includes everything I’m working on, even ongoing projects where I just have to check in occasionally. It ensures that I don’t forget anything.

Corollary: Don’t use email as a de facto list of projects and things to respond to. If you read an email and realize you now have to do three new things, don’t keep the email in your inbox; write those new things down and file the email away.

2. Turn off email alerts and process email completely

I keep my email program minimized, and I’ve turned off those alerts that pop up whenever a new email arrives. When I ”check email,” I clear time to actually process my email. When I’ve finished with an email, I move it to a folder. When I’m done checking email, my inbox is empty.

I’m not perfect with this. I doubt that anybody is. But when I do empty my inbox, I feel less distracted. Nothing nags. This habit also ensures that I’ve actually written down what needs to be done, instead of relying on a re-read of an email to refresh my memory.

This means I only check my email a couple of times a day. Even at work.

3. Every morning, schedule tasks on the calendar

Literally. Every morning, I open my list of projects. I find the most important one, locate a free half-hour slot on my calendar, and create a meeting for it. I’m the only one in the meeting. I continue until about 2/3 of my day is scheduled.

I felt weird the first few times I did this, but it worked. Not only does it push me to actually work on important projects, co-workers are less likely to schedule a meeting during time I’ve scheduled. So I’ll actually have time.

4. Take a lunch break

'lunch~' by tsuihin — TimoStudios on Flickr

I used to work through lunch, but a few weeks ago, I changed.

If I get up from my desk and walk somewhere else for lunch, even for just 20 minutes, at the end of the day I’m still reasonably fresh and energetic. If I don’t, by 5:00pm I feel beat up.

This doesn’t mean going out to eat. In fact, I usually take my homemade lunch to a conference room. It’s enough of a break.

5. Journal work and take a reward for every few items recorded

I have a document titled “Daily Time Log.” When I get to work, I open that document, then minimize it. Every time I finish a significant task during the day, or I talk to someone, I record it in the Daily Time Log along with a timestamp.

For every 6 items I record, I eat a small Peppermint Patty from a stash I have in a cabinet.

The key to the reward lay in finding something that I like but don’t love. If I kept Butterfingers or Snickers, I’d feel tempted to scarf them all down.

6. Pick a few core things to do every day

These are the things that are important to you and your work. For me, it’s writing. I write every day, when I get home. Before I eat dinner. Simple but effective.

What effective habits would you recommend?

'Brother' by linuz90 on Flickr

Man, I loved Fiasco.

Fiasco is a tabletop RPG that approaches die rolls from a radically unorthodox angle. The players roll the dice at the beginning of the game, and those rolls tie into various elements of the setting (the book comes with several starter settings). Once those dice are rolled, they’re never rolled again.

The first half of the game involves describing and explaining the elements rolled, as well as their relations to each other. If the dice connect a child’s chemistry set to a protagonist’s law offices, someone will get a chance to explain that connection at some point before the game’s mid-point.

Halfway into the game comes the Tilt, a major plot point that disrupts the ongoing story and rolls it towards disaster. The rest of the game involves narrating the characters’ reactions and fates.

As a result, Fiasco is a story-driven game, to the point of being story-obsessed. The game hinges on players collaborating to narrate whole scenes without a single die roll, skill, or attribute to fall back on.

Only one in our group of four had played Fiasco before, so he guided us through the dice-rolling and story-telling process. Most of us found the system awkward at first, but we warmed to it, especially in the second half. Our story of a small Southern town and its corrupt cop, his innocent niece, and the drug-dealing lawyer and his daughter quickly spiraled out of the character’s control, into dark places. We felt gripped by the power of our story.

What better praise can I give to a role-playing game?