I remember when U2’s “The Edge” was interviewed in Guitar Player magazine back after their first album, and they asked him how he came up with his unusual style. He answered that he really didn’t know how to play all that well so he just made it up and it seemed to work.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that when you are involved in the RPG hobby, it takes some work to develop and maintain your edge. Some will disagree, but in my experience it’s not something you can practice without actually playing.

Way back in the day, they used to try to teach people with disabilities to tie their shoes by setting up a shoe on a wooden foot attached to a board. At some point very day they would plunk this contraption down in front of the person and have them practice tying the laces.

One day a visionary said “Hey, why don’t we have them tie their shoes when they are putting them on?” It seemed like madness, but that’s how they do it now.

I have found that the more I play RPGs and the more I observe and talk to the people I am playing with, the more I am able to maintain and sharpen my edge. Very often I know what I intend, but when I’m not playing enough, my execution is a bit dull. However, the more I play, the more I hone that edge and I’m able to translate my intentions into actions.

I hear that “The Edge” leaned how to plat guitar eventually. I preferred his original style.

“Yes, it is rare and wonderful indeed.”

“A point in every direction is the same as no point at all.”

The unusual and extraordinary are tropes woven into the fabric of RPGs. It is rare indeed to find an RPG that doesn’t have something just a bit unusual involved. For many gamers, certainly for most my age, playing in games with magic around every corner was an experience we had often. While this was exciting for a time, for many of us the sheen on the plethora of magic swords and potions began to dull.

If we aren’t careful, playing RPGs can turn into season after season of the show “House”. That show is great fun, but rare diseases are…..rare. Yet somehow that one hospital manages to attract patients with the most obscure maladies so frequently that they become commonplace. We can end up painting ourselves into the same corner while running an RPG, no matte what genre.

Sure, some genres are all about weird stuff and excitement at every turn. But many are not. The really freaky and exciting stuff shines and hits you in the gut because it is so rare. However, if you hardly ever pull the crazy switch, then the sessions run the risk of becoming a bit bland. Leaning just how much of a twist to add takes time, but its worth it when you get the feel for it.

As a sign used to say at one of my first jobs, “Anything well done in this kitchen is very rare!”

When push comes to shove the RPG experience has a lot of pushing going on.

We push the envelope in game design or in stepping out of our comfort zones. We push the limits of what a mechanic or system can do and see what happens. We push ourselves and our group to get better at the hobby in many different ways, depending upon our priorities.

Sometimes we push the limits of what our characters are capable of. Sometimes they push themselves. Sometimes we or they just push their luck and see what happens.

The characters push towards their agendas, and the world often pushes back. Sometimes the whole point of a game is to push on the character’s desires, values, and beliefs, and other times the pushback is nothing more than the NPCs pushing their own agendas.

Sometimes one of us needs to give the game a little push to give it momentum. In any event, RPGs involve people doing things, and stuff happening. Without action and force, nothing happens. You say pushy, I say proactive. 😉

In my estimation, the RPG hobby is all about investigation. Curiosity leading to discovery.

Sure, the most obvious example is the investigation we or our characters conduct in the fictional game world or scenarios. What’s behind that door? Who killed Mr Smythe? What does the leader of the rebel faction really want? Where is the astral orb? What’s really going on? However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We investigate new games by reading them, analysis of how they seem to work, and by actually playing them. We investigate the system and the mechanics. How does it work? How does it feel playing this game, and how do these mechanics feel?

We investigate play styles and modes of play that we are unfamiliar with. Some become favorites, and some do not. However, if we are wise we do not become guilty of contempt prior to investigation.

Sometimes we investigate the impact that scenarios and circumstances have upon us and upon our characters. We investigate who the characters are. We investigate what happens when we combine everything together. We play to discover and let events emerge. We investigate the consequences of choices, and our reactions to those consequences.

If we are curious enough and we are willing to seek the truth we even if contradicts our suppositions, we investigate ideas. We experiment and talk with others and play games. We find out what makes this hobby tick.

From James T. Kirk to Eddie Valiant, Galileo to Lederman, some of my favorite people have made their living investigating.

One of the definitions for the word tower I came across was a structure which is taller than it is wide. That instantly made me think of a phenomenon that we run into with RPGs.

Sometimes we can be compelled to examine and try a large variety of RPGs, and a number of play styles. Sometimes this is deliberate, and other times it’s a bit of gamer ADHD. Whatever the reason, we are concentrating on width rather than depth. We broaden our experiences.

However, sometimes we concentrate on a few games (or one!) to the exclusion of others. Maybe we do this out of reluctance to branch out, but perhaps we do this to focus on those games and play styles that we have found work for us. By doing this we construct a tower of proficiency and experience with these chosen RPGs.

Both situations have their benefits and drawbacks. My own path as of late has been one of exploration followed by focusing on those RPGs and ideas that I find compelling. My landscape has more than one tower, and they are all still under construction.

“In the house and on the street, oh how many feet you’ll meet.”

RPG sessions are full of meetings. One of the most important is when the experience we have meets with our expectations. Sometimes we get lucky and it just happens that way, but more often we have to play with purpose and intention.

The first step in having our expectations met is to have expectations and to be able to define and express them to yourself and to others. We may start out in the RPG hobby thinking that everyone is there for the same reasons and wants the same thing. This assumption seldom lasts long as we discover that many people play differently than we do and seem to “do things wrong” from our perspective. We meet other gamers who we might like, but that we have trouble playing with.

Meeting together for a session zero helps us lay out expectations as a group and how to meet them. Sometimes we can all come to an agreement, and sometimes we need to part ways for that particular game. “Life is full of meetings and partings. That is the way of it”.

We meet together for games, and then we meet to communicate about how our expectations were met, and how they were not met. By being honest, by being willing to compromise and and talking like mature adults, we are able to meet with success.

Well met! (I hate that phrase)….

Life can knock us around, wear away at us, and leave us battered. However, there are those things in life which can give us comfort.

I have discovered that RPGs can be a source of comfort in a few ways. There is certainly the strong impact that was made by hours spent with a particular game starting in 1981. Flipping through those books now can bring me right back to that new love affair, cranking early Rush albums and rolling dice.

There is also a certain comfort in the ability to focus on something else besides the trials and drudgery of real life. For a few hours I can leave the real world to take care of itself while we engage in an activity that I find completely immersive.

As time has gone on I have become comfortable with different games, systems, genres, people, (sometimes we become actual friends) play styles, and even methods to facilitate play with those from around the globe.

Even making videos for my YouTube channel or writing for this blog gives me a bit of comfort as it has become a small part of “what I do”.

I suppose the snacks and diet A&W I sometimes have during the game qualify as comfort food?

Quit being so damned dramatic!

It’s no secret that one of the things that make RPGs so fun is the tendency for sessions to have moments of tension and drama . These can be planned and contrived, but they can show up on their own as a part of the natural course of game play.

In today’s video I talked about when to roll, but here I think I’ll take a different approach. As I’ve spoken about in the past, the actual chances of success or failure have a… dramatic impact on how tense the moment is. In one of my favorite moments in my first LotFP game back in 2010, my character was stuck onside in the cold freezing to death. The requirement to find my way back in was to roll three “ones” in 18 attempts on a d6, each attempt representing ten minutes. I immediately rolled a “1”, and the next 15 rolls yielded fours, fives, and sixes.

Against the odds, my final rolls were both “1”, and my character survived. It’s been a while since I did the math, but I think that my chances of rolling at least three ones in 18 rolls was something like 1 in 3. ~ That’s still dramatic, and there is something to be said for rolling once and letting it ride. Joe could have just told me to roll a 1 or a 2 in order to stay alive. However, in this case, when I just had two rolls left my chances of rolling 2 ones was only 1 in 36. Pretty nerve wracking. The last roll had a 1:6 chance of making it.

That was certainly a memorable moment, and one where the uncertainty and tension made things fun. Despite what Han Solo said, often the best thing to do is to tell me the odds.

While very often we make an effort to make the RPG experience fluid and “natural”, these games offer us the opportunity to to zoom in on each individual frame of the action. This phenomenon allows us a different experience than other types of creative endeavors.

Preferences for the degree of detail and complexity of things like combat, but however it is handled, an RPG allows us to focus on individual actions, conflicts, and decisions. We can address the situation frame by frame, making decisions and resolving conflicts no matter what the scale.

Most games allow us to focus in on other moments of the fiction as well, stopping time to consider the moment in the frame, making decisions in moments of conflict and tension.

One doesn’t have to be particularly astute to realize that most of the moments where we consider individual frames is when the system asserts itself. However, we can also choose to examine a moment independent of the mechanics.

I like the experience to run as seamlessly as possible with few interruptions, but sometimes the best thing you can do is take a moment to stop and look at the frame in the moment.