Gaming Stuff

Stuff that deal with gaming for dumping

Ongoing Projects

1. Lite Open TRPG
2. 191207 NPC of Phandelver SHEET
3. 191215 Gaming Techniques and Mechanics SHEET 

200411 Justin

200410 Justin

1. 200410 Statement Sample Print

1. 200410 Statement Template
2. 200410 Quick System Exercise

200409 Justin

1. The Fantasy Trip

1. Core Mechanic: Determine Adjusted-Dexterity (AdjDex)

1. Melee page 10.  
2. Succeed if you roll 3d6 Equal or Less-than (<)AdjDex
3. AdjDex = Dexterity + Modifiers

2. Key Category of Modifiers. It would be simpler to just describe the modifiers in 3 categories.

1. (Character’s) Condition. From -1 to -6. Check the character’s Condition.

1. Equipment: Armor and Shields give penalties
2. Battle-Condition: taking 5 or more damage gives a -2 penalty.
3. Training.

2. (Character’s) Position. From +2 to -4. GM can simplify by asking “How is the Character’s Position?”

1. Braced. This is when the character has traded mobility to be in a better position to attack. +1 to +2.
2. Range. Missile and Thrown Range penalties.
3. Cover.
4. Footing. On a fallen body is -2.

3. (Character’s) Target or Objective.

1. Attacking an angle the Target cannot defend effectively against. Attacking the Rear or Odd-Angles/Flanks grant +2 to +4.

3. Hand to Hand Rules in page 18.

1. Defender rolls a d6 when attacked (by the wording, even if its an unsuccessful attack)
2. Relative Strength determined Damage in Barehands attacks. Stronger vs Weaker.

4. Engaged and Disengaging is Confusing.  Page 19.

1. The use of “may” in the wording. Its not an option its a condition.
2. Disengaged is not an Option, it is the process you have to perform if you want to move away from a Threat.

*front only.

200405 Justin

1. 200329 FASTER Combat 16.5" x 11.7"

1. 200405 3 x 4 relative position

200329 Justin

1. 200329 FASTER Combat 16.5" x 11.7"
2. 200329 Fantasy Trip - Flow Chart 16.5" x 11.7"

200225 Justin

1. Simplified Combat

1. Instead of Rolling to Hit, Defend, and Attrition, Simplified Combat is Roll against the Difficulty of the Adversary:

1. Disable the Adversary
2. Adversary disables
3. Win at Cost; Phyric;

2. Assumptions: Combatants Being Equal, then 50/50  

1. Roll No modifiers vs Diff 10. Or Roll +3 modifiers vs Diff 13.
2. Margin of Failure or Success.

1. Assumption of 20-30% Resources Consumed (Includes Hitpoints and Conditions and or Time).

3. Relative Advantages and Scale of Modifier.

1. The GM and Players discuss the relative disads and advantages going for each combatant.
2. PC vs Adversary

1. Abilities Skills -3 to +3.
2. Numbers Advantage. -5 to +5
3. Equipment.  -1 to +1 (equipment has special mechanics for more detailed resolution, but for basic

3. In 3d6, the Modifiers are +1 to +5. If the One with the Advantage is the Adversary, not the PC, then the Difficulty is Modified Accordingly. So an Adversary with a +3 vs the PC will be an Difficulty 13 vs the PC.
4.  

200203 Justin

Outline of Open TRPG

Open TRPG TItle

1. Introductions to TRPG H1

1. Concepts and Definitions. H2

1. Playing Concepts H3

1. Scene
2. Encounter
3. Players.
4. Game Master.
5. GM-Less Play. Its possible to allow for GMless Play when most of the Players are Advanced and can create and define scopes of the Adventure and let the other players take them through its possibilities. It requires a maturity and advancement that Players can point out Difficult and Dangerous challenges, risks, problems, and consequences of various courses of actions.

1. Improv - Yes And,
2. Advance Players define the scope

1. Security and Safety to talk about dangers, risks, and consequences that arise from a course of action. Having in the scope what kind of dangers and risk are “fair game”.

3. In Character and Metagaming Controls.

6. Hook. Motivations and Causes why the Players are Invested
7. Story. Be able to identify and breakdown sequence of Events.
8. Plot. Be able to identify the cause of each sequence of Events. Actions that Push the Story forward by being the Cause for the next sequence of Events.
9. TRPG - Basic, Intermediate, Advanced and Expert.

2. Character Concepts H3

1. Characters
2. Minions and Extras.
3. Named Characters.

3. World Building Concepts H3

2. Basics H1. Play a Straightforward TRPG at this Sections.

1. Basic Storytelling
2. Basic Roleplaying
3. Basic Game Mechanics.

1. Challenges and Difficulties.
2. Characters

4. Basic Character Mechanics

1. Abilities
2. Skills and Knowledge

5. Basic World Building

3. Intermediate

1. Intermediate Character Mechanics

1. Capabilities Mechanics

1. Walking
2. Running
3. Swimming
4. Climbing
5. Navigation
6. Material Handling

1. Lifting
2. Digging
3. Loads

7. Knowledge Work.

1. Reading
2. Writing/Typing
3. Studying
4. Communicating
5. Influence
6. Relationships

2. Limitations and Hazards.  

1. Suffocation
2. Dehydration
3. Starvation
4. Exposure
5. Sickness
6. Injury
7. Neurosis

3. Social Mechanics

2. Intermediate World Building

200127 Justin

1. Universal Work: Material Handling

1. Shoveling is 5kg moved 1 meter moved in 3 seconds.
2. How much a Minute? 10 a minute with rest is 50kg
3. Table of Density
4. Material and Bulk.

2. In GURPS BS350

1. 40 cubic feet per hour (BLx2)
2. 80 cubic feet per hour (BLx4)

3. 190609 Ph Character Generation 2022
4. 190609 Character Gen Workflow

200109

1. 200109 De Re Military Maxim Analysis
2. Christian Cameron’s Bibliography  200109 Christian Cameron Bibliography SHEET

191231 Justin

1. 150428 Gaming Ideas Repository

1. 150815-191229 SOC GURPS Lite Low Tech Statement-size.docx
2. 150815 SOC GURPS Lite Low Tech Letter-size.docx
3. https://1drv.ms/w/s!ApsY6y9CXG89imlzGpZH77CoQNHT
4. 191230 GURPS Random Character Gen
5. 191230 Dungeon Fantasy on the Cheap
6. 180821 TRPG Skills
7. 191202 Lost Mine of Phandelver
8. PREGEN

1. High Elf Wizard
2. Human Fighter
3. Dwarven Cleric

9. Roll Random

1. Roll 4d12 and allocate among ST, DX, IQ, and HT
2. Roll 6d6 and allocate among Basic Lift, HP, Move, Per, Will, and FP
3. Roll 2d6 Background
4. Roll d66 Dice Odds 

5. Choose Profession.

1. Leader. Leadership and Planning Skills.
2. Agent. Influence Skills or Intelligence Gathering Skills.  
3. Specialist. Technical Skills.
4. Wanderer. Unusual Set of Skills and Experiences.

6. Roll d66

191201 Justin

1. 3d6 Bell Curve. Rarer Extremes, more frequent near the Median.

1. The biggest change is that scores at the extremes, rolling a 15 or higher or a 6 or lower (rolling 3,4,5,6, 15, 16, 17, and 18) is at the 10% chance, compared to on a d20 rolling 1-5, and 15-20 is 50% of the time.  
2. Less Gambling and More Calculated Risks. The behavior that results when there chance to roll a 10 vs an 18 means more calculated Risks. This is a style of play for problem solving and manages some of the Min-maxing behavior that would result because of the knowledge of the Probability. Knowing an 18 is below a 1% and rolling
3. DC 10 + Proficiency Bonus + Ability Modifier has more relevance because the median is more frequent.

2. Core Mechanic - The Check or Roll. Basing the core Mechanic on Conflict and Uncertainty - Will he climb the wall? ...Persuade the mayor? ...Negotiate the Deal?

1. Key Techniques that Teach Players and GM how to Frame a Situation. What is the Challenge? How the Players or GM define if its a Check to Persuade, to Save, Analyze or Understand, to Take Actions that will have an effect on a much more complicated situation.
2. A Situation drives the Roll. This means the Players think in Uncertainty and Problems, the GM and Players thinks in Conflict and Tension. Is the Objective to HIT the mark, or the Objective to Solve the Problem. My problem with certain game mechanics is that I grew up with the “Hitting” the Target mindset and that doesn't lend well to Storytelling.

3. Techniques of Narrating Combat or Thrilling Pacing. The mental model of Combat is Attack someone - which is not the case and limits the imagination. Giving players and GMs the arsenal in narrating High Tension Fast Pacing conflicts or uncertainty is one of the things I wish can be tackled in a Starter TRPG. Breaking down the Inputs, Outputs, Tools and Techniques that allow anyone to have the capability to narrate thrilling conflict.

1. Its in Law School for Everyone in TGC I was reminded of Storytelling Pacing. The lecture covered how a lawyer can Draw out a scene moment to moment to slow down time. Controlling the Audience’s Perception of Time is important in Storytelling - even if you’re just the Player but especially so if you’re the GM.
2. Speeding up time means knowing the Techniques and having followed attentively HEMA inspired Books and novels. To prevent this barrier its possible to teach key concepts of biomechanics (and key words and concepts to understand), but save this for more enthusiastic gamers who want to polish their fight narration.
3. Speeding up Time is also seeing the Consequences of the Action or the “Wake of the Action” letting the imagination fill in the details. To imply the action by describing the bleeding gash, the three steps back and their stunned form, and seeing the spear shaft break the rock barely missing the mark, but seeing suddenly the form collapsing.

4. Margin of Failure, GM never Rolls. This is the Difference of an NPC rolling “To hit” vs the GM asking for a “Save”? Both situations the PC is being attacked/threatened but the Dice and Power is with the Player. With Bell-curve probability and better framing techniques it would be faster if the GM would abstain from rolling.

1. No more Roll and Opposed Roll. Set the Targets/Value and let the dice resolve the Conflict. The only exception is rolling between Two Players, in a contest roll.
2. Holding the dice, making sure the Player knows they can frame or narrate how they deal with the circumstance. Not in the simple binary of attack and defend.

190609 Justin

1. 190609 Ph Character Generation 2022
2. 190609 Character Gen Workflow

181001 Justin

1. Discussion in PTRPG on GMING logs.
2. Recovered 140711 Cognitive Dissonance Rules Any Game System

18-04-21 Justin

18-04-15 Justin

1. How do I fix the numbering so that it has smaller indents and friendlier for A5 sized booklets?
2. I want to draw equipment and fluff.

18-03-31 justin

1. Got back to writing in the notebook about Lite Open TRPG
2. Skills Changed: Manhours of Skills Mechanic

1. Scale of Investment in Manhours

1. <10mh
2. 10s
3. 100s
4. 1000s

2. Initial investment, just like Purchase Price. The cost of buying a Car, Learning a Skill, or a house.
3. Running Cost. Cost of Maintaining a Skill.
4. Consistency/Reliability of Practice
5. Conscientiousness of Study. - Tied to the Identity of the Person. Take a limited Word Count for Definition: To open ended and its broad but shallow, too specific - it is Deep but narrow.
6. The ability to build Complexity: What does a 10s, 100s, 1000s of manhours of Reliably/Unreliabile practice, and a Conscientious Self Image of the Skill mean to this Character.  
7. Game in the Brain Blogpost 18-03-31

191215 Justin

1. TEst
2. Consolidate them into One Project Sheet. 2018-02-15
3. Plan how each Component is Going to Look like.

1. Break it down until its into 1 hour increments.
2. Methodology:

1. Organize all the Notes of Various Projects Here in the Justin’s Gaming Stuff.
2. Log in the Date and List down what was talckeled.
3. Name the Components that Needs Making.

1. Name about 2-3 Components at a Time.
2. Update the Components logical flow.

4. Hyperlink to each other.

181001 Justin

1. PMBOK Lessons:

1. Actions.  That actions are certain, and have some standardization built in to it. Its factors are knowable or taken for granted.
2. Skills. The actions and performance of skills are knowable under controled conditions. In uncontroled conditions is where failure and much of life happen. Still the GM can make assumptions and models for this.
3. Uncertainty and Risks. Uncontrolled  

2. We have more Problems than we Have Resources for.

1. The GM will always add 2 to three more Requirements to any situation.

1. Use the tripple constraint guide.
2. Remember that Quality can be substituted for Scope/Requirements/stakeholders/etc...

2. The players and everyone really just needs to prioritize and limit and manage expectations.
3. Because of this, there is a Trade-off. Thinking in Trade-offs is both a narrative skill, and reflects on the GM’s ability to manage expectations even in real life.

180926 Justin

1. 170807 Justin’s Gaming Stuff

1. Stats Roll 6 d6
2. On a 1                get a 8
3. On a 2-3        get a 9
4. On a 4-5        get a 10
5. On a 6, roll d6 again. On a 1-3

2. 180926 Character Creation Odds
3. 80/20 simplify Demographics Data for Characte creation.

1. ADd more detail as needed with finite rework data.

18-03-16

1. Want to Play breath of the wild as a TRPG

2018-02-16

1. Consolidate them into One Project Sheet. 2018-02-15

Jan 1 2018

December 1 2017

1. Game but  Lite Open TRPG
2. PH 2020

November 5 2017

1. Nightmare Fuel
2. Able Archer and all the other close calls with WWIII. Broken Arrow incidents vary, but fit. The anthrax accident in the Soviet Union, their whole biological warfare program, doomsday cults with sarin, lone wolves with anthrax, the civil war in Yemen leading to a ballistic missile getting shot down near Riyadh airport, that counts, right?
3. The small amount of copy given to that vs. the latest Hollywood scandal, that counts too, right?
4. Or do you want only rumors?

November 24

1. Realized that I already did something like Lite Open TRPG, and kinda repeated it with this newer 3d6 Open Lite TRPG

1. Next Actions:

1. Consolidate Design Objectives Here (in Gaming Stuff).

1. Simple vs Complicated.

1. It is Simple if its up to 2-5 options.
2. Its complicated when I make it >5 options. I plan to place more complicated options here.

2. All Mechanics and Design Decisions that Do Not make the Cut is Placed Here. Because I cannot kill my darlings - instead I want to save them for when they are appropriate.

June 26

1. Holocene Erea Studies.

1. Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic Era is Spears and Sorcery setting. Its more about daring of a few heroes against monsters, villains, warbands, and the elements.
2. HE = 10,000 - BCE
3. Gobekli Tepe 0HE
4. Catalhoyuk 7500-5700BCE or 2500-4300HE
5. The Flood Myth 4000BCE or 6000HE
6. Limitations

1. Foraging Rules. Carrying Capacity of an area and terrain.
2. Hunting Rules
3. Navigations
4. Physical Limits and Demands.
5. Character Creation         

7. Warfare in the Ancient Near East to 1600BCE
8. Origin of Civilization
9. Ancient Empires Before Alexander

2. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/198726/Hubris-A-World-of-Visceral-Adventure?affiliate_id=379088
3. Foraging and Hunting Mechanics Rought Sketch.

1. Classify and Sort Terrain.
2. Output. What can be foraged or hunted in Terrain
3. What output requires some Processing, has Dependencies, etc…

1. Time or Manhours

4. Carrying Capacity of the terrain.

June 25

1. OSR: Death, Taxes, and Death Taxes Are you taxing your PCs?
2. OSR: Death, Taxes, and Death Taxes: Part 2 (Design and Methods)

1. Take Away:

1. Character Creations rules that make characters that do not exist in a Vacuum.

1. Set the expectations of Needs -

1. Cost of Living,
2. Relationships, Oblgiations,
3. Masters, Patrons, Bosses
4. Dependents, Employees, Servants, Slaves

2. Being part of Society, and that Existing out of it is the Exception.
3. Gaming the Relationships and Life.  

3. Pulp Revolution. Appendix N. 

1. Swords and Sorcery. Fast Paced Storytelling with less Priming and detailed Worldbuilding. It sacrifices Worldbuilding at the expense of pacing.

1. Agile or Leaner Storytelling. Build with Action?

Gaming Skills for Table-Top RPGs

These are Table-Top Role-Playing Gaming knowledge and skills to be practiced.

Other Such Documents

• Lawrence Mingoa’s

Methodology

How this document is supposed to be used.

1. Technique or Heuristics

1. Basic Description of Technique (if Needed)
2. How it is used (Process of the Technique which follow 20rffk)
3. Examples
4. References or Sources
5. Description at Length

2. Definitions or Knowledge

1. Basic Description
2. How it is Used
3. Example of Use
4. References or Sources

3. Activity

1. Basic Description
2. How it is Used
3. Example of Use
4. Reference or Sources

Organization and Categories

Running Games

All the knowledge that deals with Running the Game.

Improv

Deals with the Player’s Ideation and collaboration. Skills and abilities in collaborating with other players tend to default to here.  

Storytelling

Deals with Player’s Narrative Delivery and Structure.  

Problem Solving

Deals with skills and techniques that help identify or define the everything around the creation of conflict and its resolution. Like course of action, challenges, problems, risks, constraints, strengths, weaknesses etc....  

Preparation

These are all the time consuming activities that can’t be done while running the game.

World Building

Deals with techniques and Knowledge that Populate the setting, world, or provides backdrop or background to the game. Warfare, Politics, Economics, Technology, Culture, Language, etc… default under this category.

Studies

Deals with methodologies of training, studying, and improving one’s “game”.

Collaboration with this Document

I’m looking for collaborators. Ideally people who agree with the goals of the document. Which is:

• Document all Actionable and Usable RPG Knowledge and Skills
• Simplify all Hard-won Knowledge into something that can be Practiced and Used. Follow the 20 rules of formulating knowledge.
• Be honest about the information:

• Attribute sources, credit to where credit is due, influences, etc...
• Disclaimer of any bias surrounding the information. “It works for me”, “I had never had success into this”, “this is my hypothesis”, (I will start putting Hypothesis/Thesis/Theories in the Appendix)

All below is not Organized or Updated

Definitions

Heuristic

Heuristics are simple formulas or processes. The document will focus mostly on simple heuristics.

Typically they are:

• one or two testable statements (see also falsifiability),
  Example would be

• What limited resource is spent by the action?

• a condition and action,  
  Example would be

• Listen to the (other)players and say “Yes and/but/or…”

Skill 

Skills are more complicated heuristics that are linked or chunked together. Skills are a way to organize a group of heuristics, typically they are organized into a Core Process or Sequence.

Examples are

• Pacing,
• Active Listening
• Planning

Sample Planning Process

What is the most straightforward way to plan a game?

1. Propose a Game and Theme to GM or Players. (1-2 min spiel)

1. Documenting the Expectations (10-20 mins)
2. What to document? (see Goals and Constraints, Active Listening)
3. How much to document? (see Documentation, Chunking)

2. Feedback to clarify expectations. (2-20 mins per player)

1. How to give Feedback (see Consensus Building)
2. How long and what expectations to nail down?

3. Develop Setting and Characters.

1. Develop Outline (See Pacing and Narrative Structure)
2. How much to prepare? (see Chunking)
3. Prepare Challenges (see Setting Challenges).

See Chunking.

See Pacing

References

• Robins Laws of Good Game Mastering
• Never Unprepared: The complete game masters guide to Session Prep
• Odyssey: The GM’s Guide to Campaign Management

Documentation

Taking Notes

Skill.

1. Efficient in capturing Ideas. The ability to capture the idea effectively in as few words as possible. (See Active Listening, Comprehension, Goals and Constraints,)
2. Accessible. Easily access the information. Getting the information in a timely way, as well as capturing the information timely. See Chunking, Organization)

Goals and Constraints

Skill. Setting out the goals and constraints is a method planning which allows one to be able to do very complex tasks. This works by having a list of Goals and Constraints and continuously referencing back to these every time one fully engages their concentration at the task at hand. It creates a feedback loop to be able to measure any clear progress and goals.

        Every time an issue, concern, a road block happens the person simply goes back to the Goals and Constraints and adds it to either goals or constraints.

        The level of skill is how quickly one can formulate Goals and Constraints, update them, and proceed back to the task at hand. As well as how clearly and effectively these can be worded, so that others can act on these same Goals and Constraints.  

        Actionability is a combination of the Next Action method in Getting Things Done by David Allen applied broadly. It draws from the best practices in of writing Requirements and Charters. Its kind a supported by  "Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases" (1982) by Khaneman and Tversky which in relation to this says that human suck at judgment and evaluations. Actionable statements instead of giving a large number of criteria to judge before acting shortcuts this human failing and gets things going faster. There is an assumption that people will adjust their actions and improve on the actionable statement with more specific details.

As I imagine instead of giving a criterion (that occupy working memory slots) by which the listener has to juggle and process, giving the listener an action and the ability to adjust to reality is far better.

References

• Next Actions Getting things Done
• Writing Good Requirements Goals
• Testable statements
• "Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases" (1982) by Khaneman and Tversky

Goals

These are actions or scope of work. A test that something is a goal is that can it be done. Can it be a measure of having accomplished one’s objective. An improved test is setting out a budget or deadline.  

• What is the Action to be done.
• Testable Statements

Constraints 

These are limitations, options avoided, weaknesses to be avoided when possible, or actions not to take. Unlike goals this list gets very long as every hurdle or challenge tends to become a constraint. Most new information and challenges are constraints. When a challenge or hurdle is identified it is filed away in a constraint to be better worded.  

• Limitations
• Actions, Options, Resources, and Methods

Player Goals and Constraints

Heuristic. This is the Goals and Constraints used by Players and the GM to set up reward and penalties. Establishing such, typically based on character story, disadvantages and advantages, allows the GM the measure by which to reward or penalize how the Players incorporate their stories.

        This can be between GM and Players, or the GM can make it Players rewarding Players by giving them XP or CP or character points that they can only reward to others.

        I’ve found this very helpful and effective in my games.

Analysis

Skill. This is the skill of asking the 5 Why’s (5Ys), and the 5 Wahs (which are who, what, where, when, which, and how). The skill allows the person to quickly analyse an event, action, cause and effect quickly and discover deeper root causes. This skill is also used in creating fictional details with consistency.

See

• Active Listening
• Documentation

References

• Root Cause Analysis          

Setting Challenges

Skill. Setting Challenges is the skill and process of creating opportunities and threats in a game in relation to the characters and players.

        The skill comes also in writing and designing these challenges that engages the players effectively, where the gm takes little time processing the Player’s and Character’s desires and setting up the threats and opportunities that engages them.

Use Analysis to generate details and relationships for Challenges.

        Some game systems do not tackle Setting Challenges specifically and methodically as Dungeon world, where they call them Fronts.

References

• Dungeon World Fronts

Character Options

Skill. Consider the Character’s Options. What are the Character and World Mechanics of an RPG System, and how to present these options as simply, clearly, and effectively as possible.

        Some game systems do not tackle Character Options with as much focus as Dungeon World.

References

• See Dungeon World Moves
• See Chunking

Running Games

Storytelling

Niche Protection

This is the heuristic to be able to let Player’s Character shine in an aspect of play, which doesnt overlap too much with other Players. This heuristic exists to balance the spotlight and attention given to a particular character relative to others.

References

• Dungeon World
• Fate

Scale

The degree of interaction the PCs have in the game’s world. This can be measured by who get affected in degrees of relationship: the PC’s friends and family, their neighbors and peers, their community or social group, their country.

        A Test is who are those affected by the actions of the PC’s. At what level will the consequences of the Pc’s actions reverberate. You can imagine it as a ripple effect of the PC’s actions.

Some games are only the PCs and the dungeon, no other thing gets affected. Some Warfare games have Nations and States are affected.  

Source Kenneth Hite in GURPS Horror

Scope

Heuristics. What the PCs can influence or affect.

        You can imagine this as the Sphere of effect the PCs generate.

        While Scale is the extent of the Ripple, Scope is the Size of the Pebble or Splash.

Source Kenneth Hite in GURPS Horror

Austerity

Heuristics. The degree by which the PCs negatively affected by the consequences of their Actions.

        Visually this is the bounce of the ripple effect towards the direction of the PCs.

        Use Austerity instead of “Realistic” when referring to the degree by which PCs can get away with breaches of social order or laws. A high Austerity game has the consequences matching the real world, A very high Austerity game (more consequences that what we believe is normal) is for games of Paranoia and Intrigue.  

References

Kenneth Hite in GURPS Horror

Theme

Genre, Style,

Heuristic.This is convention of ideas that the game follows.

        When we say Fantasy we imagine Lord of the Rings and all the many memetics that are related to it, either drawing from it or it drew from. When we say Cthuluh Horror we have the same association.

Narrative Structure

Format,

Skill. These are formulas for stories and games. The skill is an intuitive mastery over the various narrative structures that exist and being able to blend, deviate, and pivot expertly in planning the structure of the story. In a given Format or Structure a stage of Pacing will have a certain number of Goals and Constraints, typically following a particular theme. These formats will be laid out in a Pacing Process.

Survival

Escape

Gauntlet

Sandbox

Picaresque

Quest

Nemisis

The Cozy

Hard-Boiled

Procedural

Thriller

References

• Unframed: The Art of Improvisation for Game Masters.
• Focal Point: the Complete Game Master’s Guide to running Extraordinary Sessions
• Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering

Railroading

Skill.

Hook Creation

Hook is Conflict, Uncertainty, unresolved,

A set of expectations.

Stack exchange 

Framing Techniques

Noise

Requirement: the Filtering Bias of the Character. Look for something diametrically opposed to their interest.

Heuristic: Play to the Filtering Bias of the Character,

Example:

• Character likes reasonable people, probably doesn't like drama. A lover spat in the background is the clue or opportunity.
• Character likes passions and conflict (aka Drama), probably doesn't like sublime pleasures. Someone enjoying churning butter  
• Character doesnt

Sturgeon's Law aka 90% is crap

present 90% as crap.

Heuristic : ⅔ of the effort or time is used to describe forgettable crap.

Notes: 

• Sturgeons Law is frequently used as a Strawman

False Friends

Similar things that can be mistook, as well as affecting each other negatively by appearance.

Heuristic: Take something similar to the Character’s objective, that has contrary or harmful consequences.

Or make up something similar that and dangerous.  

(similar things that can present problems when confused with each other; or they hurt the credibility of the value of each other)

Unreliable Source

Poison the well, Fruit of the Poisoned Tree

Heuristic: take an unreliable source (character, tabloid, even a superstition) and use it as the source of information, clue, or aid.

Risk/Loss Aversion

Requirements: Determined or Set the Status Quo.

Frame as a Loss. 

1. Factor the Object, Event, Condtion, etc.. as the status quo,
2. Then describe its potential loss. This bias is triggered by the use of words like: Dying, Lost, Less, Cost, using “Only” to describe the quantity,

Frame as a Gain.

1. the Object, Event, Condtion, etc.. NOT part the status quo,
2. Then describe its potential gain. This bias is triggered by the use of words like: Gain, Saved, More,

This Bias is typically used by the GM as a way to Framing effect to influence the players and characters. Framing the issue as a risk of Loss and playing down (or not mentioning) what they stand to gain.

The opposite can be used on players: framing something dangerous as a Gain and playing down the risk.  

Narrative Bias

Heuristic: Take the time to tell a story about an object, person, animal, etc… to make it stand out more.

See Also: Sturgeons Law, Noise

Narrative bias is another Influence Trick the GM may use to misdirect players. Framing an event, an item, a person in the form of a Story helps distract from making a Bayesian or more Rational judgement call.

This bias is compounded by making the story weave into the narrative of the player’s own character narrative. This means weaving into the Character’s narrative the decision, event, item, place, action, or objective.

Steel-man

Don’t get too caught up with the wrong details when it serves no purpose.

Heuristic.

1. The details are minor

1. No effort of a Player was used to create that detail.
2. The Character, not the player, would have gotten the details right.  
3. The detail has no strong thematic, narrative, or symbolic value in the story.

2. Fill in (outloud) the important details the Player got wrong, and run with his feedback.  

See Also

• Crocker’s Rules (the Opposite of a Troll)
• Strawman

Leading Statement

Begging the Question

Courtiers Reply

Threats, Opportunities, Weaknesses and Strengths (TOWS)

Heuristic.Game Masters develop the world of the Characters through Threats, then Opportunities, then by their weaknesses, and then finally by their Strength. This is the process by which the Game Master builds the world and then presents and relates them to the PCs.

        This is the Opposite of how Character’s View the Game’s Reality: through their Strengths, then by their Weakness (Constraints), by what Opportunities to be had, and then finally the Threats (and the Risks).

Role-Playing Game Techniques

GMless Perspective

Yes And/But/Or

On your turn work-in the contribution or feedback of the other players with a Yes And/But/Or into your own narrative.

• Unframed: The Art of Improvisation by Game Master by Engine Publishing 
• From Various TRPG Gaming Circles. Origins are supposedly from Improv

• Happy Jacks

Constraint

When performing Yes And/But/Or modify the contribution in the following ways:

• Scope. The degree of effect, involvement, applicability  
• Cost. there is a cost to a scarce resource or commodity. examples: time, money, consumables, opportunity, availability, etc…
• Mindset. which is the Knowledge/Ignorance/Misinformation/Common Practice/Attitudes. What people think or feel about this; Example its taboo, its a mistaken assumption, no one knows that its wrong and its really something else, etc...),
• Unintended Consequences. It has unintended consequences

Successful DM Secret #253:

while running, stage whisper "YOU'RE PLAYING THE MOST PHENOMENAL GAME EVER CREATED" to your players every few minutes. ^[1]

https://youtu.be/q1wGlOwn1pM

Shadow

Describe the effects it has left.

Threats and Opportunity

Foreshadow

Telegraph, Grim Portents, GM option

Skill.

Allude

GM option

Heuristic.

Escalate

GM option

Heuristic. Escalate a Confict.

GM option

Escalate Dangerously

DeEscalte

Focus on Costs

Influence

Provoke

Threats

Opportunities

Divide and Conquer

Devils Advocate

Immediate Effect

Potential Effect

Future Effect

Chunking

Keep it Simple Stupid,

Heuristics. Applicable to game design and game preparation.

Chunking means keeping options, modifiers, and factors in 2-4 items. In GMing this means presenting only 2-4 leads, NPCs, modifiers applicable to the scene, limit the steps of causes in any analysis (don’t go full 5Ys), allowing the player to find the answer in just a few questions (5Ws), courses of actions, factors, clues, etc… to the players.

In Game Design this means keeping the options, steps,  to 2-4 items. This means using broader categories or definitions, so that they can chunk into 2-4 items. Within these 2-4 items there can be more nuances and options.

References

See Bounded Rationality

System Overview

Heuristic. These are the skills involved in learning to play and run TRPGs. This typically involves all the  mechanics a TRPG system may be needed to play. Use this approach to budget how one spends their time.  

Simply read up an overview of the Core Mechanic, Character Creation, key Conflict Mechanics (like Combat, Social, Intrigue,Warfare, Economic etc…) and World Mechanics. Plan from list of mechanics how to spend your time learning the systems concepts.Communicate to the players their own expent and expectations of learning such. Example is budgeting 5-10 mins scanning the table of contents, chapter heading and introductions.

        Measuring how long it takes to learn a core’ systems requisite mechanics and being able to start playing is a measure of a system’s degree of complexity. I recommend saying: “it will get me an hour of reading and studying” or asking “what is the minimum amount of understanding do I need to play this game”. Also consider “What is the minimum amount of understanding do I need to enjoy this system?”. This is a more constructive approach to comparing systems and being able to communicate one’s challenges.

Entities and Organizations

Heuristic..

One Spotlight per Player

Heuristic. This is a Policy but can be a heuristic/rule of thumb for the GM to measure his engagement with his players. In the course of the game Track the spotlight or highlighted scenes per player. This helps to track if the GM has given  the Players a balanced amount of attention.  

Active Listening

Core Skill. Using the techniques in Active Listening in GMing, to optimize communication in the game. Active listening is made up of a lot of  Disciplining the GM's Listening Skills.

Conversation

Core Skill. The skill of thinking up and bring up interesting topics to the other party, and maintaining a chain of interesting topics. In the beat or rythmm of conversation the gamer can do the folllowing:

• Entertaining, being able to color the topic with an appropriate mood:

• Levity
• Sincerity and Concern
• Factual or Pedantic
• Doubtful or Curious
• Praising and Complimentary

• The ability to hold the listener's attention and to respond and feedback.

• To provoke a response, or a predicted response. The strength of the provocations and the response are a measure of skill. .

• The ability to pace the topic, manage distracting topics, and foresee when a topic has run its course and act on it.

Comprehension

Skill. Misunderstanding happens a lot, there are many biases that work to make our listening selective and poor. It doesn't help that we take communication for granted and can be poor in communication as well.

In my experience relistening to past games (via Google Hangouts record hangout function) I’ve been able to have a close to objective observation of how often I miscommunicate and misunderstand

Listening Comprehension can be measured in Ideas per minute or words per minute. The gamer can test his listening comprehension by simply being able to take notes and capture the ideas as the person discusses them. Comprehension skill becomes more apparent when the person speaking is giving less than a minute for you to write notes. After the activity check how usable are the notes.

References

Effective Communication Skill by Dalton Kehoe, Ph.D. York University

New Information Test

Heuristic. Test for New Information is simply a habit of checking for new information. Its a way to check if the discussion or activity is distracting from the key matter at hand. Its asks:

• Is this new information?
• How this is relevant?
• Does it fall under the following...

• Game or Player/Character Goals and Constraints?
• Character or World Background?
• Knowledge about the Player and their expectations or tastes?

Player conveys something new about the character and a test of how well the GM listens. This New Information Test has to be made per Act, and maybe per scene (if it's a small detail).

Empathy

Skill. The ability to guess, feel, or know the emotion of another person  or a group of people in a circumstance.

Same as Comprehension but this works with Ideas. The best way to test one’s empathy is simply trying to predict the emotion of someone in that situation.

See  

Consensus Decision Making

Skill. The skill of getting the group's consensus in a particular course of action. GM uses this skill to move the story forward, especially when he seeks players buy in.

In its simplest form is keeping a player checklist to make sure we go through all of them every ACT or Scene.
        This skill means knowing how to get honest feedback, align goals, create real dialogue among players, and bring about consensus. Players can roleplay friction and conflict but the everyone must be able to maintain consensus of what is fun and what lines cannot be crossed, or the permission to try adjusting boundaries of taste.

This skill is can be measured by how much of the players feel like they have a strong influence on the game. Similar to Collbaorative World Building but this focuses more on the Games progress instead of the World building.

Organization

Session, Act, Scene, and Player Scenes

Collaborative World Building

Skill. This is the skill of being flexible enough to work in world building details the players or the GM makes into play. This can be in character background, motives, or improvisations of facts during play.

        This makes the setting and the world more collaborative and open. It helps in sandbox style settings where players and GM just make a world up on a fly.

There is a level of skill to this because some settings is hard to work in new material, like established or historical settings. The level of skill becomes apparent by the ability of the GM or the player to work in their own details seamlessly and to the approval of everyone.  

Related:

Austerity.

Scope.

Scale.

Horror

Skill. This is the skill of running a Horror games. This skill means the GM knows how to maintain the atmosphere, the player buy in, and the pacing needed to run a horror game.

Players must actively want to maintain the atmosphere of fear and tension. This means the GM should be the last one, (and a sign of his level of skill) to break character and atmosphere.

The GM must know:

• how to pace the players, as they maintain their immersion. Allowing them to take breaks and restart the Pacing and tension cycle.
• How to get their initial buy in, and prepare them for the game.
• Know enough to play with fears effectively. The different kinds of fear, and why it affects people and it what form.
• A few Narrative Structures that are used in Horro. Example: escape, gauntlet, etc…

Reference

Kenneth Hite’s GURPS Horror.

Building Tension - Extra Credits.

Mystery

Skill. The skill of running mysteries is a GM skill that focus on information management, communication, and presentation.

The GM skill in myster

• The GM should be very good in Information management. This is because there are a lot of facts and information in such games to juggle. (see chunking).
• His ability to communicate information in the game must be very good and clear. He should be able to communicate key points very well because there is a high chance that players go down the wrong avenue of inquiry because of miscommunication.
          At the same time he needs to be able to communicate clues in a way as to blend it in plain sight.
• The GM needs to be able to prepare and equip the players in handling information. As well scale the level of complexity to match what is engaging to the Players.  

References

Lisa J. Steele GURPS Mysteries

Three Rule Clue Rule

Have clues in threes.

References

• Three Clue Rule Justin Alexander (contributed by Lawrence Mingoa

Narrative Combat 

Skill. Simpler combat that is easier to run, grants more agency, and more enjoyment.

Narrative Combat Guide reference sheet - i will make my own version of this ( i have a different set of guidelines, I seem to achieve the same results in a bit of a different way).  

Workstream: Task Grouping

At first the GM masters this, but Players learn this for their Staff, Entourage, Factions or Organizations and Armies

Intuitive metrics

Using Heartbeats, Breaths, Paces, Object-Lengths (Men-Abreast, Horse-Lengths, etc...), the time it takes to perform an action, sing a song,  Intuitive Metrics instead of hard metrics because in Airsoft I realized I think in those terms when the perception of time gets wonky

Test of Agency

Heuristic. How to tell if a scene creates conflict, enhances the role-playing experience, and allows the story to move along?

Defines Character Conflict

Does the Scene bring into focus Internal Conflict of the Character? Does it surface something that illuminates the character Background, Personal history, or Motives?

Character’s Sacrifice

Does the character have to sacrifice something valuable: make a priority clearly more significant than another? Give something up? Does he have to Push down a priority or something important to the PC into a lesser importance?

Peak End Effect.

This bias means you have to leave in a High Note! So work on your ending the game strategies because biases like the Peak End Effect diminish the awesomeness over time the “Experiencing self” had vs the “How the Memory of the Game was Shelved”.

Use Repetition and Post Game Narrative Bias to polish the memory.

This means a Short Game can be awesome if you have a good strategy in packaging the memory very well.

Duration Neglect.

Ending a session badly ruins the experience more than a bad game. But this is also a positive thing because this is the BIAS that helps the GM manage expectations and pleasures of a memorable and awesome game. It is also the bias that helps players get over Agency Robbing experiences.

Planning Fallacy 

A terribly hard bias to overcome because of availability and narrative bias. Expending mental effort to Plan sets up an expectation and bias. It is a useful bias in a  “cinematic” game where plans of how things will go down will mostly go as predicted.

In a more challenging Game the GM will reward a clever and well thought of plan with some of the expectations being met, but in such a game the GM has to improvise a lot of new information and the plan’s variables falling out or stretching the Player’s plan’s flexibility. The game provides incentives for planning, as well as flexibility to be able to improvise where the plan meets its limits.

Overcome with

Outside View or Another Perspective.

Drilling down

Pre-Mortem 

Strategies that Overcome Narrative Bias

Self Model (Agency)

Characters have a mental model of their personality. This is the attributes of one’s beliefs, principles, priorities, value judgements, etc… Whenever the character violates, explores further, further defines, and adjusts his Self Model this weakens or strengthens the model.

In Game systems this means the character can draw some mental resolve from their Self Model - giving resistance or motivates the character to influence or course of action.
In some Game Systems like the classic D&D alignment system, L5R, and in certain ways of playing GURPS this can be static. In World of Darkness this is flexible - but it adheres to a particular perspective of Humanism or the alternate Behavioral templates of other beings.

In an Anygame system mechanic approach this is basically the set of beliefs, principles, priorities, etc… the Character has adopted that is subject to change: strengthening, confusing, weakening, etc… through experience. It just grants a behavioral guide for the Player and GM for the character - violating the belief and principles (through failure, influence, realization, or awareness) weakens the character’s Self Model. While small wins, some failures, relationships, and experience may strengthen the Self Model.

A strong Self Model grants Agency as an asset for the character allowing him to have the resolve to develop and pursue long range goals and very difficult undertaking.

Course of Action

Heuristic. This heuristic means always stating the objective, intent, constraints, of an action. This can be simply being more specific, visual, or detailed in the action. Having more details to work with helps immerse in the game, and gives both players and gms something to work with.

Sometimes the objective is left unsaid but

Breaking down action by Strategy/Intention/Goal > Action > Means (what is the next action or first step; and then what next). A structure to help GMs and Players complete the Idea.

Example

        “I attack”

Vs

        “I attack his right leg as it moves past the cover of his shield when he swings.”

References:

More will be covered after reading Getting thing Done

Informative Actions

Skill. Not just to simply ask GM questions but to Frame it as Information Gathering Activities or Courses of Actions. The purpose is to make each Question as an Action to keep the story going.

Pros.

• It also maintains the role of the character instead of being out of character asking the GM.
• It removes wasted time when the Player has to keep guessing what the GM will let him do.

Cons.

• Requires more improvisational GM.

Example. 

Player to GM “What are the rumours or Does the sage know this?” 

Vs.

Player to GM “I go around town making small talk with the miners in the pub. I ask the sage a series of questions about his most pressing issues.” 

Frame in Opportunities

Skill.

Do not merely frame in Actions but the opportunities. This means stating a course of action with an objective that is an opportunity or goals. This skill means being more specific with a clear objective to create a circumstance or opportunity.

The tendency is that both GM and Players can communicate a course of action lack clear goals and expectations.

Example.

        “I ask questions around town about any rumours or leads”

        “I scout ahead of the party looking for danger or threats”

        “I scrounge”

Vs

        “I ask questions around town looking for any news or activity about north, mention of the count’s activities or his associates, or the pressing distractions of the town. I try to get people talking”

        “I scout ahead of the party looking for

Pacing

Core Skill. the 3 stages of Pacing: Set up, Initial Conflict, Climax-Consequences. Mastering it and seeing the Pacing in everything.

See Dungeone Worlds Fronts. How to set up challenges and manage them.

See

Pacing How Games keeps things Exciting by Extra Credit

How Horror uses Tension Cycles by Extra Credit

Back to Basics: Pacing and Tension, Pacing Tool

Be suspicious of Stories by Typer Cowen

Scale of Pacing

It can be scaled in activities that fit a Scene or a Group of Scenes that have a key underlying theme or purpose like an Act.

Scene

Heuristic. The practice of breaking down a story into Scenes helps the GM and the Players figure out their Goals and Constraints without taxing their working memory.

        The GM who learns to use scenes can plan for the scenes that need to happen (with the help of analysis) to move the story to its next goal or objective.

        He can also make sure he gives the players all an opportunity to have the spotlight, flesh out their character, immerse the player, and create an engaging experience for the players.

        Scenes can take 1-2 minutes to set up when skilled, being not so skilled it would take a few more back and forths with the player interacting with the scenes set up for about 5 minutes before the player is immersed.

Act

The practice of organizing a group of Scenes into an Act help the GM follow the Goals and Constraints he set out for the scenes within the act and his acts follow the goals and constraints he set out in his Session.

Pacing: Set-up

Pacing begins with the set up. Priming the Audience with a set of expectations or a particular emotion. You know the set up has kicked in when Characters act or spend time (and/or resources) on the target expectation or emotion.

Telegraphing

Telegraphing is giving the players a chance to see what is coming with subtle hints, by implicating, leading statements, symbolic foreshadowing,  etc… A basic technique of Telegraphing is extending or exaggerating the Set up time or ritual or habit/mannerism or Tell (the GM’s tell) when he’s about to do something.

Leading Statement

This is a trick where one places a claim, proposes a fact or assumption, accuses, or defines someone before any real first hand experience or validation can be made by the audience or listener. It tries to trick memory with the Availability Bias.

This trick can be used for Telegraphing.

“Poisoning the Well” or Adhominem

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is a form of Telegraphing. It comes in many forms:

Foreshadowing: Symbolism

One form it does with symbolism having the Players/Characters experience or witness an Event or Action or story that has many parallels with what

Foreshadowing By Implication

By Implication is a technique by which the speaker (the GM) uses words that:

• Extend the definition or target to include
• Confusing Causation with Correlation.
• Breaking up an event and its cause so that the players don’t immediately see the connection.

Self Fulfilling Prophecy

Say a prediction vaguely and often enough and the listener is primed to see it or believe it as soon as something that vaguely matches the criteria comes around.

Initial Course of Action

Buy-In is best determined when the Players or anyone already has a course of action. Even if the course of action is to wait and see.

Predictive Initiative

Pacing: Conflict and New Information

List of Initial Conflict in Pacing.

Information Mismatch,

Changes

There should have been a significant Change in mindset and expectations from the Set up and Initial Conflict. There should have been some or a significant surprise.

Juggle just right, 2-3 Issues at a time 

• Ideally it's a problem that most, if not all the party, has different stakes in.
• The Problem tends to change between PCs and Players.
• The problem somewhat affects most of them, and somewhat the odd player out indirectly.
• While you can always generate a ton of problems,
• Do not overload problems since they dilute psychological effects and compete for mental space of you and the player.

Emotional Buy in.

• You transform and modify a problem by the emotional buy-in of  the Players. It takes on the shape of their “Fears”.
• Focus on Problems that have the greatest emotional investment - then ask why and proceed to ask harder and harder questions in your notes.
• Balance the problem between Fears and what is possible.

Pacing: Changes, Climax and Consequences

• How do you close and create a worthwhile Climax?  Mnemonics that help GMs navigate how best to close and end a scene.

Character Development.

A Climax or Ending always gives you an Answer to a Question you didn’t ask:

Ex. Then you form a Question about the Character. The Character Prioritizes XYZ and that's why he sacrificed ABC to get XYZ.

When you signal the Game’s End: You ask the question that is answered by the events and the character’s actions.  

Cliffhanger.

Techniques in Foreshadowing / Telegraphing - Framing anything into a Problem or a Future Problem.

How to make a good cliffhanger?

Information Management

These are the set of Skills and Techniques that deal with managing Information in running a problem solving game or a mystery.  

Tackled GURPS Mysteries

7 Element Limit

This basically means keeping key Characters and Leads to a limit of 7 Elements during the Planning stage of the entire story.

The GM may need to test the number of bounds/degrees one Element is related with Another by usinig the Analysis (RCA) technique. Asking how many Ws and Ys they need to ask before a relationship can be established between each element. See Analysis

See Juggling 2-3 Items  

GURPS mysteries emphasizes the 7 Element Limit.

Juggling 2-3 Items/Issues

Prepare notes so that the GM or Players only Juggle 2 to 3 items in any time. This means the 7 Elements that were prepared ahead of time are organized in a way that they can be Picked up and Deferred/Set Aside.

• The GM can easily track what Issue or Element has been taken up by the Players. Maybe using Physical Index Cards (like Zones) with references and details of the Index Cards referenced in the GM’s notes.  The GM keeps 2-3 Index Cards visible when the Players are tracking them. He puts aside an Item they dropped and picks up a new Item they are pursuing.
•   Other than Index Cards, it can be Pictures. If the Item is a Character, Place, Event, Action, etc…
• It boils down to being able to Pickup and Set Aside information so that the GM or the Players are not overwhelmed.

See Chunking

Framing

Framing is stating a fact in a way that leads the person to act on it differently based on the way it is communicated. Common techniques are: using a fact to play on Bias.

Examples

Anchoring

Give a value, example. the prices in the game book, people will base their value on any reference that is available. This technique is use to confuse the measurement and assessment of the other person (typically the players).

Example.

Setting the price of sold goods at 50% its market price, the players may sell their salvage or scavenged goods at that value but will feel it as a loss if they get paid less or in kind.

Risk Aversion

Game Planning Policies and Principles

Policies and Principles can be worked into a process by giving a logical order by which a policy can be checked or tested. It can be refine that a few Policies are in effect and checked in a step, thus having less process steps than polices.

Studying Techniques

Spaced Repetition and Active Recall

Spaced Repetition and Active Recal allows the Improv and Storytelling techniques to be learned at no cost of Working memory. Freeing up Working Memory (or Attention) to focus on where it is needed.

Spaced Repetition is important in Improvisation because it is the same technique that allows people to most effectively learn and use language, complicated processes, physical techniques and procedures. Creating the triggering conditions to exercise the Recall that is needed to draw out from Long Term memory the skill, process, or heuristic is key to appear to make a lot out of thin air. This technique requires the forgetting the technique in the conscious level, aka working memory, aka attention and to draw or pull the information under certain conditions in order to create the mental hardwiring to recall.

Process and Steps

A process can arise from the natural order in flow activities. To meet some constraints and goals certain steps and activities happen before others and thus a process arises.

Mysteries policies

Collecting Policies (a constraint) from various books like Gumshoe, GURPS Mysteries, Call of Cthulhu.

• Mysteries are not like real life

• It has a worthy adversary (in real life it doest). A test of worthy adversary is...
• Its rational and needs to make sense (while in real life it doesnt). A test of rationality is...
• Definite resolutions (not open ended). A test of definite resolution is...

• RPG mysteries are not like Books, an RPG mystery

• ...the GM is on the same side of the players(audience). A test that the GM is on the same side as the players is...
• ...are simpler than the books

• Because the GM has no control over the Players.  

• ...the players have shared control with the GM
• ...is not as talky as a Written Mystery

• RPG mysteries are not like Other RPG adventures

• It requires a Plot

• Design Principles are:

• Keep it Simple. A test of Simplity is...
• Organize Information. A test of Organization is…
• Path of least resistance
• Credibly motivated action
• Technical sound method
• Honest with the players???
• Sound story value (what is a test of a sound story value?)
• Needs suspense (what is a test for suspense?)
• It must have color, lift, and dash? (ok this needs to have a test)
• It can be explained simply when needed.
• It should be puzzling at first introduciton (conflicting or missing data should be apparent).
• The solution seems obvious once revealed.
• its effort and focus should not be spread out at once, but focused at one thing at a time.
• It must be consistent
• It must punish the adversary one way or the other

Van Dines’ Twenty Rules for writing detective stories

1. For trpg:
   Reader has equal opportunity as the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly described.

Horror policies

• The Players are the key proponent for the atmosphere of Fear.  

• Policies regarding maintaining the Fear.

• Distracting
• Breaking the Mood.

• Establishing Boundaries. Safe words.

• Fears.
• Structures and Styles

• Survival
• Gore

Tools

Naval Logistics

Everything About Seamanship

• 2017-5-19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uluburun_shipwreck

Galleys, Sailing,

This is a

Goals

• Logistics of Seamanship

• Travel Time Speed
• Supplies and
• Roles
• Operating/Running a Ship

• How things Worked
• How to Immerse

Life Event tables

Life events system is a table goal is a system by which to generate Life Events for Character Creation and Down Time.

Week Hours Character Points

This is a character creation method where the Player maps out a typical week of a character. This is also a personal operations technique, where one understand where their time goes.

How much time goes into:

1. Sleep
2. Grooming
3. Exercise
4. Studies
5. Work
6. Eating
7. Family/Relationships

Analysis (or Root Cause Analysis)

Ask the 5Ws and the 5Ys. This is a detail generating technique that can be used to create relationships between elements or to further detail elements of a character or story.

The 5Ws.

1. WHo
2. What
3. Where
4. When
5. What happened (How)

The 5ys is asking Why regarding each aspect of the event or issue occurred and asking Why again for that cause. Repeating the process until we get 5 levels of why deep into the cause.

The Visualization is the Fishbone or the Ishikawa Diagram

TCO of 5Ws and 5Ys are typically 10-15 minutes per issue. Writing down and thinking about it. Then there is the Added Cost of Validating and Ideating the next course of action (See Ideate and Validate)

Immersive Fantasy

Zones 

in-depth study of the Narrative use of Zones for Place and even Time.

Defer Distractions

Nerdjacking happens and the GM and Players need to learn to Defer Distractions. Conversation of Mutual Interests - the simple skill of controlling a geeks tendency to Nerdjack and work towards a fairer amount of spotlight and listening. Channeling the nerdjacking healthily.

Minor Problem Technique.

The GM lets players solv minor problems without a Roll. Its an exercise of GM’s thinking to always think of minor problems and ask how the Players/Characters allocate their resources.

This sets up a sense of scarcity:

by showing how allocation affects the circumstance.

By giving the GM the means to complicate the problem as Players only realize a more challenging problem when their simpler techniques are exhausted.  

Adding minor problems to a Situation to “Scale it” up or down. Minor problems create additional scopes and complexities.

Complex Agency.

How to slowly acclimate players to Complex set of consequence and challenges.

Combat Narrative

Techniques to Efficiently describe action and conflict of combat.

Useful Tools

Zeharts Videos will be a very useful reference (please share any other similarly useful resources)

See also Christian Cameron’s writing and how he describes combat.

World Building Elements

Era Metrics

A model that breaks down Eras by their the following Attributes:

• Health (food production and medicine)
• Tools (material and technology)
• Culture (knowledge, language, organization, ideas)

• Specialization

In this method we can a procedural approach what exists, whats available, the cost of civiliation, and an idea of the quality of life.

Ancient

        Mesolithic 10,000BCE to 5,000BCE

Neolithic/Chalcolithic 5,000BCE to 2,000BCE

Bronze Age 2,000BCE to 500BCE

Bronze Age Collapse 1200BCE

Classical Archaic 800BCE

Axial Age 800BCE to 300BCE

Iron Age/500 to

Classical Antiquity 500BCE to 400CE

Roman Republic

Roman Empire 100BCE to 500CE

Fall of the Roman Empire 500CE  

Late Antiquity 400CE to 700CE

Medieval

Scale-Scope

Culture

Health

Kinds of Food Sources

• Forage
• Agriculture
• Hunting
• Herding

Agricultural Attributes

• Nutrition: Manday of Food in Kg
• Yield: Kg per Ha
• Field Preparation: Manday to Ha
• Seed to Yield Ratio: Seed Kg/ Yield Kg
• Growing period: Days
• Caring: Mandays per Growing Period per Ha
• Harvesting: Manday per Ha
• Sophistication Multiplier:  

• Fallow Field
• Crop Rotation
• Fertilizing

World Building

Warfare

A set of skills to run such but for Mass Combat.

See Chunking

Superiority

The most often used factor in warfare is superiority. This means having more resources and advantages than the other side. Its most often used when forces engage and

Examples.

100 archers shooting 10 spearmen or 500 spearmen

20 calvarymen skirmish 10 swordsmen or 50 spearmen

500 pikemen against 100 halberdiers or 1000 skirmishers

Warfare Scenes

The warfare narration moves through the scenes of the Party’s Side, and the Party’s scenes.

PC’s Side

What is visible of the opposing force side

PC’s scene

Opposing force’s reaction to PC’s actions or circumstance.

Rule of 3 and 10

Handle as much as 2-3 people at the most. That means if you have 10 people chunk them in a way you handly only 2-3 key persons at a time.

3^X where is X is the level of organization.

Tags: Organization Heuristic.

Sources:

• https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/the-rule-of-3-and-10/

Warfare Metrics

Fighting Man

Households

Man-days

Scenes

Shots of a Scene

Spent

Morale fighting spirit

A problem solving tool is a Gming Technique.

This simple thesis claim means that any problem solving technique can be used in gaming or framing a challenge to players or setting a scene. This allows for the exercise and accumulation of techniques and skills to be mastered

Fluid Logistics. Imagining logistics as a liquid that settles on geography that ebbs and flows with the weather and seasons, migration patterns, trade, events, and infrastructure.
When population density is thick, water is deep; thin its shallow. It mixes with different liquids, and the foam and the currents make different patterns.

The Backdrop of Beliefs. This is coloring or framing the narratives in the beliefs of the time and character. An example is how Utrhed of the Saxon Series by Bernard Cornwell sees the world and frames it. He describes everything with the visual backdrop of his Norse Beliefs.

Scoping. An exercise of Visualization, creativity, and critical thinking - scoping is about listing the limitations, conditions, goals, and expectations. Teaching and exercising scoping practices and enhances critical problem solving skills - They go through details faster, more thoroughly, and efficiently. They flesh out the problem and the circumstance - creating greater immersion and displays their level of understanding to better match and coordinate details.

Player Action Templates. A set of templates of how players can very efficiently communicate the scope of their actions as well as make sure they are adding characterization when they have the spotlight. There is a tendency to convey incomplete information and forgetting some details that help escalate the pacing.

Player Initiative Mechanic. The one who has Initiative not just declares first but has the Last Call. The one with initiative be given a bonus to follow through but he is the first to declare and thus everyone may counter his action. But he gets a bonus to the roll, a bonus he may opt out of to make the Last Call, where he can change his mind.

The winner, the one with the highest margin of success, of the round gains the initiative.

Initiative is always with one person or side.

Complex Tasks. These are tasks far exceeding any human working memory. Typically man-day tasks an all those greater tasks time and complexity take. Examples are tasks are running and operating a business or job rolls in gurps. These tasks are capped at a 60% success rate  (see when 99% certainty is 40% wrong and small business and start up failure base rates). These are really against the odds rolls or subject to the market or situations bonus. The influence of the PC can be as much as -40% to +10% over a 50:50 odds. That circumstance has so much influence someone can do all wrong and still get it all right. Where someone who may have industry knowledge and skill of 99% can only influence outcomes of up to 10%.

Measuring Compleity

Agency

Something a character can do

Multi-Agency

A group of characters and

Competing Agency

Characters in Conflict

Multi-Agency Conflict

Systems or Social Organizations

Competing Systems or Competing Social Orgs

Eco-Systems

Ex. Markets, Economics, Politics

This level is situational and not much agency can be exerted.

No Rules Arguments while in Play. How to deal with arguments quickly or set them aside more constructively.

Does the Rule Interfere with Agency?

Was it something the Player signed up for?

No arguments rule by  Peter V. Dell'Orto

No Rules Arguments in play by Collin

Index Card Heuristic. The Index Card System is my metric for Game Concepts and Rules Mechanics. If I can fit the description in a Handwritten Index Card - that's good design. This is to pursue more Portable Gaming, for running games in Cafes, Parks, and places of work.

Each Idea is a Card. The more complicated the idea, it must be broken down to concepts that would fit into the cards. Think of each card as Bits of Information.

Physically and Mentally you can only Juggle as many Physical Index Cards. Its to train a sense of limited capacity that allows a person to better work with limited resources.  

Character Elements. A way to measure character elements and how the character develops. As stories elaborate and develop the character he adds to his cards.

Character Sheet is as complicated by the number of Cards it takes to track Ideas

Identity and Self.

Appearance, Height, Weight, Ethnicity, Dress, Gender, Gender preference, habits of expression, etc…

Psychology

Biases,

Beliefs,

Codes,

Relationships related to his psychology.  

Stats and Ability. Core stats and Abilitie

Core Stats and even some of the core mechanics.

Key System Notes. For newbies it would be core mechanics. For veteran players it would be a list of key game concepts that will be most often used. Ideally the GM or the Game system can use this.

Example in GURPS.

Passive Skills rule of 14

Rule of 16 success

Role of 20 for abilities.

BAD

TDM  

Background.

Who is this character by his history.

His Stuff in the past. By stuff - unresolved things.

Cultural aspects.

Upbringing

Relationships relative to Background

Profession/Role.

The Key Role of this Character in relation to the party.

Relationships related to his Role.

Goals and Motives. Current Circumstance.

Priorities

Duties

Responsibilities

Relationships related to Goals and Motives.

Equipment and Assets.

His stuff and possessions.

3-5 Act Sessions Formula

Acts and Pacing. Pacing is a guide for Acts.

Pacing Review:

Build up/Set up

Rising Conflict

Climax and resolution.

Scenes

How to break Acts into Scenes.

An end-to-end process of progressing from scene to scene. The process has the following:

Checking for Player Buy-in

Checking if everyone is getting their spotlight. Not that everyone needs to have a spotlight for every scene, but always check if a player gets enough spotlight for every Act.
        In an Act where a Player was not getting enough Spotlight - check if he is going to get more in the Next Act or you can extend for another Scene before the next act that focuses on that Player.

3 Act Session is great for 3-4 hour session

Act 1 Problem Introduced and Buy-in,

Act 2 Leg-work and Challenging Tasks

Act 3 Big Fight or Conflict

5 Act can be worked into a 5-6 hour session

Act 1 Problem Introduced and Buy-in,

Act 2 Leg-work and Challenging Tasks

Act 3 Big Fight or Conflict

Act 4 Change of Paradigm

Act 5 Big Fight or Conflict. The change of paradigm would give them a big handicap or the problem or opponent is even bigger.

Ending - See Peak End rule 

Sun-Tzu Art of War as a Mnemonic

Using Ankidroid get all the factuals and elements of the Art of War into a Flash card system for mastery.

Hypothesis: that all the elements of Android

Campbell's Hero's Journey.

Measuring Game materials by how much knowledge is expected to understand such concepts and use such tools easily.

Newbie GM. The material is that on hand. If the material on hand is enough for a Newbie GM.

Levels of Expertise - how many pages worth of books would be needed to run a fairly serious level. Naming the books that would compose this “level” of expertise and rating it by Pages.

Example. GURPS cabal can be run with Basic Set. But GURPS Veteran GMs are expected to draw from 1,200 pages of material: here are the following - vs Dungeon Fantasy which is Basic Set and

Scaling TIME is a technique i'm familiar with with a very basic understanding. Basically my working Thesis is that: Important actions may take seconds or fractions of a second but everything else leading to that action takes more time and that's the Rising Tension or 2nd part of Pacing. Scaling time is manipulating the Rising Tension or Conflict to scale the amount of time that occurred to be more-or-less similar to everyone else so that All actions of all PCs (Players) happen near simultaneously. It is in the Build up and Conflict that extends or dilates sense of time.

Exploits Narrative Bias

Peak End Rule

Duration Negect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension_neglect

Concept Skill level used for this technique list.

Familiarity. I can intuitively grasp it but poorly describe it.

Basic Understanding. I can describe it but its not really a good description. It’s a Testable Description (see Positivism)

Good Understanding. I can describe it well, but its not yet mastered in a way that I can do it without having to think about it. Its possible to use it in other skills but it takes a lot of  work and ideating.

Petty Mastery. I can do it without thinking, it doesn't eat up a lot of working memory so I can apply it to what I’m doing without much thought or process.

High Mastery. I can apply it to other skills and concepts. It becomes my scaffolding for another concept that is similar or applicable.

 the RPG Design patterns CC book by Whitson John Kirk III. Use this to talk about TRPG mechanics and design. Since its system agnostic it can help better modify game systems to meet certain design goals.

Ex More narrative

Resolve in a Certain way

 super memo's 20 rules of formulating knowledge

Write in Ideas that can be broken down into simple notes.

Easy for someone to learn any of my techniques so they can see for themselves and tell me anything wrong with it.

If anyone can learn my skills and correct me then I can learn more from it.

Rule of 80%. Some situations cannot have a success greater than 80%. In GURPS this is 13. The rule makes it that control over a situation is up to 80% (prieto principle). This is applied after the Situational Conditions and Applicable only to Complex multi-agency rolls.

Passive Abilities. Making some abilities passive.

Useful Base Rates

Bystander Effect: 70% fail to come to peoples aid an analogue for good will in the community and risk aversity of people in general.

Business Failure rates: 3 years fail at 70-80% an analogy

Major Administrative Projects can only be portioned up to 2-3 year goals. (searching for reference of this). Any suitably

 Overconfidence Bias. 40% of the time, Professionals 99% certain, are wrong. This translates to the 80-60% rule. This rule is that Success is Capped to 80 or 60 for complex situations.

Real Economic Growth (by real its after inflation). As examples of Complex Situational Modifiers. Analogous to REG is seasons like Spring, Autumn etc… where making something grow would be really hard or easy.

Getting Things Done.

Next Action Framing of all Tasks and Projects. Rapidly creating a sequence of Next Actions. Being able to think in the scarce resource of time.

GMs mastering GTD can quickly see the obstacles and trade offs of every action.

Hardmode: 60-80% rule.

Complex situations that are directly under the control of the PCs have a maximum of 80% success rate. Examples are medical diagnosis, some magical challenges, and

Complex fields (like medicine, economics, finance, environment… see complexity theory) and organizations where the character may only contribute so much have a Cap of 60% success.

This rule does not factor Circumstance modifiers which adjust these factors. Operating a biz in a boom economy (real growth in GDP of 2% to 6%) has a much better chance than someone in a recension or difficult economy. See  

Low Success Rates from the Business Failure rates

Some flawed assumptions that can work in a game.

If business failure rates are measures of real skill over time (since its controled for economic conditions) then we can use it as the success rates of most people who think they are competent. So a competent person has a success rate of 20-30% but even if they think they have mastered it only have a success cap of 60-80% on complex affairs like predicitng other people, groups, or running organizations, medicine etc..
     So this is where rapid ideation, flexibility, mastering framing, and all those problem solving tricks come into play. When you have 20-30% success on average and at best only 60-80% then we try to make as many opportunities as possible.

Complexity Theory. (see the TGC lecture)

A useful tool for GMs to describe and determine “complex” situations.

These are multi-agency and adaptive organisms.

It’s useful in dealing and accepting of uncertainty (and creating coping or mental strategies for uncertainty)

My Notes in Zones. 

Scale. How big or small or grand the scope of the Zone is. As well as organizing sub-zones.

Features. What are the notable features or aspects of a zone.

The most common Zones featurs (based on the Art of War):

Broken

Concealed

Entangling

Open

Strategic

High

Narrow

Fortified

Land Forms Knowledge set.

Deepwork . An argument for 3-4 hour game prep sessions, to make each game prep an exercise of deliberate practice.

Deliberate Practice. Setting up more elements of game prep as deliberate practice.

Setting up Shorter Feedback Loops. In games, and gaming life, we try to set up shorter feedback loops.

5S - 5 S methodology approach to game prep, running games, and improvement. Decluttering, Distraction-Removal, Emphasis in core skills and tools, etc…  

Lean Manufacturing. The lean appraoch to self improvement is process based improvement. The emphasis of having a process in place which we follow, but spend ⅛ of our time continuously improving the process. We resist some of the improvistation so that we can see the flaws of the process. In TRPGs improvisation is a key skill and improving on improvisation is trying to capture our methodology and improve on it.

Old Hangout Notes 4-10-2015

Abbreviated Injury Scale

Minor

Moderate (1-2% prob. death)

Serious (8-10% prob. death)

Severe (5-50% prob. death)

Critical (5-50% prob. death)

Maximum (100% prob. death)

Injury Severity Score

Player Defined Skills System.

Players define their skills,

They have points to further develop and define the scope of the skill.

Skills tend to limit what can be done in a Workload, and greater levels of skill allow the character to perform multiple workloads a day in a sustianed pace or multiple workloads a week.

Managing workloads is a seperate skills, particularly management operations and leaves the technical domain.

Skills are best benchmarked at what can get done in a Workload.

Workload Limits to Activities.

All activities are limited to the block of time in a workload which is 4-6 hours.

Tasks more complicated that take many workloads to finish run an uncertainty that cannot be really modeled with a very higher overview of time. You can only go for an abstraction of time to a weekly scale.

Workload Definition (4-6 hours)

Partial Workload (1-3 hours)

Minor Task (Under 1 hour; 10-60 mins)

Very Minor task (2-10 minutes)

See Taylorism for more benchmarks.

Productive Work.

The ability to resist or identify: Bikeshedding, Yakshaving, or Busywork.

The ability to identify real progress in solving a fundamental problem.

The confidence to maintain doing the key work when busy work threatens to disrupt and interrupt everything.

The ability to balance busywork and real work.

Push Pull Systems (see operatins encyclopdeia)

 Morale Victories. These are small wins that improve the morale of the participants or players. It helps in drawing out tension and conflict.

Differentiation of Moral and Morale

Tension techniques.

Threats to the character or what the charcter cares about.

Uncertainty and Ambiguity of solution, sources of threats, and the next action.

Complicating Threats or Overloading working memory

Some game mechanics are designed to make the tracking of factors or conditions easy.

Leaving Open Loops / Preventing Closure.

Small morale defeats

Tension can lead to frustration if its exceeds the sense of agency and capacity of the player.

Small Morale Victories

Closing open loops (Closure) of some issues

Pareto Principle in Penalties and Bonuses.

Count the biggest penalty or bonus, increase the modifier by 1 for every significant condition or factor.  

World Building as a Skill.

Demographics

Population Density

Medieval demographics made easy 

30 to 120 per sq mi

 11 to 45 per sq km

Growth Rate

Absolute Growth Rate of 0.1% yearly

Family Size (see Medeival household)

Mortality Rate

⅓ children died before 5

20% maternal mortality rate for child bearing.

Life expectancy

http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/life-expectancy-in-the-middle-ages/

Mid 40s.

People

Daily Life of People

Relationships

Client and Patron

Guilds

Organizations and Entities

Institutions

States

Social Status, Groups, and Hierchy

Anthropology

Economics

Using Households

Households US

Knowledge of Goods and Commodities

Key Economic Entities

Food Production.

How much land produces how much food? Typically cereals.

How much man days to Prepare and Harvest?

What are the seasons and cycles of productions?

What was their supplementary food source from?

Books that help in this is: GURPS low Tech Companion 3, Building Low Tech Landscapes (GURPS), and Harn Manor.  

Gives a sense of averages, values of land, and the primary concern of everyone: where their next meal is going to come from.

World

Seasons, Climate and Weather

Geography

Assets and Gear.

The Other Greeks by Victor

Farmers could afford a helmet, spear, shield, greaves, and shortsword at the cost of 100 drachma p242. A slave as essential part of the load out.

Agricultural Slave is 100 drachma

Skilled Slaves 150-200 drachma

Laborer per day is 1 drachma* but skilled mercenaries are 1 drachma a day as well.

Plato idealized a fine of 500 drachma for fleeing in the face of battle.

Hoplite panoply 30 to 75-150 drachma

Hoplites are required 2000 drachma asset evaluation

50 drachmas per plethron or 0.21 acre

2000 drachma would be 40 plethra of land or about 8 acres. In most medeival landscapes 30-60 acres per homestead is ideal. Factors like field rotation must be factored (see Hide).

Because of crop rotation of 50/50,

Less ½ because the resat is stored for seed

Barley 800kg per ha (gurps low tech companion 3)

25.8 medminos

Barley 4 ha = 3.2/ tons, or 103 medimnos.

Lentils (legumes) 318kg per ha

4 ha of lentils = 1.272

1.16 cal per gram of lentils 737 man day meals of lentils of 1.272tons

2.8 cal per 1g of barley bread.

200 talents = 1.2million drachma. 6000 drachma a talent.

Campaigns costing 12M drachma

30,000 drachma per day for a campaign of 5,000 combatants and their servants.

Medimnos

52 liters dry volume (up to 71 liters in sparta)

Tritiaos ⅓, Hekteus ⅙ , Choinix ⅛

40kg of wheat or 31kg of barley

173,600 calories or 87 day meals.

8 Medimnos (248kg of barley) enough for a man.

25 Medimnos for a household 2 adults and 3 children.

32-40 if we add the slaves or agricultural workers.

Taxes of 500 medinoi a year (15.5 tons of barley)

200 for an agricultural worker (6.2 tons of barley)

*Gurps low tech companions 3 sites 700lbs of barley per acre. That maks 20 acres of land.

A plethoron takes a day to work but its one 5th an acre. *  That makes 100 man days to work this amount of food.  It would be then better to assume most farms having beasts of burden to help with the work: ox, mules, or donkeys. 40-60 days would be the upper limit of harvesting or working a field.

Note greek soil is not so good as other lands in comparison by most historians.

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire

Remount logistics

Steppe Cavalry marching rate (assuming up to 7 remounts) 50-80km a day. Assumes 8-10 hours of travel

Arrianus, Flavius, Tactical Handbook and Expedition Against the Alans (Ares 2003)

Minimum Compositioni needed to deal with a highly mobile all cavalry force. IIRC you need to have as much as 20% the cavalry of the opposing all cavalry side. And double their numbers in footmen. So fighting a 300 man cavalry would require 60 cavalry and 600 footmen.

Open Field Article

Barley 800kg per hectar of land.

One Acre is 1 man day with an Ox-team. Assume Acre or Man days differ with tools.

Man with tools

Men with tools

Men with Plow Animal 0.3

Man with an Ox x0.5

Man with an Ox pair or Plow Horse. x1

Calorie Density for Food

i find it funny how i learned the calorie value of a cereal vs a vegetable: typically a cooked cereal is 3.5 kcal per gram (making a cereal into bread or porridge dilutes the calorie density), vs veggies of about 0.1 kcal per gram. A difference of 35x cal. I guess that would mean a person needs to eat 500-600g of cereal to hit a active persons diet of 2000-2500 (sedentary can work with just 1600) while to gain its equivalent in veggies would mean 17kg (30lbs) of vegies .

It makes me imagine characters who have no access to calorie dense food eating edible roughage constantly every hour.

Hide.

60 acres = 24ha

16 ha cultivated, 8 ha fallow

How to model a community as a basic economic unit, like a family?

land productivity should be so much that it can withstand lean periods. the numbers are more complicated lolz.

Failure rate of farms @ 25% by the first year,

Early Bronze Age (2500-1500BCE) 40%

Late Bronze Age (1500-500BCE) 35%

Early Iron Age (500 BCE - 500CE) 30%

Late Iron Age (500CE-1000CE) 25%

Pre-industrial Age (10C - 15C CE)

Calculating Deviation:

Ex. 25% farms fail, driving the average to X

X*(100%-Percent Failing)

Example.

850kg per ha of millet

25% fail, so 850*.75

637.5kg median out put of the failing 25%.

The succeeding output has a X*(100+Fail Percent).

Example.

125%= 1.25%

1.25*850kg per ha = 1064.5kg per ha

Milet farming

Jackpot.
Millet along with Sorgum are not covered in GURPS low tech. This gets complicated since the Straw of Millet is important fodder. Raw Millet is 3.5cal per gram vs Raw Barley at 3.7cal. As bread Millet its 1.16cal per gram vs Barley as 2.8cal per gram.
_Average millet yields are difficult to estimate, as figures are so rare. The Warring States politician Li Kui referred to 1.5 shi/mu as an average yield for setaria, which in modern terms is roughly equivalent to 6-700 kg/ha, a rather low figure. According to Buck, millet yields in early 20th century China varied between 400 and 1,200 kg/ha while Wagner gives figures of 800 to 1,000 kg/ha of grain, plus 1,300 to 1,600 kg/ha of straw (48). The straw was very important as it was reckoned highly nutritious fodder. Modern improved varieties are said to yield as much as 5,000 kg/ha in experimental conditions

2d6 Distribution

On a Roll on and below.

2        2.78        

3        8.33        

4        16.67        

5        27.78        

6        41.67        

7        58.33        

8        72.22        

9        83.33        

10        91.67        

11        97.22        

12        100.00

3 Factors in a Die Roll

The Actor

The Circumstance

The Resources/Medium.

Maximum 3 Factors in a die roll. All other details can be ignored or bundled into one of the 3.  

Agricultural Notes

Land Output

Carrying capacity

Types of Output an cultivation

Economic Entity. This would need its own gdoc refernce sheet as this developes.

Time it consumes. Character Overhead.

Difficulty to Manage. Distraction penalty

Outputs

Inputs

Reserves.

Process and Fiscal reserves are measured with Con

Output and Power is measured in Strength

Flexibility to move around resources and people Dexterity. Shifting the commodities and adapting to the market forces.

Intelligence - documentation, processes, and legalistic capabilities. Business intelligence about the industry as well.

Wisdom - institutional capacity and flexibility in dealing with internal conflcits.

Charisma - Network and influence

Wisdom and Con are the key abilities that can kill an economic entity when reduced to 0.

Modeling Economic Entities with Limited “Keys”

https://g.co/kgs/JRqqOM The Dictator’s Handbook

Political Survival

So as above’s economic entity but having a finite number of keys to track.

The high cost of alternate keys

Competing keys

Zero-sum advantage of having certain keys

Losing Valuable Keys

Keys occupy Resource and Scope of any goal.

By resources its Time and Scarce Material or Manpower Upkeep.

Scope is requiring an additional goal for success.

Project Managment Rules

Murphy’s Law: If it can go wrong, it will.

• Second Law of Thermodynamics (Law of Entropy): All systems tend toward their highest state of disorder. (Murphy’s Law is an application of this law.)

• Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time allotted to it. (Parkinson’s exact wording was “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”) This is only one of many laws found in his book (Parkinson 1958).

• The Pi Rule: Poorly managed projects take pi (π ≈ 3.1416.) times longer than originally planned. People tend to think that the path is across the diameter of the circle, when it is in fact the entire circumference.

• The optimistic time estimate law: Projects rarely do what was promised and are rarely completed on time, within budget, or with the same staff that started them. Corollary a: It is highly unlikely that your project will be the first exception. Corollary b: A carelessly planned project will take π ≈ 3.1416 times longer to complete than expected, and a carefully planned project will take only e ≈ 2.7183 times as long. Corollary c: When the project is going well, something will go wrong. Corollary d: When things cannot get any worse, they will. Corollary e: When things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.

• The last 10 percent law: Projects progress rapidly until they are 90 percent complete. The last 10 percent takes about 50 percent of the time.

• Brooke’s Law: Adding people to a late project generally makes it later.

• The project employment law: A project requiring more than 18 months tends to lose its identity as a project and becomes a permanent part of the organization. Corollary: If the project objectives are allowed to change freely, the team might unintentionally turn the project into guaranteed long-term employment.

• The project charter law: A project without a clearly written charter will experience scope creep and will help stakeholders discover their organization’s worst political problems.

• The project correction law: The effort required to correct a project that is off course increases every day it is allowed to continue off course.

• The matrix organization law: Matrix organizations tend to be dysfunctional. All employees really have only one boss and that is the person who makes their next salary decision. (However, matrix organizations are essential in the modern firm, particularly for project management.)

• The project leader law: A great way to sabotage an important project is to assign whoever is completely available as the project leader.

• The technical leadership law: The greater the project’s scope and organizational complexity, the less likely a technician is needed to manage it. Corollary: Get the best project manager who can be found. A good project manager will find the right technical people for the project.

• The belief in the system law: If the user does not believe in the system, a parallel informal system will be developed, and neither will work very well.

• The post-project review law: Organizations that do not have a disciplined post-project review process are doomed to repeat their mistakes over and over again.

Occasion to Roll. What are the tests for the occasion to roll.

Is there a significant setback if the roll fails.

What if: Opportunistic vs Pro-Active

Significant Actions are Work the character can do. The work may open up opportunities.  

The more work the character does the more opportunities that come around.

Designed in a way to make players think in generating opportunities proactively.

Significant Actions are in Worload (work that can be done in 1-3 hours for partial, or 4-6 hour for full; Or a Complex for a Week).

The cost factor (multipler to themargin of failure) is much smaller. Typically x1.5 or x2.  

Minor Actions are Opportunities the characters have to redirect or influence events in their favor.

There are always unplanned opportunities, but they tend to always have an big cost factor.

Make the cost factor greater (meaninig success at a cost has a very big multiplier; this is also risky so these are usally challenging because of their timing). Ix Squared or X2 to X4.

Ancient warfare Pikemen and heavy Infantry

Pikemen or the Macedonian phalanx are basically a great way to use less skilled Infantry.

The other uses is for skirmishers.

Heavy Infantry are better than Pikemen. Probably 2x it's value but 3 to 5 times the cost raise and upkeep.

In mass combat unit If Strength is the offensive capability, Dex is the flexibility and defensive capability. Pikemen have as much offensive capability than heavy Infantry at such a disadvantage in flexibility . They are vulnerable to ranged attacks and flanking maneuvers (when another unit out maneuvers them to flank).

Their low cost and high offense is really useful when manpower is high.

In Cavalry Dex is the number of remounts. The more remounts the more flexibility and options.

Philip the great pioneered the small baggage train. 1 servant per 10men. Comparing it to Maurian reforms.

Ground (the art of war). These are terrain conditions. Theys may be mixed and matched.  

Broken ground. Cannot hold cohesive formation.

Entangling ground

Open ground. Room to maneuver and be flanked and out maneuvered. The ability to maneuver.

Accessible Ground

Narrow ground. When taken by one group, their flanks are covered.

High Ground. Incline.

Steep Ground.

Impassable Ground. Its

Cornered Ground..

http://www.literatureproject.com/art-of-war/10-art-war.htm

Disposition. These are Troop Condition. In The Art of War. These are

Zealous. 

Committed. Like heartened but out of some intense emotion. Typically fear or having their options closed.

Committed can lead to shaken or risks being shaken. But can lead to desperation.

Inciting wrath makes a Unit Committed. Typically this means giving no quarter. This causes the other unit to be desperate.

Heartened. This unit is confident and in control of itself.

Confused. Flat Footed. Unable to react or very difficult to act.

Divided. A kind of confused disposition wher the unit is its own enemy and threat.

Half the Force Value after all other factors.

Shaken. A weakened morale state.

Facile Ground.

Light Ground.

Shaken happens when performing morale-testing feats and fails.

Failure can leave a unit shaken.

When shaken, half the Strength of the unit.

Broken. Thi

Half the Force Value (after all other factors).

Can be made into Desperate.

Can be rallied to be shaken.

Desperate.

The unit has no choice and goes all out. It will now perform maneuvers and actions that are dangerous and risky.

Cornered units

Opponents that give no quarter.

Zealous.  

Warfare

The Commander determines the “posture” and positions of his assets, how his resources are deployed, and eployed.  

Van Guard

Rear Guard

Flank Guard (Cardinal or Ordinal Values)

Reserve (can be detailed by various reserve positions)

Baggage Camp

Command Camp

Who are the commanders and where they are employed.

We go into details like What the combat groups:

Role

Number of Men

Strength (this is determined by their training and equipment)

Dexterity

Corp (Con)

Key Mechanics. Damage or Mechanics.

Ranged attacks is Strength that weakens as it is employed.

The Endurance of the Cavalry tracked by Dex.  A diminishing stat as it is employed.

Key Assumptions. All things being equal.

In open terrain Heavy Infantry Taxi vs Pikemen Taxi has 2 vs 1 odds to succeed.

In Narrow Ground its 50/50

In open terrain Foot Bowmen (80lbs draw) vs Heavy infantry have 50/50 to succeed

In broken terrain archers have 2 : 1 in their favor.  

In open terrain Light Cavalry vs Heavy infantry is 3:2

In Broken terrain

In open terrain Heavy Cavalry vs Heavy infantry is 3:2 in Heavy Cavalry’s favor.

They have better odds if the Heavy Cavalry has more odds

Heavy infantry in broken ground or narrow ground have the advantage against heavy cavalry.

Each unit has a Strength based on the training and equipment. Default is 5 (regular).  

-3 to -1 For untrained

+0 for Light Infantry

+1 for Medium Infantry

+2 for Heavy infantry

+2 for pikemen deployment, at the cost of dexterity -4.

+1 per level of experience.

First compare numbers or strength depend on the conditions.

Armor Calculator
How to measure a dress shirt

14ga 3/8" mail is 1280 rings per sq ft

1.3= rings per sq cm

338 rings is 0.42lbs

0.56g per ring

716.8g per 1000cm or 1 sq ft

14 ga 5/16 1992 rings per sq ft

1.9 rings per sq cm

406 rings is 0.37 lbs

0.413g per ring

822.696g for 1000 sq cm or 1 sq ft

US Medium / Asia XL

Sleeve 65cm, Perimter 40cm = 2,600 sq cm

Chest 104cm, length 71cm = 7,384sq cm

9984 sq cm =

Mail, 12,979 rings

648 man hours

7.3kg

Fine Mail, 19,968 rings

1664 man hours

8.3kg

How many lamellar plates do I need

2”x3.375” lamellar

10 plate rows 12”

Each row adds 3”

1.22” x 2.345” lamellar

15 plates for 12”

Lamellar

4.5” x 1.5” area = 6.75 sq in = 43.55 sq cm

33 plates = 11.7” x 11.7” 136.89 sq in= 881.87 sq cm

 On Horsemanship. If a player wants to get immersive and GMs want to give realistic bio-mechanic limitations to horse performance.

Needs to be detailed with Biometics.

Other books

Warhorse

Consumption

People Land and Politics

Jongman (2003, 112–6). He assumes that one person consumed 100 litres of wine, 20 litres of oil, and 200 kilograms of wheat per year, and that one hectare of land produced 2000 litres of wine, 440 litres of oil, or 400 kilograms of wheat: cf. Jongman (1988, 81 note 1 and 132–5). Of course, production was subject to regional and even local variations and was different for each specie s of grape or olive, of which there were many kinds. Consumption varied according to social class, age, sex, and occupation. Cato Agr. 11.1 estimates the result of fi ve harvests at 800 cullei (416,000 litres) for an estate of 100 iugera; this would suggest a production of 832 litres per iugerum per year, or 3,328 litres per hectare. This may, however, be an exceptionally good harvest, and average yields may well have been lower. Cato Agr. 56–7 informs us on the amount of grain and wine given to slaves, who received at least 420 litres of grain (4 or 4.5 modii per month, depending on the season) and 160 litres of wine per year. Of course, children and women ate less, so the average consumption was much less than the fi gures given by Cato. Cf. Erdkamp (1998, 29–30); Morley (1996, 146–7); Purcell (1985, 13); Rathbone (1981, 12–3).

The population of Rome was about a million people. The diet of these residents was based on wheat, olive oil, and wine, supplemented by dry legumes and other locally grown produce. Ancient historians have inferred the average consumption of Roman residents from “subsistence levels” in less-developed countries today. A generous estimate is that each person consumed on average around 300 kg of wheat, for a total Roman consumption of approximately 300 million kilograms a year (Garnsey 1998, 239–45).

300kg /365 0.83kg per day  o

Early Agricultural Produce

Early Cattle was only 200-400kg

Moriceau (1999: 47); Kautsky (1899: 38); Kron (2002, 63). Roman cattle, which generally reached withers heights of 135 cm, would therefore weigh approximately 400kg: Kron (2002). In 1806, German cattle weighed on average 204 kg, reaching Greco-Roman or modern Dutch or English live weights only towards the end of the nineteenth century. French oxen and steers averaged only 225 kg in 1862, rising to 262 kg, still smaller than Roman cattle, by 1892. See Kautsky (1899, 38). Even in England at the turn of the twentieth century the average weight for all English cattle was still only 300 kg: see Collins (2000, 310 table 3.3).

See Kron (2008, 183–5). Roman chickens were raised and fattened in large numbers in highly productive battery farms and were as large as many modern breeds, generally weighing from 1.5 to 2 kg compared to the 1 kg or so common with earlier breeds.

Relative time narration.

Christian Cameron in Long War and God of War

Bernard Cornwell in The Last Kingdom

Each scene has a flow of time reference. He would use actions we would have an intuitive sense of reference. This is great for scaling what is the scope and scale actions and

To follow more observations

Effort and Performance Level Mechanics

Both Endurance Riders and Athletes use Beats per Minute relative to resting heart rate to measure Effort level to examine their Performance Level.

For Athletes they measure their work out average BPM vs their performance: the Reps, Sets, KM/Miles, aka WORK metrics. Pace describes the performance level

Same goes for Horses. In AERC they have a certain pace for the horse relative to its BPM. A horses resting heart rate is ~25 and they allow for up to at 65 bpm effort level after a 10 minutes rest.

Character generation:

Roll Stats in one throw. 6d6 for 6 stats.

Roll Background

Roll Education

Skill or Mental Models as Brain apps

The thing about Load Bearing Gear, Logistics, and any Mental Model is that its kinda a skill when it comes to TRPGs. By skill I mean: One has understood it to a point that they can recall a lot of key details about the matter without much load to their working memory Or ones conjures the Mental Model (imagine it as an app that starts running in your brain) that will deal with: Travel Mechanics, Trade mechanics, Personality mechanics, etc.... working with the example of load baring gear: the more you tackle and handle load bearing gear the more intimate and ingrained the knowledge becomes. Almost without much effort you realize and constrain your options and actions based on the Opportunities and Constraints of the Load Bearing Gear (or what every Mental Model you've conjured).
Which provokes a kind of discussion about TRPG running/playing games skills (which Id like to further discuss in a Gdoc):

Hypothesis/Claim: Some games or styles of play are harder and more complicated because they require some Skill or Mental Models to run smoothly (or run with a Good User Experience).

Are these Barriers to certain Games? Is it why people hate these kinds of game, are theyre just experiencing the Skill Learning Curve to a certain game, are they experiencing the ambiguity of uncertainty from not really mastering the skill (or having no one to feedback to help them improve)?

An example of mental model: The Constraints and Goals/Opportunity Model.

An Inspiration from Work and in Games (can't tell anymore) is Goals and Constraints Mnemonic.  So basically in any project of so much complexity that our working memory needs anchors and tests to know if we are headed the right direction there are Goals and Constraints by which we can check our progress. There is a Skill involved in crafting Goals and Constraints as well as conditioning so that when Our attention and focus realized an amount of time or work has passed we go back and check on these navigation guides. This becomes a skill when the person can always rattle out all the Constraints and Goals at any point of time: they have a working memory slot to be able to hold the constraints and goals to be able to use it periodically.

I learned this in TRPGs and further developed it in work. Basically I realized that when I role-play I adopt the Goals and COnstraints of my Character. These are in the form of the characters SWOT, his personal history and psychology. You do RPGs enough that we get into character quite easily and quickly - but to take it further is to use this technique in Navigating Projects of complexity that we can only take small bites or bits of the Project at a time and process them with our working memory.

Details Slots.  

In Fate Details can be brought to the forefront with Fate points. Either the GM or the player can act on a detail.

Draft. Detail slots work by bringing a Finite amount of details in the forefront. There is a limited number of Detail slots and each slot has a significant weight in the game mechanically. When the detail gets more influence a detail has to reduce influence.

Games Information Management Process

Source: GURPS mysteries

Source: GURPS horror

Skills are:

How to organize information.

How the GM can organize information

How to manage Uncertainty

Miscommunication in a Mystery

How facts can be misinterpreted or can have other interpretations.

How the Players can organize information.

How to play to Players and PC’s SWOT

How much information to Prepare

How to (the GM) create or generate information out of leads.

How to adopt the Plot or Story to the Players. .

How to set up scenes, and how information flows.

Entity Resources.

A lot of the actions and activities of NPCs, organizes,

Gold and Silver.

        Silver is around 20usd per ounce

        Gold is about 1250usd per ounce.

        1:70 of gold to silver value.

        Typically coins are 4.5g (7.75 or 8 in one once or 31 grams)

                See Drachma

                See Solidus

        72 in a roman pound is 324g or 100 in a pound.

        Mina (unit) is 1-1.25lbs

        Talent (Unit)  is 26kg (57lbs)

        Stone (Unit) 14kg

        Li (unit) 500m

        Stadion Stadia (Unit) 185m

        Medimnos (Unit) 51.84L

        Modius (Unit) 8.73L

Author Methodologies

Techniques of various others simplified.

Neil Gaiman’s Style Explained

• His ability to take another story patterns and:

• Embed it with many other story patterns. Drawing parallels from other stories.
• Iterate and process them many many other ways. His ability to create many more perspectives and insight on the idea.
• Create strong symbolism

• His weaknesses.

• Action and Conflict. His technique focus on immersion and using other story patterns to create more insight, but its not good in shifting attention to problems and conflict like that of Pulp and Military authors. He’s a story teller and his technique forcuses on the storytelling, and not the complexity of physics, economics, logistics, and some of the mental constraints of action and conflict.

• What to draw from him.

• His ability to use personal narrative (of players) and give it a grander sense of importance, and significance in the story.

Bernard Cornwell’s Writing Advice

Stephen King’s writing Style

Stephen King on Writing

Simon Scarrow

Christian Cameron

Appendix

Everything until it has a proper place in the following categories:

• Methodology
• Running Games

• Improv and Collaboration
• Storytelling (Framing,Narrative and Descriptive)
• Problem Solving (Ideating and Managing Conflict)

• Preparation (everything not directly part of running a Game Session)

• World Building
• Studies

Goals

• Document the most used skills and heuristics in Gming. To be able to break down Core skills into sub-skills, and the heuristics so that it can be practiced and measured. More specifically what can be learned and approached with a self made regimen:

• Light. Gaming 1-2 hours a week (initial goal)
• Moderate. Gaming 2-5 hours a week
• Serious. Gaming 5-10 hours a week.
• The amount of hours one has practiced these skills and heuristics.  

Constraints

• Make it Easy to Follow for a Newbie Gamer.
• Make it more reader friendly.

• Will look at DnD5E Language and organization

• Will need to Analyze the Traits of what makes DnD Writing

• Will need to gather leads on the “best” style of game writing.

• Will check out David Pulver’s writing style.
• Checking out Dungeon World

Reasons for Methodology

The methodology is written so that:

• Collaborators can feedback

• Corrections,
• Identify steps, sequences, or elements that have reliability or risk issues.
• to improve on the methodology

• Collaborators can use the same methodology

20 Rules of Formulating Knowledge

• Summarize the knowledge as a Rule, Heursitc, Mechanic, or Conditional Statement in the first part.

• If X happens, Do Y.
• Or Do X, and If Y happens, do Z.

• Proceed to explain after the Heuristic.
• Explain the Constraints, Limitations, Weakness, Risks, Unreliability, etc… under the Key Action.

Formula, Definition, and Examples 

The formula, a grammar like algorithm, will be given and its elements given definitions. In this way, like Grammar, it is a procedural sequences that can be exercised and trained. Gamers who want to get better can try to exercise plugging in variables of the algorithm and working them into a narrative or descriptive or immersive exposition.

Actionable Knowledge

Focus on Action, leave the rest as optional reading.  

Giver readers action and a way to adapt to feedback and new information. Action first, then we discuss the theory where supporting experience, knowledge, and information can be organized along the theory for analysis and evaluation.

Prevent:

1. Long explanations, Option to Skip explanations.
2. Analysis Paralysis
3. Untestable Thesis
4. Echo Chamber or Circle Jerks

Activity Time

Give a sense of how much time each action takes.

There will be notes on the activity time, these are anecdotal or best guess. Time and Motion helps as being another way to check if they are doing it right. They also help in prioritizing when they look at their output as compared to their time they put in.

Examples of Activity Time

• Speaking Time 150wpm
• Elevator Pitch focus on 30sec 0.5-2min
• Abstract 100-500 words (0.75 to 3 minutes)
• Pitch
• Spiel
• Long Activities
• Like Compostion and Creative Writing
• Stephen King’s Composition is 400+/-20% words per hour, 2000 words per day
• Bernard Cornwell is 300 words per hour.

Newbie Gamers

They may want to budget how much time and effort they will spend in this. In this Case I will format this that way Heading 1 will be the Key overview concepts that is still practicable and all the sub-headings are sub-concepts that are variations of the overview heading.

        These skills and heuristics can become Intuitive approaches, Conditioned responses, good habits, and reliability executed successfully, and a way to measurable where the gamer is and choose what to work on.

Anki Deck of GMing Skills

There will be an Ankideck for this created so that gamers can work on this. The Methodology of Formula, Definition, and Examples allow that Spaced Repetition System and Cards can be created to exercise these techniques.

Challenges for the Anki Deck

• Random Elements. The knowledge presented here is best used with randomly generated elements that can be filled into the formula’s variables.

• Interim solution. There are many random word generators that can be used along side the anki deck. The Gaming Skills deck can be physical (as index cards) and the phone can just host the random element generators.  

Core

Core Skills and Heuristics are those that are prioritized, as it has the most utility/usability and reward for the time spent learning them. The differentiation of Heuristics and Skills is so that end-users can break down a skill into component heuristics they can train in, and bundle into a skill for the future.

Deepwork

Skill. This is a skill of achieving a level of concentration that allows one to get real complex and valuable work done. In relation to TRPGS, some Gamers get their kicks in the preparation of a game using Deepwork.

References

• Cal Newport Deepwork 
• Stephen King on Writing

Core Skill. These is the knowledge and awareness of the Options and Tools a GM has to push the story and the game forward and engage the Players.

        So far only Dungeon world has gone and codified and refined (and designed) the activities of Game Masters.

References:

• Dungeon World Game Master Moves

Key GM Options

1. Focus On (TOWS)

1. Escalate
2. Reframe

2. Foreshadowing
3. Inquire

Gaming Styles Criterias

1. Jeffro’s Ideas after finishing Appendix N https://jeffro.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/appendix-n-survey-complete/

Case Study Method

Heuristic. This is a style of play that focuses on Problem Solving. The Case Study method is a method of learning where students role-play being the entrepreneur or businesses and making decisions based on their resources, market conditions, goals, and constraints. The Game Running method that follows this learning method heavily focuses in problem solving. Like Horror, the players must want this level of immersion and challenge. Case study method can be very frustrating because it is more austere (see Austerity) when it comes failure rates and difficulty.  

Improvisation hypothesis: Ideation Techniques

Hypothesis: Ideation Techniques allow the Improv to create details, complications, feedback, that can move the story or engage the audience (which are the other players).

The Improvisation Hypothesis of Ideation Techniques means that We can master ideation and problem solving techniques and use them for improvisation. These techniques when employed Elaborate or Create Blanks to be filled by a certain criteria. We fill in those blanks very quickly through master of the Ideation technique. Mastery, used to master language, where the technique is stored in long term memory and recalled immediately as soon as triggering events occur.

Ideation Techniques Include

• 5Whys
• 5Ws
• 5S
• Ishikawa Diagram
• Design of Experiment
• 8D (eight disciplines of problem solving)
• Post Mortem
• Pre-Mortem
• SWOT Analysis
• DMAIC and DMADV
• Getting things Done
• SMART criteria
• Humble Iniquiry
• Word Association

Gaming Skill Log

May 25

• https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6d22mv/eli5_why_do_5yearolds_and_under_like_to_watch_the/dhzlqy3

May 18

• https://mechanteanemone.wordpress.com/
• https://mechanteanemone.wordpress.com/2016/06/23/how-to-discourage-me-from-playing-your-game-part-1/
• https://mechanteanemone.wordpress.com/2014/09/30/the-surest-way-to-become-a-better-game-master/

TRPG Tools

Fantasy City Generator

https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator

Six-Sided Tables.

https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/05/osr-medieval-stalemate-simulator-or-six.html

http://whatwouldconando.blogspot.ca/2017/04/five-dimensional-weather.html