Pteryx

One thing I've noticed about blogs pertaining to tabletop roleplaying games is that they're primarily written by people who don't play online through text, and if they've tried, they're baffled or repelled by the different conventions that have developed online over the years. That being said, I've definitely seen plenty of people with only or primarily online experience who don't quite get some things either, or have weird hangups about how to relate to their fellow players or what constitutes "good" or "bad" writing. As such, I think there's a hole in advice online that can be filled with my opinions on some things. Probably the most important thing to write down on that front is what I think constitutes good practice when it comes to roleplaying through a chat room, whether engaging in freeform RP or playing tabletop roleplaying games through them.

First, what do I mean by a "chat room"? Essentially, any medium where the primary mode of communication is via text in real time, as opposed to asynchronous text-based media, voice, or video chat. IRC is the iconic old-school example, but there are also options like the text portion of Discord channels, or text-only games in virtual tabletops such as Roll20. If it involves the group gathering in a particular computerized text-based area at a specified time, communicating through the written word during that time, and the game going on pause at the end of that time period until the next time you meet, then it counts as a chat room for the purposes of this blog post.

One of the benefits of chat room RP is that while recordings of video or even just voice take up a lot of disk space and can only be edited in limited ways after the fact, text is very easily logged and processed for post-production into pretty files with typos corrected and continuity errors fixed. Your group may or may not wish to take advantage of this, but it's one of my favorite parts, as it helps preserve a readable history that can also easily be shared with friends outside the game for their enjoyment. If you have a webspace of some kind, HTML files are a good kind of output to aim for.

Among the first things your group needs to agree upon, alongside the actual medium, the game to be played, and crucially the schedule, is your convention to signify whether something said is in-character or out-of-character — for example, putting things ICly spoken into quotation marks, OOC commentary into parentheses, and things that are ICly pertinent but not spoken, such as narration or descriptions of actions taken, into neither. This applies to both actual tabletop roleplaying and to freeform RP. If you are likely to have a lot of OOC chatter, you may want to consider a separate channel or the like in which to have the bulk of OOC chatter occur, and only have OOC comments immediately pertinent to the game (such as immediate questions for the GM) happen in the primary IC channel.

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is that in a chat room, both pacing and signal-to-noise ratio are worth paying attention to; this is true whether you're playing a TTRPG or a freeform RP. If people are chatting OOCly too much without a separate channel for that OOC chatter to go into, it is far easier for people to miss IC things that have been said — especially if they don't understand how to scroll the chat log back (and there's always someone who doesn't and never learns, trust me). Regardless of whether lots of chat is IC or OOC, it is possible to drown people out by playing so fast that some players can't get a word in edgewise. Alternately, someone might not be saying anything due to falling into the trap of becoming so enraptured as an audience member to remember that they're supposed to be an active participant in the game and have a character they're playing in it. If you can't think of something for your character to be saying during an animated conversation, try to think of how they're filling this idle time — or how they're wordlessly reacting to the things being said — and briefly describe that.

On the flip side of pacing concerns, if people play too slowly due to inattentiveness, indecisiveness, excessive line length, or frequently leaving their devices behind to do other things, the game can easily slow to a crawl, and that languid pace can become a molasses snowball as people find other things to do while waiting and start missing opportunities to respond themselves. Remember that everyone has set aside time in their busy lives to participate in this game; don't waste their time by being only half-present. If you must step away for long (say, more than five minutes), inform people so they can decide whether to continue without you, wait for you, or continue until it seems like your character should have something to say and then wait.

Line length involves more than just making sure you're posting frequently enough to keep up the pace but not so frequently as to drown others out, however. There is also the matter of how much you need to say to be clear and to give other PCs something they can react to — or how little to say to make sure your point isn't lost in a sea of purple prose. As I always like to say, good writing is as long or as short as it needs to be, and that includes things said in chat rooms... though for things said in chat rooms, both in RP and not, it's often best to err on the shorter side. If the obsession with writing entire pages of imagined novels is excessive and cringeworthy in play-by-post games, it's outright deadly in chat rooms; in most cases, you don't want more than a single paragraph at the most. One good way to keep chat room lines from becoming overly long is to look for the earliest time when someone might reasonably be able to interrupt and end your line there (though this tends to be less of a concern in TTRPG combat and the like, as those tend to parcel out time as part of the rules anyway).

A chat room line should typically focus on what your character says and/or does, with the optional addition of their body language, expression, and/or tone of voice. These are things that are actionable in the world; other players and the GM or moderator can have other characters in the scene respond and react to these things. Introspection, whether directly stated or narrated in the third person, is not normally actionable and therefore makes your post longer without offering more to react to in-world, slowing the game down both in terms of real-world time and in terms of narrative pacing; as such, it's ideally kept to a minimum. Your goal is generally to describe what happens, not to justify your character's actions or hit a minimum word count. (As an aside, it is a bane of many play-by-post forums that people will write several paragraphs of introspection to justify a simple action or single line of dialogue to make sure their post is "long enough", on the assumption that this constitutes "novel-like" writing.)

When your character does something that might not work or go as planned, do not write as though your character has necessarily performed the action or succeeded at it! In freeform RP the term for this has long since been corrupted into "godmodding" (it was originally godmoding, after "god mode" in the old video game DOOM, but people assume these days that it refers to usurping the role of a moderator instead). For example, if your character attacks with a spear, it is proper to say that they thrust or lunge at the target with that spear, not that they hit with that spear or run the target through. This allows the dice or other resolution mechanics in a TTRPG to come into play, or the player in charge of the target to negotiate or decide the result in freeform. In the context of TTRPG combat or similarly fast-paced action, though, an alternative way to approach things is to declare actions OOCly, resolve all rolls, and only afterward describe anything; that duty could fall upon either the GM or the player whose character took action.

In TTRPGs that have complicated subsystems for particular sorts of action (most often combat), it is usually helpful to follow up any flavorful descriptions you might have of your actions with a summary of what your character just did in game terms. In the example above of attacking with a spear, if it were done in a 3.x game, one might describe weaving around foes that might be in the way, then taking a thrust at their target, and conclude by stating, Move: 30' movement. Standard: Standard attack vs. ogre. Done. That way, the game-mechanical meaning of your action is not misinterpreted or lost. If you're using virtual tabletop software, it can also help to use it to temporarily display any complicated paths your character might have taken on the map. If the game system you're using allows particular kinds of action out-of-turn, don't forget to give the opportunity to let those actions be taken!

Another thing that needs to be kept in mind when playing TTRPGs via text chat is that you will need some way to simulate the resolution mechanics. In VTTs, this will generally already be accommodated in some way, but in other forms of chat room, you will need a dice or card bot, plugin, command, or the like. Often, more dice rolls will be made out in the open in chat room TTRPGs than would normally be the case; for example, it's typical for a GM's attack rolls to be made publicly, as this reduces the amount of communication necessary to resolve attacks. For those cases when it's important that a roll must be kept secret, however, make sure that your dice arrangements include a way to accommodate that need.

I hope that the length of this post isn't intimidating; I just have a lot of opinions about how to make chat room RP work best. It isn't like face-to-face RP but textual, the way voice and video RP more closely resemble face-to-face RP, nor is it like most kinds of play-by-post; I have seen it confuse people coming in from both directions as a result. I hope my viewpoints make it more comprehensible.

I've had part of an idea for an investigative game percolating, thanks to having talked myself through some of my problem in the process of trying to actually successfully explain the problem itself to people. I do figure by this time that actual clue cards are unavoidable and I'd just need an online solution for clue cards with a trackable status in order for my theoretical game to be played online, though.

Speaking of those statuses, while I mentioned the idea of an unshared > untheorized > unproven > proven track in passing in the post linked above, and have had a firm idea of why this track would exist and take this form, I haven't spelled the idea out in full to anyone else until just recently. So here's what I'm thinking:

• Unshared: At least one but fewer than all PCs know the clue exists. The purpose of this status is to prevent players from hoarding information (whether to make their own character "seem smart" out of a misapprehension of what intelligence is, or some other reason), and thus ensure that reasoning is a group activity. I imagine unshared clues to be face-down in a face-to-face game; this is distinct from not being on the table at all, which a clue known to the GM but not the players would be. This should make it obvious from an OOC perspective that some PC has something that needs saying to everyone else in order for the game to advance.


• Untheorized: The whole team knows about the clue, but there are no current suggestions about what this clue could mean. Note that ideas that have been disproven don't count! The purpose of this status is to suggest that people make attempts to extract meaning from clues, not merely collect them and expect a victory cutscene to play once enough have been accumulated. (Sadly, yes, in my own experience that's the median expectation for how a TTRPG mystery works...)


• Unproven: The team has a working hypothesis about what the clue might mean, but have not yet determined whether their idea is actually true or not. This is where any red-string-style connections would come into play. The purpose of this status is to show that it's not enough to make wild guesses; you need to test them against the game world. This is going to be a trad game about the challenge of discovering pre-existing truths in a solid imaginary world, not a storygame of making up something mystery-shaped as you go.


• Proven: The team knows, beyond any reasonable doubt, that this particular clue means a particular thing, and can serve as groundwork for figuring out more or pointing fingers. Typically, multiple clues will advance to this status together, becoming meaningful in each other's context. The purpose of this status is to keep facts on the table once they have been established; the PCs won't be able to solve the mystery if they forget what they already know!

One motivating thought I've had is that approaching social conflicts as mini-investigations might be a much better approach than all the "social combat" approaches around. Maybe between all this and the dice mechanic I have in mind, I've got enough to go on...

...except, that is, that I feel like there's still a major piece of connective tissue missing. Yes, I can have a bunch of organized clue cards with statuses and say that while some scenes involve a primary action of searching for clues, other scenes involve a primary action of trying to advance clues along the reasoning track. However, it's not at all clear to me how the median player wouldn't just assume that advancing clue status has nothing to do with them or their characters, and thus still not engage with the concepts of interacting with clues and of PCs discussing clues with each other.

Why? Because I don't immediately know how to forge a link between the PC and the clue cards via the character sheet, the way that there's an obvious connection between the PC and the battlemap in WotC-era D&D via the character sheet. Levi Kornelsen recently blogged about the extreme rules gravity of character sheets, which helped me to put words to this lingering problem in my head... though apparently still not very good ones, as I then proceeded to end up in a very long thread in which I was trying to explain my design goals only for them to not get through easily.

So what are my design goals? Well:

• It is a traditional tabletop roleplaying game, built around a GM who knows the truth behind the mystery, and players whose characters strive to uncover that truth. The effort of solving the mystery is an intended challenge of the game, not a conceit that merely exists to make your characters look cool. It is not a game where there is no truth and the goal is to go through detective-like motions and roll dice until the overall result is shaped like characters solving a mystery; instead, an actual fictional mystery exists to be solved by characters who exist in that mystery's world.


• The mystery is to be solved by the players as detective characters. This should be completely clear from the beginning. If the GM ever takes action to "solve" any aspect of the mystery "for" the players, that will instantly pervert expectations and cause the players to start treating their characters as though they're not detectives at all, but CSIs who serve some NPC in the game — or worse, serve the GM that the characters shouldn't even know about!


• The game assumes rational detectives within a rational setting, if not necessarily rational other people within that setting. Speculative fiction conceits should behave in reproducible and predictable ways. If there is magic in the world, it should lean towards Sufficiently Analyzed Magic instead of being chaotic or rare. The idea that an adult tiger is typically bigger, stronger, and less tame than an adult housecat is not "racist" (though assuming that intellectual potential differs with skin color definitely is!). The things being investigated should not make a mockery of rational thought, understanding the universe, or the idea that the PCs are capable of either.


• This game should be a game of thinking and independent action, not of following instructions. The PCs should be understood from the very beginning to be the ones bearing responsibility for their actions, and responsibility for solving the mystery itself. It should easily be possible for the game to proceed without the GM having to lead players through a linear path; indeed, PCs should often be able to come up with multiple places to go next and choose between those. It should not be necessary to include any sort of in-game authority figure for the game to function.


• The game should, to the greatest degree that doesn't undermine player agency, hedge against mystery genre blindness, lack of reasoning skills IRL, and fear of looking stupid. I assume that in order to accomplish this, the game will need to sneakily teach the necessary thinking skills to portray detectives. The reasoning track on clue cards should serve as one piece of that greater teaching effort. Heck, if that makes my game the most dangerous one in the world, I'll gladly die for that as long as the game's broken containment first...


• The game involves investigation phases and reasoning phases. In investigation phases, skills are applied to uncover clues and leads from in-game environments, characters, records, and the like, in time-honored tradition. In reasoning phases, which to my knowledge is a new concept for this game, characters discuss clues gathered so far in order to further their understanding of the mystery and decide what to do next. These don't necessary have to be firewalled from each other, but doing so might help players understand that both exist.


• When the characters find clues, they should remember those clues and make use of them. Clue cards with reasoning statuses should in theory make that easy. Aside from using the clues as discussion fodder in reasoning phases, it should be emphasized that you can do things like analyze them in a lab, compare them with each other, do research on them, or show them to NPCs.


• Players should be reassured that not knowing the answer immediately is OK. It's a mystery. It's normal for the detectives to proceed from a weak understanding to a strong one gradually over the course of the entire adventure. Making mistakes can be a setback, but they won't make you or your character look stupid.


• In my experience, a combination of player intuition, clue redundancy, and a sufficient GM understanding of the truth to improvise are enough to make what you do investigation phases easy to grasp. Furthermore, for the majority of players, the presence of skills suited to clue-finding seems to be enough of a toolset to help them understand how to search for clues. Therefore, the only significant innovation for clue-finding itself is every character getting the most basic investigative skills automatically. Much as in D&D everyone's bonus to hit scales automatically, so too does everyone's sheet have prominent numbers for searching areas and spotting details; differentiation should lie in what else they can do to help.


• The difficulty lies in designing the reasoning phase:


• In my experience, only people with a deep understanding of the mystery genre grasp why reasoning phases need to exist at all, so the game needs to explain the need for reasoning phases in the first place. While people easily grasp that investigation phases have searching for clues as a default action, the idea that you then need to think about the clues you've found seems lost on people by default; this causes mystery games to grind to a halt.


• It needs to be made clear that conversing with your fellow PCs is the primary action to be taken in the reasoning phase, because this is supposed to be a team game. Two heads may be better than one, but two heads interacting with each other are more than the sum of their parts.


• It should also be made clear that reasoning phases are important for figuring out what investigative steps to try next. The GM must not simply tell players what places they should consider investigating or what people they should attempt to talk to. Instead, the PCs should use their reasoning skills to figure out possibilities of that nature themselves.


• It next needs a way to connect player characters to reasoning phases, and neither automate reasoning nor railroad the player. Nothing about the design should boil down to "roll Deduction to win". The player ought to be helped to understand basic reasoning skills, allowed to apply them, and given affordances for doing so.


• It needs to specifically avoid associating particular NPCs with the reasoning phase, because many players will then perceive reasoning to be that NPC's responsibility and not their characters' (and, by extension, theirs). Even without such an NPC, it's worth reiterating that I've had players act as though the GM were the detective, and their PCs were mere CSIs tasked with delivering clues to the cusp of the fourth wall.


• A few negative design points:


• The game is NOT a storygame, but a trad one. The usual GM/player divide applies, and is indeed crucial to having an underlying truth that the PCs unravel. The challenge of the mystery itself is central and intentional. The truth is not supposed to bend around player or character speculation, nor do you "roll to see if you're right". The game is about doing detective things, not being glamorized as a detective.


• Clue collection alone should NOT serve as a progress bar towards automatically solving the mystery. That's only half of what a detective does! Reasoning is important! Reasoning is the part of detective work that people overlook so completely that I'm designing a whole new game to try to address it in the first place.


• The mystery is NOT made up as the game goes along. That means the GM having an actual situation in mind with characters and some clues before the game begins, any improvised clues being based on the underlying truth rather than exclusively on what the players do, and no oracles. Likewise, as already mentioned, guesses about the truth do not magically become reality in order to make characters look cool.


• The game's design should NOT punish the players for not understanding what to do. That risks players shutting down, disengaging, and possibly resenting the entire ideas of mysteries and reasoning for the rest of their lives. It should instead make what one can do, especially during reasoning phases, obvious and accessible. Even rewarding players for doing "the right thing" is a dubious practice, as it risks replacing understanding with reward-seeking.


• The game should NOT rely on the GM asking leading questions to function on a basic level. That undercuts player agency, which is one of the most essential aspects of a roleplaying game. The game should be designed such that the players understand their options without the GM having to run them through an explicit checklist. Even the reasoning track is merely an implicit checklist.


• The game should NOT require reporting to an NPC, not even an "absent" one you merely write reports for. While that could theoretically make for a good means to get PCs reasoning, it doesn't prompt them to reason with each other. It also risks players abandoning their characters' collective responsibility to solve the mystery, and instead looking to one specific PC — or worse, the NPC the reports are for, or even the GM — to do it.


• For the fiftieth time, no, I am NOT interested in Gumshoe! Gumshoe's design solves problems I do not have (players missing clues or not understanding how to find them, players having trouble sharing the spotlight), and ignores the problems I do have (players not understanding that they need to reason about the clues with each other to figure out the mystery, not just gather clues until they have enough to redeem for the ending).

With all that said, then, what am I on about when I say that I want something on the character sheet that connects PCs to the idea of reasoning through clues? Recall that character sheets are the primary part of TTRPG rules that players tend to care about. To the extent that players interact with other props — such as miniatures, battlemaps, or ability cards — it's because they understand how those connect with their characters and things on their sheets (this is a model of my character, this is what they can see, these are the details of what they can try to do). By contrast, clue cards marked with or arranged by statuses clearly connect to the mystery, but don't clearly connect to the character in the same way, even if solving the mystery is supposed to be the character's responsibility. Thus, I want to bridge that gap.

When it comes to investigating, that gap seems to be bridged quite naturally by skills. People understand that you can use their social skills to prompt NPCs to share information or take action, or their education to know things about clues, or their lockpicking to break into locations or containers full of incriminating stuff. But having skills to roll for reasoning would ironically cut thought out of the entire process, turning what should be "ah-HA!" moments into "roll dice to win" gambles. As for what I actually want to have happen instead, what would rolling a die to talk to your fellow PCs accomplish? How do you put a number on "put the clues together as much as you can at the moment" so players actually pay attention to the idea?

Sure, specific mysteries can be made relevant to characters (though that can be done too often), and a detective is likely to have a motivation for solving mysteries. But that still isn't going to be enough to connect the character to the mental action that needs doing enough for the player to understand or care that the mental action is as important as the clue-finding, and indeed drives future clue-finding. If I can just bridge that gap, I may have enough to finally start writing a TTRPG book.

Thanks to Levi Kornelsen, Silverlion, Thought Punks, and Alex Keane for the conversation that led to this blog post, frustrating as it may have been.

Hexcrawls often involve keying a location of interest to every hex, and rolling for random encounters that aren't location-linked beyond being suitable for the wider region. However, it seems to me like also keying a random encounter to each hex (likely linked with that hex's location of interest, such as 2d4 bandits for a hex whose location of interest is a bandit camp) and having your random encounter rolls involve a chance of getting a nearby linked encounter instead of a wider regional one would be worthwhile. Localized random encounters like this could serve as clues as to what points of interest could be found nearby, particularly if the party has been missing its rolls to discover actual locations by pure chance.

1d6	Encounter Type
1-3	Local (roll 1d10)
4	Nearby (roll 1d12)
5-6	Regional (roll on regional table)

Of course, if a hex's keyed location of interest changes in some way, change the linked random encounter, too!

So this past weekend, I wrote a long, very angry letter to Paramount over Star Trek: Prodigy's pending cancellation... and more importantly, its being pulled from Paramount+ entirely rather than left available. Notably, this pulling is occurring before the already-practically-complete Season 2 is made available. Worse still, this is supposedly being done for the sake of a tax writeoff... something that has at least sometimes involved the actual destruction of the shows being written off.

Needless to say, the idea that it was even possible that Star Trek: Prodigy could be thrown into a bonfire as a sacrifice to the god of capitalism enraged me — and it would be far from the first corporate move in the past year to do so. This has been a year of destruction of communities, knowledge, and art, and of full-on assault against the ordinary, non-wealthy people who create and use such things by the billionaires and multimillionaires who use the products of others' hard work as poker chips. We all know about the sabotaging of Twitter, the invasive species that are "intelligent" text and image generation algorithms, and the intended take-backsies of the Reddit API and locking of it behind a ridiculously expensive paywall. For an example that hit closer to home for me, I had already been part of the fight against Wizards of the Coast's attempt to change the Open Gaming License; while that had the pleasantly surprising ending of WotC releasing the entire 5.1 SRD under the CC-BY license (rather than the likely-uncopyrightable excerpts they'd proposed releasing that way a week before that) to create a dual-licensing scheme, WotC then proceeded to blow the second chance they'd earned by sending the Pinkerton Detective Agency out to threaten and intimidate someone who'd received a misdelivered box of Magic cards.

If Square Enix or The LEGO Group goes evil on me too, I swear* that I'll find some way to invent an intercontinental guillotine.

* sarcastically, since the sworn action is not literally possible

In any case, in a year of peak corporate greed and billionaire hubris, I do not trust Paramount to do right by Star Trek: Prodigy by selling it to someone else or putting both full seasons out on Blu-Ray, particularly given how other companies have treated movies and TV shows that were written off for tax purposes. As such, the cancellation/pulling/tax writeoff news prompted me to write a very angry letter to Paramount... only to find that their online email form cut it off halfway through my second paragraph of nine. Thankfully, though, someone helpfully provided an appropriate snail mail address, so I printed my letter out on Sunday and sent it this past Monday. Now that it's been in the system long enough that it should hopefully already be postmarked, I am also going to post it here. That way, my communications will not simply be swallowed into a void of denial on Paramount's end, and the dates should confirm that my letter was not just "copied off the Internet".


( The angry letter )

So the OGL 1.2 survey dropped today. As promised, there are text boxes everywhere to write in details — and based on my experience, I'm inclined to believe that the insistence that they read this stuff is accurate. At the same time, though, I recognize that allowing Hasbro/WotC to corral the conversation to these text boxes, where nobody else will see, is a terrible mistake. As such, I am posting what I wrote (though not most of my radio button answers; you can assume they reflect the text).

This was all off-the-cuff, so it may not be absolute perfection. Nevertheless, I am reasonably confident in my convictions and my ability to write about them.

( 2. Now that you've read the proposed OGL 1.2, what concerns or questions come to mind for you? )

( 4. What would be needed to improve your perception of Dungeons & Dragons' future? )

( 7. Do you have any other comments about the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and/or the content that will be released under Creative Commons? )

( 9. Do you have any other comments about the Notice of Deauthorization? )

( 12. Do you have any other comments about the types of content covered and/or the content ownership rights outlined by the proposed OGL 1.2? )

( 16. Do you have any other comments about the 'You Control Your Content', 'Warranties And Disclaimers', or 'Modification Or Termination' sections? )

( 18. Do you have any other comments about the Virtual Tabletop Policy? )

( 21. Would you be comfortable releasing TTRPG content under the proposed OGL 1.2 as written? 22. Why do you say that? )

( 24. Do you have any other comments about Content Creator Badges? )

( What other feedback do you have for us (related to the Open Games License or otherwise)? )

A lot of my anxieties as a GM (though not all of them) stem from a D&D 3.5 campaign that I ran in the late '00s. The idea was an Eberron campaign set in Sharn, wherein the PCs would be dragonmarked heirs who inexplicably had not just the normal powers of their marks, but also powers similar to those of hybrids with highly magical creatures. Most templates that gained spell-like abilities according to a creature's HD were fair game. Since being dragonmarked at all puts some pressure on characters to serve their Dragonmarked House, the more powerful the mark the greater the responsibilities, these extra powers that broke the marks' normal patterns could lead to a variety of problems if people's Houses learned about them, and D&D is first and foremost about having adventures, I was basically envisioning this as a superhero campaign, secret identities and all.

The campaign was called "Mighty Scions"... which was intended to be a working title and I'd said as much, but maddeningly none of the PCs would come up with either a name for their party/superhero team nor a term for those with planar-empowered marks other than "like us". I ended up having someone in-world come up with the term "mighty scions" later to finally put a lid on their constant use of "like us".

And it didn't last more than a few months total, because so much went so horribly wrong.

• The party in general, being played by people assembled from the very small pool of anyone I knew at all with any interest in D&D, had a severe case of "pickup party syndrome" — behaving as though the rest of the group were just uninteresting coworkers, and all they themselves had to do was play their role well in isolation. I had intended "We have this unusual problem in common that we can't talk with most other people about, and we also have in common that we want to try to use our weird powers to help people despite this; let's band together!" to serve as party glue, but it didn't. Given prior GMing experience, I had attempted to head off "pickup party syndrome" and foster a party dynamic by linking people to the Five Man Band trope page, but it seemed to be processed as just a second layer of "balanced party" rather than an attempt to foster relationship dynamics. (To be fair, in later years it did wind up identified more as functional roles and less as a set of character dynamics, but it wasn't at the time.) Basically, of the original party, the two friends of mine tended to only interact with each other, and the two acquaintances of mine likewise; I was treated like the only person worth addressing otherwise.


• In retrospect, a better introductory adventure centered on making a big deal about the group's unusual powers would have gone a long way towards hammering the commonality home, and what I created as a first adventure might've made a better second adventure. It would've been very hard to do without blowing the lid off of what was supposed to be a long-term secret, but it would've paid dividends. It would have done a lot to hammer home that the premise was not a light flavoring or an element of only one character, but a major influence over the campaign's style. Some people, it seems, don't really listen to campaign premises and don't realize their implications until they see them in gameplay.


• I had, at the beginning, thought that a good introductory recurring villain would be a "Smithy" sort of character, someone who was interested in causing havoc by arming people. Unfortunately, it turned out that one of the acquaintances I'd recruited — the one who pounced on the opportunity to be "the leader" and "the detective" of the group, for reasons that we'll get into later — was in no way, shape, or form onboard with the concept of a recurring villain. She would not let the adventure end until the person who'd supplied the minor lackey who was supposed to be the villain of what was supposed to be "issue 1" was absolutely and unequivocally dead. Clearly, to her mind, a recurring villain was a loss condition in the game of D&D, not a potentially entertaining trope. She acted so outraged at the idea that the lackey had a bigger villain behind him, and so zealous in her insistence that he must die, that it was obvious that if I'd let said bigger villain escape or pivoted to a different recurring villain in some fashion, she would have felt cheated and still would not have let the adventure end until things were neatly tied with a blood-soaked bow. The entire campaign would have distorted around chasing down this one villain or his replacement, and nobody would have had fun — not the other PCs who signed up for a different campaign and didn't see this villain as being nearly so unbearable an existence, not myself who did not want to be running an endless pursuit campaign, not even the "leader and detective" player who would've seen the whole thing as continued malicious denial of her demand for closure. Even after the mini-dungeon and boss fight in which the party did in fact get to kill him, she complained that the resulting "issue 1" was too long and should be called "arc 1" instead, as though this wasn't the result of her own persistence. This forced the campaign into a completely episodic format for the majority of its run, though I still held out hope that once the party gelled, I could bring in larger myth-arc elements.


• Looking back on this, it's an object lesson in what happens when fundamental agendas are mismatched. This acquaintance wanted to absolutely and unconditionally win a game, and considered leaving any sort of loose end to be a chump move. If I'd known she would behave like this and had a choice of other players to consider, I wouldn't have recruited a player who thought this way. Clearly, she wouldn't have been on board with long-term arcs later any more than she was at the start.


• The other acquaintance wanted to be "the smart guy", but turned out to have neither the brains for it nor the skills to compensate. He made the common culturally-induced mistake of thinking "intelligence" only involved knowing more facts than other people. This most notably led to him keeping information pertinent to the whole party to himself early on, partly in the interests of trying to "seem smart", partly because he mistook the underlying premise of the campaign for "his character's thing" only. He also once asked me what the strongest summon he had available was in the context of wanting to fight something in a stone-paved area, I pointed at the fire elemental, and he then proceeded to send said fire elemental into a garden and was surprised that this set things on fire; insert shocked Pikachu face here. The one intelligent thing I remember his character doing was being the first to run away from a losing fight.


• This guy was the most obvious problem in the early campaign. Because his issues were so flashy, they ended up distracting me from the deeper, more insidious problems in the game... particularly his friend the "leader and detective", as strange as that may sound in retrospect. As a result, I sweat the small stuff, assuming it's going to turn out to be symptoms of some kind of enormous problem. To his credit, unlike the educated character in my prior campaign attempt that got anywhere, he at least didn't assume that being "the smart guy" meant that he had a Correctness Halo giving him as much or more power over the truth of the setting as I... somebody else did that instead.


• The acquaintance who jumped on the opportunity to be "the leader" and "the detective" was secretly thinking in pure dungeon-crawling terms, considering her character to be first and foremost a melee warrior and grousing if the party didn't get to fights fast enough. She didn't do detective things because (as she later explained) "D&D doesn't have detectives"... never mind that this was an urban campaign in Eberron, she had detective skills and feats on her sheet, and the detective part was not an artifact of the Five Man Band but a specific request I'd made for the purposes of this campaign. She also quietly assumed that a superhero premise meant logic did not apply at all, compounding the issue. Her treating the "detective" role as a joke and an imposition when I expected her character to actually do detective work ironically led to the campaign having more mystery focus and less combat focus than I'd intended, even though she expected and wanted the opposite. Because she couldn't actually do the job properly, the mystery parts of the game wound up stretched out and distributed around the group as a whole. Note that through all of this, she never actually explained what she did and did not expect or want, only occasionally griped in very unclear ways; this becomes important later.


• One thing I learned from this is that some people, no matter how much you explain or demonstrate a premise that changes core gameplay, will still never see past your game system's brand name. Some people are convinced that D&D is only one specific thing, or Call of Cthulhu is only one specific thing, or DWRP jamjars are only one specific thing. If your campaign doesn't fit their expectations, they'll act as though it does anyway — sometimes blatantly (treating NPCs as monsters to be killed for lack of actual monsters, for example), but other times far more subtly (treating NPCs as meaningless background color instead of someone to interact with or someone who might overhear your character). In the subtle cases, one may not even realize something's wrong until it's too late... One reason why I long to make a coherent game system of my own is that it would, in theory, prevent people from stubbornly expecting whatever they think "D&D" is instead of the actual campaign premise.


• In addition to this player pouncing on the "detective" role and yet not actually buying into it, this player also didn't actually seem to like, let alone buy into, the superhero premise. Why she joined such a game despite this is something that to this day I don't completely understand. Her lack of buy-in for superheroes manifested not only in her loud and zealous opposition to recurring villains and her assumption that logic didn't apply, but also in horrible Clark Kenting. I had to work around her giving no regard to secrecy at all, her refusal to consider the idea of the party getting a base of operations, and her disinterest in actually having her character be meaningfully connected to members of her own House (which is to say, her character's "secret identity" life). She tended to actively resist genre conventions; I had to basically have NPC authorities warn them that killing enemies rather than subduing them and turning them in would have negative consequences for them in order for murders like that at the end of arc 1 to stop.


• While the matter of refusing to grasp the implications of an urban campaign that calls for a detective can be chalked up to a failure to accept the idea that a premise can change fundamental gameplay loops within the context of a known tabletop RPG system, the active resistance to a genre aspect of a campaign that one joins anyway is something I've had a harder time making sense of. On the other hand, by sheer coincidence the player had chosen a House with a major counterintelligence aspect, which made it easy for me to assume that they understood the need for secrecy even if the character didn't, and were thus cleaning up after her character as best they could... which still was not perfectly, given just how much the "detective and leader" was flaunting any concept of secrecy. Unfortunately, the campaign did not last long enough for the group to see the consequences of her having the party talk shop in a bakery.


• The distribution of detective duties meant a lot of splitting up, which resulted in my players having contradictory expectations of me. On one hand, I was supposed to let everyone play every session, or else it "wasn't worth showing up". On the other hand, players refused to schedule sessions outside of our scheduled weekly session so we could get split-party scenes done and have group sessions dedicated to group scenes. And on the mutant third hand, they refused to stop splitting up, because splitting up saves time from an in-world perspective. Do people think the role of GM comes with the ability to bend space and time in the real world?


• This bullshit is one of a number of things that has convinced me that in dedicated roleplaying campaigns, not all responsibility lies on the GM. There are player responsibilities too. Roleplaying is not passive entertainment, but an active and participatory craft. While it is fun, it is also work; you need to put in effort, you need to cooperate with the GM and with each other, and you need to take scheduling seriously to make it all possible in the first place. This isn't even a new idea; sports teams and musical bands have existed for a long time. (For that matter, the same can be said of raiding guilds in MMOs; I've found similar concerns to apply to them.) If I seem "pushy", "overzealous", or "overinvested" when it comes to making an RP work, this is why. I'm actually trying. How about you?


• One pattern that started to show up was that while players understood perfectly well how to search for clues — examine bodies, scour suspicious sites, talk to people, and so forth — they generally had no idea what they were supposed to actually do with the clues once they found them. They knew they were supposed to report their findings to each other, of course... but after that, the chat room would go silent. There were many times when I had to kick the game back into gear by rolling Knowledge checks for the players, because they never did anything like discuss clues amongst themselves, compare clues with other clues, or above all ask questions. This was the point where "pickup party syndrome" really struck me as the most glaring, as characters did not of their own accord converse with each other about the clues; I had to feed them Knowledge check results I rolled one at a time, from lowest roll to highest, in order to create results anything like such a conversation. Damningly, there was one piece of information that I gave to two different players that went in one ear and out the other in both cases; apparently, if they didn't understand it, it was better to pretend it didn't exist than to suffer the humiliation of saying "huh?"


• To be entirely fair, as mentioned above Mighty Scions was not intended first and foremost to be a mystery campaign; it just worked out that way. Even so, I believe the way things played out here exposes something critical about mystery campaigns that literally no one ever managed to realize before. I talk about it at length in On the missing half of mystery tabletop RP... including how it took me over a decade to pin down a cause, and how dismaying it was that third parties flat-out gaslit me about the effects I saw.


• The "pickup party syndrome" and so-called "leader and detective" issues came to a head in the fourth adventure. Because the party was not gelling or working together well as a team, I decided they should face a party who did work together well as foes. Unfortunately, the player of the "leader and detective" took the PCs having to retreat from a losing fight against a well-coordinated team not as an object lesson in how the party could use better teamwork, but as a metagame signal that chasing the villains was "wrong" — even though the party gained a level from the ordeal and had a new party member show up, both things that could have tilted a future confrontation in the party's favor. What she did instead, between that misinterpretation and my own poor handling of investigative elements on the fly, was to decide that the villains would rob the same place they'd already robbed again, "because they're evil!", and absolutely refuse to let the party budge from the building — or even fortify it or create rumors of there being anything new to steal so it would make any kind of logical or narrative sense. Even my trying to actually use a metagame signal (a reporter showing up with news from outside the building) that the villains had done something somewhere else was dismissed as "a trick!", which led to my letting some snark through in my building anger and the session stopping. It ultimately turned out that what she expected was that volunteering for the roles of "leader" and "detective" would mean that I as the DM would bend reality to make her character always look smart and be right — that these were not things her character was supposed to actively do through her effort, but things her character was supposed to passively be by my grace. She thought she was volunteering to have her character glorified in a situation that was being made up as I went, not taking on part of a team's responsibilities in a world with some level of solidity. She didn't speak up about any of this until I confronted her in rage, so her issues were stealthy compared to the "smart guy's"... though I can see the warning signs in retrospect. Ultimately, I kicked her out.


• To be fair, one aspect of the problem here was underprep on my part. I should have anticipated the possibility that instead of either following the blood trail of the villains or trying to guess where they might go next, the group might instead investigate the hotel they were already at in order to figure out where to go next. Even so, though, the insistence on sulking in a corner until I made her character right was frankly inexcusable in the context of a traditional RPG. At best, it reminded me of camping a respawning special mob in an MMO because it didn't drop the Obvious Clue key item the first time. At worst, it struck me as the behavior of a petulant child. Frankly, it should have never come to this; in the face of my asking for a detective in a game that in her view "doesn't have detectives", she should have asked what I meant, not assumed that I meant a free Correctness Halo.


• For a moment of relative levity in this litany of things that went wrong, there was a combat encounter I didn't balance properly, making it too strong — partly the system's fault for having the CRs of many "dumb brute" animals be too low (and this was, in the end, a templated big cat), but partly because I overestimated the players' ability to make particular intuitive leaps. I had structured it with the intent that the physical sorts would struggle for a couple of turns, then the cleric would swoop in and save the day. Unfortunately, the cleric didn't end up turning the tide. Why? Because I expected these players, as players of JRPGs, to attempt one of the most basic of JRPG strategies: if physical damage is working poorly, try magic damage. Not only did this not seem to occur to them, but the magic damage I was expecting them to exploit was this cleric's ability to spontaneously cast sanctified spells such as Ayailla's Radiant Burst... if he succeeded at a Knowledge (religion) roll, as to my mind he was right on the edge. In the end, the group wound up setting up a dramatic moment for me to fiat it to death.


• Aside from learning the hard way that big cats' CR in D&D 3.5 is underestimated (a lesson my current DM as of this writing also wound up learning the hard way), I learned not to take people applying knowledge I know for a fact that they have for granted, and not to have an encounter rely on the use of an ability that the PCs literally never use and have openly written off as something that may as well not be there. This is not the first time I had seen somebody simply refuse to use an ability with a random chance element, though I didn't in that case get to see that person refuse to use it even under duress.


• In response to us losing our so-called "detective" and the so-called "smart guy" leaving alongside his friend without comment, a new player joined with a character to replace both of those roles at once. This player was both intrigued by the game I was running on its own terms and actually understood mysteries. Unfortunately, this also meant that this player was so much better than anyone else at understanding and thus playing mysteries that it fostered envy and resentment from other players. (Well, one also had a personal reason for resentment that actually stemmed from a misunderstanding, but that's a whole other story.) While this never led to a crash and burn, it did dampen goodwill and probably made the game less fun for everyone else.


• This is why Justin Alexander's growing thoughts on the concept of game structures (which were only posted years after the campaign took place) really grabs my attention. Not only was the difference between someone who understood how to play a mystery and those who did not a matter of night and day, but it seems to me as though everyone understanding how to play the game being run is absolutely critical to the game being fun for everyone. This, too, factors into my desire to make a game system that is centered on the kinds of games I actually want to play and run; with the right framework well-presented, everyone will actually understand what they're signing up for and how to play.


• After one more arc, one of my other initial players in the campaign at the time quit and terminated our friendship over my getting mad at and kicking out the so-called "detective"... right as I was preparing a focus episode for his character. Through the pain, I wound up retooling the adventure so that his character was one of the murder victims (no thanks to one group of people I'd thought were my friends joking about it all in an over-the-top manner when I tried to ask for their help in said pained retooling). It turned out to be one of the campaign's better adventures. This was a noteworthy case of actually overcoming an awkward situation.


• The character's player saw the edited log years later, and was satisfied with the way I handled his character's death. I think that speaks particularly well of how it turned out and proves it's something to be proud of.


• Over the course of all of this, I had been running things in a relatively episodic fashion, in the hopes that the party would gel over time before I brought in anything serious. Six episodic adventures, three lost players, and two new players later, I got sick of waiting and gave up hope on this approach, and tried running an introductory adventure for a longer-term arc... only to be met with cries of "too intense!" and demands of a beach episode at the most awkward possible time.


• I feel like some of my mistake here was not reiterating that starting out episodic and becoming serialized later was my intent to begin with. If I recall correctly, I only really mentioned this in passing at the start of the campaign, when — as has been established — a lot of information went in one ear and out the other. The one player who was still here from the start thought of the campaign only as episodic, and was blindsided by the attempted shift to the campaign being in one way what I wanted to do in the first place.


• During the course of my trying to run a side arc away from the city since obviously the players didn't actually want to dive into the serious stuff there I'd only just introduced, it became clear that the three players I had left wanted completely incompatible campaign structures, and I couldn't please more than one of them at a time. One wanted to be able to explore freely at will with no regard for what other players or characters wanted or the consequences of wandering off, like an Elder Scrolls game. Another wanted a completely linear game with minimal thought required and bright-line indications of where to go when, with his only responsibility being to fight fights and come up with dialogue, like a Final Fantasy game. The third was actually here for the mission-based, mystery-centric game I had wound up running in the first place (which I labeled "Shin Megami Tensei" for lack of a better analogy). ...And yet people were still confused when I gave up on the campaign on these grounds.


• I feel as though this was a problem that partly stemmed from a fundamental lack of deeper understanding of tabletop RP in general, especially game structures, and partly stemmed from my having to work with so small a pool of potential players that I couldn't assemble a like-minded group even if we'd had the necessary shared vocabulary to identify them in the first place. What distresses me is that even when I try to explain to others that I can't run a game where one player wants The Elder Scrolls, one wants Final Fantasy, and one wants Shin Megami Tensei, no one gets it.


• One house rule I had in place for this game was somehow so incomprehensible to my entire playerbase that it was never made use of within the context of my own campaign. The context of the house rule basically went like this: As an Eberron game, we were using action points. As I understand the action point rules, your action points reset whenever you level up; thus, the action points you gain each level are on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. We were essentially using what these days would be called milestone experience; thus, everyone would level up at the same time and I'd know when that would be. Of course, this also happened to conceptually be a superhero game. Therefore, I had this house rule: during a fight that the group would level up after, players could spend two action points to use a capability that they were just about to obtain from their level up one fight ahead of time. I reminded players of this house rule whenever we got into such a fight... but nobody ever used it, and lots of unused action points went to waste. In a shounen-anime-flavored D&D 3.5 campaign I played in a few years later with basically exactly the same rules context, I asked the DM for permission to use this old Mighty Scions house rule. He agreed, and it was with my demonstration of how to use the house rule that it finally clicked. At the cusp of every level in that game from there on out, someone would use a "class feature preview".


• The positive way to look at this is that some things are better demonstrated than explained. However, I can't help but feel as if this instead means that I can't verbally explain simple ideas for the life of me... I also feel as though I failed to take into account that people were reluctant to spend action points at all despite their use-it-or-lose-it status. They were inappropriately suffering from the same hoarding instincts that make people reluctant to use consumables in JRPGs... even on the final boss, after which point those consumables would become meaningless because the game is about to end. The players' refusal to use the "class feature/superpower preview" house rule was very much like a JRPG player's refusal to use a Megalixir while fighting the final boss.

All of this led to my losing friends, losing confidence in my ability to communicate at all let alone GM, fearing that GMing is only for people popular enough to have dozens of players to choose from and assemble into a coherent group of four to six people with universal buy-in and compatible schedules, and fearing that any small problem in RP will snowball into disaster within weeks if left unaddressed. I seem to have somehow lost the ability to interest people in campaign concepts since then, too, and I'm not entirely sure how or why.

And yet, at the same time, enough good came out of Mighty Scions that rather than regarding it as an unmitigated disaster, I see it as a successful failure. More good RP came out of it than just the one salvaged focus adventure. Kyra, Liridon, and especially Althea were all excellent characters, and Gharta wasn't bad either. I may not have been good at running mysteries and most of my players may not have been good at playing them, but I enjoyed trying, I improved a little over time, and I'd like to try again — on purpose this time. I feel I've learned some lessons about appropriate levels of prep from it, and I've studied GMing a lot over the years since then as well.

Way back in 2009, I scoured several sources (though not every conceivable one in 3.5) to flesh out the spell list of the Healer base class from the Miniatures Handbook. My comments at the time were as follows:



Looking back at this effort in the face of being deep into a 3.5 game today, it actually turned out far better than my fuzzy memory was telling me.

At the time, Pathfinder was barely more than a houseruled transcription of the 3.5 SRD. By the end of its life, however, Pathfinder 1e was a treasure trove of things that could be backported to 3.5. And unlike 3.5, where only a small subset of rules are open content, the majority of things in Pathfinder 1e are shareable. As such, here is an update of my old list, with links to the new spells included.

0-level: create water, cure minor wounds, dawn, deathwatch, detect magic, detect poison, foraging charm, light, mending, purify food and drink, read magic, resistance, virtue.

1st-level: abstemiousness, bless water, cloak of shade, conviction, cure light wounds, delay disease, diagnose disease, dream feast, endure elements, faith healing, fastidiousness, foundation of stone, goodberry, healthful rest, hidden spring, invest light protection, lesser vigor, protection from evil, remove fear, remove paralysis, remove sickness, resist starvation, resurgence, rite of bodily purity, rite of centered mind, sanctuary, shield of faith, spell flower, speak with animals, touch of jorasco.

2nd-level: benediction, blessing of courage and life, body ward, calm emotions, close wounds, clothier's closet, consecrate, cure moderate wounds, divine insight, divine protection, delay poison, ease pain, estanna's stew, false life, gentle repose, ghost touch armor, healing lorecall, invigorating poison, protection from negative energy, protection from positive energy, reinvigorating wind, remove addiction, remove nausea, remove blindness/deafness, remove disease, resist energy, restful cloak, shared healing, shield of fortification, shield other, soothing word, soul ward, stabilize, summon elysian thrush, lesser restoration, web shelter.

3rd-level: antidragon aura, attune form, channeled divine shield, create food and water, crown of protection, curative distillation, cure serious wounds, energy aegis, heart's ease, invest moderate protection, irian's light, magic circle against evil, magic vestment, mass conviction, mass lesser vigor, mass resist energy, neutralize poison, protection from energy, refreshment, remove curse, remove fatigue, restoration, safety, shield of warding, status, symbol of healing, tiny hut, vigor.

4th-level: astral hospice, channeled divine health, convert wand, cure critical wounds, death ward, delay death, freedom of movement, globe of tranquil water, greater resistance, greater shield of fortification, grove of respite, healing spirit, life bubble, mass cure light wounds, mass shield of faith, panacea, persistent vigor, planar tolerance, positive energy aura, revenance, secure shelter, seed of life, sheltered vitality, stoneskin, sustain.

5th-level: atonement, aura of evasion, break enchantment, contingent energy resistance, dance of the unicorn, darts of life, greater status, greater vigor, healing circle, indomitability, invest heavy protection, life's grace, mass cure moderate wounds, mass sanctuary, pillar of life, raise dead, renewed vigor, revivify, stalwart pact, stone to flesh, sturdy tree fort, true seeing, warding gems.

6th-level: energy immunity, greater restoration, heal, heroes' feast, mass cure serious wounds, regenerate, revive outsider, secure corpse, superior resistance, vigorous circle.

7th-level: energetic healing, fairy ring retreat, fortunate fate, mage's magnificent mansion, mass cure critical wounds, mass restoration, rejuvenating light, renewal pact, repulsion, resurrection.

8th-level: death pact, holy aura, mass death ward, mass heal, protection from spells.

9th-level: foresight, nine lives (no racial requirement), pavilion of grandeur, prismatic sphere, true resurrection, resplendent mansion, sublime revelry, undeath's eternal foe.

As before, I hope this is of use.

• Divine magic is no mere misunderstood arcane force, no simple pools of energy tapped via delusion. Failures to tame it the same way arcane magic has been tamed prove there's more to it than atheists say. The divine is a real and vast force of its own, and must come to be understood on its own terms.


• Questioning the divine is not heresy — quite the opposite, pursuit of knowledge is as applicable to sacred space as mundane reality. Mortals can come to know divinity even better than any one religion can tell us. Seeking and sharing divine truths and advancing our knowledge together is itself a devotional practice.


• All faiths have a grasp on some fragment of the greater divine truths, however small; that is why they work. People who've touched the divine filter their understanding differently. To understand how two very different divine spells drawn from very different faiths inspire the same miracles is to better understand the nature of the divine.

The Archival Foundation does not claim to be a religion, but an organization of academics — though some outsiders would disagree, either calling them a new religion in denial or a motley crew of heretics. They are founded on principles of gnosticism and religious liberalism, seeking an understanding of the divine magic of Eberron that transcends religion as people know it while offering it the respect it deserves and clearly requires. Ideally, they hope to bring divine magic to the mainstream through such understanding, improving society with it just as arcane magic does.

The Foundation is relatively new, having been founded by pacifistic scholars during the Last War. While questions about the nature of divine magic and divine casters abounded well before this, their belief that such power would help lower the death toll of the War if it were just understood added new urgency to these questions. They realized that prior attempts to make sense of divine magic were typically the efforts of those who hoped to prove that it wasn't "divine" at all, and took the stance that this was the root of their failures. Realizing that zealous fundamentalists and possibly even agents of House Jorasco might take exception to their efforts, the Archives they built of divine texts, scrolls, and occasional relics were cleverly hidden in cities across Khorvaire. Only after the signing of the Treaty of Thronehold, by which time their numbers and progress allowed them to defend themselves, did they reveal themselves and their goals.

Today, they welcome members of many religions into their Archives, seeking productive religious debates and exchange. Indeed, many members of the Archival Foundation also belong to established religions, seeing their own religion as merely a starting point towards a greater understanding of divine truths. One does not have to belong to a religion already to be welcome at an Archive, though; so long as one keeps an open mind and is not warned against by someone already known, they can come learn or contribute as well. However, while this does help the organization advance their understanding of divine magic, it also leads to internal feuding. The organization often only barely holds together through common cause.

While they have no rites of their own and their Archives are the closest thing to temples they have, the Archival Foundation has adopted a symbol: a side view of an astral deva carrying a book, with a yardstick along its wing. Buildings that contain secret doors or passages into Archives now typically advertise their presence with such a symbol on the entrance, though the entrances to the Archives themselves are still warily guarded.

One example of the plague of black-and-white thinking in the world today is the dueling extremes in advice concerning what verbs to use to tag dialogue.

For a significant part of the 20th Century, the prevailing advice was that "said is dead" — one should never use it because it's bland. Pamphlets were even handed out in English classes full of related words to use instead, known as "said books". Unfortunately, these said books were generally lists without any context, and even included completely inappropriate words like "implied" or "ejaculated". Furthermore, teachers offered little to no guidance on the usage of colorful alternatives, instead just marking stories down for using "said" and calling it a day. Needless to say, this led to a lot of people misusing various alternatives to "said", often painfully so.

Thus, in the 21st Century, there has been a severe pushback against what has come to be known with the sneering reference "said booking". Writing advice videos insist that "said" is a perfectly serviceable and invisible word... and, the implication seems to be, one should never use anything else. Every alternative, these people insist, automatically draws attention to itself and knocks the reader out of the story, the implication being that using "said" constantly won't gradually do the same. One can easily find defenses of "said" several minutes long, and not because of the presence of any nuance to these presentations. After all, nuance is so out of style.

It should be abundantly clear that I think both of these approaches to the problem of what verbs should accompany one's dialogue are poorly thought out, to say nothing of trying to dictate what amounts to a question of style. "Said booking" is easy to do poorly, leading to distracting and absurd results... but on the other hand, using only "said" is a quick ticket to repetitive beige prose. Furthermore, both of these extreme viewpoints overlook the third possibility: not using a verb at all. I'm of the opinion that all of these possibilities deserve respect and consideration from writers, both in the broader question of one's style and the narrower question of what to do with each individual line of dialogue. It troubles me that no one seems interested in trying to explain how to do this instead of expanding a two-minute PSA into six, so I'm going to take a stab at it myself.

On the topic of "said" itself, there is some degree of truth to the insistence that "said" is an invisible, punctuation-like word. It's a choice worth considering if there's nothing special about how something is being said or what the speaker is doing, but you still want to denote the speaker explicitly. It has other potential benefits as well; it's easy and effortless to use compared to the alternatives, and is ideal for children's books due to the limited vocabulary and reading comprehension of the very young.

However, too much of any one thing will call attention to itself — even punctuation, given how readily people will mock an overabundance of ellipses. Furthermore, using "said" in places where the dialogue is clearly well outside of a bland normalcy can be every bit as distracting as a misused alternative; even a children's book should consider using "whispered" and "shouted" where appropriate.

Not using a verb to describe the dialogue at all is a more difficult option than using "said". If the speaker is sufficiently obvious from context, one can simply use nothing but the quote itself; however, this can grow disorienting in excess or confusing if there are more than two people speaking, so I recommend using this only sparingly. The more potentially nuanced variation is to describe the speaker's actions or body language instead of embellishing the dialogue itself with a verb. This is a good way both to express emotion that's not obvious from the speaker's words and to keep the reader connected to the world rather than feeling as though they're reading a chat room log. Furthermore, it still denotes the speaker, and has more room for variation and expressiveness than any use of "said booking".

Even this technique can be misused, however. Saying nothing of consequence is one potential pitfall — for example, stating that Alice is looking at Bob when that's not a clear change from what she was doing before. Another form of misuse is making the descriptions too long relative to the speed of the conversation; this can make dialogue choppy or slow an action scene down. Taken to an extreme, the dialogue can seem to proceed at a severely unnatural pace in favor of the author wanting to show off in the middle of a conversation.

Furthermore, the technique can be overused. Overly frequent description of body language, especially strong body language, can lead to a sense of melodrama or distract from the dialogue itself. Lots of description of actions taken while talking can be appropriate to tense or generally active scenes, but using it for a low-key situation can make people appear antsy or distracted. Taken to excess, use of description of things other than the dialogue can even give the impression that the speakers aren't actually speaking at all. Does the writer simply like putting telepathy in quotes?

Thus, "said booking" exists as something of a middle ground between using "said" and inserting description around your dialogue... but only if it's used properly. Of the three general ways to frame dialogue, this is the hardest to do right, hence why its prior presentation was so unforgivably bad and the backlash against it is so extreme. Furthermore, if alternatives to "said" are misused, the fallout will be worse than that of misusing "said" or description. Misuse of "said" is merely dull, and misuse of description normally just distracting; misuse of "said booking" looks utterly ridiculous. The last thing a writer wants to appear to be is functionally illiterate.

The first thing a writer interested in using "said booking" must do is actually familiarize themselves with what various alternatives to "said" mean — and not just casually, but intimately. There are many subtle shades of meaning between various "near synonyms" that almost no thesaurus effectively communicates, and "near synonyms" of "said" are no exception to this. In the process of educating oneself, one should be wary of words with distracting alternative meanings (such as the infamous "ejaculated") and words that don't actually make sense to apply to direct quotes (such as "implied"). Furthermore, one shouldn't stop at "near synonyms" of "said"; broaden the search in order to get as rich a selection as possible, so you'll always have the right word for the job. If you're not entirely sure you're using the right word, don't be afraid to look at the dictionary again to verify.

The next thing one should typically do is to make sure that one chooses a word that expresses what the character is actually doing, but isn't completely obvious from context. There is no need to add "he shouted" after a cry of "Look out!" under normal circumstances, but in a stealthy situation one might need to differentiate between whether he shouted that warning, implicitly blowing his cover for the sake of the other person's safety, or merely hissed it in hopes of warning the other person without giving himself away.

The rarer, stronger, or narrower a word is, the more important it is to only use it when it's important. "Explained" is a relatively plain word, useful in a variety of situations and not prone to calling attention to itself if used properly and in moderation. "Exposited", by contrast, isn't used nearly as often, and may even send a minority of readers to the dictionary. If you're going to use it, only use it when you want to call attention to that particular shade of meaning and make the reader think about the expressed fact that the character is expositing.

Be careful of using the same word too often, though. Alternatives to "said" reach the point of distracting overuse far quicker than "said" itself. Know which words are similar enough to each other to substitute for one another, while being careful not to misuse a word in the process. If your "said booking" is highly repetitive even then, it may be a warning sign that the content of the story itself is too lacking in variation... or just an indication that you should mix in other techniques too.

If one wishes to use "said booking" heavily enough to mostly or completely avoid "said", the importance of avoiding obviousness diminishes — but not to nothingness. Using a slightly different word than one might expect will help point out important information. The importance of using alternatives correctly, knowing which words are less attention-grabbing, and varying the words one uses to avoid reader fatigue, however, are significantly magnified. Said booking is a skill; the more you intend to use it, the better you have to be at it in order to get away with it. Practice and vocabulary enrichment in terms of both breadth and depth are key.

A related maligned technique that should be mentioned here is the use of adverbs to modify either "said" or an alternative. Avoiding obviousness is even more important here; a redundant adverb, more than anything else in this essay, will prompt the reader to leave the story long enough to quip to the absent author, "Thank you, Captain Obvious." There are two times when one might wish to consider bringing an adverb in: when no alternative to "said" will work in place of "said" paired with an adverb, and when one wishes to add a second dimension to a dialogue tag. Concerning the latter use, be careful that adding depth to the tag is in fact what you're doing; it is possible to be redundant or contradictory instead if one isn't careful.

I hope that this helps you begin to develop a multifaceted understanding of all of these tools a writer may use when narrating about, or in the immediate vicinity of, dialogue. Contrary to longstanding yet shifting tradition, there is no fight between good and evil to be found here — only favorites, applicability, and ease or difficulty of use.

Sapient technology, by its computerized nature, has a strong sense of math and reliable memories. Typically, if such people don't know a number off the top of their heads, they can calculate it from data on hand, including data humans wouldn't have noticed or remembered. They tend to be more precise about numbers generally than humans at least in their own heads. If they're rounding to vague powers of 10 when they speak, it's just to be polite to any humans present.

Sometimes, however, there really isn't enough data to form a calculation from no matter how much they comb their databanks, nor is there any additional information they can pull up at a moment's notice without visibly plugging themselves into a smartphone or the like (a step widely considered necessary for their own security — an always-on personal wireless Internet connection is a potentially dangerous thing to have when it's possible for one's very thoughts and feelings to be hacked). Furthermore, at times numbers aren't supposed to be derived from other data at all, but instead arbitrarily chosen. As such, once in a great while even an AI must estimate a number, make a wild guess, or simply pick a number out of nowhere.

However, sapient technology is literally not wired identically to the human brain. Humans tend to favor bases 5 and 10 due to the number of fingers they have; AI instead tends towards base 2 like their underlying architecture. As such, robots, androids, and other AIs tend towards different numbers than humans do when speculating.

( And the numbers are... )