#141: Do The Thing

fun conversations over on the Yes Indie'd Podcast

I. Dear Reader

Over on the Yes Indie’d Podcast, I had a really nice conversation with Fiona Hopkins and Stephanie Burt about their lovely podcast, Team Up Moves, where they play and review superhero RPGs. I want to talk about something that came up right at the very end in a section titled “All Advice Is Advice For Myself”.

This is Stephanie Burt’s tip:

In terms of RPG specific advice I tend to try to use the most distinctive powers that my character has to do everything. If you've got telekinesis and it's breakfast time, I'm gonna try to cook using telekinesis and that's fun…

I’ve been thinking about this as well and I’ve been referring to it as: Do The Thing.

This is primarily applicable to one shots, short-run campaigns, or any game when I’m first starting out with a new character. The idea is that my character is supposed to be good at something but sometimes I forget to do it in key situations. For example: I’ll make a hacker and then I’ll try to talk my way past a guard, instead of making them leave by sending a fake message to their phone or whatever. It’s been useful for me to think of my characters as a hammer for whom every single task, no matter how big or small, is a nail. Basically, to start as a one-note as possible. And then branch out from there.

(The sometimes less-fun corollary to this is when your character can only do one tactically optimal thing and you spend whole sessions doing just that, again and again. That’s not what I’m talking about and I don’t really play games where that’s possible anymore.)

This also helps with thinking about how to set other people up to do their thing. Sometimes imagining my character as a one-trick pony lets me look at situation and then throw the ball to someone else. Sometimes I’ll throw it to a specific player but I think often, I will just say something like “Maybe someone else should handle this, because if left to me, I’m going to do [insert convoluted plan here] and it sounds like a terrible idea.” Basically, set someone else up to Do The Thing.

Anyway, it’s a good episode, check it out!

Yours auto-advisingly,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• The Fine Blueprints podcast discusses comedy and TTRPGs, which I find interesting because comedy is one of those areas where the question of “design” is often contentious.

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III. Links of the Week

• Based on a talk given at Big Bad Con 2022 with Tan Shao Han, Pam Punzalan breaks up TTRPGs into constituent elements: “When we analyze literature, we often speak of things like Plot, Character, Setting, Theme, and all that jazz. What, then, are things we should consider when we talk about TTRPGs?”

• There’s a TTRPG For That, the tumblr page, has a fun list of system neutral fantasy settings.

• On the Age of Ravens blog, a mystery for Swords of the Serpentine about 5 adventurers, a god trying to make a comeback, and some grisly murders.

• Aaron Lim, designer of Spectres of Brocken among other games, blogs on cohost about the joys of messing with the boundaries of games or “playing play”.

• A review of Wildsea, a game of sailors piloting their ship on a sea of trees.

• A series about using LaTeX for creating your game texts.

• The old Gauntlet gaming community has formally split from the publishing side and has become an independent community. It’s now called Open Hearth Gaming and as someone who plays there regularly, I’m really excited for this next phase. I think it’s going to be great. Do check it out!

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IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Mitosis is a Mothership pamphlet adventure and in-universe board game. Back now on Kickstarter to get your own copy of the “family friendly” game of biological warfare.

• The Wanderer's Companion is a Create-a-Portrait sticker book with 600+ stickers to help you create your next TTRPG character - Out now on Kickstarter!

• Bridgetown is a pastoral, liminal RPG setting of a never-ending, ever-crumbling bridge. Built for Troika, usable anywhere. Our Kickstarter funded in the first day, so you can snag a copy of Bridgetown and get a free poster with it!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• A shorter bundle for Airship Daedalus, a game of 1920s pulp adventure a la Indiana Jones and Sky Captain.

• A huge Tiny D6 bundle containing Tiny Dungeon, Tiny Frontiers, Tiny Cthulhu, Tiny Supers and more!

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!