Endless Pointless Zak Debate

As the legal process chugs along...

...we’ve been having depositions. For example:

Mandy got asked how I could have “forced” our ex-, Viv to move in with us. 

She admitted--despite what she'd earlier claimed--that I hadn’t forced her to move in with us. She said I called Viv and I asked if she wanted to move in with us. That's it.

When Viv said reasons she might hesitate on the phone (she might have to break her existing lease, for example) I said reasons why these things actually wouldn’t be a big deal and so Viv was like, yeah ok, I’ll move in with you. She did, liked it, and redid the living room.

Viv said the same in her deposition--after much hemming and hawing. So that’s on the books. It’s resolved. It’s down. It’s over. Mandy and Viv were lying about that. They can't say that anymore. We move to the next thing. 

The Rules

Depositions aren’t complicated, the process goes like this:

1. People ask each other questions

2. They answer them

It closely resembles what every sane person since Aristotle would recognize as “a conversation between people who disagree about something” and which the RPG internet calls “An endless Zak debate”.

Of course it's not endless--it's usually pretty quick. (Mandy and Viv could've said the two sentences it took to admit the truth two and a half years ago but they dodged it until there was lawsuits.) It only ever takes a long time if the person being asked questions is lying and is trying to figure out a way to avoid saying that. But even then it ends pretty fast.

What people who complain about answering questions are scared of isn't wasting time (they have enough time to say all the other shit they say online): it's being revealed as liars.

The Great Rebranding

I didn't invent asking and answering questions. This, for example, was on the internet way before I showed up.

Rebranding the most common and efficient way any issue gets solved in any sphere where the truth is admitted to matter (whether it's legal, academic, scientific or journalistic) as “an endless Zak debate” rather than just like admitting that's how grown-ups who disagree have to talk to fix anything is probably the single most toxic thing the RPG internet ever did to itself.*

The arguments raised against just answering questions are, basically:

-“I have a bunch of feelings and therefore cannot be asked to do anything”.

-“Before investigating, I decided anyone who disagrees with me about this is evil and I don’t talk to Nazis”

-“I don’t wanna”

-“Ew, isn't that a  debate” (it's not) "debate is bad"

Whether you think these are good or bad excuses, using them guarantees issues will never get figured out or solved and conflicts never de-escalate. Instead you get…

The Normal Way 

This is how the RPG internet likes to handle things:

1. One person says a thing, articulately, or forcefully or both.

2. People use the tools of social media to spread or otherwise express approval of this take.

3. Another person disagrees in a completely different venue--sometimes equally articulately or forcefully.

4. They never talk to each other. They are never put in a position to answer questions.

5. It never gets resolved ever.

6. Everyone argues about it over and over and complains that it never gets resolved, no-one learns anything, and people who lied or never did their homework are not uncovered and they stick around and poison the community forever by lying about bigger and bigger things.

This is supposedly a really good alternative to talking to people/Terrifying Zak Debate.

A Few Greatest Hits

I would argue all of the biggest problems on the RPG internet have been caused by the online nerd social norm that’s it’s ok to blow off questions. Some examples:

-If not The Original Sin, then a very early one was Ron Edwards claiming, on his own forum, that playing the game Vampire: The Masquerade caused brain damage. When asked for proof, he said—explictly, you can go back and read it—he did not have to answer questions. Ron suffered no consequences. This was one of the earliest examples of folks from his scene—the storygamers—making bigoted statements against people who played other games going unchallenged, which tradition continues to this day.

-The Gauntlet forum’s official policy is “If you ask someone a question and they give no answer, assume the answer is ‘No’” which has got to be the single most abusable and thoughtless rule in the history of forums—and is completely responsible for that community falling apart.

-Edition wars? When D&D’s 5th edition was announced, fans of 4th edition (including many still-active designers) claimed that 4e was very popular and selling well and that WOTC's decision to do another edition was actually based on old people complaining on the internet. They were asked for proof of this. They didn’t answer. They also claimed there was no way people having more fun playing older editions were telling the truth and/or that there was something wrong with people who said this. Again: when asked they provided no proof. This kind of thing is what caused the edition wars.

-The guy who founded the actual website “Storygames” eventually apologized in a thread for the way OSR creators and fans had been treated on his site for years. He was asked what he was going to fix the damage he’d done by platforming stupid gamer hate for years. He gave no answer.

-Arnold K / Goblin Punch literally cited my belief that people should answer questions as a bad thing when he joined the hatemob against me, and when Scrap Princess joined she bragged about how she wouldn’t answer questions or back up the obviously false claims she’d made. This kind of set a fashion in the new OSR where flaunting your total inability to make sense was cool—probably best exemplified by Jared “infinite mao” Sinclair and the Troika Trolls—who delight in their total failure to help each other or anyone else figure out anything. They are currently all blocking each other and hating on each other on twitter because of, basically, they don't want to answer questions.

-Ok, but all this is small beans next to, say, sexism, right? Well: RPGnetters (et al) also made bold pronouncements about how women felt about everything from preferred mechanics to RPG art. Women then showed up to protest these claims. When asked why these women’s opinions didn’t count, the RPGnetters gave no answer.

-When an RPGnet mod was accused of rape, they were asked a lot of questions about what happened, how, and who knew what when. They didn’t answer and apparently did no internal investigation.

-When someone with Green Ronin was accused of sexual harassment, the company’s heads—Chris Pramas and Nicole Lindroos—refused to answer direct questions about whether this happened, how it happened, what evidence they did or didn’t have, etc. 

-Racism? When the accusations against me came out, everyone who supported my ex was asked why they supported the white girls rather than the women of color—who were telling more consistent stories that actually made sense, were corroborated, and were backed up by documents. Nobody answered.

Literally all of this could be fixed if people would just adopt the social norm followed around every dinner table: you ask a question—when someone doesn’t answer that’s weird and they look like they're hiding something and it’s obvious and everyone knows you can't be trusted.

So, I'm asking you (and there are thousands of you reading this) why are you ok with this? You don’t put up with it at the dinner table, why do you put up with it here?

Or maybe an easier question: does it seem weird to you that this super normal way of interacting in real life is called "Zak debate" here? And that finding out who you can trust is considered bad or not worth it?

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P.S. Oh but can't we just never ask questions about anything important and just play games? Sure. There's lots of new stuff in The Store since last I mentioned it, pick something up:

Cube World #46--Goblins and Murder

Cube World #43 --Ths Stair and the Vizier's Secret

Cube World #44--Traps, Traps, Traps

Cube World#45-Warmutants of the Cube

Cube World #47-The Pentamorph and More

Cube World #48 Two Cults

 Cube World #49-Two Gimmicky Dungeons

Cube World #50-Hell on Earth (and in Hell)

Cube World #5-Four Elementals and a Giant's gut

Cube World #52-The Fox Witch and the Freckled Hog

Cube World #53-Quiet Places

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*In the law it's called "depositions" and "testimony" and "cross examinations", in science and academia it's "defending your thesis", in journalism it's "interviews" and "press conferences".

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Hey You Know What's Fun That You Did Not Know Was Fun?

It was with trepidation that I opened Deadly Fusion. What a terrible cover. Unremembered, unloved, seemingly unread and unreviewed, and not even having DC Heroes’ usual snappy trade-dress, that terrible cover-art it looks doubly off-brand. Was this review just going to be a string of jokes?

It was not. Despite everything, Deadly Fusion turns out to be a really interesting module, and I’d hope to see more things like it or inspired by it.

Like TSR did with their Marvel game Mayfair seems to have decided to let their superhero adventure modules be a place where designers got to experiment with mutant formats and ideas. When you look at old fantasy, horror and sci-fi adventures you see the beginnings of things we still see all the time today—normal scene-chains (sometimes expanding into scene webs), and location-based sandboxes. This isn’t one of those. Like Marvel’s Secret Wars and Nightmares of Futures Past, Deadly Fusion spawned no descendants, and that’s a shame.

New adventure formats are rare, and not enough people complain about it.

Deadly Fusion is called a “match play” and what that means is it’s for two people who both take the role of player sometimes and GM sometimes, specifically here:

-Using one of two books, one player GM’s the other player—as Batman—going through some scenes in Gotham City investigating a plot which eventually leads to the Joker.

-These scenes alternate (every two or three) with the Batman player acting as GM (using the other book) to get Superman through some scenes in Metropolis investigating a plot which eventually leads to Lex Luthor.

-That's most of the adventure. But then for the last section both players then stop and begin reading: the two separate books become separate Choose Your Own Adventure style books with paragraphs ending in choices for their respective characters—you go to the numbered paragraph and read the next thing—with the possibility of skill checks and fights along the way.

-Then the characters (and their players) re-unite fight or talk or both, and then make some decisions together, then finish the Choose Your Own Adventure thing to see what happens.

It’s super weird, and not perfect—especially the end—but surprisingly well-done. The whole thing is enabled by a few interesting techniques:

-First: limiting information. The two-book format, the investigation structure, plus the fact that the two investigations are separate for most of the game gets rid of the problem of the GM-player’s metaknowledge getting in the way of being fair. The Batman character doesn’t have enough information to figure out anything about Batman’s mystery while reading Superman’s and vice versa. The game doesn’t quite stick the landing at the end but it offers some intriguing tools which could’ve probably been leveraged to do it, which we’ll see below.

-Using superheroes. Superheroes don’t much sandbox: if Lois is in trouble, you go save Lois. This allows the GM to be sure that if the PC survives, they’re going to get to the next scene eventually without too many railroad nurses or nudges. 

-Using specific characters: Both of these scenarios wouldn’t work if you had a PC with telepathy, but, no: you have Superman, you have Batman. This allows the creation of very specific scenes and challenges and for the game designer to anticipate—with a fair degree of certainty—the range of outcomes. It also has some fun side-effects, as we’ll see.

You can start to see right away some of the barriers to this kind of adventure catching on, the main one being: this isn’t the kind of writing that can arise organically from normal RPG play. Unlike a typical adventure module or even a ruleset, this kind of match-play requires one person to set it up—including dropping in hidden information for both sides—and then to hand it over to two other people and not participate at all in the resulting game. It has to be a product. It isn’t the kind of thing that’s just an extension of what a GM might make at home for their own campaign.

Also: it’s not re-usable. You play once and pretty much it’s used up. And it requires two GMs. I think in the internet era, however, this could be a very good fit for, say, two RPG internet friends to play on Zoom.

So, the details:

Good

-Great scene: Batman has to interrogate a pawn shop guy behind bullet-proof glass named Gus Rogers. Gus isn’t especially crooked but he thinks Batman’s an idiot and makes fun of him, which seems like a fun thing to roleplay. When the scene gets to the breaking point, Gus runs off, if Batman pursues him he ends up in Crime Alley and has to deal with a My Parents Are Dead flashback. This is the kind of thing you can only do if you are playing an established character and the module really plays it for all it’s worth.

-When Batman gets to the docks ““straddling the littered sidewalks, overweight sailors seasoned with equal parts saltwater and rum, stagger about and decry their sorry plights” then ask batman for a drink. If he gets rough he has to fight

lol

-Because he actually isn’t the villain behind everything, when Batman meets the Joker the Joker’s confused and thinks he’s been drugged and taken to the Batcave. This is a good way to make the Batman player interact with the Joker instead of just immediately punch him.

-The real villain in the end is Brainiac—who wants to blow up Metropolis and Gotham. In the final scenes, if Batman or Superman loses their fight to Luthor or the Joker, then the player takes over Luthor or the Joker and they have to foil Brainiac, because their city is at risk, too—I love that.

Bad

-After explaining the format, both the “Batman” and “Superman” books start with a fake article about getting energy from cold fusion and shouldn’t. There’s no reason the GM needs this information and I can see it spoiling some surprises and challenges for them when they take on the player role—I wonder if someone higher-up asked for this to be put in at the last minute to make it easier to understand the technological plot points that come up later

-They also have a page up front saying what the hero knows about the other hero and about The Joker and Lex Luthor. Like the fake article, I don’t think this serves much purpose except to tip the module’s hand as to who the villains are, but y’know, LotFP hadn’t invented profit-share-modules yet so a freelancer’s gotta hit that word count. (The author's read Dark Knight Returns--Batman thinks Superman’s “patriotism prevents him from making the most of his abilities”.)

-There’s also a place to “Use this section to (secretly) mark your answer to the offer made to you by the Joker/Luthor during Encounter Eight” —to keep it secret from the other player/GM. Nice idea, it shouldn’t be in this part of the book because, again, tipping the module’s hand. You don’t need to know you;ll meet the Joker or Luthor this early.

-A lot of indulging in that mainstream RPG vice: endless statblocks for normal people. Lois Lane has an Aura of 2. Did you know that? I like this bit 

Most notable about Lois are the conflicting aspects of her remarkably resourceful intelligence and her unerring ability to fall directly into deadly criminal schemes.

 Fair.

Also I don’t completely remember what "Aura" is but it has something to do with personality and mystical oomph I am 100% sure Lois has more of it than fucking Jimmy Olsen. Also featured: Cat Grant (who I, who have read almost all comic books, barely have heard of), Margaret Sawyer (who I have never heard of) and Officer William Henderson (ditto). They each get a column of descriptions to themselves but no picture at all, which seems like the opposite of what you’d want had anyone but the writer given a fuck about this module. A lot of the personality information they’re trying to get across so the GM could role-play them could’ve been gotten across in one picture or—better yet—a comic panel where they’re saying some characteristic catch-phrase

-They do some railroading they could very easily have avoided. They basically offer nursing and nudging options to get PCs to move to the next scene, but since DC Heroes offers xp for all kinds of things, the module could easily make it like “If the player correctly follows the clue, they get Hero Points, if Jimmy Olsen has to point it out to them, they don’t”. You lose something for not solving the challenge, but it doesn’t affect the module’s ability to take you to one of the next scenes. Since this is primarily a superhero game (so about role-playing and fights) rather than a detective game (about the convolutions of solving or not solving various riddles on time), and it obviously requires the two players to submit to the unusual format in order to be playable, I think this is a good compromise. Also: Hero Points are a spendable xp stat, so if you don’t solve shit yourself, it does legitimately affect your game later, which is nice, without having to write an endlessly branching octopus module to account for every twist the story might take.

-The Choose-Your-Own Adventure doesn’t quite work. Obviously it’s less fun to have the two friends, after having been talking to each other throughout the game, have to go off separately and do homework—and, more than that, the choices they have to make don’t really offer an interesting range of options or involvement with the mechanics. However, it really seems like some of what they did with each player having information the other didn’t could have been used in another way to make a more interesting and surprising climax. The cover shows Superman and Batman about to fight—which they probably won’t—but I think it would’ve been worth railroading the heroes into fighting if they could’ve made it into an interesting wargame with some secret info on both sides. Or, better yet, ended with them both fighting something that has pre-programmed surprise moves like "In round three, whoever last interacted with Brainiac gets their brain transferred into a pig" etc.

Weird

-In Batman’s endless statblock, perhaps as a deliberate choice, Batman is not carrying “omnigadgets” as he is in the normal DC Heroes rules from this era. Omni-gadgets are a (great) catch-all rule which allow gadgeteering characters to pull out until-then-unexpected pieces of equipment like shark repellent, which is pretty true to the genre. It makes sense that for this adventure, what Batman’s carrying is standardized, like: this is what you have to work with on this day in Gotham. There are also traces of DC Heroes designer Ray Winninger’s maniacal “quantify fucking everything in rules terms” ethos with Batman’s miniature camera described as having the “Recall” power at 3 with the limitation “Only Recalls visual information” instead of just saying it’s a fucking camera. The cassette recorder has Recall: 10 for some reason.

This is clearly a Batman influenced by the Dark Knight Returns era, described as “…a callous and obsessive veteran of a dark and malignant war”. 

-Superman’s statblock: No super-ventriloquism it’s a cover-up. 

-Information on what Superman knows about the Joker, Luthor and Batman (“as ruthless and violent as any proclaimed hero to have ever lived” which seems a little extreme considering Superman lives in a world where Lobo and Brainiac’s son have had their own comic book for a year, but whatever).

-Joker— Motivation: Psychopath. Occupation: Psychopath

-Commisioner Gordon is only one point tougher than Jimmy Olsen I call bullshit.

-Now the adventure begins with the Superman player GMing the Batman player as Bruce Wayne in the mansion: You see the bat-signal but also, to let you know about a separate incident, Alfred tells you that he saw one of the alert buttons blinking while he was dusting the Batcave. Is that really how that works? 

-The map of Gotham City (above) does not look like any map of Gotham City I’ve ever seen.

The current canonical map—which looks like Manhattan only fat and drunk—was drawn, I think, by Eliot R Brown (the guy who did the technical drawings in DC Who’s Who and Marvel’s OHOTMU as well as all those Punisher comic pages where it’s just pictures and technical specs of his guns) for the No Man’s Land storyline.

The current canonical Metropolis looks like Manhattan sideways and, likewise, does not look like the Metropolis in this book.

-The read-aloud text is very purple.

Superman: “The city is a beacon of hope to the teeming millions, representing all that is good and true of the American dream.”

Batman: ““Every single inhabitant of this decaying borough at once envies your strength and hates you for it.” “The store itself reeks of a mingled stench of aged sweat and gun oil.”

I’m going to say something strange: I think the read-aloud text is good in this module. I usually hate read-aloud text but a thing like this where you and a friend pretend to be Batman and Superman is probably best played in a spirit of slightly ironic indulgence (after all, if you play too seriously you just have Batman just call the rest of the Justice League as soon as he sees trouble). Ham it up, read to each other. You don’t have 4 people waiting to start arguing about how to cross the orc moat—I could see it working.

-There’s a minisystem for computer hacking where basically different levels of security have more digits and the better you roll the more of those digits you get for free and the rest you have to guess. It’s a nice idea but the game doesn’t really show why having to brute force the remaining numbers is bad. In theory it’s a time-sink but since, unlike a typical dungeon, the game has no random encounter there’s no particular reason not to say “Ok, I try every digit starting with 1, then every digit starting with 2…”. It would’ve worked fine if they’d put a ticking clock in there.

Now I've said already "Someone should make one of these" and, fine, in writing this I twisted my arm.

I'm getting to work writing and drawing one now. More later.

Incident

A random fan met me and Stokely at the bar and asked me to run a game for him and his friends at GenCon a few years ago. He as nice, so I did.

Then, like basically everybody else, he joined the hatemob.

Then he asked me for a game thing last week--he wanted to buy a pdf.

We talked on the phone after he texted--I was like "Sure, after you publicly apologize for being part of the hatemob that destroyed my life".

He pretended like he didn't do anything. Like he forgot that he picked up a torch, lit it and chased an innocent person with a pitchfork just like all his shitty friends.

I reminded him--I have screenshots.

He was like "Ok, man, but you blocked me"

And I was like "Yes, I blocked you. You assumed the accusations were true without proof and I asked you a direct question, you didn't answer. Both of those things will get you blocked by any sane person immediately."

He admitted that yeah he'd done the wrong thing.

He said ok, yeah, maybe it's a thing, maybe he'll make an apology. Sorry, man.

It's been 20 days, he's done nothing.

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This kind of thing happens all the time. Here's one from April:

People contact me, I tell them if they want to make public accusations they need to make public apologies--they always agree that that makes sense. They say they'll do something. And then they do nothing.

The reflexive thing a troll is thinking to write right now is "Well this won't help, dude, duh". Fuck that. People have an obligation to do the right thing especially when their victim won't be nice to them.

Accusations were made: I'm not in jail, I'm not even charged with anything after over two years. I'm not losing in civil court, after over two years of discovery there have been no terrifying revelations of a secret conspiracy. And for all the complaining that I was supposedly a terror on the internet nobody in court or out who has accused me of even internet wrongdoing has come up with a single screencap of me doing anything bad. Every adult who's investigated has come to the conclusion I'm innocent, none of Mandy's friends from when we were together are backing her up, women she asked to testify told her to fuck off and at least one even testifed for me instead. It is most definitely not her word against mine--all of what she's said has been contradicted by eyewitnesses and documents, and anyone who doubts that can just ask for the records. Two years, seven months and two days.

There's an online network for game designers that get harassed. I've repeatedly asked them for help, they talked to me, the case offficer (or whatever its called) didn't take my case--then she herself got cancelled last week.

Are you all doing what this dude did? Are you all just pretending you weren't a part of this? Are you going to keep doing it when I win and then I gotta go through the whole media thing of pointing out why it happened?

What exactly is everyone's plan for when it's a matter of legal and public record that all of this was a farce and you helped? Buy a fake moustache and move to Guam?

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There's new stuff in The Store:

#44 is full of traps

#45 has warmutants

#46 has goblins

#47 has THE PENTAMORPH

Buy something.

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Ten Ideas From Ten Years Ago

So you may have noticed that they've began reprinting classic (translation: old) D&D adventures in deluxe hardcovers with modern-edition conversions alongside essays from various luminaries reminiscing about the original books.

Longtime readers may remember: I told them to do this in 2011, the same year Mike Mearls (one of the essay-writing luminaries in there) said "Hey man. I really dig your blog. I send links to it around the office often enough that I should probably be paying you a consulting fee or something." Which they eventually did.

So, I took a look at some other ideas from ten years ago that maybe someone might want to use:

1. My First Dungeon Kit--Someone should get out their Cintiq, scrub this up and sell it for 50$ a pop. Or, better yet, make it a website.

2. Handwriting fonts--Great if you want to print a hand-drawn map but then you make a mistake, just make your handwriting a font.

3. Information Design That Doesn't Suck--Information design in RPGs has improved somewhat since I made this post, but people still haven't really got it. A lot of games look better but you still can't find tables when you need them, or like Skerples will use bullet points for dungeon room descriptions but then the bullet point says "Cold and dark"--yeah, dipshit, it's a dungeon. You just took a tool used to save time and space and made it waste time and space all over again.

4. Comb-bound Books--From this entry. Not to make your regular book look cheap, but for content specifically designed to lay totally flat--a book full of die-drop tables and two-page-spread dungeons. And the comb should be nice and thick like that cupcake book.

5. Tiny spellbooks--From the same entry. A spellbook for players the size of a deck of cards. Get on it.

6. Interaction matrices--These kinds of charts where you examine how each element in a set interacts with each other are still underutilized. I remember the original Unearthed Arcana used them to show how different species interacted with each other (antipathy, hatred, toleration, etc) but there are so many other ways to used them.

7. One-page character generator--Ten years later and WOTC still can't figure out how to do it.

8. Gigacrawler--Gigacrawler was two ideas: Sci-Fi dungeoncrawler and crowdsourced library content (spells, items, etc).

This seems eminently doable in 2021, especially because there are so many video game models to go off of and it's probably not too hard to build web tools to allow anonymous authors and vote-on-able content.

You make a new kind of proton gun, write it up, upload it to the site anonymously, then everyone who thought it was good upvotes it, everyone who used it in a game gets 2 votes.

You could even have a system where--at a certain vote threshold--a thing got illustrated.

9. Procedurally-generated dungeons using distance from the entrance as a variable--Like this. Basically, the further you are from the entrance, the greater the chance of weirdness, danger, and treasure.

10. Fill-in the Blanks Dungeons--This seems like a no-brainer. In the current environment, anything WOTC releases will be A) Roundly criticized for real or imaginary content problems and B) Sell like cakebusters. So why not release something where the content is up to the customers? You rope in all the old schoolers by enabling good-old-fashioned do-it-yourself content.

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Honorable Mention: This one's only 7 years old, but somebody finally used this idea today, so...

Fred Hicks getting off social media-- The harasser who heads Evil Hat made attacking people and then immediately claiming he couldn't engage or provide proof of what he'd said for mental health reasons to a fine art. People have been telling him to stop doing this for, like, ever, most recently from fellow indie-RPG harasser Brandon Leon Gambetta.

Today he announced that he finally got the memo:

Since he's "listening", if you--unlike many of Fred's victims--are not blocked, you might wanna ask him to make efforts to undo all the damage he's done by not realizing this sooner and make reparations to the people who's lives he helped destroy by lying on the internet.

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Oh there's a new module up in The Store--The Stair and The Vizier's Secret. Go buy it.

The Cat, The Sphinx, and The Spinneskelle

The Spinneskelle is a weird automaton that can fit into pretty much any adventure, the Black Sphinx is the answer to the riddle of why an obsessed scholar won't leave his library, and the demon cat of St Ylvyst's Hospital for Imbeciles and the Mad is just a jerk.

Available for 12$ in The Store.