Day in the Life of an Idiot

 I was feeling pretty smart that I remembered that today was "What are you reading Wednesday," but then I popped on here only to discover that the LAST time I posted was LAST Wednesday. Well, given that, I think I will forgo the list of reading material and tell you, instead, about my life. 

Last Saturday was Imbolc (also known as Saint Brigit's Day) and Sunday was Groundhog's Day, so, of course, Shawn and I decided to have a Sunday High Tea. As some of you may remember, last year, for her birthday, I gave Shawn a trip to the Saint Paul Hotel's fancy dress high tea. We had also been hoping to attend a tea ceremony at the Como Conservatory's Japanese garden, but, I had neglected to remember that Shawn's knees were failing, so we ended up canceling that. As part of her "year of tea" last year, I bought Shawn a subscription to a very genteel magazine called Tea Time, which literally is just recipes for fancy tea cakes and sandwiches and pretty images of people's tea sets. So, we decided to make a ham salad recipe from one of her Tea Time issues which we spread on bagette slices...



Image: mostly these kind of look like mayonaise-covered dog food? But they were insanely deliciously and curry-flavored.

For me, the real star of the show, however, were the raspberry filled tartlets. In comparison to a lot of the very picky and time-consuming recipes I have made for our various teas over the years, the tarlets (and the ham salad, honestly,) were shockingly easy. Like, the the biggest thing to making the tarlets look good? Owning a tartlet pan. Which, OF COURSE, we do. 



Image: Raspberry tartlets on top, lemon poppy seed pound cake on the bottom tray.

I just ate the very last leftover of the tartlets this morning. They're such an oddly enchanting "mouth feel" because the bottom is philo and the top is more like a soft muffin. In-between is a generous spoonful of raspberry jam. So they're kind of "springy" and chewy on your teeth? It's odd, but, as I can personally attest, weirdly addictive.

Surprisingly easy to make given how fancy they look, too.

Yeah, so, this is how we're surviving the state capture of the United States by a criminally dangerous South African immigrant that I would sincerely like to see rounded up and deported. If we could just send him to Guantanamo instead, I dunno, innocent children that would be fantastic. Weird how no one has thought to send ICE agents into the Treasury Office. That would have been my first phone call.

My next would be to a nice, young Italian man....

But, I digress. 

In other news, I been running some absoluely soul-rejuvinating TTRPGs. Last night, my Thirsty Sword Lesbians solved an interdimensional-dimensional rift and a yakuza turf war with a bit of flirting and some donuts. Ah... I mean, my shoulders just dropped two notches TYPING that. Last night, I was just grinning happily for a couple of hours post-game.

Last Saturday, my Dungeon & Dragons party rescued a dozen Dwarven miners from an as of yet unmet Infernal foe. A little less universally satisfying, but on its way, and to be fair, we had a thrilling marketplace heist pulled of by none-other-than our party's PALADIN. I am still laughing about that. Good times.

 So, we take it all one day at a time.

How are you doing?

 This weekend, I blew off some responsibilities in order to take part in Free RPG Day. 

My friend tallgeese alerted me to the fact that there was a big event at Tower Games over in Minneapolis. I noticed on the events page that someone was running a Thirsty Sword Lesbians one-shot. I should probably be sick of TSL since I took my responsibility for running a game at ConFABulous so seriously that I ran not one, but TWO practice sessions. But, two things. First, I was interested to see how someone else might construct a one-shot and, secondly, there's just so many scenarios you can play with this system that it's not like it's ho-hum, same old, same old. 

I had never been to Tower Games before. It's a nifty little store that is super easy to get to (at least for me) because you basically get off 35W right at the exit that used to be "mine" when I lived in Uptown, (36-38th Avenue.) Then it's a short hop down Nicolet and you're there. I was worried about parking, but I got there early enough that I was able to park on the street on the same block as the store, even. Tower Games is set-up like a lot of gaming stores seem to be where there's a front area with all the merchandise and then, once you go through this narrow hallway, it opens up into a backroom that's set-up for gaming. For this event, they had long, skinny tables--sort of like the kind you might find in a bar?--with basically a set of barstools around each. They managed to cram SIX tables into this space, which, I think would normally have otherwise seemed decently spacious, but felt really crowded during the event. At one point, in fact, our GM got kind of overwhelmed by the ambient noise and lost her train of thought!  So, given that I think she's a regular there, I think the place was unusually packed. I did hear someone say when I was coming in that they had NEVER seen this many people at the store at once before.

Our GM, Emily. was wearing a mask and so I asked her if she would be more comfortable if I did. I had brought one with me--like it was literally on my wrist, but I had planned on reading the room and gauge how I felt about it (it wasn't nearly as crowded when I first came in). But, even though she said it was up to me, I followed her lead and put mine on.  What was amazing to me is that once at least one other person had one on, everyone else around the table masked up. Most of us were clearly ready and willing to, which... the cockles of my heart were warmed, let's just say. One of the players clearly felt badly about not having one, so I asked her if she wanted one as I had extra unopened KN-95s in my car. She said yes and so I ran off before the game got underway and gave her one. We might have been the only table that was 100% masked.

But, unlike a lot of other spaces, there were just generally lots of other masks all around the room. I don't always love my fellow nerds, but this was nice.

Our table was also almost entirely women, though we had one brave guy probably my age join us. (I think we were the oldest two players--he might even have only been in his 40s, and I'm 56.) We all chose to play she/her lesbians, only one she/they lesbian, which was my character.

The scenario that Emily had prepared for us was PIRATES! 

I'm not going to go into all the details of the one-shot because I know that can be boring, but I do want to talk about it a little. Emily made the interesting choice of letting us develop our own characters. I go back and forth about this in a one-shot, if only because it can really take away a lot of the gaming time. In one of my test runs, in fact, it took and hour and a half of the three hours we had blocked off to play.  But, some people are, in fact, there to see how the game WORKS. Like, they signed up for this one-shot because they want a quick intro to the mechanics of the game. Part of that is developing characters and choosing to have players make their own on the spot does give the GM a chance to familiarize players with their playbooks/character sheets--which has to get done, even if you use pre-generated characters. So, this is a big part of why I feel like both choices are valid. I just tend, myself, to favor those who want to get to the Thirsty and the Sword part of playing Thirsty Sword Lesbians. 

I chose a playbook that I actually find LEAST attractive as GM in part because I wanted to explore this character type/get to know it better by playing it. Thirsty Sword Lesbians had a ton of different playbooks you can choose from a lot of which sort of/kind of map to D&D character types. Like, there is a Trickster playbook which is sort of like a rogue (though arguments could be made that Scoundrel better maps to rogue, though maybe that person is more like a bard...) and a Beast that is sort of like a barbarian, etc., etc. There are two magic-user types, the wizard analog, which is Spooky Witch and the druid analog, Nature Witch. I picked Nature Witch because, speaking of mechanics, I find some of the things about that playbook to be kind of... not dumb, that's unfair. But, as a GM, I find them hard to figure out how to work into a scenario so that players who do want to be this type of person can DO those things. Like, there's a very clunky mechanic in Nature Witch where you are supposed to attempt to complete four "trials" from a list. And the list is random AF. "Kiss someone dangerous," "Lose something important to you," "Ride a magical beast," etc.

Okay, a little side rant, I find this kind of disrupting as a GM. Like, Nature Witches are often just doing things in the game that seem like left turns because they are trying to check off their ticky boxes in order to gain experience points or whatever is the prize for having completed their list.  So, when I homebrewed my cyberpunk game I wrote a list of trials to chose from that would ACTUALLY ADVANCE MY DAMN PLOT and move people around the board, as it were. Like, before I thought to do this, I found my test game's Nature Witch just leading everyone fully away from anything remotely connected--which is fine in a longer campaign, I'd imagine, but kind of nuts if you assume people want to sort of have a conclusion to the story you promised. (And yeah, I know most one shots turn into three or four session games, but I'll have you know both one-shots I ran at ConFABulous got to a resolution in 3 hours! And, Emily also wrapped our story up in 2!)

But, so I actually tried to see if there were trials I could do that would fit with a pirate scenario. I managed to get two out of my four completed, but that felt satisfying enough. I don't know. I will say that enjoyed this game playing as a Nature Witch, so that was a success. 

I also took full advantage of the TSL / Powered by the Apocalypse gaming culture wherein players have a lot more agency than your average D&D player. The other players elected my character to be the Captain of our pirate ship and, so I asked them what they all thought their jobs were, and first mate/XO, gunner (for the Beast, naturally), and cook all got snapped up fast, but our Spooky Witch character was at a loss, so I just declared (like you can in PbtA games) that because I'm a Nature Witch and spacy like that, I kind of just found our ship? It ran aground in whatever cove I normally holed up in and so I just took it over, like you do. A crew was still on it, however, but they were ghosts, and so we needed a Spooky Witch to be our ghost wrangler. Our ship is basically haunted all the time, maybe isn't even really sea worthy (magic might be involved), but we don't let that stop us. This DELIGHTED our Spooky Witch. The GM was also really happy because that was a whole extra layer of flavor that she could weave in. 

So, it was a fun game. We kind of resisted the plot unintentionally, it turned out. None of us wanted to trust the pirate queen's girlfriend, because when the GM asked me how I might have known this person I immediately declared them an ex and so the whole rest of the crew was disinclined to want to help. But, it was clear where the bread crumbs were leading and we got the two back together in time for a nice finale. 

It was a FANTASTIC way to spend two hours, plus I got a swag bag to take home. There weren't any games in the bag that I was particularly interested, but they were fun to look through before they made their way to my little free library. 

Anyway, that was my weekend. YARRR!  You?

I've been wanting to run a Thirsty Sword Lesbians game at ConFABulous for over a year now, and I finally took the plunge and signed up to do it: https://confabulous.org/wordpress/gaming/



Image: cover art for TSL: two (presumed) lesbians crossing swords and gazing intently at each other. Color scheme: the lesbian pride flag colors.

For what I hope are obvious reasons, I didn't want the actual convention to be the very first time I tested out my story, my storytelling abilities, or being the game mechanics arbitrator. (As well as all the other stuff a DM has to juggle.) So, I set up a couple of playtest dates.

First, my family--just Shawn, Mason and I around the dining room table--ran a very simple "do I know how to explain this game? How easy is it to create characters or should I have pre-generated ones available? Is my scenario to simple or too complex?" game.

The things I learned in that very fist attempt at running this game is that, first off, my son is an extraordinarily good RPG player, as is my wife. Mason, in particular, though, latched on to a couple of the images that I gave in my world introduction and then, immediately, sparked ideas that had never even occurred to me as options. Going forward, I now have to credit him for what I'm calling "The Drowned Ones." In general, though, this did reassure me that my impulse to explain the world BEFORE character creation was a good one. 

I'm running a homebrew cyberpunk game. Thirsty Sword Lesbians does have a cyberpunk "setting and adventure" option in their core rulebook called Neon City.  I will say that despite this, TSL is not really set-up in a way that slots easily into "What if no swords, but instead Net Runners?" 

TSL is a Powered by the Apocalypse game and so runs on playbooks. So, rather than having a "class," like you might have in D&D, where you basically chose your job, your race, your background, all of which come with a set of skills, you have, instead, an archetype, a personality template. The playbook then gives your archetype various distinct moves, but its intended to be much more open-ended and flexible based on what fits that character's motives, etc. Dave, who is in my regular D&D group (which eventually played this as well), described it as having to build a character from personality up, rather than creating a backstory as an afterthought to paste over a character once its designed. 

So part of what I learned in this initial game is that some of the archetypes/playbooks work better in cyberpunk than others. Some needed almost no scenario-specific tweaking, like The Scoundrel or The Trickster.  But, playbooks like Nature Witch and Spooky Witch, which allow for magic, need to be accounted for and given fun, world-specific things to do. For instance, the Nature Witch has (for some inexplicable reason) a list of trials they need to complete if they want to gain experience points and advance. These are written into the Nature Witch playbook and are considered non-negotiable (the box is already checked, automatically <--a very annoying choice on the game designer's part.) Especially since, "ride a magical beast" is NOT something I've planned for a cyberpunk adventure, you know? Plus, since I'm running a one-shot, some of the other more broad trials seemed unfair, given the time constraints. "Reject a conviction you once held," is lovely if playing an on-going campaign, but is asking a lot of a player who is dipping toes into the game at a con. So, after this first game with my family, I came up with a number of Nature Witch trials that would be not only be easy and fun to check off the list, but would also potentially nudge a player character to explore all of the various sites I'd created/move my plot along faster.

Also, even though TSL is designed as a player-centric, relationship game, I did decide that I need to have a bunch of pre-generated characters available. The process just takes too long? Like, just thinking up names is HARD. I will admit that I had initially resisted of having pre-gen with my family's game because it's so clear that TSL wants the experience of this game to be about relationships and falling in love and whatnot (there is an actual mechanic called FINALLY, A KISS IN A DANGEROUS SITUATION, which grants a +1 going forward) that I feared that having pre-generated characters might rob players of the chance to make someone they could really invest in. 

On the flipside, my family barely left TSL's version of "the tavern" even after three hours of gameplay. So, I mean, there does seem to be such a thing as too much investment in characters, too.

The other thing I learned in this first game is that the fighting mechanics of TSL are just clunky... and oddly punitive. For example, if you roll well on DARING (which is one of two main fighting stats) you can inflict a CONDITION (which is emotional) and do a couple of other moves from a prescribed list (none of which is "inflict physical damage" or, you know, whittle away at someone's life force, as in D&D.)  However, if you roll moderately well, the attacker has the opportunity, automatically, do the same to you. The CONDITIONS simply aren't fun. They're things like Anger, Hopelessness, Guilt, Fear, and Insecurity. You not only get actual mechanical penalties when you mark a Condition, but you also are expected to act out on them, emotionally. I find this kind of... well, the best word is, unfun. When I am feeling less charitable, I would call it controlling in a very icky way. Maybe I'm playing a Scoundrel who is some version of a swashbuckler, do I really want to go around making people feel insecure and then maybe, if I roll poorly, have to break something important to me (<--an actual requirement of the rules) because I was given the Anger condition? NO. I want to be cool and daring (in the traditional sense) and defeat my enemies with a flourish!

In fact, it's clear, in many ways, that the TSL devs just don't want you to fight.  They have since made expanded fighting moves, which I haven't looked into yet, but, seriously WTF.

In general, I find that a lot of the playbooks in TSL are designed in a way to make what you might like about playing a particular type of character uncomfortable and unfun. Like a Beast, which is archetypically a werewolf or something similar, is penalized when they transform. They're required by the playbook (again, it's automatically checked) to confront the damage they do when in a rage. Which, again, okay, yes, maybe in a long running campaign that's worth exploring, but the title Thirsty Sword Lesbians sounds like a game where you are just supposed to have fun and be a bit over the top. Soul searching every single time you wolf-out (or have a berserker rage) is kind of only fun, if that's what you know you've signed up for. 

So, one of the other things I did after this initial game was write up a list of warnings for players. Like, play Beast if you like playing barbarians or werewolves or body-modded mechs or whatever, but be warned that part of the game mechanics does this weird thing to you. I also made explicit in that list that for the purposes of the one shot, those mechanics can be avoided if the player isn't into them! I will support people who want to lean into the soul searching, but also those who don't want to. I play to read over this a bit at the start of the game, but also just hand out a printed sheet with that info on it as part of handing out the playbooks. 

We'll see how well that works. 

Armed with all of this, I made a very short "Players Handbook" which I gave to my regular Wednesday night D&D group in advance of running the one-shot a second time. I also came to the first session (and yeah, like all one-shots, this one just refuses to be done in one) with a pile of pre-generated characters and several of them got picked up and seemed to be embraced and enjoyed by the players. One of the mechanics I was able to write into the pre-generated characters was this other odd, somewhat clunky thing called STRINGS. Strings are supposed to be imagined as "heart strings" and, among other things, you can spend them in order to get an NPC to do what you want, etc., etc. When I generated a set of characters, I made sure to give them a string on at least one NPC so that I could also streamline some of my storytelling? Like, the opening scene is at a internet cat cafe and there is a barista there and by giving a string on this NPC, I can drop in a bit of information that this player might already know about the business, the person, etc. I have to write all this up on their character sheet, but TSL has form-fillable PDFs which you can get without the art. Without the art taking up a huge amount of space, there's lots of room for a GM to write extra stuff.  This worked out particularly well as one of the players at my D&D group picked up the Trickster character who l decided has a string on literally everyone... by chance the person who picked this up is our usual GM, and so I basically had a co-story teller.

I mean, in PbtA games the players are way more co-story tellers than they are in a lot of other traditional systems, but I could really rope the Trickster in to all the scenes because I could feed them information the already knew by virtue of having a String.

So, that was useful to learn.

I will say that after all my complaints of this system, I have to take a second to note that my mostly cis, straight D&D group embraced Thirsty Sword Lesbians with GUSTO. They immediately understood this was a go big or go home kind of game, played their characters larger than life (biggest kudos to my Scoundrel, who rolled with having "one in every port" with wild abandon) and leaned into the emotional/role-playing parts in very surprising and unexpected ways. I did not actually expect such heavy use of Emotional Support (<--yes, an actual mechanic) to get used so often and so WELL.

I honestly was not expecting a group of tried and true 5e folks to be as DOWN with the loosey-goosey-ness of TSL. Our rules guy (who happened to be playing the Scoundrel) and the player who played the Nature Witch were really great at helping me figure out was to flip some of the clunkiness of the rules to storytelling advantages. And, I mean, honestly, we had an absolute BLAST playing this, despite all of its flaws. 

It was a delight to run this game with them--and, in fact, they not only requested a part two (even though I managed to lead them by the nose to a possible conclusion after four hours), they now want a promise of a part three whenever they need/want a break from our regularly scheduled 5e.  

With the D&D group, I learned some practical things, like how to organize my notes better, and as I say above, some better ways to utilize certain mechanics. Steph (the Nature Witch in this game), in particular, gave me the advice that even though the rules say "answer the question" the GM does have the discretion to answer via body language, facial expressions or other more subtle clues, rather than just spoiling some plot point (which admittedly I was knowingly doing in the first session of the one-shot because I really wanted to get them to The End--which, of course, we never did.) But, this did remind me that even if people are signing up for a one-shot at a con, most experienced players are aware that they might not get to the thrilling conclusion. I can also just be explicit at the start of the game and note that while this game CAN be finished in one, four hour session, in many ways, if we're doing it right, it won't be--since the game is supposed to be about the players role-playing and having feelings and relationships and just generally having fun. The plot, in many ways, is secondary to that, and that's how it's SUPPOSED to be.

Steph even made fan art of her character. Just to be clear this is art she'd found and colored--she was a little disappointed not to be able to find more body positive options, but... at any rate, I was so... chuffed? Like, it's so cool that this group so willingly embraced the whole concept.


Steph's Nature Witch, Michaela.