Your Questions Answered

Thematic December Emails Are Thematic

It would appear that in December, we answer questions. I’ve just done an issue of question-answering in my other two newsletters, and having gone looking, I’ve had a few in response to Throwing Irregular Shapes, too, or questions about gaming in other media. Some of these have been sitting for a long time, so apologies for that. It’s been a busy year.

(This is what Midjourney thinks game notes look like)

Some of these questions have been munged beyond recognition by the original querants, while others are verbatim. Consistency is for narrative, not for commentary.

How do you keep your game notes?

I have a sense of deja vu with this, mostly because I’ve written about it before. Here’s what I wrote in a previous issue:

I write my game notes longhand, on refill pads. I am moderately particular, by now - I want decent paper, narrow-lined, and I want my preferred Uni-Ball EYE Micro pens to write with. I write on one side of the page and I keep them in order in binders. I put in-game dates at the top of the first page of each set of notes (which might cover one session or as many as ten), and in Heliomar, that’s occasionally in as many as four different calendars. The first page for each set of notes then has its own number, a decimal, and a sequential number. So the fourth set of notes starts on 4.1, and the second page for that set will be 4.2. By the time all the notes are written, the sequence might go 4.1, 4.1A, 4.1B, 4.2, 4.3, 4.3A, 4.4, or the like. The A-onward pages are usually the detailed statblocks for monsters or NPCs which are outlined on the relevant just-numbered pages. I’ve run this up to H in one set of notes, but that was the detail for a random encounter table. I use bullet pointed paragraphs, sometimes with bulleted lists below them. Names and most proper nouns go in block capitals, and are underlined on the first occurrence (usually, anyway; I sometimes forget). Experience points for combat encounters go in the left margin, and each set of notes gets a list (invariably incomplete) for things that might be achieved in them and the experience points for each.

The binder itself is usually a fairly cheap 2-ring binder, with dividers. The dividers read “Current Session”, “Past Sessions”, “NPCs”, “Maps”, “Odds” and “Plot”. If I have major dungeons or other distinct adventuring locations in the setting, they usually get their own divider. “Odds” contains bits of notes that don’t fit anywhere else - lists of elemental concordances, elven historical periods, names of that one god that has more than I can remember, and so on. “Plot” is where I write down things that have happened in the setting which might or might not come up in the actual game, but which I want to track for reasons of, well, plot.

However, there’s been some change in that, or rather a reoccurrence of an old mode of game notes, which I haven’t used in some time. The sandbox-y nature of Heliomar has resulted in about three games in a row which have consisted of the player characters finding new people from whom to get information, and basically getting massive lore drops. And these are hard to write notes for in advance. I could write down a summary of all the things the NPC knows that are relevant to the plot, for sure, but in some cases that’s a LOT of writing, and I know that only a sub-set of it is going to come up. So instead, my notes consist of who the NPC is, where they can be found, maybe some notes about their attitudes to other NPCs and organisations, and then a mostly blank page.

Then, during the game, I write down each thing the player characters get told, usually on a post-it, and summarise that back into the blank page. This means that in a lot of cases, I’m improvising bits of plot, setting history, and the capabilities of the NPC. These are often more fertile ground for extra bits of plot to appear than usual, so I do have to watch that a bit when we’re already around level 17 - sandbox or not, I don’t want to be throwing out whole new lines of interest at this stage.

What games do you want to play, but haven’t got to?

(This was one of a whole load of questions with which I was tagged on Tumblr; most of them are more appropriate for game designers than someone who largely just homebrews for D&D.)

I have whole shelves of games I want to play, and haven’t, and a huge stash more in PDF. It is exceedingly likely that I will play D&D and nothing else next year. There are certainly games I would like to play, but there are very few people in my social circle who are willing to run games, and of those, D&D is usually the game they know best and are willing to run. I don’t really have the time anymore to learn a new game enough to run it, and I don’t have time to run any more games anyway.

With that caveat, I’d like to play: Monsterhearts, Microscope, Burning Wheel, Stars Without Number and/or Worlds Without Number, and Old Gods of Appalachia. Some of those have been on the list for a long time, others are pretty new. They range from pretty crunchy out to not very crunchy at all, and cover fantasy, SF, urban fantasy, and the anything-at-all nature of Microscope. Someday!

Regarding languages in a TTRPG, do you find it useful to associate a real world analogue with a language, for the purposes of communicating how people "feel" about a language?

The first thing is that I decide in a campaign setting how common the "main" language is. In Heliomar, Ayuuran is the language of the Empire, so pretty much everyone speaks it. Whatever that language is, we're representing that as English. Then there's how I want other languages to feel. So if I have a place that's sophisticated and has good food and is maybe a little lazy, then French will convey that. I've used bits of ancient Egyptian and Aramaic to represent Ancient Heliomaran.

I had an NPC with a slightly Caribbean accent last night, so everyone will know when they hear her again, or someone with that accent. It hasn’t yet come up in game where in the world she’s from, so that detail will have to turn up later. I try to avoid Latin and Greek, though. I find Google Translate will provide all kinds of obscure languages now, and avoid the semi-religious effect of Latin, in particular. And I try to either go for languages that have passing familiarity, or none at all - I don't use languages that another player is more fluent in than me. So that mostly comes down to not using Finnish or German in the current groups.

I did try full conlangs (well, partial construction, mostly bits of vocabulary) for a while, but it's hard work, and hard to remember what things sound like when there isn't a real-world analogue. Tolkien (who would totally have been a gamer if he’d happened further down the timeline) did invent whole languages, and then translated back into English in places, which is utterly beyond my capabilities.

What do you think of CHatGPT, Bard and other AIs for generating game material?

I think it’s useful to understand that these things are Large Language Models - essentially very advanced autocomplete - rather than actual intelligences. I’ve poked at them occasionally, but I’ve never really used any of the stuff thus generated. Broadly, there are two uses for them: “give me ideas” and “shape this idea for me”. I don’t have a lot of use for either; I have never in my life had a shortage of ideas, and mostly I have many, many more than I have any notion of what to do with them. There’s a bit in one of Terry Pratchett’s books where there’s a dwarven playwright by the name of Hwel “into whose hairy bullet head inspiration sleets from the farthest corners of the multiverse, coruscating across his brain and setting the pages of his plays afire”, and man, do I ever identify with that dwarf. And when it comes to shaping ideas, I kind of want to shape my own. The AIs never really generate good expansion on a concept, although they can do adequate most of the time. Everything they come up with is based pretty directly on something someone else came up with, sometimes quite transparently.

The one very narrow and specific use that I have found for them is in generating names, or words for concepts. ChatGPT seems to have some actual capability to answer prompts like “give me five plausible words in Proto-Indo-European for a tribe of rats”, and that can sometimes sort out details I’d otherwise spend a lot of time on for small results.

Since my ability to illustrate things is very limited (although I’m currently learning to draw architectural perspective sketches), I do find uses for the image-generating AIs like Midjourney. I don’t think I’d ever use them for anything serious - they really can’t handle specific instructions - but they’re fine for getting something to fill in a space, such as for a newsletter illustration (see above, like).

[Throwing Irregular Shapes is also represented on Tumblr. The stuff there - 95% reblogs - is completely different to what’s on here, so if you have a Tumblr account, follow me there. And if you don’t, well, Tumblr is honestly the best social network out there at the moment. Elon Musk is nowhere near it, for one thing.]