Stats & Character Promotion
Jim Vassilakos (jimv@uia.net)
In A&E #333 I talked a little bit about
character promotion (bit → minor → major
→ main), but I failed to bring into the
discussion the question over how to flesh out
a character's abilities and stats during this
promotion process, and I neglected
discussing how central the design of the
game system is to this question. Likewise, in
A&E #312 I talked a bit about the five basic
stats in Ragamuffin (and I've since added a
sixth), but this whole question of character
promotion was one which I largely ignored.
Hence, the crossing of these two ideas in this
issue's IgTheme is something I find rather
interesting and somewhat neglected.
In the current version of Ragamuffin,
which is still on the drawing boards, the six
stats are as follows:
• Strength
• Durability
• Agility
• Dexterity
• Perception
• Intellect
My reason behind choosing these six
attributes in this particular order was that I
wanted them to form a qualitative gradation
between body and mind. Durability, for
example, is mostly about the body, but
there's also a mind element, a sort of
willpower component, if you will. Likewise,
perception is mostly a matter for the mind,
but it also involves the senses to some
extent, the actual physical ability to see,
hear, etc.
As for agility and dexterity, I reasoned that
they should be split mainly for the sake that
they are both combat-related stats. I felt that
if they were combined into a single stat (as
they were in my article in issue #312), the
tendency would be for players to maximize
that stat, whereas maximizing two different
stats will be twice as costly, and hence
players will be more likely to rethink this
strategy.
Of course, all of this talk about body and
mind and stats tends to obviate and dismiss
through gaming tradition a rather more basic
question, which is: Are stats even necessary?
When we think about people, we don't
think about their strength or their durability
unless these qualities are germane to some
problem at hand. What we tend to think
about are their looks (the mental images we
carry around in our heads of the people we
know), their personality (dour, happy,
generous, arrogant, all of which ties in to
whether or not we like the person), and their
situation (economic/social status, career,
who they know and so forth). As for their
skills, talents, and abilities, we generally
don't think too much about these unless
we're put in the situation of having to
manage these people, in which case such
attributes become important. In such a
situation, a detached manager might not look
at his or her employee so much as an
individual person as, rather, a package of
skills and abilities that can be directed to get
a particular job accomplished.
Now, of course, GMs are managers in a
way, and it's important for us to sometimes
know a character's stats, skills, and so forth,
but I wonder if all of this paperwork gets in
the way of the players, the actors, in effect,
and if perhaps the character sheet should be
a GM-only preserve. In short, if we take
away the character sheet, would the players
end up doing a better job of sinking into
character and actually roleplaying as
opposed to trying to acquire x ability or y
stat in this sort of penis-waving frenzy of
never-ending one-upmanship that is
traditional character advancement? 1
Of course, players want to know what their
characters can do, and they want to know
their probability of doing it right before they
try. That's what the rules of most game
systems are designed to convey. But in so
doing, it seems to me that the very notion of
character is often somehow lost like the
proverbial forest amidst the trees.
Do we really know with great accuracy
what we can and can't do? I used to play
little league baseball, but with what
probability can I still pitch a perfect fastball?
I have no idea. I can program computers to
some small extent, but how efficiently can I
write a bug-free program on paper under a
time constraint (for example, while taking a
test)?
I haven't the foggiest. It all depends.
What's the program supposed to do? How
familiar am I with the language? How much
sleep did I get the night before? There are
probably a dozen intangible variables.
Hence, what sense does it make to have a
well-defined programming stat? Stats can be
good guideposts, but with so many clinging
to our character sheets, perhaps they
ultimately get in the way of what it is we're
really doing.
This, of course, is the argument made by
designers of freeform RPGs, minimalist
games which purposely put forth as few
actual rules as they can possibly get away
with. And, of course, in so doing they leave
much for the traditional gamer to be desired.
Several of these sorts of games are available
online free-of-charge.
One example, which I'll point you toward,
1
I mention this in particular because it has
been a topic of some recent discussions.
is the Window2, a game created by Scott
Lininger during the late 1990s. This system
uses strength, agility, health, knowledge, and
perception as it's five basic, recommended
stats, although these may be modified
according to genre by the individual GM.
The system's gimmick is the competency
ladder. Each level of competency is
associated with a particular die. It works as
follows:
• Incredible (d4)
• Very High (d6)
• High (d8)
• Above Average (d10)
• Average (d12)
• Below Average (d20)
• Low (d30)
This, in itself, is rather interesting, because
in marketing classes back when I was
studying for an MBA, we were taught that a
seven-point scale was considered ideal for
questionnaires, because various cognitive
studies have shown that the average person's
maximum number of degrees of reliable,
qualitative differentiation is seven. I wonder
if Scott knew this when he created this
system.
The other reason this is interesting, of
course, is that there also happens to be seven
types of dice that we are all familiar with.
So, obviously, this system makes use of all
of them.
Under the rules of the Window, you want
to roll low, and, of course, the more faces on
the die you're rolling, the harder that is to do.
In general, the target number for most tasks
is 6. For an easier task, the target number
may be higher. For a harder one, it may be
lower. There are no firm guidelines with
respect to task difficulty. Hence, how high or
low to make various target numbers is a
matter purely up to the GM's whim, which,
perhaps, is as it should be, although I
wouldn't be surprised if many players might
quibble over this argument.
Hence, if Joe is an expert marksman (very
high: d6), he doesn't even need to roll to hit a
moderately sized target at a moderate
distance (this possibly being a failing of the
system, as it doesn't account for highly
skilled characters making that rare but
critical error). Hitting the bull's-eye,
however, should be considered a harder task,
perhaps requiring a success roll of 3. So he
rolls, and on a roll of 4-6, he fails, merely
hitting the target, not the bull's-eye.
As to be expected of such a minimalist
system, there are no firm rules for character
generation per se. The prospective
2
See http://www.mimgames.com/window
gamemaster is thrown some ideas but is
essentially directed to design his or her own
system within a system. And this may be
good or bad depending on your point of
view.
Now my point in relating these details of
the Window is simply to demonstrate one
example of a minimalist RPG and talk about
some of the pros and cons of this particular
system, which are common pros and cons
for freeform systems in general. On the one
hand, I like it as a GM, at least in theory,
because it would allow me to define
characters, and in particular NPCs, very
quickly. I could scratch out a few words and
the NPC would be ready, and then if that
NPC turned out to be a regular character, I
could flesh out the character to whatever
degree necessary. In short, minimalist RPGs
mean less paperwork and more freedom for
the GM.
However, there is, of course, a certain
problem with everything being so loosely
defined. Many GMs as well as players want
more structure, and I find myself leaning
toward this camp if only because it's what
I'm already used to. Perhaps if I GMed a few
sessions of the Window or some other
freeform RPG, the initial discomfort and
feeling of nakedness at having no firm rules
structure would evaporate with experience,
and I would come to prefer it. I suspect that
may be the case, but I really don't know.
If nothing else, it would force me to define
all the game's particulars in my own way,
everything from abilities to skills to
character equipment and so forth, and
perhaps that's the whole point. Perhaps it's
not intended to be a system so much as a
starting point for that next jump in personal
creativity.
So I'm tempted to play around with it. Of
course, I would probably have to develop
more structure into the system in order to
feel really comfortable with it, yet in so
doing I might well end up returning to the
original problem of too much structure and
too much paperwork.
It would be nice to have a system which is
modularized to the extent that a GM could
quickly create NPCs on the fly but could
then quickly upgrade them into major
characters if the need arose. For the whole
system to be self-consistent, however, I think
it would have to be well-structured and fair,
and that, of course, is the real trick.
I raised this question among others in my
comments to Spike Jones in this issue, and I
think a solution exists in this notion of
modularity, character templates, and skill
packages, something which the Window
doesn't address but which many of the
professionally published RPGs do. I'd be
curious to hear what the rest of you think
about all this as well as what you find works
best for you and your players among the
different game systems that you've
encountered.
Comments on A&E #352:
Paul Cardwell: RYCT me: You make
some excellent points about international
politics. I definitely need to learn more. Any
highly-readable (interesting, thorough,
accurate, non-partisan) sources you can
suggest?
Myles Corcoran: Loved your examples
although I'm not familiar with HeroQuest,
and hence your variant rules haven't yet
processed. Nonetheless, I'm now curious to
check out the system. My only question is
whether I really need to put "gather clothes
and skedaddle 5m1" on my character sheet.
RYCT me regarding your idea for a
potential IgTheme question: "Player or GM?
What draws you more to one role or the
other?": That's certainly an interesting
question which I have only fleetingly
considered, and it ties in with another
question which I think is somehow related:
"How do you think you might be different
today if, like so many other people out there,
you had never been exposed to RPGs?" 3
Of course, there is no rewind button when
it comes to our lives. We can't go back to see
what might have happened if only we'd
taken that left turn at Albuquerque 353
issues ago. What we can do, however, no
matter how nonsensical it may seem, is
hypothesize. And in so doing we might
somehow answer that other question about
what it is about playing or GMing that
attracted us and held our attention for so
long, and whether or not that energy would
have been developed at all, or perhaps found
some other outlet, had it not been for RPGs.
It's altogether a rather curious question
which I'm not sure can ever be fully
answered.
Michael Cule: I seem to be missing the last
two pages of your zine. No, wait, it got
mixed into Lisa's zine.
Regarding your problem of having two
free evenings a week with nothing to do, I've
got the perfect solution. Buy yourself a TiVo.
I guarantee that all your remaining free time
will instantly dry up. I currently have about
60-70 hours of programming on mine. It
almost makes me long for the days when I
didn't even have a television.
3
This, come to think of it, relates to some of
my comments to Spike Jones in this issue
regarding the marketing of roleplaying as a
creative tool to non-RPGers.
Regarding your GURPS:Traveller
campaign and your mention of the psi-
phobic Lt. Commander: this psi-phobia has
always struck me as rather strange, and I
wonder if you've done anything to try to
justify it within the setting. One idea might
be to make it fairly commonplace for psis to
band together for criminal enterprises, this at
least giving people a reason to fear them.
Another might be to link psionics to various
forms of insanity or mental instability,
giving all psis some form of psychological
handicap.
In any case, I've rather fallen out with the
idea of allowing psionics in Traveller merely
on the grounds that Traveller ought to be
hard-SF. I talked about this in the most
recent issue of APAcalypse4, citing my
Travelleresque novel, the Harrison
Chapters5, and discussing part of what I
think I did wrong when I wrote it. I'd be
curious to hear your take on psionics and
whether you think it really belongs in the
Traveller setting, and if so, how you think it
ought to be modified it if at all.
Robert Dushay: Next time you're in
Southern California, feel free to email me. I
live in San Bernardino, the smogpit of the
state, and during at least one recent year, the
murder capital of the nation. Be proud of
what you've got, I always say. 
Regarding the Morrisville Guild, I'm
reminded of Toastmasters. They have a
definite program on how to attain rank in the
organization (unsurprisingly, it is by giving
speeches). I wonder if a similar program
could be created for GMs. A system of
mentoring could even be developed, along
with all the various rules and rituals which
good GMs tend to follow. In this way, new
GMs could be brought up to speed, and
moderate-to-poor GMs could improve their
skills or at least get some new ideas. This is
4
Issue T-50 which should be coming out
soon. See www.ketherian.org/revelations
5
www.elektrasystems.net/~jimv/har.htm
all idealistic crap, of course, but honestly,
why not?
Lee Gold: In case you're on the lookout for
such things, there are some potential
IgTheme questions in my comments to
Myles Corcoran.
RYCT Robert Dushay on the city of
Nyosa: Sounds like a hell of a place to visit.
I'd be curious to learn more.
RYCT me on teenagers today being
economically less mature but physically
more mature: Excellent point. Your
argument makes me think that perhaps the
starting age for PCs in fantasy RPGs ought
to be before or around the onset of puberty
(perhaps slightly later for mages, depending,
of course, on their training requirements).
Spike Jones: RYCT Paul Mason regarding
Ryan Dancey and his claim of five-minute
character generation: That's funny. I actually
rather dread working up a character in
systems where the number of options are so
many that it ends up taking forever. On the
other hand, I actually remember enjoying
character generation in Classic Traveller
(which often took a considerable amount of
time), because the career details of the
character's life were fleshed out in the
process. I think if character
generation were more life-
path oriented rather than
"choose from this list of skills
and combat-options" oriented, it
would be more fun and
interesting.
Of course, that still leaves the problem of
creating NPCs. One thing I like about
GURPS is the possibility of creating various
templates and skill packages. For instance, it
wouldn't be too hard to create a series of
packages for various professions and classes
of hobby. If I want a starship engineer who's
also a big-time party animal, voila, combine
those two packages. If I want an school
teacher who is also a big-time outdoorsman
(or outdoorswoman), voila. This sort of mix-
matching shouldn't be terribly hard to
achieve.
What would be more interesting, of course,
would be to find some way for both
mechanics to exist side-by-side, so that you
could use the long-method for main
characters, and the short-method for minor
characters, but also so that you could convert
from the short-method to the long-method
when a character is promoted in status from
minor to major.
I'm not sure that there's any gamesystem
which has done this or even if any have
attempted it. Would be curious to hear your
thoughts on the matter.
RYCT James Reichstadt regarding how to
turn the tide from roll-playing to role-
playing, you have given a despicably,
frustratingly pessimistic analysis of the
situation, and I'm sorry to say that I
completely agree. Here's one idea, however.
Instead of trying to target gamers who are
not good roleplayers, how about trying to
target non-gamers who could be good
roleplayers?
As an example, there are several books and
dozens of articles published every year on
writing fiction, all of it aimed at creative
people suffering from writer's block or
perhaps just a lack of habitual typing
experience. One way to bring them in would
be to contact all the people who
write these sorts of books
and articles (or write some
yourself), talking about the
great virtues of roleplaying
to unlock (or rather
exercise) the creative
genius within.
As for the
example outline
of such an
article: (1) depict the problem
of a writer staring at a blank screen waiting
for inspiration, (2) explain how play-by-
email roleplaying games can be used to
examine and develop ideas from the comfort
of one's own home, (3) summarize and
examine a couple of publicly-available
freeform rulesets, and talk about the pros
and cons of each one, giving examples of
how they are used to resolve conflict, (4)
insert a list of web-resources for additional
information, including a list of websites
where the newbie can connect with other
PBeMers, and finally (5) give some actual
GMing advice aimed specifically at the
PBeM medium.
I'm not sure this will actually make these
people better writers, but it might turn them
on to roleplaying, which is more or less the
not-so-well-hidden agenda. In short, these
gamers-who-never-were may be reachable,
but nobody is presently reaching out to
them. It almost seems as it the market
expects to absorb them by osmosis, which
may eventually happen, assuming, at least,
that our public schools don't finish stamping
out creativity first.
RYCT me regarding dialogue in write-ups
and the inability to remember lines of
dialogue verbatim: This is one of several
reasons that I tend to prefer PBeMing over
face-to-face play. However, for some of the
difficulties I've observed, see my comment
to Lisa Padol in this issue.
Joshua Kronengold: You want me to write-
up an outline of the Jinx campaign? Hmm...
I can give it to you in a sentence. Jinx travels
about the Hells having a series of semi-
amusing conversations and develops into a
goddess along the way. Anything more
detailed than that and I would end up giving
away the whole story, so I beg for everyone's
extreme patience. After all, just as with any
story, the devil is in the details.
Mike Kubit: RYCT Lee where you
describe starting characters in your
game, you talk about PCs growing
on the "horizontal and vertical
planes" (depth and breadth as Patrick
Riley referred to them; see my
comments to him in this issue), but
you also indicate that you want
starting characters to be able to
buddy-up with veterans, that
although they may be less "well-
rounded" they shouldn't be
significantly less "puissant or
hardy than their more
experienced counterparts."
And, of course, that creates a
dichotomy, because if
characters are allowed to buy
combat-related abilities with
"experience points" or
whatever mechanic you
intend to use, then there is
going to arise this
expectation that veterans
should be significantly more effective and,
hence, more viable in combat situations. The
question, of course, is how do you think this
dichotomy ought to be resolved?
I ask this question without having found
any obvious solution, except perhaps to cite
the tentative one I mentioned to Patrick,
which implies that perhaps veterans are not
more well-rounded than recruits, but rather
than their skills are better focused on what it
is they actually have to do. Perhaps it is the
recruits who are better rounded, but that
their extraneous skills slip away as they
focus more and more on the skills they end
up using day in and day out in order to keep
themselves alive.
Perhaps, actually, the best solution would
be to force starting characters to take
extraneous skills in order to model a
comfortable, civilian lifestyle. Then, the
whole process of becoming a veteran would
require a shedding of the superfluous, along
with the training and honing of what is
essential to the soldier.
I'd be curious as to your thoughts.
Brian Misiaszek: Nice game write-up. I
once had a player who knew too much
physics and would work out things like this.
He was fairly painful to GM, as I'm sure you
can imagine, though certainly a good deal
more painful to the monsters, as I think you
effectively demonstrated.
RYCT Michael Cule: Writing hard-SF is
hard. Writing a hard SF-RPG is harder.
There was, of course, 2300AD, probably the
first SF-RPG to incorporate both a 3d
starmap and a playable ruleset. I guess the
question always boils down to this: How
hard is hard?
I still haven't given up on Ragamuffin (see
A&E #298 & #310 among others), though I
think the only thing that'll really light a fire
under my ass would be to run it as a PBeM
(see the tail end of my article in A&E #307)
with a freeform ruleset in order to drive the
development of all the various details that
have to be considered. Of course, like your
experience with babysitting the computer
until one-o'clock in the morning, running a
second game may also turn me into a
walking zombie, so I advance this notion
with no small trepidation.
RYCT Patrick Riley: So am I the bore or
the crank? On second thought, maybe it'd be
better if you didn't answer that. 
RYCT me regarding a retro-zine, that
would be amusing. I'm sure a few long-time
gamers might end up scratching their heads
wondering why they'd never heard of it for
all these years. Sadly, most gamers would
likely regard it as crap, seeing as it wouldn't
be d20-compatible. Strange and silly times
we live in.
Jonathan Nicholas: Re ESP: Yes, ESP is
very annoying. It became so annoying, in
fact, that we decided to remove it from the
AD&D game entirely, although it has since
come back in other less obvious ways.
Re PC motivations: Putting some controls
on their initial motives is also useful in terms
of party-building, as you say. I've pondered
the idea of starting all the PCs as members
of the same family, essentially brothers,
sisters, and cousins, weaving their character
histories together so as to bind them not only
by blood but by years of shared childhood
memories. Granted, that would also require
some racial restrictions, but it would be
interesting to see how intra-party politics
develop as a result, and it should put a big
block in the way of any troublemaker
who might have designs on
backstabbing his buddies. He would,
essentially, be backstabbing his own
kin, not something well-regarded in
any culture save, apparently, among
the so-called nobility.
RYCT me, I looked at strategy.com and
didn't see what was supposed to be so
great about it. Am I missing something
obvious? Regarding getting back-issues of
The Onion, I decided against coughing-up
$30 for a subscription, although I'll admit I
was tempted.
Lisa Padol: While reading Lozen's
Adventure, I was reminded of a nagging
question in PBeM gaming: To what extent
should the GM exercise his or her editorial
authority?
In nearly all the PBeMs in which I've
played, the GM has taken a minimalist
approach, generally declining to edit the
players except where absolutely necessary. I
think the reason for this is that editing takes
time and effort, and unless the GM is
planning on novelizing the correspondence,
it's generally of little value.
In the PBeMs which I've run, however,
I've taken the opposite approach, heavily
editing both character actions as well as
inter-character dialogue. Granted, while
editing, I try to preserve the substance of the
players' actions while changing the style of
the writing to better fit with my own style,
but fairly often I find that even the substance
itself must be modified in some way. And I
don't wait until after the game to do this. I've
typically done it during the actual progress
of the game, composing a series of updates
which continually advance the plot, always
showing the players the GM's perspective,
interpretation, and final say on what just
happened.
These are, of course, two separate
approaches, and neither one is necessarily
right or wrong. There are, however, pros and
cons to be considered. After all, many
gamers (and many people in general) don't
like to be edited. Nonetheless, I think that
very often they need to be edited for a whole
multitude of reasons.
First of all, as I previously indicated,
everyone has a different written style. By
doing the editing, the GM can "normalize"
everyone's writing around his or her own
style, making the overall write-up more
coherent (assuming, of course, that he or she
can write coherently which may be subject
to some measure of debate).
Blah, Blah, Blah
Secondly
(and this is probably the main reason I
personally go to the effort), there is a huge
difference between written and spoken
dialogue. When people write, they tend to
write in speeches, long sermons which
enumerate all their points in a painstaking,
somewhat boring manner (this very
comment being a good example), whereas
when people speak, they tend to cut to the
point a bit quicker, allowing their specific
arguments to wait for the secondary (debate)
phase of the conversation, rather than
packing them all into the opening ("this is
my idea") phase.
The primary reason for this should be
more or less obvious. In written
communication (or, more specifically,
communication by email) the turn-around
time is much longer than in a face-to-face
conversation. Hence, people try to pack
more material into their dialogue just for the
sake of moving things along. However, in
face-to-face dialogue, there is a sense of
"taking turns" to speak of which each
participant is subconsciously aware. Hence,
is should be so surprise that written and
spoken communication are completely
different.
Of course, streamlining written
communication into "natural conversation
flow" is as much an art as the initial
composition of the conversation itself. When
a player emails a submission (their character
dialogue or actions), they tend write a
multitude of ideas, and each idea,
represented by anything from a fragment of
a sentence to several paragraphs, is subject
to response by the other players. All of these
ideas and their associated responses each
becomes "threads" of the conversation. In
their initial written form, they are spliced
over many different emails, and they must
be combined and made to flow with all the
other threads in a natural, convincing, and
readable manner. Otherwise, the
conversation will not be believable. It will
look, instead, like a series of monologues,
not like the way in which people really
speak.
When undertaking this task, to combine
and edit the words of the players, thereby
manufacturing an edited scene from the raw
material of their various submissions, I find
myself sometimes changing their words here
and there, sometimes deleting various
extraneous threads of dialogue which
seemed to me, at the time, to not
contribute anything of substance to
the overall conversation.
Likewise, I often find myself
adding bits of dialogue to serve
as transitional elements between
various threads of the
conversation, and more
substantively, to bring up various
thoughts and memories which, I
sometimes think, may pertain to
the conversation but which the player
might have overlooked.
Of course, if a player argues, "No, I
wouldn't have said that," then I will
generally retract whatever part is found
offensive, however, I prefer working with
players who trust me enough to cede some
small measure of their character's autonomy,
thereby allowing me to edit and flesh-out the
ongoing story in this way. As the trust
grows, I'll often put more words into their
mouths than they might have preferred, but
it is never done to make the character look I find myself agreeing with all of these
bad or to usurp the player's authority. Rather, points, yet they are interesting in that a
when I do it, I do it for the sake of the certain dichotomy arises from this
overall story. discussion. Clearly, power-progression is a
My fear, of course, is that by inserting goal of many gamers. It seems, however,
myself into the flow of the correspondence never to be the goal in a movie or a novel.
in this way, I am very likely influencing the The protagonist doesn't undertake some
plot as well as casting my own perceptions quest in order to go up a level.7
on various characters which may not be So, I guess my question is: Should power
entirely fair to their individual players. This progression be taken out of the equation?
practice gives me more room to play For instance, I think that in some RPG
favorites and to insinuate my own will into systems, the number of skills you can learn
the campaign in ways that a GM probably are determined by your character's
shouldn't, so I find that I have to continually intelligence. Well, if we (as real people) max
watch myself in order to check these out our skill slots sometime in early
tendencies. There is, after all, a fine line adulthood, then after that, all we're really
between extensive editing and actual doing is forgetting old skills in order to open
rewriting. up the slots to learn new ones. For example,
In any case, I'd be curious to learn your I haven't played baseball or done any fortran
thoughts on these issues and whether you've programming in years. My skill level in both
ever considered modifying your personal isn't what it once was.
approach. Perhaps character development should be
handled in an analogous fashion, where
Simon Reeve: I'd be curious to learn about players can modify their characters without,
the origins of that catpeople race you for example, increasing their total skill-set or
detailed. You mention that you'd already overall power beyond that of a starting
decided, but for some reason you state no character who is new to the group.
preference over the various theories you That’s all
However, if Ifor thisthis
make month.
supposition, then
included. Actually, unless there is a really what In does that do to heroism?
the next issue, I'll try to Can getthe
good reason not to tell the players, I protagonists
back to the Jinx in Hell write- of
still, realistically, be the stars
generally prefer to have all this their story. And, of course, this goes back to
information out there. After upcomment
your and hopefully
on TNG. steer away
all, assuming the race is of a from these
Thoughts? See alsosorts of polemics
my comment to Mike
considerable population, I've been doing recently,
Kubit.
there will likely be many stirring up trouble for no good
who know of their Brian Rogers: You make an interesting
origins.6 Some of those
reason.point
Hehregarding
heh…. the butler who
should be willing to As forwishedlifehe'dinbeengeneral,
a mage.
talk, and if nothing everything Somewhat
is going tangentially,
very well, I
else, sages of history although awonder
lack of if there's
spare ever
timebeen
is, a
should have been horror
of course, moviean told
always issue.from the
able to figure it out. monster's point of view. I'm
As for voting on In reminded
order to ofconsume
The Sixthmore Senseof and
future projects, I'm thisThe non-existent
Others, but thesespareweretime,
really
always up for SF- I'mgimmick-movies.
thinking about finally
Their scripts were
oriented material, so more about
starting up that Ragamuffin clever deception,
put me down for
options C & D.
PBeM (seeduping my the
were,
audience, as it
comment
rather
to
than
Brianpresenting
Misiaszek). Just thought
an actual, straight-
Patrick Riley: I I'd forward
mentionplot.it in
Now case there are
Monsters, Inc.,
like your mention of anythat bored
was a great SF movie, a perfect
enthusiasts
the "neener-neener" factor, where the GM is inversion
around for kids
herewithitching
chronic insomnia.
for yet
doing too much dick-flopping for his own To get back to topic, I guess your butler
good. The players should, indeed, be the another monumental waste of
might have a point if his lack of useful skills
heroes of the story. Having said that, or time.
position in the party ended up
however, you make the comment to Lisa that Before
marginalizing you Ifemail
his character. me,
not, however,
TNG's officers seemed to be too good at too thanhowever,
I don't see where
please his gripe is coming
forewarn
much ("depth and breadth" as you put it), from. He can always be the butler who
adding that the goals you personally set out
yourself by glancing over my
studied magic and became a sorcerer, a sort
for your own PCs have little do with of comments
Jeeves meets to Lisa ThatPadol
Gandalf. might
personal power or abilities. regarding
actually be fun. my rather egregious
editing-style. I'm sure I've
6
Although, strangely enough, this driven players crazy without
apparently wasn't the case with the gypsies meaning to, and since I don't
of Europe who had somehow forgotten their
7 really know how to stop, it'll
own origins over their many centuries of "Let's go rescue the Princess!"
wandering. At least, that's the impression
probably be better if everyone
"Why?"
I've gotten from what little I've read about "Ijust
needaccepts
the XP." it. 
them. Take care everyone, and may
you all have a merry, non-
religious holiday and a happy