Teos Abadie

And that exacerbates this issue of, you know, well, of course, we have to send the face in to convince the people to open up the door for us. But the person playing the face may not be clever at coming up with things on their feet. Right. And that that creates this problem.

Yeah. And I think that is the you know, what is the right answer? The right answer is that you don't want to clamp down on it too much because it will other problems will arise that are worse. And so really, it's an ad hoc situation. Be aware of this and then play off of it in the way that will be most fun at that particular time.

Sure. Yeah. In the meat space, as you said, it can be hard. Sometimes conventions will, certain conventions will have like a play test area, which can be invaluable for game designers. A lot of board games do this. So they will go to these particular conventions that feature this to be able to run through tons of tables and they have some way of saying like, hey, come try new games.

So people know that they're not fully finished games and they're looking forward to that and providing that feedback. um there are groups online like discord channels like there is the um uh uh rising tide ttrpg group that is on discord you can find them uh on maston for sure maybe blue sky as well uh and join that server you can find people to play it to us people on our discord will um

put in requests to playtest, right? They will try things out there and say, hey, I want to run a thing next weekend who's available so that I can try this thing out. So just find some format where you're happy to be as happy as you can be to be and lowers that sort of anxiety and so on so that you can just find a group of people to kind of try through things and try it.

It is always difficult to find people, but a lot of these places at least have people doing this often enough that you're not strange, right? You're yet another person showing up to people who are ready for this and prepared for this. And that's the ideal thing is find some group like that that fits your needs, where that's the expectation is this is not particularly polished, etc.

And, you know, the beginning of this sort of said, I don't do social media. And I would say that even if you did do social media, I would not recommend kind of typical social media for this because just like random people on Blue Sky or Macedon aren't necessarily going to be great play testers.

I would still say try to find the places where this is being done by others and join that because that's going to just give you a better result. It is great to get feedback from just random people, but you will get better results from people who understand playtesting and what's expected from it.

Which is...

doing what you can't do in everyday life like that's something i see new people time and time again so achieving results but results that you can't you know in this imagined fantasy space right that i can ride a broomstick or cast a spell or whatever it is that you're coming from that you can now do that instead of seeing an actor do it or reading a book about it is a huge thing and so you want to show how easy it is to do that

Yeah, I love those. I shared on a recent show that the struggle we had a little bit with Savage Worlds and Deadlands. And Deadlands has this interesting story where it was the RPG, then Savage Worlds, and so to the point where now, the current version, you buy the Deadlands set, but you also need the Savage Worlds core buckets.

And then when you're looking something up, you're like, where do I look? And the best explanation was actually their quick guide, not the Deadlands book. So that's their point number one, right? That the best way to learn the game is to go get the free product. not the paid product. But even with that, now I have three things. I have the Savage World book, the Quick Guide, and the normal book.

And then I have to decide which do I look in? And sometimes we were looking in all three. And that bogged down play, right? And, you know, I'm about to run Savage Worlds again. So I've been prepping an adventure and I'm looking forward to it, but I'm not looking forward to this continual problem of which book has the rules how.

And with what's described here in this opening question of a system that's fairly complex and allows you to choose your approach to the rules, right, your rules modules or something like that, that's going to be even more critical.

And so how can you, especially at this quick guide level, whether it's someone else running it themselves or you're explaining it, you're running it at a con, something like that. The players must be able to do that really quickly. And so the perfect showcase is almost like what Sean was saying about a choice around your character.

If you could very quickly say, OK, we're going to play this game that I've made. Do you want it to be sci fi or modern? That's we've got many choices, but we're just going to choose those two things. Let's go with sci fi. OK, here's this very simple thing that we have. Here's this one page that captures all of the differences we're going to embrace because of that. And now let's play. Right.

That might be something that's doable. Right. For a new player to take on. Because when you ask about the entry points for D&D, why does it work so well? Because it fairly simply delivers on what people want out of the experience and then has more depth behind it. But the very basics are simple to grasp. They're iconic. They all translate. Right.

That's a good trick. You know, a lot of there's a lot of talk about why ideas come out in showers. Right. And it can be the simplest explanation is because when we're in the shower, we're not really doing anything else other than a thing that we can kind of do while only thinking. And so you achieve a flow state creatively, flow state, get it? See what I did there?

Anyway, you are more creative because you can kind of not worry about the fact that you're currently putting in shampoo or whatever it is, and you are thinking about the problem and coming with ideas. And too often when we should be in a creative mindset, we are doing other things that don't allow for that sort of flow state.

And so what often happens is the flow state only comes when we have the deadline. I've got to run that game tomorrow. So I need ideas now. I just have to. So I turn everything else off and I focus. Well, that is the key. Turn everything else off and focus. And so a walk in the woods, a walk on the treadmill desk and those can often do that, too, because it sort of gets your body going.