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This is where I try to record my best thoughts. I welcome all comments or inquiries through e-mail!

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Sugar

is as addicting as cocaine. It is as harmful as cocaine; it just takes decades to kill you. I might be exaggerating, but this is the mindset you need to over...

Macronutrients

Getting enough, and getting only enough, is the key to the “balanced” diet. To do this, we need to understand what our bodies actually need.

Proper Proportions

To cut down on eating, we’re going to back off slowly, hour by hour, with “one easy trick”: Serve yourself your normal portions. Drink a huge glass of w...

The Right Diet

We want to get away from the Standard American Diet (SAD) of nutrient-robbed grains, artery-clogging meat, and fat-building drinks. Don’t be SAD.

Keep it up!

The only way this is going to work is if you form good habits. This means making exercise a part of your life. You don’t have to be a fitness buff, you just ...

Burn it off!

How exactly do you lose fat? Through your sweat and breath! The more you sweat, the more you breathe hard, and the faster your heart pumps, the more weight y...

Medical Advice

If you’re looking for real medical information, please don’t just google your symptoms. Speak with a real doctor, if possible. Otherwise, visit familydoctor....

Where do I start?

Head over to ahealthiermichigan.org to get started on your new vitality education. These folks are doing a great job, and have more honest material than I co...

Inverse Dice in Practice

Sometime within the last few years, while playing with Hostargo’s Inverse Dice Mechanic, I realized it wasn’t working as intended. Players were having troubl...

A Minimalist Definition of an RPG

A role playing game (RPG) is a scenario of drama, and a mechanic for acting in that drama. RPGs are an exploration of what it’s like to be somewhere, someone...

Uncertainty in Games: Meaning

Poorly written rules are frustrating. Ambiguity can lead to disagreements or confusion. But the meaning of specific terms or abilities isn’t always a detrime...

Uncertainty in Games: Players

Competition has been a part of human civilization since the earliest days of man. Whether struggling over food, wrestling for ruling power, or just participa...

Uncertainty in Games: Solver’s

“Will they solve the puzzle?” can be a great dramatic question for a roleplaying scene. The party might uncover a secret clue, find hidden treasures, or save...

Uncertainty in Games: Player Performance

A “hardcore” game might be described as one with only a single source of uncertainty: player performance. No random factors. Complete information. Only how w...

Uncertainty in Games: Randomness

One of the most important uncertainties for role playing games is randomness. That might seem obvious, but randomness is only one of the eleven sources of un...

Uncertainty in Games: A mini-series

The unknown, unsolved, and unpredictable nature of games is exactly what makes them intriguing. As soon as you know that tic-tac-toe or Candy Land are determ...

Why Tabletop?

Advancements in video game technology have given us unlimited possibilities for high quality entertainment. The drive of the AAA tech giants and the hearts o...

Have Fun Designing: The Rule of Cool

Getting excited to work on your project shouldn’t be hard, but sometimes it’s not at the forefront of what you want to do. For professional game designers, I...

Three Axes of Outcomes

A swing-and-a-miss just doesn’t cut it anymore. Every roll in a tabletop RPG should be interesting. Our hobby now has more mature systems, like FF’s Genesys,...

Priority Scheduling: Big Buckets

When you actively seek out to do the dishes instead of sitting down to work on your game, you know you’ve lost a little bit of something. But that something ...

Give Players Tools, Not Roles

Sitting down at a table with some of your friends, bullshitting around with a story, and making badass characters thrive is only a shallow perspective on wha...

Mechanics for Both Sides of the Table

Game Masters do a lot of work. They are the ones doing the prep, adjudicating fairness, and roleplaying a whole world, while players show up to game day wit...

Simplicity vs Depth

Over the New Year holiday I got a chance to run a couple games that I’ve grown to love: Dr. Magnet Hands and All Out of Bubblegum. These are excellent party ...

Revisiting Advantage

I love the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic in D&D 5e.  It's so simple and elegant, and it works perfectly with how the players interact with the ...

A Better Stab at Armor

In my last post about armor, I discussed the possibility of a system where we introduce different types of attack damage, and therefore different types of a...

Armor vs. Padding

Even the chainmail bikini usually gives an RPG hero a boost in “armor”: that generic value of how protected a character is.  In a lot of games, there’s no re...

What is your style of fun?

When gamers mesh well with each other, it’s not just because they’re gamers.  On the contrary, a lot of us can get on each other’s nerves, simply because we ...

The Worst Game Mechanic

Your friends have all gathered to play a game.  There are five of you, but the game is only 4 players.  Someone has to sit out, and it’s randomly dec...

Addressing Min-Maxing

“We’re starting at level one for my campaign.” - GM There is a low grumble from the group of players, who reluctantly start to fill in their character sheet...

The Inverse Dice Theory

The first step to creating a role playing game, for me, was to get a dice mechanic that I was happy with.  Ignoring the actual ‘game’, you have to start with...

GM-Player Trust in an Open Roll System

Games like D&D have the game master (GM) secretly think of a target number (TN) for the player to roll against. In traditional RPGs, the hidden informati...