On “Hobby” stacking

By this point in time, habit stacking is a somewhat popular concept in productivity focused communities. Its a concept that asks, how might we have our habits flow into each other to improve the stickiness of new habits we want to integrate into our routine. Something like adding light standing stretches while you’re cleaning your home, or taking your evening anime enjoyment to the gym elliptical. Its a way to use the staying power of your existing lifestyle to nudge yourself towards a slightly more productive version of you.

Lately I’ve been doing something of a “hobby” stacking technique. I have some long standing hobbies that I don’t fear are at risk, like table top role playing games. I’ve been committed to a handful of long running games since 2020 and my thirst for trying more games is as powerful as ever. So when I began to feel my hobby repertoire was feeling a bit stale, I endeavored to stack on this interest.

Mostly, this has manifested as art, a natural pairing to a hobby primarily composed of imagining fantastical worlds and characters. On my page you can see some character design that has resulted from this. I’ve also recently picked up pottery and clay building as a more practical avenue of this. Premium dice towers and trays cost around $100 each, which is a bit prohibitive for me for something that’s just a nice to have. However, with the power of clay, I’m able to create the towers and trays that’ll fit my space perfectly, and for the cost of clay and kiln time.

These pairings of hobbies has proven to be a powerful driving force, pushing me to be better and better at my craft. Perhaps my character portrait doesn’t quite capture the emotion I intended, which launches me into a study on gestural drawing and color theory. Or my dice tower has a strange wobble to it, pushing me to rabbit hole projects to prototype new ways to build for stability.

There’s a real strength and power to a healthy ecosystem of efforts. In my life, its habit stacking and now hobby stacking. In my professional career, its pushing for cohesive value streams and provisioning projects such that they naturally feed each other. I always am striving to make sure our teams exist in an ecosystem where the connections in our work is evident to our team members, to help drive the purpose home in a natural grass roots way. It can be a wicked organizational problem to solve fraught with political pitfalls. But even without a reorganization, there’s ways to organize ART syncs (or project syncs depending on your organizations philosophies) to bring together naturally joined work into a single space where we can map the dependencies and let the team discover on their own why their work is critical to our company.

So, how might you bring together different aspects of your life, interests, work, to more cohesively draw out your passion and drive in an effortless way?

Musings on player agency against indomitable odds

With spooky season upon me, I find myself gravitating back to grittier and at times more punishing table top RPGs like Call of Cthulhu and Ten Candles. Both games have the energy of a horror film about them, the players are the protagonists in a story about a massive unstoppable force that’s poised to destroy everything they hold dear. Mechanically, both stack the odds deeply in the “big bad’s” favor. In both, game masters generally encourage players to not become emotionally attached to their characters as death looms at every turn.

But despite these surface level similarities, I feel that they couldn’t be more different tonally from each other. This difference I believe hinges strongly on the element of player agency in the game.

In all table top role playing games, player agency is a delicate line that the game master has to tip toe along. Too much player agency and the game will lose its driving force, the plot and world that engaged the players falling to the side in favor of momentary fancies of the most vocal player at the table. Too little player agency and the game plays out more like a linear video game, or worse, a fan fiction of the game master’s favorite media tropes. A balance of player control and game master control keeps the tension and pressure on the story line without crushing the player’s enjoyment and creativity with their characters.

If we take a look at the two games I mentioned earlier, we can see how this twists the energy of each game. Call of Cthulhu is based on the writings of HP Lovecraft and features cults and monsters levels of magnitude more powerful and knowing than the players ever can hope to be. The players in reality have very little influence on the course the story takes outside of key pivotal moments. Which tracks, you wouldn’t expect a typical beat cop to stand a chance against an international cult worshiping an awakened old god head on. Instead, players have to embrace unexpected opportunities to nudge the story off a disaster path, maybe replacing a cursed idol with a fake or taking a cult leader out for drinks before the night of a ritual to lessen his effectiveness. The lack of agency adds a feeling of dread, hopelessness, and, at times, frustration.

Ten candles on the other hand tends to have a feeling of hope against the odds, bittersweet sadness, and catharsis. Ten candles centers on a group of players who are up against an entity that’s unstoppable and defined through play rather that set up front. The rules are that scene length is dictated by players dwindling luck and the burn time of generic tea candles, plus that all players die by the games end regardless of actions. With this in mind you might think that players have less agency, but in actuality the game is set up to allow players to rally against their impending doom in a spectacular display rather than being crushed beneath a gods foot. Players can make rolls to handle situations however they like, and playing true to their character grants them additional dice to even their odds. They can also choose for their character to go out on their terms, perhaps improving the state of the world in exchange for their characters life knowing the end is nigh. The collaborative storytelling at the heart of the system creates a surprising amount of agency for everyone at the table. Though we know that we cant take our character with us after the game, we can tell their story in a way that does them justice.

Player agency takes Ten Candles, something that sounds like a depressing slog on paper, into a heartfelt and exciting experience. And stripping out player agency takes Call of Cthulhu from a potentially fun and insane tour of classic literature into a fight against a game master and predestined story. One is not better than the other, but despite the similar desperate setting, the outcomes couldn’t be more different to me.

A word of advice to new and soon to be game masters for these games: talk to your players ahead of time about expectation for agency within the narrative.

More on Ten Candles
More on Call of Cthulhu

Musings on “Alice is Missing” RPG

TL;DR: Alice is Missing is a new take on an old format incorporating light prompts and messages over face to face communication to heighten roleplay

“Alice is Missing” really puts the Roleplaying in Roleplaying Game. I’m a huge fan of games of all sorts, doubly so when it comes to games that allow for creative expression and the forging of a new story. Which is why “Alice is Missing” is one of my favorite RPGs currently.

At its core, the game is just a few light suggestions attached to names and a time box. In the physical edition, you receive some cards for locations, people, motivation, and vague events, along with a game guide for the game “master”. There is no story enclosed, instead its written on the fly by you and your fellow players.

This may seem intimidating, especially to folks new to RPGs, but the game has another trick up its sleeve. The game takes place entirely in messaging apps rather than verbally at a table. This little nuance changes the pace of conversation, multiple people can respond at once, and in multiple threads. You also have the increased immersion as you don’t have a familiar voice and face to remind you its just a game.

This combined with its heavily unstructured story prompts (something like “this person showed up to Alice’s house upset, why?”) make it so that the game is unpredictable, a story that no one controlled, but collectively was written. You could even call it the Ouija board of RPGs.

All in all, “Alice is Missing” is a lovely twist on classic RPG mechanics, coupled with real and heavy themes of growing up. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for ways to increase roleplay among hesitant groups, or to anyone who’s grown tired of fantasy trope games.