So, The Bones. It’s a fitting follow-up to Things We Think About Games from the Gameplaywright gents, in the sense that it’s about gamers looking at the games they play.  Honestly there aren’t enough books of that sort in the world (though Green Ronin’s 100 Best series offers fine entries to the form). This time around, The Bones gives us more heft: six in-depth articles including “A Random History of Dice” by Kenneth Hite, and 19 essays, one of which is mine, in which I talk about how playing diceless for years made me love them bones. (Added bonus: the table of contents is a set of random-roll tables. Surprise yourself! Let the dice tell you which essay to read!)

I bring this up because the special-edition hardcover is available for pre-ordering right now. It’ll stay available to order until June 6th or until they hit about 100 copies ordered, whichever comes first (which for all I know could come fast). The special-edition is being printed to order, come June. It’s available only direct through the Gameplaywright folks, and costs $27 + shipping. As an added benefit, folks who preorder the hardcover will get the PDF within 24 hours of placing the order. Details and purchase widgetry to be found hyunh: http://gameplaywright.net/?page_id=958

If you’d rather wait (why? why?!) then no worries — hang around a while and wait for the softcover edition to go on sale. I’ll holler atcha when it does.

Mechaphor
noun. A game mechanic acting as a metaphor for a concept in your game's setting, philosophy or general theme.

Example:

In Space: 1889, the system uses cards instead of dice because cards are a sign of more civilized culture than the thuggish brutes who roll dice in alleys. This is a mechaphor for the aloof Victorian attitude.

In Agon, you roll attack dice in your right hand and defense dice in your left hand, just as you would a sword and shield. This is a visceral mechaphor for brutal ancient combat.

In Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, a bag with black and white stones allows each player's decisions in the short-term to have long-term consequences for the whole group. This is a mechaphor for karma.

I just submitted Do to Ryan Macklin's editorial wizardry. The writing portion of this project is now mostly out of my hands for the next few months. Here's the letter I sent out to the Evil Hat crew explaining the voice of the text and some other aspects of the sausage-making.

~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~

Hey fellas,

It's been a while since I last emailed you all as a group. It's been an eventful year for a lot of you, what with the babies and all. Mazel tov, Fred and Rob!

On the subject of newborns, I'm submitting the most recent, most complete draft of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple to Ryan for editing and midwifery. You're all now invited to access that document, too. (Actually, two documents, since Google Docs has an upper limit on file size.)

You've probably seen me tweet or blog about my progress on this draft the past few months, mostly concerning the word count. This beast is roughly 125,000 words at the moment. The reason for this absurd length is twofold:

1) Ryan pointed out numerous areas in the last draft that required further elaboration, tools, advice and examples of play. Because I've got a wedding coming up in a few months, I won't have time to do that degree of writing again soon, so I figured it would be better to get a "Delete This" edit than a "Write More Here" edit.

2) Secondly, and somewhat related to the first point, I am quite an inexperienced writer. Really quite bad, actually. That being the case, I took on this task assuming that every word that makes the final cut of the final game would probably have ten words that got left on the editing room floor. To spin a clunky metaphor: I'm trusting Ryan to be the sculptor, but I'm trying to provide the best marble I can.

If any of you besides Ryan are insane enough to try to read this whole thing, here are a couple notes on the voice of the text:

- The general setting and procedural text is meant to be friendly and conversational, as if I am speaking directly to the reader. In earlier drafts, I tried affecting the voice of a wise Miyagi-like mentor, but I couldn't pull it off. I thought it better to just do what I could to be clear.

- The examples of play that are within the procedural text are written in a third-person voice. Each describes players doing things at the table, but never describes individual characters acting out of context. So an example might say:

"Fred decides that Tordek will drink one more stein of mead for his fallen ally."

That example would not be phrased as:

"Tordek drinks one more stein of mead for his fallen ally."

The examples of play always follow the players at the table, not the characters in the story. That's to reinforce the very explicit focus on telling a story in the game, rather than necessarily playing a character.

- Also, those examples never show players saying things in their own words. An example would not be phrased as

"Lenny says, 'Hey Fred, what if Tordek has another stein of mead?'"

Instead, the example would be phrased as:

"Lenny suggests to Fred that Tordek would want another stein of mead."

Earlier drafts had examples of play that included table chatter, but that didn't flow as naturally with the procedural text.

- Instead, there are two whole chapters where a complete example of play is laid out as a transcript from an actual game. The first is "Example of Character Creation," in which example players Allie, Bebe, Cat and Dev follow the whole character creation process from scratch. The second is "Example of a Pilgrimage" in which the whole chapter shows them playing an entire campaign of four letters.

- That second chapter is unfinished. That's unfortunate, but the deadline's here and I gotta deliver this baby even if it's a week early.

There is another unfinished chapter, called "The Subtle Art of Gonzometry," which is kind of a grab bag of somewhat advanced play issues that would take up too much room to discuss in the main procedure. I bet Ryan's gonna edit down the bulk of this chapter and scatter it around as sidebars.

So that's the schpiel. Hopefully this overly long email is a sufficient guide through the overly long draft. Feel free to email or call me if there are any questions over the next several months.

Thanks so very, very much for your patience the past couple years. It's been a long flight, but I think we're coming in for a landing soon.

-- Daniel

~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~

And thank you, too, kind readers. Have a happy new year!

Remember that scene in Neverending Story where Atreyu's slogging through the swamp and his horse drowns from sadness? That's what my sinuses feel like right now.

I came down with some kind of sniffly bug during the holiday weekend. That means the four vacation days I scheduled for the end of the year to wrap up the draft's last chapters may be occupied with soup and bedrest. Nuts.

In case you didn't know, my fiancée's very kindly suggested I set writerly tasks aside after the New Year until we get married in June. Most of my evenings have been spent churning out a few thousand words here and there. It's about time for a break.

I think I'll just send off what I have to Ryan. The current draft is hovering around 125,802 words. All that's left to write is the tail end of Subtle Art of Gonzometry and the transcript of a full pilgrimage. Not essential stuff by any means. May even be able to sneak in some more work through February, but I ain't gonna push it.

After the new year, I'll return to the visual side of development. I'll post some layouts, colored art, and video updates on the cover.

At a whopping 100,000+ words, the unedited playable draft of Do is complete and can be found on Google Docs at here and here.

In other words, the setting chapter, character creation chapter, how-to-play chapter, and a healthy chunk of the play advice chapter are complete, with tips, tools, and examples of play throughout. The examples of play account for at least 45,000 words alone, written since the beginning of November in a caffeine bender.

The stuff I'm writing this month, before sending the whole shebang to the editor, isn't essential for play, but it's nice to have. This includes a chapter devoted to a transcript of actual character creation, a chapter for a transcript of a three-session pilgrimage, and finishing the rest of the chapter titled the Subtle Art of Gonzometry.

A lot more time has been spent discussing gonzometry than I anticipated at first, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It inspired a setting detail that actually explains the whole business with pilgrim names being their source of superhuman powers (if any.) See section titled "Naming" for more info.

In short, the elders kinda sorta know they're characters in fiction. This enlightenment allows them a subtle power over that fiction in the form of metaphor and allegory. Thus, by naming a pilgrim "Rushing Spring," that pilgrim's abilities and how they get in trouble reflects that name. Or is it that the elders recognize those attributes first, then bestow a name that fits those attributes? Chicken and the egg.

This was inspired in part by Heinlein's world-as-myth stuff, which half-tempted me to make the Gonzometer an actual in-game artifact that the pilgrims carry with them, but decided against it. :P

It's amazing how much you can get done when you're on vacation. We're up to 87,928 words, folks. Mostly finishing up examples of play on Step 5b and creating more consistent formatting for Steps 5c and 5d.

The word count would have probably been higher, but yours truly thought it was a good idea to pre-fill examples of play with Lorem Ipsum text. Deleting that filler copy made a word-deficit that had to be overcome first. So though I probably wrote about 3000-4000 words today, it only raised the word count by half that much. No worries, still making progress. Every 100 words in this draft translates to one good word in the final cut.

Oh! In other news, Liz Hooper is working on another art for the book. She wanted more opportunity for faces, so I broadly outlined this crude sketch for a "Big Heads" movie poster treatment. I doubt it helps her, but makes me feel useful. :P

(Click link for annotations describing what's happening in these chicken scratches.)

Speaking of arts, I guess once I send this beast of a draft to Ryan, it will be time to get back to work on that long-delayed cover. Remember that?

Oh yeah, definitely looking forward to this.

81,614. That's the word count so far. Started with 55,000 words before November and tried to get around 40,000 words of examples of play before the end of the month. Fell short of that goal, but hey, 26,614 ain't nothing to sneeze at.

I've got a week-long vacation at the moment so I'm taking this time to push on ahead, wrapping up what I can before shipping everything off to Ryan for editing, spellchecking, re-writing etc. Great big swaths of content have already been fleshed out, though. You can see what's up here and here.

Noteworthy sections include:

• The Gonzometer and Elements of Gonzometry.
• What it means to be "in trouble" or "out of trouble."
• How Goal Words work in actual play.

Presently, I'm writing examples of play for On the Pilgrimage. Specifically step 5b or so, and on to the rest of that procedure. In the first half of the book, I'm almost done writing examples of play in the Storytelling advice sections. There's also a big chapter at the end where I compile some of the more abstract concerns like whether to use veto rules, how to establish precedents in the story, and how to write your own letters. That chapter is tentatively titled The Subtle Art of Gonzometry.

On top of all that, I still plan to write full script-form examples of play as chapters of their own, different from the passive voice of the examples of play in the main text. These will be heavily designed transcripts of an actual play group, with visual aides. You've seen me attempt this sort of thing a few months ago, but it was too intensive to try to work into the main procedural text. They're going to be their own chapters instead, the first being an example of character creation, then an example of a full pilgrimage

The latter is greatly aided by Mark Sherry's automatically generated game scripts. These last two sections are going to be done during my *next* week-long vacation at the end of December, right before sending the whole package to Ryan.

Yup, lots and lots of content done and still a lot to go. Hopefully this shows I haven't been slacking. :)

In my quest to write around 40,000 words of examples of play as a part of NaNoWriMo, I have inadvertently discovered a limit in Google Docs. Apparently docs can't be more than 512k!

So I've split up the current draft into two google docs here and here.

It'll be a little trickier adding up my word count each day, but no big deal otherwise. Just surprised that Google Docs has any kind of size limit in the first place.

Currently, the draft is around 71,300 words. About 20,000 of which are examples of play. With luck, I might actually break 100,000 words, which is pretty much ridonkulous.

In a further attempt to make Ryan's job as hard as possible, I'm spending this month adding the long-delayed examples of play throughout the live doc of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. I'm following a vaguely NaNoWriMo daily schedule of 1500 words a day. Without the examples, the doc is about 55,000 words. I plan to add about 40,000 to that, entirely focused on examples of play.

In all likelihood, with some final fleshing out in December, the doc could be around the 100k mark by the time it falls in Ryan's lap. Yeah, it's a lot, probably too much, but I'm following a 50 pounds of clay philosophy here: Quality emerges from quantity. Or, in other terms, if the final book has one good word, there's probably 100 words that got edited out in an earlier draft.

You can keep up to date with the word factory here.