I recently had some people on my Discord complaining, in a general sense, about the difficulty they had in running their games, and I jumped in and asked for specific examples, because this sort of thing is some of the most valuable, direct feedback you’ll ever get, and I compiled a list of complaints.

Trader Bands won (tied) the Wiki Week poll, so I’m revisiting some old content that didn’t make it to the wiki (Counterweight, and deeper rules for Zephyr). I really like the Trader Band, I think the approach I’ve taken has resulted in very good content and that Psi-Wars content creation is at its best when it follows that model of short, tight cycles of creation. The problem is that approach relies on existing material that I can reach for and deploy, and when that isn’t there, I find myself casting about, and then sitting down to create it. This feeling I have is almost exactly the same sort of issues these GMs run into, so I thought I’d talk about my thoughts on what makes games hard to run, problems GMs often run into, and what I can do, what I am doing, to alleviate some of these issues.

What do I mean by “Hard to Run?”

Alright, I’ll level with you. This is too big a topic to tackle in a single post, so I mostly want to talk about specific sub-cases and complaints people run into. But more generally, I mean anything that breaks my flow. Say you’re in the shower, listening to music, or reading a Psi-Wars post and you suddenly have an idea “Oh! I want to run that!” you say. So you sit down and start scribbling out your notes and then, suddenly… you run into a problem. What is it? I don’t know, but whatever that is, that’s something that makes a game “hard to run.” Or, if you finish your session prep and you’re actually running the game, what do you slam into that keeps you from starting, or grinds the game to an instant halt? How can we minimize those problems? Can we identify these pain points and sand them off a little bit?

Caveat: I don’t run published adventures

I can count on one hand the number of pre-written adventures I’ve run, and most of them were the adventures that came in the back of Marvel FASERIP, and they acted more like a testbed for the game than a true adventure, so I have a very hard time understanding what should go in an adventure. I regularly run highly detailed sessions with extensive planning and design work, but that sort of material is designed for how I work and how I think. There are skills I have that I cannot count on other people having. Even when I look at published adventures, the vast majority of them tend to be D&D, which work nothing like the “secret agent” gameplay of Psi-Wars. When I do look at adventures built for GURPS or games like Night’s Black Agents or World of Darkness, they seem pretty minimalistic and I’m not sure how much value they really add.

So I find myself casting about in the dark. What would I need? Well, I have what I need, and I “eat my own dogfood” so the Psi-Wars material you see is generally sufficient for me to run a game, even designed to help me run games. What do you need? I’m not sure. What I see in published adventures suggests “not much” but that can’t be right, so I’m not sure what I’m missing.

So the first, obvious solution, which is to write your adventures for you is out, for now. I think I’ll need to do that eventually, and I have a few, but they have problems. Undercity Noir is too big, and Wanders of Dhim is very dark and Umbral and I’m not sure it should be my first foray into adventures (though it’s something tightly contained enough that I could do it, and then get some feedback on it).

I have begun to reconsider what I think of as an “adventure.” I handed some “racing” rules to some playtesters, and they crowed about how fun they were. I thought of them as “rules” but I suppose when you combine them with some of the NPCs I have in mind, you have all the pieces you need to run a night of adventure: characters come to Zephyr, something something story hook, you have to race because reasons, run through the race, sprinkle some NPC drama in from the pre-written NPCs, and there you go, a night of fun and excitement. Is that enough? I might experiment with this idea of “microadventures” a bit more before I foray into true adventures.

The List of Problems

So, with that out of the way, let’s look at some of the problems my Discord users came up with.

NPCs

One issue that comes up a lot is NPC creation. A lot of RPGs have example NPCs, or “canon” characters that GMs can just grab and toss into their game. What about Psi-Wars?

I have a few issues with these characters. First, I rarely use them for the same reason I rarely run adventures. I have the chops to write my own, and I’m stubborn enough to not bother with existing material. But more than that, I ‘m not sure what value they add. World of Darkness has a list of NPCs in the back of each supplement, or big signature NPCs, and not once in my life have I seen a GM use any of those characters. What value would creating Dun Beltaine as a “signature Space Knight NPC” add? I can’t see any. I don’t think people would use him at all.

I do see people use certain setting-relevant characters. Having more details on the Emperor would offer a great deal of value, and a lot of people call for it. So I can see the value of that, but does he actually need stats? A lot of what people use with these sorts of characters is more context and role-playing tips. I tend to be nervous about defining such a specifically important character, but having some details on some important governor or crime boss, how they’d behave, what their connections would be, or how they might work as a patron, seems more relevant to me, but despite the praise I’ve seen over my Daemons of the Deep Engine, which amounted to nothing but a giant collection of flavorful contacts with lots of details (Merchants of the Trader Band offered that too) I have no sense anyone actually uses them. I could be wrong, though.

So what I struggle with here is what you actually need. I have a few NPC ideas I want to try. My current ideas turn on Contacts, Bounty Hunters and Criminals. The Contacts (and Patrons) represent player-facing options as well as deeper discussions of what various factions might be doing, and who represent the leaders of those factions. This sort of thing showed up in my Templar Chapter designs and I know for certain those got used, so these seem to have some utility. Bounty Hunters and Criminals represent a mini-game: if you’re playing “rebel scum” bounty hunters are a list of NPCs the GM can drop on you. If you’re a bounty hunter, Criminals represent a list of bounties you can chase after. But they also represent worked examples of how NPCs should function.

One issue I really have with all NPC designs I’ve seen is they’re stat-block piles. If you look at a monster in GURPS DF and you read through the advantages, does it tell you anything useful? I can work out the useful information, but I’m parsing details and I need guidance, and the notes provide all of that. Can’t we break out the monster/NPC design in such a way that those are more obvious? I’ve tried with my monster designs and those seem well-received. But the same should be true for story hooks (“What can I even do with this NPC?”), social RP tips (“How does this character behave? What do they want?”) and context (“What broader implications does involving this NPC bring into my campaign?”). The result of these thoughts is that NPCs get pretty big, and slapping out a statlbock is pretty easy. So I’ve been slowed down by this particular aspect, but I should just bite the bullet and see what you guys think of some of my designs.

I have heard some requests for combat-oriented NPCs, but this seems to be buried in a discussion of “how to balance combat in Psi-Wars” which is a topic I’ll tackle in a different post. Still, there is some value in having some ready made, characters with interesting combat details and tactics, which you can also see in some of my monster design. I’d love to hear feedback on that sort of design, as it’s very different from how most GURPS NPCs tend to be designed.

If you have seen any of my NPC designs that you found particularly useful, or NPCs that you used extensively, or NPC designs in other RPGs you found useful, point them out to me, please. I could use the tips.

Loadouts

A lot of people called for Loadouts, on the basis that if they knew how people were equipped, they could rapidly generate their own NPCs (especially combat NPCs). That is, if you know how imperial troopers are equipped you can slap some BAD numbers on their stats and off to the races.

I agree with this approach and we definitely need loadouts. It helps PC creation too! But I think the idea that loadouts are enough is naive. In Iteration 5 (or was it early 6?) I had created doctrines, and I think those are also essential. It’s not enough to know how an imperial trooper is equipped, you need to know how he fights, and how that fighting operates in the broader doctrine. For example, if you want an encounter with Imperial security forces, you need to know how they’re equipped, yes, but what common attack/defense tactics they use, what vehicle they show up in, what sort of backup they might call up and what that looks like. It’s not just “five agents are here, fight,” it’s security agents with vehicles stopping you and when you pull out your force sword, they call in an IFV with some heavier troopers while a gravcraft races in to provide aerial assistance and support, and you’re fighting a small security unit while looking for a dramatic, action oriented escape.

This is the intent of my often promised War update: the tactics, doctrines, loadouts and NPCs that support these aspects. I keep putting it off, because it’s big and intimidating, but it’s essential. Perhaps I should narrow it down and find a way to do it faster and quicker, a tight design that promotes faster design, because this is a real flaw and something necessary. It’s rather shocking that we don’t see it in Action, or frankly any RPG I’ve looked at (maybe I just haven’t looked closely enough, but I have no idea what a generic Arasaka response team looks like in Cyberpunk, or what a typical Wyld Hunt in Exalted looks like).

GM-Facing Traits

So this has triggered several discussions, but I think I can break them down into two major categories. Both of them are traits where the GM has to remember what a PC took and how they interact with everything, which adds to the burden of a GM who also has to track all the NPCs and rules. We want to take some of that load off. How?

One trick I use is to write down all the “GM-Facing traits” that the players typically have, and then regularly check that list, especially at the beginning of the session. This is a pretty common trick, though, and I’m pretty sure most of you know about it. I think we can do better, though.

Sensory Traits

The GM is the players’ view port into the world. The GM describes everything to the players, and thus if the players have special, unique senses, those need to fit into the broader discussion. This is often crucial: if the GM has NPCs ambush the player characters, the PC with “Danger Sense” will cry foul if the GM didn’t let them roll in advance. This gets worse if the PCs have esoteric senses, like IR vision, which would let the player see things like warm bodies in the dark, or the warmth left on a seat by someone who just left, or possibly even the foot prints of someone who just passed through on bare feet. These things would certainly stand out.

I can’t really “fix” the problem of sensory abilities, but I can mitigate them somewhat. I’ve not had this as a design principle, but thinking on the problem, I’ve noticed nobody ever complains about Keleni emotion sense as such an example. It grants an esoteric ability to know what people feel basically at all times, and yet none of the people complaining about GM-facing traits every complained about it, despite the fact that I know they all make use of the Keleni. Why? Well, if I had to speculate, it’s because it’s obvious to these GMs that Keleni have these traits, while some random PC having subsonic hearing will catch a GM by surprise. I also haven’t heard anyone complain about the supernatural abilities of sorcerers or many psychics (though ESP people might cause such an issue).

This discrepancy gives a hint as to how we might begin to resolve this problem. GMs seem to find no major load when the unique sensory abilities is a signature trait of the character. If you are a Sabine or an Esper, obviously, you have special psychic senses the GM should be aware of. If you are a Trader or a Keleni, you have additional senses that are central to your race. Sorcerers can activate Sorcerer’s Sight and numerous other Sight spells, but they must do so actively and announce them. If I declare I am activating Chaos Sight to look for lucky characters, then the GM is informed I now have this ability, and can ponder if this gives me any additional information. The problem then is passive abilities that aren’t central to the character.

If I wanted to follow this to its conclusion, I would perform an audit on Psi-Wars races, power-sets and options, and try to remove anything that’s surprising or doesn’t fit, things that aren’t easy for a GM to remember. As a rule, I tend to favor Perception or Acute Senses over specific abilities like parabolic hearing or ultrahearing, and I should lean more heavily into that. I especially like arbitrary improvements to Perception, as that boosts certain skills, like Survival. If the race has an unusual sense, that sense should be central to that race: Keleni with Empathy, Traders with Ultrahearing and ETS; Krokuta discriminatory smell isn’t “essential” but if they didn’t have that, people would complain; similarly, we would expect Lapine, with their big ears, to have superior hearing. Examples that run contrary to this are Ranathim Blood Sense (though I think I’ll keep that anyway, because it feels evocative enough, with their vampirism, to remain), and Keverlig Ultrahearing, if they still have it, which I think I can remove.

Other senses should either be tied to a power that’s explicitly about senses (ESP, Telepathy), or require active, intentional use, like Sorcerer’s Sight.

Technology and cybernetics breaks this, unfortunately, but I can’t really put that genie back in the bottle, and I don’t hear many people complaining about hyperspectral goggles. These are a narrow set of “known quantities” that most GMs can plan for fairly easily.

So the core take away here is to be more judicious about what senses I allow in the setting, and think twice before allowing someone access to unique senses without making it central to their identity or requiring active use.

Disadvantages

Finally, we have all the disadvantages that the GM is expected to enforce. These are typically traits like Code of Honor, Bad Temper, Enemy, etc. GURPS has an “adversarial GM” model that grants players “free points” for disadvantages on the basis that the GM will use those disadvantages to make trouble for the player.

Technically, this works for all disadvantages, but many disadvantages either directly impact the PC’s “statline” in such a way to be self-reinforcing, or they’re exceedingly obvious, like the secret templar has a Secret. I find these don’t need help.

No, the problems are those that require the GM to rewrite their story (Enemy), or to enforce how the player character behaves (self-imposed or self-control based disadvantages). We can dispense with two of these quickly. Traits like Enemy or Dependent should be taken at 6 or less unless you have a compelling reason otherwise. The GM introduces them when they see fit, as often, or as rarely, as they wish. The self-imposed limitation, in my experience, is player maintained, because they already intend to play a certain way and are fishing for points for it, such as “never use any weapon other than a force sword.” Furthermore, and we’ll get to this later, but this is one you can revisit later: if a player with that vow picks up a blaster and uses it, you don’t need to remember that during the session, you can realize that they violated their vow later, and apply the appropriate penalties then (their oath breaks, their dojo sends them an angry letter, whatever). So that removes the need to remember it during the session and reduces it to “bookwork” that can be handled after or between sessions, and frankly, at some point someone will remember it.

On Self-Control Disadvantages

This leaves us with Self-Control disadvantages. If your character has Bad Temper and someone picks a fight, or they have Lecherousness and a hottie walks past, then characters should react appropriately. What if they don’t? The problem with self-control disadvantages is that they put the onus on the GM. You need to remember that the Bad Tempered PC has Bad Temper, and for some reason, we don’t expect the player to remember that. Why not? Because we have an Adversarial GM approach. By contrast, in systems like Fate, the player is rewarded for bringing up their “disadvantages.” If a character has a “bad tempered” aspect, they don’t need to have a bad temper, unless they need fate points, then they get angry at the drop of a hat! Why can’t we make GURPS more like that?

There are lots of reasons, most of which turn on the fact that Fate gives you nothing in advance for your disadvantages, while GURPS gives you points up front. There are some advantages to the GURPS way: it encourages players to think about their disadvantages during character creation because it immediately rewards them in a visceral way. But the game incentivizes getting those points up front and then bailing, rather than dealing with the problems put in place. Every session they go without their disadvantage being noted is a sort of “free points” that they “stole” from the GM, or at least this is the sort of argument I’ve heard as to why we can’t treat them like fate points: you got your 10 points for taking Bad Temper, you don’t get to squeeze more points out of it over time, because the guy who didn’t take Bad Temper, or any other disadvantage, isn’t getting those bonus points, either the -10 or the free XP or whatever, that the guy who took Bad Temper did.

But is this actually true? Let’s read what GURPS actually has to say about these sorts of disadvantages:

You never have to try a self-control
roll – you can always give in willingly,
and it is good roleplaying to do so.
However, there will be times when
you really need to resist your urges,
and that is what the roll is for. Be
aware that if you attempt self-control
rolls too often, the GM may penalize
you for bad roleplaying by awarding
you fewer earned points. –B121

Bad Roleplaying is mentioned in a lot of places, but further discussed here:

The GM is free to award any num-
ber of points . . . but in general, he
should give each player between zero
and five points, averaging two or three
points, per session. The low end is for
bad roleplaying or mission failure,
while the high end is for good role-
playing or mission success.
— B498: Awarding Bonus Character Points

This is in regards to Bonus Character Points. The idea is that players should get between 0 and 5 points per session depending on how well they did, including how well they fulfilled their disadvantages. That is, if you have Bad Temper and you never get angry, the GM should penalize you by giving you less points than everyone else.

Nobody likes to talk about this. First of all, people dislike “penalties” and this feels like social control masquerading as a game mechanic. General RPG culture consensus is jerks who refuse to play by the rules should be booted from the game, rather than quietly given less points than everyone else. Furthermore, if you do let Bob continue to play even as he ignores all his disadvantages and just give him 0-1 XP per session, while Alice, good ol’ Alice, who always plays up her disadvantages, gets 4-5 per session, in 20 sessions, Alice is +100 points while Bob is +10 points, and if you started at 100 points, the power difference is pretty staggering. Can Alice and Bob even face the same enemies? Not to mention the calls of “Favoritism” that the Bob will hurl at the GM. So most GMs I know dismiss this advice, and even the “Award Bonus Character Points” section suggests doing it secretly.

But we often dismiss really good rules without understanding why they’re there, and once we understand that, we can revisit them. I’ve been using the word “penalize” because that’s the sort of language GURPS uses, but what the rules actually says is you should give players a few bonus points if they play out their disadvantages, effectively. If Alice plays out all of her disadvantages and Bob doesn’t, she gets more XP than Bob does. The rules implicitly support the notion of giving bonus XP for fulfilling disadvantages! It just phrases it as “penalize for not fulfilling disadvantages.”

Okay, but what about Carl, who doesn’t take any disadvantages? Alice plays up her disads, gets her bonus experience; Bob doesn’t, so doesn’t. Carl doesn’t play up his disads, because he doesn’t have any to play up. Does he get bonus XP? Yes! That’s the real difference between Fate and GURPS: you should get bonus XP unless you’re failing to play up disads.

Optional Rule: The Disadvantage Audit

So let me propose this approach: at the end of the session, review every player character and check to see if they played up their self-control disadvantages at least once during the session. If they can name an instance where they played up each one, they get +1 bonus experience (or +2 or whatever your group agrees to). If they can’t, they don’t.

Some natural consequences of this. First of all, players will start monitoring their own disadvantages. The GM will still need to do some extra book work, but it’s at the end of the session, rather than in the middle of it. Characters with fewer disads will have an easier time meeting their “bonus XP” quota, so it naturally balances out that characters with a disad will feel the disad. Players who struggle with expressing a disadvantage in play should rethink whether that disadvantage belongs there. The GM might make exceptions for disadvantages that couldn’t plausibly come up (Lecherousness for a character stranded alone on a ship), but on the other hand, maybe not, because clever players can find ways to express that side of their character in unconventional ways, and it encourages them to find ways to make their disadvantage a disadvantage (lecherous guy should get lonely when alone, bad temper guy can lash out at inanimate objects, etc).

I can imagine several objections to this, so let me forestall/address them.

“I don’t want to audit at the end, I want to award in the heat of the moment.”

That’s fine. Every character should get one bonus XP at some point if they fulfill their disadvantages. If they do it in an especially cool way, you can give that point right away; if they have no meaningful or useful disadvantages, you can simply give it at the end of the session. Create a pool of bonus points (say, with colored glass beads) that you hand out once their disads have been fully activated; any you have left at the end result in some questions about why. If they have no disad that could come up, you can still award them anyway, but this will trigger a discussion at the end of the session, which results in a mini-audit anyway, and feels a more natural way to handle it.

The Ham Clause

The Ham Clause is a powerful, but somewhat underused, means of handling disadvantages. Introduced by Kromm in Action, he seems to love it and pushes it everywhere. But why? Why would you bother taking a -2 to your rolls because of your Bad Temper when you should be acting out?

Well, if you’re running my optional rule, it’s obvious! If you have to fulfill every disad during the session, and it’s not really worthwhile to lash out or flirt or be Cowardly and run away, etc, then you can instead invoke the Ham Clause and thus ensure you get your bonus XP.

“I don’t like power inequality.”

Some GMs and groups object to the imbalance created when one player regularly indulges in their disadvantage but another doesn’t. One point per session won’t create a huge disparity in most cases, depending on how many points are given, but some reject the idea on principle.

That’s fine, just use impulse buy points! They will have no lasting impact on the power level of the game and won’t result in power creep or imbalance, but they are exactly as useful as a character point, only in a more temporary sense. Players are rewarded for playing their characters properly and fulfilling their disadvantages, and thus incentivized, but you don’t have as much of a drawback if one player really struggles more than others.

The Power of Quirks

The final objection to this is that while it shifts the burden to the player neatly, the player may find it too burdensome if their Bad Tempered, Lecherous character with Bloodlust and a Sense of Duty needs to justify all 4 of those disadvantages every session for a character point. Exhausting! How do we fix that? The short answer is: Stop taking so many dang disadvantages!

I often say I love quirks and have a hard time only choosing 5, which often triggers surprised reactions from others who do struggle with coming up with 5 quirks. I think the difference between them and I is that they define their characters with disadvantages where I would define them with quirks.

Let’s imagine a character, a wanna-be pirate with a heart of gold. He has gone into the Umbral Rim to seek his fortunes and one of those fortunes is that he definitely wants a harem full of sexy Ranathim dancing girls, because he loves the ladies. He’s tough and likes to swagger and doesn’t react well to insults. However, despite his tough-guy talk, he has a heart of gold and can’t resist a plea for help. Finally, he would do anything for his crew, even die for them.

A lot of players would look at this description and go: he has Lecherouness, Selfish, Compassionate and Sense of Duty (Crew), and thus, every session, would need to fulfill all 4 of this disadvantages, not to mention he’s looking at -40 points in disadvantages right there, without even getting into Enemies, or Duty, or Social Stigma (Criminal Record) or anything like that.

But I would argue he doesn’t have four disadvantages; he has one or two, and then a couple of quirk ideas. See, a disadvantage is about the thing that the character “always does” and needs to struggle to not do (hence the Self-Control roll). They should be the most defining traits of the character and how they roleplay. What’s the most defining things about this character? What must he always do? We can pick and choose. In this case, Sense of Duty seems very crucial to him, and I like Compassionate: it’s the sort of flaw that can get him to act contrary to his best interests: he’s trying to get that harem or he’s trying to prove he’s a cool pirate, but then some orphan child gives him puppy-dog eyes and pleads for him to save his pet fluff-slug, and the pirate sighs and goes and does that. So Compassionate and Sense of Duty become our defining disadvantages, for -20 points.

But what about the rest? Do we just lose those other characterizations? Of course not! Clearly our pirate still needs to be lusty! We can give him Desirous or Hedonist or Goal (Harem). He needs to continue to affect his piratical personality, so we might give him Proud or Easily Insulted or Picks Fights. Or we can give him several of these. He still behaves in a way appropriate to these quirks, but if he fails to live up to them for some reason, if he swallows an insult because it will safe the fluff-slug, or he foregoes getting the girl to save a crewmate, he’s not violating any of his disadvantages. And if he inconveniences himself to fulfill his quirk as though it were a disadvantage, isn’t that also worth some bonus XP? Perhaps even above and beyond the 1 per session rule (especially if we’re talking IP)?

By reducing disadvantages to quirks, we lower the load on everyone and remove them from the social contract of “Traits I have to maintain,” we think more about our character, about what the core of that character really is, and we collect even more quirks to better define the characterization of our character, and we make this whole mental load of disadvantages a lot easier.

I like this rule so much I’d institute it as a Psi-Wars standard except there’s no real way to integrate it into templates. This version has -20 points of disads, but an Overconfident Selfish character is just as legitimate, and only worth -10 points, and there might be cases where you decide that you really, legitimately, need 3 self-control disads, or cases where you can only really justify 1. So this should be more like a guideline than a hard rule.

“But what Self-Control Rolls?”

Okay, so if you need to fulfill your disads at least once per session, then you need to always fail your disads, right? Then what’s the point of the self-control roll? If you’re Always Angry, why not take Bad Temper (6) instead of Bad Temper (12)?

Well, first of all, that’s not a bad way to handle it, if you like. If your character is always angry, then it’s fine to give them Bad Temper (6)! But I also want you to consider that disads also act as GM hooks. Yes, the point of this section is to remove the disad as a GM-facing trait and make it a player-facing trait, but that doesn’t mean the GM can’t interact with your disadvantages! If rivals try to egg your angry character into making a fool of himself in front of someone important, or to attack one of his own allies, or otherwise make a critical mistake due to your disadvantage. You could indulge and earn that one bonus character point, but maybe that’s just not worth it, in which case, the GM can try to force you via the self-control roll. The rules even state this:

You never have to try a self-control
roll – you can always give in willingly,
and it is good roleplaying to do so.
However, there will be times when
you really need to resist your urges,
and that is what the roll is for.

So in principle, a character with Bad Temper (12) should be angry at least once per session, or make use of the Ham Clause at least once per session, otherwise they don’t deserve their bonus XP, but if there’s a reason not to indulge, to not send your Lecherous character into a dark alley to chase after the cute girl that’s invited him to follow her, or to not take the bait when some rival hurls insults at them in the midst of a royal court, then we have the self-control roll, and then the difference between Self-Control 6 and Self-Control 12 becomes evident: the first really is “always angry” and will fly off the handle at the rival even at the cost of their standing in court, while the second is “almost always angry” but can hold it in, sometimes, when it really, really counts, even if their characterization is very often angry.

Making Psi-Wars Easier

In conclusion, is Psi-Wars hard to run? Well, I don’t know, I have an easier time with it than any other game I run, but it could always be better, and I’m looking to improve it.

I wanted to get a blog post out this month that wasn’t directly related to wiki week and since I’m working on the Trader Band, this came up. Making Psi-Wars easier will be an ongoing process, and in a sense, it’s what I’ve been doing this whole time. I hope some of my newer designs, like the Trader Band and, hopefully, the War update, will make it even easier. I have a tendency to be very player-focused because character creation is fun and I figure GMs can also pillage those mechanics when making NPCs, but I’m learning a lot about how to communicate NPC and adventure design, and this post is part of that process.

I always seek feedback, but posts like this benefit even more from feedback than usual. I definitely want to hear what’s helped you, where you’ve been stuck, what you’re looking for, and how you experience these own things in your own games, so I can keep compiling my list and finding ways to better aim Psi-Wars at your gaming table, so you can experience even more Psi-Wars fun.

Thanks!