Ask Me Anything: tibbius

You've shared quite a few interest checks for your own rulesets. Of the stuff you've published, which one is your personal favourite, which one is the most popular by the numbers?

I see that you run a lot of games. I'm curious:

(1) How many concurrent games do you run?

(2) How long do your games typically last before they conclude?

:-)

What kind of law do you practice?
Would you recommend it as a profession?

New England, huh? Would that make you a Bruins fan, or do you have a preference for another team? We're not even ten games into the season and are you sick of hearing about why the Toronto Maple Leafs really should be winning the Stanley Cup?

Name a book that you think has ideas more people should be familiar with, and briefly, why?

My personal favorite, at the moment, is the most recent (as usual) - Link-boiZ and ScoundreL. I think ScoundreL, in particular, can do a great job of satirizing capitalist "meritocracy," though that will only be evident when I release the rules for starting equipment and a barter economy.
I also feel like I finally hit the right rules for armor protection and defensive skill as thresholds for damage ...

... the most popular thing I have written is Fair Ones, which is a modern urban fantasy thing using 24XX rules. The next most popular seems to be Sharps of the Knife, which is a really bizarre setting with custom rules that I have honestly come to dislike - they're too fiddly.
(1) I think between here and other boards I have about ten open games. Some are active, others not so much.

(2) My longest-running game is a duet that is going on two years and now at 1050 posts. Most of my games make it about three to four months before interest flags. I have only had a few play by posts "conclude" in a manner that satisfied me. One of those closed up in about four months. Others lasted up to six months.
Intellectual property. I am not sure that I would recommend law as a profession over any other profession. Like every line of work, the quality of life depends a lot on the people you work with and the level of remuneration. Law has a weird "double hump" income distribution, with peaks below and above the median national income. There are some very nice people in the field, and also a lot of weirdos and control freaks. The two types tend to cluster, so you'll either work for a great firm or a terrible one. Fortunately, the firms with nice people tend to have more and better work and better pay.
Islanders.

Books. There's a brief one written by Thich Nhat Hanh, called How to Love. It's a good read, very real about life and relationships.

bonus: A movie more people should think about. Princess Bride. It's way more complex than it looks on the surface. There is too much in there for me to do it justice by trying to unfold it, but it's really worth some thought next time you watch it. If you haven't watched it, really, I recommend it.

My usual question ....what's your favorite genre of music and what are some of your favorite bands?

This is quite difficult to answer, my musical taste is so broad and eclectic that many would say I have none!

at various times I have liked the Dead, Johnny Cash, Metallica, Guns n Roses, Scandroid, Waveshaper, Taylor Swift, Dylan, Willie, NiN, Nirvana, Eminem, Fort Minor, DJ Snake, Florence & The Machine, Band Perry ...

Lyrically and musically, I would hold out Taylor Swift as being very, very clever. Verging on or perhaps achieving genius level.

oh, also The Smiths, Pet Shop Boys, Faithless, and Erasure make my list.

You've bent your arm significantly writing rules light games/settings, which certainly lend themselves well to PBP. Do you routinely play live, as well, and if so, do you prefer crunchier in meatspace or continue to prefer lighter rulesets?

Do you have an in-person group that you play with regularly? If so, what is it like? Are you long time friends or met fairly recently? Also, what are you playing now and how's it going?

I do not play live. It has been over two decades since I had an in-person gaming group. Play by post is pretty good, and a lot easier to schedule around all the big stuff in my life. A couple of years from now, when the kids' activities might slow down a bit, I may be looking for a live group as well. But I think whatever space I play in, lighter engines are what I prefer.

My last solid group of players was back in high school. Some of the best friends I've had. Our lives went in different directions, though.

Currently I'm playing a lot of online text games. Two favorites are @Rabbits' Iridescent Dawn game (World of Dungeons) and @scrol's Galaxy Truckers game (2400 Cosmic Highway). I'm trying to learn from their examples how to be a better DM. They write very engaging games.

Kudos to all these rulesets you've been churning out! Where do you think your game design philosophy is heading currently, both in terms of system design as well as setting visualization? And what would you say are the more current influences that shape your thinking?

Due to your profession, do you have a hard time not being a "rules lawyer" while RPing?

I'm not good at forecasting my creative process. One thing that I notice as a commonality in my current influences is a skills-focused approach to character description. Warrior, Rogue & Mage, Tunnel Goons, and 24XX games all look at characters as a collection of trainable skills rather than as a set of immutable attributes as in D&D-like games. This is a fundamentally different paradigm for understanding the character. ScoundreL is my latest swing at system design. It describes each character with five class scores, the characters are fairly fragile - most are capable of one-shotting each other -, equipment makes a big difference in performance.

I am not quite understanding the question about "setting visualization" but I'm going to gesture toward my general trend of using random tables as the core of how I describe settings. Even in Listening to a Vanished God or After the Serpent, which are my two most heavy-handed efforts toward setting description, random tables do a lot of work in that regard.
The longer I spend in the legal profession, the less contentious I become. I'm particularly not interested in arguing over minutiae while I'm off the clock. As a result, I put my energy into running and playing rules-light games where player consensus drives the story. My favorites are World of Dungeons, 24XX.

What board games, if any, do you enjoy?

I really enjoy mancala.