May Musings: Simplicity is Complicated

Taking inspiration from my collaborator Julian K., I decided to try doing regular blog posts here. We’ll see if it actually turns into something!

A while ago a had a serious case of l'esprit d'escalier (also known as afterwit, the thing where you think of the perfect thing to say after the fact) when in a job interview, they asked me what they’d learn about me after working with me for a while. My not very good answer in the moment was “that I’m a huge nerd.” The much better answer I came up with on the way home was that game design leads me to think about how to make things simpler and more efficient, which my bosses tend to find out when I send them long emails with ideas about how to improve our processes. At home one of my hobbies is to identify things I can make work better and go buy whatever I need to make that happen. A simple example is that in the house we have two identical trash cans for garbage and recycling, and after getting tired of guests asking which was which, I got big, unambiguous stickers and put them on the cans. (I am unironically a huge fan of Ikea as well.)

My current obsession with mechanical keyboards started with looking for ways to type more efficiently. I’ve had tendonitis periodically flare up for years now, and there are times when it hurts too much to type, a problem when both my day job and a lot of what I do for fun require typing. I’ve resorted to using speech recognition at times, but it’s frustrating, especially because it tends to involve a lot of corrections that have to be done verbally, badly breaking my flow. Alternatives to standard QWERTY keyboards do exist, but they tend to be expensive and, in some cases, hard to come by, and they come with a definite learning curve too. The DataHand has its own unique layout, is very rare now that the manufacturer went out of business, and the keyboard has optical switches that can fail. The Open Steno Project let me satisfy my desire with relatively affordable hobbyist steno keyboards and a lot of practice. Of course, I now have about half a dozen keyboards that can do steno, plus a student steno machine (a Stentura Protégé) I got for cheap off of eBay. I am not nearly as efficient with my finances as I am with some other things, though to be fair I’ve been under a lot of stress (like most people these days) and messing with keyboards helps me cope.

The other day I came across artsey.io, an open-source project to create a one-handed chorded keyboard using 8 keys. While they’ve designed a specially made mini keyboard for it, any mechanical keyboard that supports the QMK or ZMK open-source firmware packages and has a suitable set of keys can become an artsey.io keyboard with some firmware changes. Spacecat Design makes a Launch Pad macropad kit that they sell for $7.99 (it takes around $15-20 worth of additional parts to complete it), and there are a few others (though they’re more like $40-60), compared to at least $200 for most chorded keyboards. It’s still a somewhat technical undertaking—right now you pretty much have to be able to solder a PCB and edit and compile firmware to get an artsey.io keyboard up and running—but it’ll be relatively easy for individual sellers to offer artsey.io keyboards that work out of the box. One-handed typing is necessarily going to be less efficient than two-handed in terms of speed, but of course not everyone has two hands they can use for typing. While it’s slower to type, assembling an 8-key keyboard is of course much easier and faster than building a full QWERTY keyboard (which will require 40 to 100 switches, each with a diode).

Efficiency is complicated, it turns out. The fastest way to type is with a stenotype, but the inventor of it had to spend years doing an intensive study of the English language, and the result was something that takes a few years of intensive practice to use at its full effectiveness. QWERTY isn’t the fastest way to type (I’ve read that Dvorak and similar layouts can potentially give you a speed boost of about 20%), but a literate person can at least puzzle out how to produce words without any training, whereas a stenotype is decidedly opaque to the novice.

Thinking about things in terms of how to make them more efficient has profoundly affected how I look at RPGs. Average TTRPG gamers don’t care all that much about having efficient rules—otherwise D&D wouldn’t be able to maintain its domination of the hobby—but there’s a lot of stuff that in the mainstream of TTRPGs that amounts of busywork. Jim McGarva’s Strike! is a really interesting game for how it started as a hack of D&D and became more and more its own thing as Jim radically streamlined the rules, until he had a compelling D&D-like tactical combat system where a single d6 roll without modifiers resolves most actions. I wouldn't advocate for that kind of ruthless efficiency as a guiding principle throughout RPGs, but there’s a lot of room to question assumptions.

The other day the third and final proof of the POD version of Back to the Rifter came in the mail, so it’s become the new target of my weird habit of periodically re-reading sections of books I wrote (Kagegami High and The Dungeon Zone are also champions on that front). It’s reminding me all over again just how much of character creation in Palladium’s house system is busywork. In high school I would dutifully write down all the skill percentages, and (as Julian pointed out in BttR) it’s kind of bonkers that they couldn’t even be bothered to print the skill percentages with bonuses in the O.C.C.s, maximizing how much page-flipping goes into each character. During high school I had the idea to divide all those percentages by 5 and switch to a roll-under d20 roll (most skills would go up by 1 point per level, a natural 20 is an automatic failure, you get the idea), but today I’d ask why the hell the game needs 126 individual skills—each with different starting percentages—in the first place.

If you write for a Palladium game (and I produced a pretty massive volume of fan content for Rifts back in the day), you end up having to come up with a lot of pointless numbers. The things that are actually important about a Glitter Boy are that it’s incredibly tough, relatively small, takes half damage from lasers, and has that huge railgun that makes a sonic boom every time you fire. For the purposes of playing a role-playing game, you do not normally need to know its exact dimensions, weight, speed, and so on (both metric and US customary units no less), but Rifts gives you all of those numbers and more. In contrast, when I read Apocalypse World it feels like Vincent considers words and numbers a necessary evil along the way to providing you with the game he has in his brain. It’s built around the processes of play to the point where it doesn’t involve any real-world numbers per se. You don’t write down that a guy is 7’4”, but you might circle “really tall” or “hulking brute” in your playbook.

One of the things we noticed going over Rifts in exhaustive detail is that the GM section is an afterthought, and amounts to some design notes (where Siembieda calls it a “thinking man’s game” because words don’t mean anything) and stats for NPC antagonists. He doesn’t particularly try to explain how to be a Game Master—even Palladium’s usual copy-pasted basic explanation of role-playing is missing from Rifts—and instead the game assumes that you’re already steeped in the oral tradition of RPGs. He’s since made some flailing attempts at providing GMing advice, but for the most part Siembieda just seems barely aware that the basic processes of role-playing are something a designer even can write about. He was hardly alone in that—it’s a problem that Gygax had too—but Palladium is a notably bad case. Without general knowledge of RPG play or at least some determined improvisation, it’s hard to go from what’s in the text to a game happening at the table.

Being involved in the making of something necessarily involves getting a lot deeper into it than the average end user. If you try building a keyboard you get to worry about things like stabilizers, switch mounting, and keycap profiles, and I know that most people have no reason to care about those things, even if they go into something they use every day. I’m kind of that way with cars; I tried doing an oil change once and decided it was best left to the professionals. I don’t fault anyone who prefers to tinker with their car or even just likes to drive a stick shift, but I mostly want a car with a reliable automatic transmission, air conditioning, and CarPlay.

With both D&D and membrane keyboards I find myself wanting to say things like “If that works for you then more power to you, but have you considered these nifty alternatives that are better in countless ways?” There’s nothing wrong with sticking with the basic membrane keyboard that came with your computer, but the range of other options available now is downright dazzling. While I find the domination of D&D and the prevalence of membrane keyboards lamentable, ultimately I don’t have it in me to care too much about the big picture when I have little to no power to change it. I can’t give out mechanical keyboards or indie RPGs the way Tom Hanks does with typewriters (check out the documentary California Typewriter), but I can give recommendations when people ask and I can use keyboards that I personally really like more often than not.