Last night (as I write this), I uploaded last week’s (as you read this) article; and for the first time in the nearly three year run of this series, I do not have an article drafted to run in the next week’s slot.  That is, this article did not exist a week ago when I uploaded last week’s Sounds Like; there was no article for this week one week ago.

  That’s not to say I’ve run out of ideas.  Even with the culling I did for Treats last Halloween, in which I pulled a batch of ideas that had been on the ideas sheet for too long without going anywhere and turned them all into one article of shorts, I still have nineteen numbered ideas; one of those is a reminder that there are at least three more articles in the alignment miniseries.  I’ve got the heart of the next free quarterly wrap-up drafted, on memories.  There are a lot of ideas there which eventually will be articles.  It’s only that there isn’t one drafted for next week–rather, this week, today, as you’re reading it.  I’ve drawn a blank, as it were–I have nothing prepared.

  I could give excuses.  I was very focused recently on preparing for convention demos, and they went extremely well, I thought.  I’ve been trying to squeeze more into my week, working on several books, covering forum posts, developing worlds.  None of that matters.  My excuses do not justify a failure to produce an article.

  I have frequently talked about my preferred answer to writer’s block.  I keep several irons in the fire.  When it’s time to write, I have the novel series, the world books, several games in development, the Faith and Gaming series, occasional articles for other sites and e-zines, and this series, and I can always find something I can write, as long as I’m not falling asleep at the keys (and sometimes even if I am).  That’s good; but that doesn’t help.  I’m committed to having an article here, and my ability to write something else doesn’t help that in the least.

  None of which is your problem.

  Yet you also have this problem.  You are, I expect, a gamer.  Most of you also run games.  That means that there are regularly scheduled times when you’re expected to be ready to run the game.  For some of you it’s only a couple times a year; others are called to the task several times a week.  Perhaps you have such a creative mind that you’ve never had the experience of coming to the game with no real idea what you were going to do.  All I can say is don’t worry.  You will.  We all do, one time or another.

  So the question is, what do you do when you get to the table, and you don’t know what to run?  How do you referee a game when you are not only unprepared but completely without any ideas?

  The odd thing is, the answer is you don’t necessarily need to have a clear idea in mind in order to start.  You just have to start somewhere.

  E. R. Jones (whose math skills often were quite imaginative) chose to have bias in Multiverser run from a high of fifteen down to negative fifteen so he could randomly set the bias by rolling a thirty sided die.  I don’t recommend this.  Apart from the fact that it doesn’t actually work the way he thought, negative bias requires a lot of thought to run effectively.  However, the core idea behind it is well worth recognizing:  it doesn’t matter where you start so much as that you start.  Make up a starting point of some sort–any sort, anything you can imagine–and start there.  Let the players respond to it, and see where they’re going with it.  Respond to what they do.  Sometimes give them what they expect; sometimes use what they expect to surprise them.  Multiverser provides the wonderful GE roll from which you can build entire universes merely by figuring out where the player wants the world to go and using the dice to see how close to that it actually comes; but even without this mechanic, your perception of what the players want and expect can become the drive and definition of what you offer them.

  I once played a game of Twenty Questions with a couple guys.  It was my turn to guess, and I started asking questions.  Yes, no, no, yes, um…that’s also yes, they answered each of my questions.  In the end I was stumped.  What was it?  They had no idea.  They had decided they would just randomly answer the questions and see whether anything came of it.  That time, nothing did–but Twenty Questions is a lot tighter than a role playing game.  More than one referee has told the tale of the time he didn’t know what he was doing so he let the players create what they thought was happening and used their guess to build his solution.  Some have told of the time their players’ guess was so much better than where they were going that they changed the plan on the spot to go there.

  A lot of what happens in games, and whether they work, depends on those of us who are referees.  We are in some ways the creative minds that drive the games, the organizers that keep them running, and the judges who settle the disputes.  So much depends on us that we sometimes forget something very important:  we are not the only creative minds at the table.  There are several other people here, each of whom has ideas that can be folded into the mix to create something more wonderful than we could on our own.  Tapping into that resource takes very little talent beyond paying attention, listening, watching, noticing what they’re saying and doing.

  I worked with a Cubmaster years ago whose slogan was, ideas come in books.  Whenever we had to create a ceremony, a game, an activity, he pulled out the books and read them.  He and I taught a class to cub leaders on skits, in which we showed them how to take a joke out of the back of a magazine and turn it into a skit for their meetings.  One of those skits started showing up at scout meetings after that.  I have a lot of ideas; you probably have many ideas, too.  Yet the success of the game shouldn’t depend entirely on us; and it doesn’t.  Ideas come from other people, and recognizing and utilizing them, incorporating them into what you’ve already got, is one of the best ways to develop something better than you could have created on your own.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.