What creative projects have you been working on?

I'm finally learning guitar! I've been talking to my friends about it for years now, but I finally made the commitment to buy one and take weekly lessons.

So far I'm only on week 2, so I'm still practicing chords and learning all the notes on the fretboard. I'm a programmer by trade so I'm using Python to help me practice the notes! As I'm practicing putting note names to frets I have Python shuffle all of the notes on a string so that I play them in a random order:

''.join(random.sample('EFGABCDe', 8))

I'm super excited to play the songs that I've loved for years.

I have been doing writing for symbiosis, a research and organizing group working to build coalitions between liberation, power-building, and ecological movement in north america. Some of the members are working together on a book we are calling the "Primer." Our aim is to inform and inspire members with historical precedents, new tactics, and institutional/social forms for a more just, sustainable society.

Personally my projects are, writing and doing an interview about a short-lived direct-democracy assembly convened by an alderman in Chicago back in the 1970s, turning some notes from school on Freetown Christiania Copenhagen into an essay, and starting the ball rolling on a section about what a just, sustainable society consists of.

It's a fun project toward a worthy goal and the other people are a real treat to work with. Plus we're always looking for folks to join up with us!

I've been slowly developing the RPG system.

One of the big steps recently was reimagining of the stats system. D&D and most other RPGs offer you a set of abstracted values based around an idea: Strength, Constitution, Charisma, Intelligence, Luck... I find it reductive and too removed from reality to really get a hang on. Sure, it's meant to be abstract and removed for a reason: to reduce the cognitive load during long games so you don't have to consider every single aspect of your character's being – but I want that detail to matter.

What I've been doing was heavily inspired by Disco Elysium's METRIC system, and how the game itself handles it. In short, it gives you 24 skills, each of which is responsible for a part of your character: either physical, mental, or supranatural (this game's idea of a slight level of ESP). In the game, each skill is also an aspect of your personality:

• your Physical Instrument – your muscle and skeleton – seeks to resolve problems with brute force and chastises you if you chicken out of a physical challenge;
• your Suggestion – the part of your mind looking to extract value from manipulating people – looks for a subtle approach invoking saying something, though it also looks for harmony and rocking the boat too much in other people's eyes (though it will not mind some rocking if it gets you further with someone);
• your Reaction Speed lets you catch off-hand mentions that others may have wanted to slip past your notice

and so on. Part of the game's appeal is how well-written all these skills – and other parts of your character, like your spinal cord and your "ancient lizard brain" (which, too, converse with you on occasion) – are.

What I'm looking to do with Frontiers RPG system is take a similar approach: take basic aspects of characters and represent them in a neat system of traits. The goal, much like METRIC's, is to make the system comprehensive, by allowing it to represent most, if not all, aspects of a character.

At this stage, there are four categories, called Interfaces, each with four traits:

• physical interface (of your body: organs, muscles, skin etc.),
• mental interface (of your mind: problem-solving capacity, memory, creativity etc.),
• human interface (of one's own personality and interacting with others: empathy, manipulation, understanding of social structure etc.),
• world interface (of understanding the world and making things with it: engineering, minor crafting, sciences etc.)

I'm currently finishing the physical interface. The difficult aspect of working this out is making sure I abstract one's skeletomuscular system correctly. Also, coming up with a name that doesn't sound like Strength for that part of the interface has proven difficult.

I also dislike rolls for skill checks, because they disregard the amount of training and experience the character has. Instead, I'm experimenting with insight points. In this system, each trait has a number of points available to it. Using a point provides the player/character either with an insight from that particular sphere of understanding or an opportunity to excel a step beyond one's usual capacity.

I think rolls are only good for random circumstance beyond the characters' control. Ideally, I would like to get rid of dice and rolls entirely. Ironsworn, an indie RPG system, has done so by using shuffled cards to represent the next circumstance. It still uses dice to figure out the situation's outcome, however.

Let's see where it gets me.