Your feed has been down so I did not know you were back until you twittered today.

Congratz on the Unfade

The basic premise of the essay is that nerds want to be smart more than they want to be popular. So nerds put more effort into getting the right answers than they doing at being attractive and pleasing.

Thanks for your comments. It is valuable to hear how things went from your perspective. In fact, if you, Emma and Liz are keen, perhaps you'd all like to do a podcast from the GM's perspective on Pheno? I'd be very interested in hearing that!

Rest assured that I don't intend to give up on Pheno. In fact, I am giving serious thought to running something next year.

In regards to the points you have raised here, I'd really like to respond to them but I'd prefer to do it in another forum. I don't want to start an in-depth discussion that detracts from the awesome work that Liz and Emma do here.

So, with your permission, I'd like to continue this discussion in a thread at RPGMeetup.com. There is already a thread on reports from the con there and some interesting discussion about Phenomenon games in general is taking place there, too.

Anyway, let me know if you are interested in doing that or not.

Or maybe not- but that's how it sounded to me

Michael the designer of Floodland here. I'm sorry Narayan didn't enjoy Floodland. But no game can satisfy everyone – it simply sounds like he's not in to that style of module – no harm – everyone has their own tastes. And please don't give up on Pheno because of these games -there are other styles represented there that it looks like you didn't play.

As to whether modules like Floodland are a game? Hmm, I could point you to some game theorists that question whether *any* form of roleplaying game is actually a game. Is the Floodland style of systemless a game? Depends on your definitions. I can give you ones where it is, and ones were it isn't. But I can also give you ones where no roleplaying game fits the definition of "game". I find modules such as Floodland fun, and that's enough for me.

As to the question of choices in the game, here I do have to take some issue. I think there is a confusion between "lack of choices" and "lack of external choices". By external I mean "affects the world". Listening to your discussion of the Cabinet of Dr Makundi, when you started talking about a system that could have been applied to it, most, if not all, of the comments you made were about things you could have done that would have affected the world around you.

In a three or six hour con module you can't do everything. The style of module (let's avoid the term game) that Floodland represents avoids the external to spend as much time as possible on the internal. Here's some choices I'd claim I saw people making in Floodland:

does that person stay my friend?
do I stay with my life's work or leave it?
do I start a relationship with that person?
am I happy with the way I lived my life?
which of my companions do I trust?

It's about investigating the internal landscape of the character. The external plot, such as it is, is simply a vehicle to allow that exploration to take place. I make no pretence that everybody will like this sort of thing – hell, I'm convinced a majority *don't*. I suspect more people would share your view than mine.

The real story in these modules isn't the bare bones external structure, it's the emotional journey the characters make. And I would contend that the players have a lot of control there.

Again, not something everyone is into. It is it's own peculiar little niche, and a touch masochistic. If we all liked the same sort of thing it would be a very boring pasttime. But please try to understand what it is others might see in them before writing them off as "boring non-games with no choices".

I'd like to clarify on why I think Emma-Jean won the Player's Choice. We would have given you a GM's Choice had you not already won Player's Choice by miles.

You bought a huge amount of enthusiasm to the part, you got deep into the character, and you made every interaction you had with others interesting and engaging. You took every angle you had on the character, and just ran with it full out.

Liz, we also really liked your take on your character, dark and moody at the beginning, and lightening up later. You were considered for a GM award.

Great idea to be doing a podcast, I'll be listening to your archives.