Please join me in a few moments of centering silence so that we can come together in spiritual community and now please remain seated as we sing our in-gathering hymn this little light of mine and The words that we will sing are printed in your order of service. So not the whole song but what we have here Thank you I'm gonna let it shine So little light of mine I'm gonna let it shine I'm gonna let it shine, let it shine let it shine let it shine Everywhere I go I'm gonna let it shine Everywhere I go I'm gonna let it shine, everywhere I go I'm gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine Building up a world, I'm gonna let it shine Building up a world, I'm gonna let it shine Building up a world, I'm gonna let it shine and let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. Good morning. Good morning. If we weren't awake, we are now. Loud Gong and Fun Song. Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual, as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Karen Rose Gredler, and on behalf of the entire congregation, I would like to extend a special welcome to any visitors who are with us this morning.  Newcomers and others are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library, which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your beverages and your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal colored stoneware coffee mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would welcome visiting with you. Experience guides are generally available to give business, to give building tours after each service. And I believe we have one this morning. So if you're interested in a tour of our sustainably built complex here and the landmark Frank Lloyd Wright building across the parking lot, please come up here to the area by those windows on your left after the service to meet your guide. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service. However, because it is difficult for some in attendance to hear in this lively acoustical environment, our child haven back in that corner and the commons area outside the auditorium are great places to go if a child needs to talk or move around or jump up and down or whatever. The service can still be seen and heard well from those areas. This would now be a great time to turn off any devices that might cause a disturbance during the hour, especially your cell phone ringers. I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly. This morning our sound operator is David Bryles. Our lame minister is Tom Boykoff. Our greeter is Corrine Perrin. Our ushers are Liza Monroe and Dick Goldberg and hospitality folks making coffee and probably lemonade and back in the kitchen are Allison Brooks and Biss Nitschke. Please note the announcements in the red floors insert in your order of service which describe upcoming events at today's society and provides more information about what will be going on during the next week or two. So look at these announcements and see if there's anything you're interested in. Again, welcome. We hope today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. Thank you. Even as we would leave behind us under the chalice, the words are printed in your order of service. We now kindle, inspire us, use our power to heal, to hinder. Now if you'll take a few moments to reach your neighbors. I want to come up for the story. There's some, not to call you out, but right over there are some. Any more? Any children at heart who want to come up? Well, maybe I should come over. What are you guys doing? Good, okay. Well, I'll tell you what I'm reading today. Since Jim will be talking about some things related to perhaps wanting more than we have. Come on, sweetheart. We picked a book for you folks that talks about thanks so that we can think about all the great things we do have and appreciate them. Does that make sense? Okay, so this book is called An Awesome Book of Thanks. I say, thank you. Say all these little fuzzy people here. Hi, sweetheart. Do you want to come up for the story? Thank you to the sun above. Thank you for my friends I love. Thank you for the earth and air. Thank you for the food we share. See that?   And thanks for trees and thanks for trains and for the breeze and for the rain. Here you see trees and you see wind, energy generation and trains. This is a modern book with those, what? And rain, you're right. Don't let me miss anything. You catch me on this, okay? And thanks for books to fill my brain. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Look at all those books. There's a million of them. You see that? Books, books, books. Yeah. And thank you, thank you, ocean deep. What's that big guy there? You're right, a whale. That's absolutely correct. And there are other things in there too. And desert dry and mountain steep. See, there's a desert on the one side. You're absolutely correct. Desert and mountain in these pictures. They're a sharp cookie. And pigs and cows and ducks and sheep and horses, geese and hens. See those guys? Oh, is that right? Okay. And balls to kick and kites to fly and places to go when you need to cry. Ever need to do that?  Hi. Thank you, thank you, thank you. To moms and dads and sisters and brothers, teachers and doctors and artists and others.  And they all have different roles and we appreciate all of them. Say what? Do you? Oh yeah. And look, there's a king or a princess or somebody. Yeah, there's a doctor. Cool. Who make our lives so much better for living. Thanks to music and dancing and singing and giving. Thanks for patience and hopes and rewards and revisions. Wizards and lizards and delightful decisions. Can you see? Oh, the lizards. Yeah, the lizards and the wizards are playing basketball. Cool, huh? You wanna see this picture? Okay. Quite delightful picture of wizards and lizards in a basketball game. Thanks for taking time. Thanks for going fast. Thanks for jumping high. And thanks for finishing last. Have you ever heard that? Thanks for finishing last. Because first isn't always the best place to be. Now you have your usual tortoise and hare. And I guess they're saying it's okay to be last. It's okay to be slow. Thanks for second and fifth on through 453rd. That makes sense? See all those people have numbers on them. And the last one is 453rd. Even bad things. See that sea monster there creeping along? Sea monster. Even bad things can turn out to be good. Look, they're two sea monsters and they're meeting and they're friends. And they both have, one has flowers and one has a heart for the other. Aren't those cute? Yeah, and they're happy. No, they do not look scary. And I'm sure they don't look scary to each other. Thanks for those bumps and those bruises that turn couldn'ts to coulds. Look at this skateboard fuzzy guy. He didn't quite make it that time and he fell. Thank you to those for they make us all stronger. They make us all smarter. They make us last longer. So he fell off a few times and there he did it. But I do not suggest that you do that. It looks very dangerous. Thank you to all that has ever existed and everything else I could never have listed. What's this look like? This one, that's the whole solar system which is sort of our everything for now. Thank you with kisses and thank you with hugs from a part of my heart that is so filled with love. Yeah, look at all those pretty hearts. Aren't they sweet? I say thank you to you just for being yourself. Yourself is important as anything else. That's the story. Thank you very much. Are you ready to, let's see. We're singing a song, correct?  Have a good time. Bye-bye. Which have given us this unprecedented opportunity to deceive ourselves and has provided a landscape and has given us the resources and the opportunity for this feat. But each of us individually provides the market and the demand for the illusions we want and we believe these illusions because we suffer from extravagant expectations. We expect too much of the world. Our expectations are extravagant in the precise dictionary sense of the word, going beyond the limits of reason or moderation. They are excessive. When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect we even demand that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radios, we drive to work and expect news to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house not only to shelter us, to keep us warm in winter and cool in summer, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. We expect everyone to feel free to disagree and yet we expect everyone to be loyal, not to rock the motor, take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion and yet not to think less of others for not believing. We expect our nation to be strong and great, vast and varied and prepared for every challenge. Yet we expect our national purpose to be clear and simple, something that gives direction to the lives of more than 300 million people and yet can be bought on a paper bag at the corner drug store for a dollar. We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars, which are spacious. Luxury cars, which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence and to be made illiterate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and yet more neighborly, to go to a church of our choice and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed or never has a people expected so much more than the world could deliver of what the world holds and of our power to shape the world. We know about the extreme, we know about the extreme examples, but we also know about the normal, more normal expectations. Popular, good-looking, to us. Competitive, successful, follow in our footsteps. I think that's not their plan or their body's plan. Do they then become a disappointment? And what is it like to carry that sense of fear? Teachers certainly have expectations. Pay attention, be interested, learn. At least don't show you're not doing these things. But what if you're not interested? You can't pay attention. You can't or won't learn.  You're going to carry that sense of fear. And your classmates have expectations. I can really speak only for the guys here. The expectations are clear and forceful if you were big, you should be a football player. If tall, a basketball player. If neither, at least not a sissy or a tattletale. And you should take science and be loyal to your science even if you might get beat on for that. And you should never cry, you get the tattletale. Now, Borstein, a historian that he was, is more interested in the expectations generated by the mass mediums, newspapers, radio, television, movies. These mediums expect attention, even clamor for it, but just enough attention so it doesn't become critical attention. And they know that we want instant gratification. And so they constantly tease us with the next thing right after these messages. What are the consequences of this pandering to our expectation for instant gratification? Let's check in with our assigned authority, Daniel Borstein. The making of the illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America. Some of it's most honest and most necessary and most respectable business. I'm thinking, Borstein says, not only of advertising and public relations and political rhetoric, but of all the activities which should purport to inform and comfort and improve and educate and elevate us. The work of our best journalists, our most enterprising book publishers, our most energetic manufacturers and merchandisers, our most successful entertainers, our best guides to world travel, our most influential leaders in foreign relations, our every effort to satisfy our extravagant expectations Borstein continues simply makes them more extravagant and makes our illusions more attractive. The story of the making of our illusions, the news behind the news, has become the most appealing news in the world. Well, by the way, Borstein published these thoughts in 1962, over 60 years ago. They still sound familiar. These observations from a man who, despite his vast learning, knew nothing of the internet, the smartphone, Facebook, Twitter, friending and unfriendly. What of that? And what about the expectations they create? We're talking here suddenly of the social media. I'm guessing it started with email, exploded with Facebook, became worldwide with Twitter, it became quicker and more M&S with Snapchat and it's fractionated with multiple e-services far beyond my knowledge. And I am left, of course, pondering the question, is Pokemon Go a social medium? I don't have the answer here. I must admit that I'm not the best source of information here. I do have a smart-ish phone, but it's a lot smarter than I am or cared to be. I have a Facebook account that says, it tells me that I have 294 friends, but I have no idea who most of them are or how they got to be my friends. I suppose I could go through that list and unfriend them. That seems harsh. And besides, they might buy my book. Why are these social media so attractive? They're personal and instant. They give the illusion of connection and the illusion of control, safety, distance. We hear frequent stories of the emptiness of that illusion, not merely of pathological behaviors like the slender man stabbings, but the repeated reports of internet bullying among adolescents leading to breakdown, social withdrawal, and sharp increase in suicides. And only adolescents? What about workplace bullying? Bullying of people perceived as different for whatever reason, way beyond adolescence. You don't grow out of bullying if it keeps working for you. How strong an attraction do these social media have? Well, can you imagine the powerful appeal of a martyrdom? You ask yourself, how did these young Islamic radicals strap arms to themselves and want to kill innocent people?  Would you kill for it? People do every day. They answer the phone while driving. They make the urgent call while driving. They text while driving. They crash and sometimes die and sometimes kill. I'm not trying to take any kind of righteous stance here. I've done a lot of distracted driving myself without the benefit of a cell phone. I'm only trying to show how intense is the urge to be connected in the incident and the occasional but growing cost of that intensity. This is the time for a person of my age to go off on a rant about the pace of modern life. Such rants go back a long way in Western civilization, at least to the ancient Greek philosophers. But I have news for them and myself and all of us. The pace of modern life is not going away. And it's not going to slow down unless comes the great catastrophe, the apocalypse. My old colleague, Marshall McLuhan, used to say, the medium is the message. The social media are here. They are multiplying and there is no going back from them. And those new media inevitably change society. How will they change us? Political blogger Andrew Sullivan cites Plato's Republic to the effect that democracies, as they become more democratic, become more and more vulnerable to the appeal of a shameless demagogue. Fill in the blank yourself. Republic was written some 2,500 years ago, but founding fathers of America were well aware of Plato's warnings when they crafted the elaborate system of checks and balances which we call American government. They feared such a tyranny and they guarded against it. Consequently, the government works slowly, laboriously, often taking one step forward and two back to the frustration of many and satisfaction of others. As Churchill observed, democracy is the worst of governing systems except for all the others. Sullivan points out what the 21st century added to this tendency toward tyranny in democratic political systems was media democracy. In a truly revolutionary form. If late stage political democracy had taken two centuries to mature in America, the social media equivalent of about two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse. Sullivan suggests that the process has its origins in partisan talk radio at the end of the past century. The rise of the internet and events so swift and pervasive in its political effect is now only beginning to be understood. Further democratizing every source of information, dramatically expanding each outlet's readership and giving anyone and everyone a platform. For example, Sullivan notes, political organizing, calling a meeting, formatting a rally to advance a cause used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds to set up. The distinction between politics and entertainment becomes fuzzier. Election coverage becomes even more modeled on sports casting. Political speeches are crafted to produce a 10 second sound wake for the evening news. What this fuel, Sullivan thinks, is what the founding fathers feared about democratic culture. The valorizing of feeling, emotion, and narcissism in place of reason, empiricism, and public spirits. I'm earnestly attempting not to get into the political campaign here. But the most obvious evidence available suggests that there is widespread anger, disillusionment, frustration, hopelessness, even despair in American culture. And it has certainly reached a boiling point in the contemporary election. Political liberals traced this back to Ronald Reagan's famous slogan, government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem. But Reagan only said that because a lot of people already believed it. So they elected Ronald Reagan, who for some reason did not dismantle the government since he was the head of it. The cohort which embraced this slogan, the Tea Party, represented only a small, fairly coherent slice of the political spectrum. But the political pollsters have been finding that many of the people animated today by the political campaign have been largely indifferent to party affiliations and reach across a wide range of political attitudes. Of course, older political liberals, shall remain nameless, traced this back to the disillusionment with the Vietnam conflict and the Watergate scandal, or perhaps even to the collapse in the early 70s of the social revolutions of the 60s. But who remembers that? Certainly not me. But it is the responsibility, function, and faith of the government in power to be blamed for the contemporary situation, whatever its political strength. And the blame game is always momentarily satisfying, completely ineffective, and ultimately frustrating. We are totally a democracy that people have power. But when we don't see the change we extravagantly expect, we are frustrated again, and we want to express it. The social media have given anyone a voice. President Obama loved his Twitter account. The Pope has a Twitter account and uses it. Beyonce, well, I won't go through the full list. Is this a good thing? It sounds like a good thing, a democratic thing. Don't we all have a right to our opinion? Don't we all have a right to express it? Isn't belief in the democratic process one of our UU principles? Or do the flood of social media segments emerge from a thoughtful, insightful consideration of the issue?  Not to characterize them in any way. Borstein would say that we have extravagant expectations for quick results, from a system designed to work slowly and cautiously. We hear candidate say, on day one of my administration, but that's just not the way it works, not for any new president. Well, what can we do? We can start with what spiritual guides call discernment, a power to distinguish, discern, judge, or appraise a person or situation. For example, what do we expect of ourselves, our spouses, our children, our schools, our church, our nation? Are our expectations reasonable? Are they based on righteousness or cynicism? Do they produce euphoria or bitterness? Do they lead us to action or discourage us from action? Borstein thinks that what we need is to disillusion ourselves. What ails us most is not what we have done in America, but what we have substituted for America. We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted not by reality, but by the images we have put in the place of reality. To discern our illusions will not solve the problems of the world, but if we do not discern them, we will never discover our real problems. To dispel the ghosts which populate the world of our making will not give us the power to conquer the real enemies of the real world or to remake the real world. But it may help us discover that we cannot make the world in our image. It will liberate us and sharpen our vision. We hope it will clear away the fog so we can face the world we share with all mankind. Let's get started on that right now. It's time for our offering. Noise and sorrows received, celebrated, and shared. We pause now and smiley and says, my son Will has been doing archival research in Istanbul, Turkey. At this, for the entire past month, he is well and his flight home is scheduled for Wednesday. So we'll all hold him and the entire family in our hearts for him to be back where his mother can hug him and thank the universe for his safety as we will all. May we silently, in the spirit of empathy and hope, hold in our hearts and hands the unspoken joys and concerns of this community, of the mourning French people, and of our entire wounded world. Let us please take a moment of silence. Because of this time shared, may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. And now please rise as you are able for our closing hymn, number 151, I wish I knew how. Be content with yourself, just the way you are. Let this knowledge settle into your bones and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance.


On behalf of Brigadier General Julie Nethercott, I'm proud to present to you this special performance by the Paris Island Marine Band. Today, we bring to you the classic wind ensemble work by the great American composer, Frank Tekely, entitled Simple Gifts, Four Shaker Songs. The first movement in Yonder Valley enhances images of spring with the first three notes in the flutes, depicting a bird call. The second movement, Dance, gives us a familiar and fun melody used for inspiring movement and togetherness. The third movement, Here Take This Lovely Flower, is a lullaby sung to children. Its purity brings to mind the innocence of a young child. And lastly, the finale, Simple Gifts, gives us the most famous of the melodies and brings us an optimistic and uplifting closure to the works. As we head into what we hope is a more optimistic future in which the pandemic is conquered, it is our hope that we hold on to some of the simplicity that this last year and a half has brought to our lives. Let us not forget that some of the best things in life are sometimes the simplest things in life.


The parade agiton now presents the assembled command to the commander of troops. At the command, officers center march, all unit commanders and guide-on-bearers march to the front and center of the formation. Historically, it was at this point that commanding officers would issue orders and instructions to the unit commanders. Following this, the unit leaders would face about, return to their units and pass the information along to their marines. Throughout our nation's history, millions of men and women have earned the title United States Marine. Many who have helped shape our history join us here today. In keeping with their tradition of once a marine, always a marine, we would like to recognize them. At this time, those in the audience who have served as marines, please rise. Ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause for their dedicated service to corps and country. Thank you. Please be seated. Ladies and gentlemen, the battalion commander for first recruit training battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Roger A. Hollenbeck. Morning, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning. We'll get there. Take two. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of the commanding general, Brigadier General Rines and the regimental commander, Colonel Rummler, welcome to Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and the graduation ceremony for Bravo Company. I'd also like to extend a special welcome to today's Parade Reviewing Official, whose impressive bio you'll hear in a moment, the chief engineer for the Marine Corps, Mr. Grant. Welcome, sir. Today's ceremony recognizes your new marine and all they've accomplished in the last 13 weeks. Gathering here as individuals, from all corners of the globe and all walks of life, they stepped onto the legendary yellow footprints and into uncertainty. But they dug deep. They trained hard. They came together and stand before you as a confident team of Marines, the best this nation has to offer. Now, this magical transformation didn't happen on its own. So I'd like to thank those that made it possible. First, the foundation of their character wasn't made here. It was made in your homes, in your schools, and in your communities. So thank you to the parents, teachers, families, friends, and coaches for your love, your support, and for many, your signature on the contract set the conditions vital to their success. Give yourself a round of applause, please. Second, spectacular drill instructors who spent every moment teaching, training, mentoring, and leading these Marines. Their dedication and work ethic has left a tremendous and lasting impact on your loved one who will always remember and appreciate their efforts. Now, the drill instructors and officers are able to commit themselves to the business of making Marines because of the love and support of their families who also join us in the audience today. Please join me in a well-deserved round of applause for the drill instructors and families of Bravo Company. I'd also like to recognize the martial arts, marksmanship, water survival, and academics instructors, our outstanding Chaplain, Corman, and the entire medical team who've done a tremendous job keeping us physically, mentally, and spiritually strong. And of course, the dedicated recruiter that saw potential in your Marine. In fact, joining us today from Weapons Field Training Battalion is Sergeant Buelna, responsible for training the platoon with the highest rifle qualification score. And joining us from Denver, Colorado is Staff Sergeant Corsetti, responsible for recruiting today's honor graduate, outstanding work, gentlemen. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll address the Marines one last time as their battalion commander. Good morning, Marines. I mean, you gotta love that, right? All right. We've got some manners. We've got some discipline. That's what I'm talking about. You made it to graduation. You earned the Eagle Globe and Acre, and you earned the look of pride on your loved one's face across this parade deck. It took you 13 weeks to earn this feeling, but it doesn't stop here. We promised you a challenge, and we will continue to deliver. You must continue to earn the title every day to honor the legacy of those that came before you and blaze a trail for the next wave of warriors. The Marine Corps will be what you make it, so never forget the skills, the spirit, and the values that have been drilled into you, and I guarantee your success. You are the future of the Marine Corps and the future of this great institution. So stand tall, take charge, and when you get home, introduce your buddies to your local recruiters. Congratulations, Marines. Thank you for all your hard work and for your commitment to serve this great nation. Take care of each other, take care of each other, and cultivate the relationships you've made with your fellow Marines. They'll serve you well. Welcome to the Corps, Semper Fidelis. Now taking their position in the reviewing area as today's Parade Reviewing Official, Mr. Timothy M. Graham, Deputy to the Commander, Systems Engineering, and Acquisitions Logistics Marine Corps Systems Command. He is accompanied by Brigadier General James A. Ryan II, Commanding General, Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and the Western Recruiting Region. Mr. Timothy M. Graham. Mr. Graham currently serves as the United States Marine Corps Chief Engineer and Deputy to the Commander, Systems Engineering, and Acquisitions Logistics for Marine Corps Systems Command. Mr. Graham has served in a variety of challenging billets in numerous commands to include Assistant Chief Engineer for Mission Capability at Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, Technical Authority and Deputy Warranting Officer for Naval Information Warfare Domain, Deputy Chief Engineer and Senior Scientific Technical Manager at Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, Chief Engineer for Multiple Department of Defense Acquisition Category 1 programs. Mr. Graham was appointed to Senior Executive Service in 2020. Mr. Graham holds Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and a Master's Degree in System Engineering Management. Mr. Graham has received numerous performance and leadership awards, including the Navy Superior Civilian Service Award from Commander Pacific Fleet in 2019. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Timothy M. Graham. The pass and review is a tradition within all military units, allowing the unit commander to formally inspect the unit under their charge. More than a million Marines have been trained here in the past 100 years and have departed San Diego for combat in conflicts around the world, including places whose names are immediately associated with Marine Courage and Dedication. Names such as Guadacanal, Terroir, Iwo Jima, Pusan, Inchon, Chosin Reservoir, Quezon, Huey City, Lebanon, Granada, Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, Fallujah, Ramadi, Marja, Sengen, and our most current operations worldwide. This parade deck is rich in history and tradition, and no Marine trained here ever forgets its sights and sounds. Ladies and gentlemen, as the national flag passes directly in front of you, please rise. Once it passes, you may be seated. Ladies and gentlemen, the commander of troops, Captain Christopher M. Guerra and the regimental staff.  Series 1021, Series Commander, Captain Corey A. Patton. Platoon 1021, Senior Drill Instructor, Sergeant John P. Leola. Platoon 1022, Senior Drill Instructor, Sergeant Julio C. Mayorga. Platoon 1023, Senior Drill Instructor, Gunnery Sergeant, Cresce Siano-Reyes. The regimental color guard is led on the march by the regimental color sergeant, Drill Instructor, Sergeant Rodolfo Navarrete. Series 1025, Series Commander, Captain David L. Aug. And Platoon 1025, Senior Drill Instructor, Sergeant Fernando S. Anzandoa. Platoon 1026, Senior Drill Instructor, Staff Sergeant Blake A. Kendricks. Platoon 1027, Senior Drill Instructor, Staff Sergeant Eugene J. Galvan. Ladies and gentlemen, if you turn to page 21 of your graduation pamphlets, you will find the Marine's Hymn. The Marine's Hymn has a history dating back to 1859 and has a long-standing tradition for Marines to face the direction of the music and stand at attention when it is heard. It is now directed that all Marines present and who have served honorably and, ladies and gentlemen, you are all encouraged to join. Sing the words to the first verse as Marine Band San Diego performs anchors away followed by the Marine's Hymn. Will the guests please rise? Thank you. Please be seated. The Marine Corps' uniqueness and strength as an elite fighting force is directly attributable to the magnificent efforts of the drill instructors and company officers who train and supervise the recruits. The distinct qualities of spirit and discipline, the heart and soul of every Marine, have been developed, nurtured and ingrained in recruits through observance and in relationship with their drill instructors and officers. Recruit training is the very foundation of the Corps. Each year, recruit training provides thousands of America's finest young men and women with a basic knowledge and skills to function in a profession characterized by its own set of high values and tough standards. The most important thing we do in the Marine Corps is make Marines. The individual Marine is the Corps. That is what we do here. For the Marines graduating today, the long, arduous journey of the last 13 weeks is but a small step into the Marine Corps. Although Company B prepares for their final dismissal from boot camp, their initial training is not over. Soon after graduation, they will report to the School of Infantry, Camp Pendleton, California where they will continue to be trained to serve as an effective member of the Marine Rifle Squad.  Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we would like to introduce to you the Marines responsible for ensuring the success of the difficult transition required to become a Marine. The Company Commander is Captain Christopher M. Guerra. The Company First Sergeant is First Sergeant Jason D. Brooks. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in a round of applause for the Company Staff of Company B. The next portion of the ceremony will be the traditional function of retiring the Guidons. The Guidons have been carried by the platoons throughout recruit training and are being retired to symbolize the disbanding of platoons. All similar units in the Marine Corps carry such Guidons which identify the unit and or a source of pride to each individual member. Note that the honor of carrying these Guidons is bestowed upon those Marines who displayed outstanding leadership qualities, motivation, and character and were selected as a Platoon Honor graduates. The Platoon Honor graduates compete for the titles of series and Company Honor graduate. They are considered the top Marines graduating today and have demonstrated the highest potential for future leadership and responsibility in the Marine Corps. The Guidons will now be returned to the drill instructors. The Honor graduates will now be presented a plaque by the Battalion Commander Lieutenant Colonel Roger A. Hollenbeck and the Battalion Sergeant Major Sergeant Major Rashad M. Browning. Ladies and gentlemen, please hold your applause until all Honor graduates have been recognized. The Honor graduate for Platoon 1021 and the Company Honor graduate is Private First Class Land N. C. Adiaga from Granby, Colorado. Private First Class Adiaga is also the recipient of the Chess U. Puller Award for his outstanding meritorious performance while in recruit training. The Honor graduate for Platoon 1022 is Private First Class Daelyn J. Pressler from Phoenix, Arizona. The Honor graduate for Platoon 1023 is Private First Class Michael J. Angelis from Austin, Texas. The Honor graduate for Platoon 1025 is Private First Class Abraham Echevaria from Pico Rivera, California. The Honor graduate for Platoon 1026 and the Series Honor graduate is Private First Class Bain W. Thomas from Placerville, California. And the Honor graduate for Platoon 1027 is Private First Class Miles A. Stow from Pollock Pines, California. Ladies and gentlemen, the Honor graduates of Company B. The Company First Sergeant will now give the command to the senior drill instructors to dismiss their platoons. Needless to say, this will be the most welcome command they have received throughout recruit training. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's ceremony.


We're here today because Australia, you know, we've run this exact lecture with a few tweaks at several packs is in the past starting in Oh, hey, you might think oh, we're recycling but we are recycling. We talked a lot. We figure none of you know We are and you've never been to packs. This is new to you So I can tell the same jokes that no one will know right But the real reason we wanted to bring this old panel back to you right is that in you know I'm sure you guys play a lot indie video games especially with your PC culture, right in the US We have a lot of indie tabletop RPGs which we love but I am not so sure that those have made it to Australia So we wanted to spread the love of them now We tested this on the tram here the tram was 90% packs people and we're on the tram and we meet this guy He's a super tabletop game. We're talking about Pathfinder. I'm like, all right I'm gonna list for you the names of games We're talking about in this panel if you ever heard of anything and none of them So I think we're in a good place. I think we're in a good place now. We did add something to this panel That's where we're gonna start right here But when we first ran this, at PAX 2008, we ran it right after the Dungeons & Dragons as awesome panel They thought that these two panels would go together No, we kind of shadow over Dungeons & Dragons for an hour And we're gonna shadow over Dungeons & Dragons for an hour But for the first 20 minutes, people in the audience were like clenching their fists, like, how dare these guys All right Right guys, they love D&D so much.  I played D&D since I was in like third grade D&D, I had characters I took from second ed to third ed, not to fourth ed I went to nerdy summer camp, right? In a nerdy summer camp at dinner, they would list the activities for after dinner And the number one activity was, quote, adventure games, which meant going to picnic tables behind the, whatever it is, cafeteria and play D&D So, and that was second ed So, we want to be very clear, this all comes with love We, I love Dungeons & Dragons, I love everything that it is, and I'm about to take a crap over it and my childhood for the next hour So, let's begin. Role playing games, that's what we're talking about, right? What is a role playing game? Well, Dungeons & Dragons The title of this panel, Beyond Dungeons & Dragons, and we use that term to describe Dungeons & Dragons But we also use that term to describe that What is that really having in common with Dungeons & Dragons? Yeah, there's characters and they have some stats, and that's pretty much it, right? I mean, the story is not different, Cecil goes through his transformation whether you like it or not, I guess unless you stop playing, maybe But there's so many games out there that people call a role playing game, and you look at the whole category of everything that's called a role playing game And these things don't even resemble each other, how do they have the same label? Makes no sense I am playing a role in this game, I'm taking this character, they're going through all the motions But most of the game is this sort of combat game that's kind of separate from the role playing part I mean, you don't watch a movie and there's a thousand random encounters along the way So obviously, we're not talking about this when we talk about Dungeons & Dragons Because really, that is the extent of the role playing in a traditional role playing game Does that love me? The trick here is that no matter what you answer, you are forced to answer yes If you say no, she says, but thou must, and you have to answer again I could say this is some sort of allegory for relationships but What about this? That's role playing, isn't it? It is indeed role playing Kenneth Brown, I was playing the role of Hamlet, but I don't think Shakespeare was rolling dice when he made Hamlet I don't know if Brown was rolling any dice either So we've got a game where there isn't really any role playing We've got role playing where there isn't really a game Now, we know we're talking about that, that is what this panel is about I had hair That is our gaming group, there's a bunch of people there with pajamas Sitting around a table, funny shaped dice, nachos, everything So we're talking about this, but the role playing game covers so many different things That we really need to define the term Because if we don't define the term, it's really easy for us to get way off track in our discussion But even further, we keep using that word game I figure Princess Bride would go well over here We don't even have a good definition of the word game I mean, patty cake's a game Yeah, what kind of game is patty cake though? I mean, is there a winner? Is there a loser? Can you mess up? When one plays patty cake, everyone loses Or is it Roger Rabbit patty cake? I mean, Poker's covered that, Meatgate, we were talking at a convention called Magfest in the US And a woman in the audience took Umbridge with the fact that we wanted to define the term game for the purpose of discussion Because, and I quote, I watch movies with my friends and we consider that a game If you look at the dictionary, that could definitely be a game It's like an amusement or whatever, right? Candyland, I mean, you think Candyland's obviously a game But in Candyland, no one makes any decisions All you do is reveal cards and move the thing, determining, you know, based on what the cards say No one decides anything, there's no decision or anything It's just, play it out and see who wins You can just flip over the whole deck of cards and be like, rim wins Now, too many people, when they want to, as soon as someone starts trying to define They want to make a definition of game They start using that to exclude other kinds of games Or somehow denigrate those other kinds of games Usually, they're trying to make a no-true Scotsman argument Like, you know, people will be like, oh, that's not a sport, that is a sport And what they're trying to say is, I respect that activity, I do not respect that activity Oh, I respect that as a game, yeah, I like that one I don't like that, I don't want to call that a game Because then it's, you know, we're not trying to do that, right? All of these various activities are even, you know, watching movies we don't consider to be a game That doesn't mean we don't think watching movies is a good way to spend your time, right? We're just trying to have a discussion about a particular subset of things that many people call games So we need some sort of word to narrow it in So there's no confusion that we're actually talking about something else Now, the trouble really is the word game It's an ancient word, it's been used for a long time We have a lot of different things I mean, if I hunt pheasants, pheasants, that is also game So Richard Garfield, you may have heard of him He, you know, Magic the Gathering, Android Netrunner, kind of a famous dude in game design He coined the term, and that term is orthogame The book in which he coined this term is what's the characteristics of games That book is like our Bible If any of you are aspiring game designers Go buy Richard Garfield's book, Characteristics of Games, and read it cover to cover It looks like a boring textbook, but it's actually the best book Now, he covers orthogames exclusively The definitions of games we use, we really use three definitions In interactive amusement, a series of interesting decisions Or a competitive test of skill And he decided to make a new word for that An orthogame is a competition between two or more players Using a set of rules and a method of ranking Poker, chess, football Suddenly we have a word and now we know that Pluto is not a game in this context Right, Candyland is not a game Patty Cake is not a game if we're going by orthogame And we just don't want to say orthogame every time, because it's annoying So he coined this term and it's a very useful term But his book very pointedly only covers these kinds of games It doesn't cover role-playing games So he needed a word for these other kinds of games So we want to commit a little bit of hubris And we've tried to coin a term, ideal game So if an orthogame is defined by this He chose ortho because ortho is the prefix for sort of straight He used it to mean a straight or pure or true game And ideal means unique or personal So a series of interesting decisions that produce a personal outcome Dungeons and Dragons does that Mass Effect does that to a degree In fact, notice some of these games recently People play them for the story and then they even let you turn off the game part Because they choose your own adventure stories all anyone actually cares about Yeah, but Final Fantasy wouldn't really work up to this, right? Sure, you might make some interesting decisions But it's not a personal outcome, right? Final Fantasy VII ends the same way for everyone in this room There's no personal about it whatsoever, right? You might have a personal reaction to it But that can be said for anything, you know? So it doesn't really count So the kinds of games we're talking about For the rest of this lecture are ideal games But even that is just a high level category So I'm going to answer the next question for you And then we're going to proceed Conflict Conflict is the answer to the next two questions What makes a good story? Star Wars seems to be the theme in every pack's keynote ever So I figured we'd go along with that, I assumed and it would be So the whole point of a story like Star Wars Is that there is conflict between these characters That is why we watch it We're not interested as much in the conflict between us and George Lucas Some of you might be, but not everybody You know, the conflicts are internal or external It's like basic literature in 101 action here, right? What drives a good game?  You get credits and that's it I beat Double Dragon Luke beat the Emperor, spoilers I beat Double Dragon You see how the conflict in a sort of an ortho game Like Double Dragon Which isn't even really an ortho game because it's not between two players But it's still more of a game Not too much role playing It's all about you in the real world You beating this thing I got the high score at Space Invaders I beat Rim at a game of Puerto Rico I beat Rim at Magic the Gathering When you play D&D It's my character went and rescued the whatever Suddenly you're inside the story It's the things that matter That personal outcome You don't win Dungeons and Dragons At least in the sense of an ortho game You want to find the conflict in the fantasy Not the conflict of you trying to conquer And improve your skills So if we boil all this down And take all these concepts together This is our proposed definition of a role playing game That we will use for the rest of this panel Because really, why do we play role playing games? Because we're trying to tell cool stories But simultaneously, we're not good storytellers And with all of that combined We're also gamers and we want to play a game So a role playing game Is nothing more than a mechanism of conflict resolution In order to facilitate collaborative storytelling Right, I mean anyone can just sit down And tell a story It's pretty easy even if you're bad at it And good writers can tell stories Because that's what they're good at But me and Rim, we're computer people We can tell stories really well at all But maybe if we get together We can have a lot of fun Coming up with a story together Maybe someone's a good writer Maybe no one is But it's a good time It's like okay I want the guy to go and kill the dragon That would be so awesome So keep this definition in your head For the whole rest of this This is how we're defining the term role playing game Because that is what we're talking about We're not talking about Final Fantasy And I just want to point out Yes, I did photoshop my friends From the D&D group Onto that Star Wars picture I don't think they know that we showed that picture In all these conventions all around the world Except that you were at the last time we did this One of them was It's actually big right there It's the only one Captain Giant had So the whole point of this is That role playing games let us make our own God damn Star Wars So let's talk about some concepts Of role playing games Because we're going to build to Actually taking some examples From existing role playing games You might not have heard of That do the kinds of things we're talking about Role playing game tends to have A game master up at the top I've stolen all this from the Bay of Tapestry We have our PCs over here And we have the world The environment The obstacles Right the conflict that we're resolving here Is the conflict between the player characters Right and the things in the world That aren't necessarily players Deep dark dungeons And horrible monsters And traps of all kinds Are all represented on the right And how is the conflict resolved We have a mechanism of conflict resolution King Harold up there Now wait We're about to crack over D&D We haven't really cracked on it yet D&D does not help us tell good stories D&D is mostly terrible at that And you're all thinking right now But I've told great stories with D&D And so wait We have It wasn't the game that was doing that Because you can't evaluate a role playing game By your experiences alone You can only evaluate it By what is actually written in that book Right A lot of people try and tell me I say D&D's not a role playing game Or it's a bad role playing game And they're like No I just had the greatest D&D session We have this great story going Everything's amazing And I'm like that's all you What part of that did D&D make happen And they can't tell me Right They just come up with some other excuse Listen we can role play Monopoly Good So get off my Atlantic Avenue Post taste Him and I have it I'm playing a crazy guy My character doesn't want money Right Does that make Monopoly a role playing game Because we can role play We can create a good story Around the game of Monopoly That doesn't mean Monopoly is a role playing game You're giving Monopoly credit For the thing that you did All on your own It was you all along Right D&D is the magic feather You don't need D&D to fly You don't You can fly on your own You don't need this weird system That all it really does Is tell you how to move around In the dungeon and stab things So my character before He's confronted through the game master With this world We're going to have some conflict What is my character My character is literally Nothing more than that In Dungeons & Dragons Now you might think I think they're laughing at the fin Up in the corner Now you might think That your character has a lot going on But that is really all that's there And we're not just talking About Dungeons & Dragons Pathfinder Pretty much are Werewolves All these games Are basically mechanically Sort of call like a fool And mostly The same game They're different combat schemes And what is essentially The same role play Right It's like Oh in L5R You can die really easily And use D10s But in D&D Use a D20 It's like It's the same idea though It's all So if I'm going to tell the story Of my character here I'm not going to talk about My strength stat That's not interesting And it turns out That that's the only part Of my character That is character That is story Who he knows What he's done Where he's going Why he fights For what he fights for That's it And that whole character sheet That's it So try to tell me This is a role playing game But what percentage of it Has anything to do with role playing That percent And most of that is a picture Now you've been in this boat before Right there on the relationships You write that Kelvin Blackstaff is your uncle You really love Kelvin Blackstaff don't you This is my go to example You know what we should go with Drist is your cousin That's why We should go with it Ah We'll get to that later So I write down My character sheet In that tidy little space For character background That Kelvin Blackstaff Is my uncle Who doesn't give one shit About that There's no rule in the book That says anything about that If Kelvin Blackstaff is your uncle Then you get plus one And no There's nothing like that Right It's just something you make up In this text area they gave to you And nothing in the book Makes that matter Whatsoever If you're going to make that matter That's something you do on your own Not something D&D makes matter So all of that How much of this does D&D Make matter Well Pretty much Just race That's the biggest stretch I can even make To have anything highlighted on this So Let's talk about Conflict in role-playing games Because the conflict between The characters And the conflict between the players Are both very important So My PC runs into a guy Trying to sell I guess some sort of cat And a guy's got a bowl Stuck on his head Looks more like an artwork Kind of thing Without a big nose This guy might be an astronaut I really want that head bowl The head bowl is really easy Alright So we want the head bowl Now Maybe the guy doesn't want to Give us the head bowl Well What are we going to do here We can buy it from them Now maybe we're going to start Role-playing That's not the game If we just start talking And characters And don't start telling me That D&D says Make up your own rules I can make your own rules And write on the last page Of the Monopoly instruction manual That doesn't mean anything Alright So If my character Is just that character she And I'm confronted with this What does the game Try to tell me to do Well If all I have is a hammer Then a bunch of people Are going to end up dead Everything highlighted in red Only Applies to Killing people With swords and hammers And magic There are other parts here They're also used in combat But they can Theoretically be used For non-combat In a few situations That red stuff Just fun I mean Your rope skill Can be used to kill people But also To get over a trap That's not killing anyone So basically The game is giving me All these great tools If I want to fight With these guys And kill them And smash that ball It's going to be way fun We're going to get to use All these fun stuff In the D&D book Like oh my god I get to kill someone Look at all these I'm rolling tons of dice I'm using all this stuff On my character sheet And a bunch of people die I got a ball now from my head But if I want to talk to the guy Maybe I roll a diplomacy check One line on the whole sheet How satisfying is that?  Right, now I've met people Who love D&D And I say What do you love about it? It's like they love Going to Dungeons And having combat And shooting monsters And all that stuff And to that I say Well, D&D is the perfect game for you You want to go in there And kill monsters With some average damage Which slash Or attack Or you know His magic spell Is going to make that happen And then having a tank And a healer And all that World of Warcraft stuff If you like figuring that out On paper Play D&D All you want In fact, it's an even better game You can play Descent Or I've never played Descent Where you build a little dungeon It's even better at that, right? And it has the same Role-playing framework As Dungeons & Dragons Yeah, nothing If you want to play And if you want Little kids to play Get here on Quest Same thing Just don't tell them About the secret Attack until you open a door So you effectively Don't have to roll the dice Yeah, we'll move on beyond that So really What it comes down to Is that Dungeons & Dragons Exists in a continuum Of role-playing games And we made this handy chart At the top there Is the authoritative game One person is telling a story At the bottom, collaborative A bunch of people are telling a story And they all have equal input Games fall On different parts That continue them On the left to right Game versus role-playing How mechanic heavy Is the role-playing game Is there mechanisms for conflict Resolution that is social?  Or is it purely role-playing? Is it a game where There is basically no game at all Except maybe you flip a coin? You mean your high school Drama club?  Is it kind of a game?   I don't know what fantasy Book would be good here Or I could make a joke About that fantasy book right now I don't know Did they know Prince of Nothing? No one here knows a prince of nothing No, okay Alright, let's get in the Interesting part We're gonna actually take you Through a ton of games That you've probably never heard of And probably aren't available In your country Internet exists, people Internet Alright, the shipping is gonna be the same As the markup at the game store So So we're gonna start with the game Called Inspector Now, I'm hoping many of you Have seen an old movie You might have heard of it It's called Ghostbusters It's a big New York movie I don't know So it's the people that are from there This is a role-playing system That makes Ghostbusters happen Right, you can't use You know, people like to brag About D&D They try to like hit every hammer With it, you know We can use this for any kind of story And you see, remember In the D20 days it was big D20 modern D20 Star Wars We can use the same set of rules For every kind of story No, you can't Alright, inspectors will only tell That story of a company of people Running a business Where they work together To solve supernatural disturbances If you do not want to tell A story about that This game will not do that It does only one thing And one thing only The really interesting mechanic About this game That I want to highlight There's the character sheet And there's actually not that much on it It's mostly flavor text They actually put the rules Of the game on the character sheet They had so much leftover space So here's the deal If I'm a player And I want to do something I roll some dice You know, athletics Whatever Yeah, it's always going to fall Into one of those four skills Academics, athletics, technology Or contact, right? So if you wanted to, say Beat up someone on the street Who wasn't giving you information Right? Because they definitely saw it But they're walking away And they deserve a beating You're going to use athletics For that, right?  So if you roll moderately well It's like, okay You get to tell the story But the GM gets to slip in A negative aspect Or if you roll poorly It's like the GM tells the story But the player gets to slip in One positive aspect So if I'm researching The microfiche in the library To find out if The picture of the guy Who we think did the murder Looks the same 20 years ago And 50 years ago If I roll a six I narrate exactly what I found What did you find? So it turns out That we keep finding this guy's picture Going all the way back To 300 years ago What does the guy look like?  You heard some noises Around the corner In the back of the library Ah And then you went to investigate them Look, I don't need his permission To make him go investigate I'm telling the story He failed, right? You went around this corner To investigate The door closed behind you And now something is Grabbing your neck Oh, no Now we can continue And get, you know Going to the next roll Right? Because there's a new conflict Now the conflict is no longer The conflict of Finding the thing In the microfiche in the library It's not the conflict of him Versus the monster In the back of the library So instead of the mechanical Mechanic Mechanical mechanic Going back and forth The currency of the game Being hit points Damage per round All that stuff In D&D like games The currency is Who has control over the narrative And the mechanics of the game Just let you pass That currency around So like you have a candle Or else the candle could talk And roll the dice So you guess the candle The other cool thing This game does Is it has a shared space There's a character sheet For your home base How many of you played a game Where you have a home base You've got like These cool magic items You've got your butler Or whatever You role-play stuff out In your treehouse The treehouse is a character here There's rules for Hey, do we have a Sama Flange in the treehouse? I don't know, do we have a Sama Flange? Let's roll a check And find out We do need to have one So suddenly You don't have to worry About this minutia of Do you have 108 gold pieces And 15 electron pieces In your stash You abstract that And roll dice Do we have the thing We need for the plot Right now? Or not? In fact we do We always do We don't Primetime Adventures Okay, so Primetime Adventures Like Inspectors Is a game that tells One and only one story One kind of story It makes a TV series Any sort of serial TV series So it can actually cover A wide variety of genres If you want to do Lost the role-playing game Perfect, Game of Thrones Perfect Bucky, The Vampire Slayer You can use this For a lot of anime games If you want it to be Like a cowboy view-up situation Perfect, right? The mechanic We want to point out here This is actually a card-based Game you play with A deck of playing cards Is the screen presence Right? You basically You must play nine sessions Of this game for it to work Right? And what you do is At the very beginning When you make the characters You determine your presence Per episode Right? And if you think about You know TV series It's like, yeah There's a lot of characters And some episodes Focus on one of them Like Simpsons Right? It's like This is a Moses-like episode He's just all over this episode He's trying to get with Marge Remember that one? Yeah So Moe has a really High screen presence He goes to Moe's bar once And that's it really Maybe he gets a prank call From Bar So his screen presence That episode is going to be One or two Right? And the screen presence The higher it is During that session The more power you have To exert your influence On how the conflicts are resolved So more of the scenes In the game Are going to want to Involve you Other characters You take turns When a character has a scene They're going to want to Get you involved in that scene So you can exert your influence And help them You know get Whatever they want In that scene Whatever Have more cards Basically available Because the number is How many cards you get And such So you're going to be In more scenes There will be more screen presence Now remember We're not good at Writing or telling stories Right? But there's a certain Math involved In setting those screen Presence numbers Right? And the people who Made this game They are good writers They are good storytellers That math happens to Coincide with Having really good Pacing Having really good Evenly distributed Character focus Just by following the rules You will tell a good story Right? You're not At least not going to get Those parts wrong The pacing will be good And the character focus You know being shared Equally will be good You're going to mess up Something else Think about the problems This is already solving I mean like we said The guy with the Ladder charisma At the table Who's talking constantly Bowling everyone over In D&D This game Forces all of you To spread the story around To all the characters No one's being left out At any point It also Forces you Do I want to be big In this episode Or that episode And also Another kind of side With other games Do this better This game forces you To write down Who your nemesis is So if I were A Kelman Blackstaff As my nemesis Then he is guaranteed To be in the story It's part of the rules He is my enemy You can actually Use the rules Because it's written Down in the character She matters Not like D&D Where you write Character background You can't force There's no rule about that It's just a flavor text Down here In all of these games Real text Where there's a rule about it If you have a connection Kelman Blackstaff You can Kelman Blackstaff Shows up in the diner It happens You say it happens It happens It's a rule As long as you have them On your sheet Free market Free market is crazy This is a role playing game That comes in a box Like the old D&D games It looks like a board game The deal with it Is that it plays One kind of game Very specifically Notice the trend here They all play One kind of game So you can play A lot of different things This is set in a space station In a post-scarcity world Imagine a world Where energy We have infinite energy It's basically a cyberspace Cyberpunk utopia Right Where everything is amazing And the only scarcity Is physical room If I die They just reprint me And put my memories back in I'm good to go Right You can't die All you can have Is really social You know currency Like people don't like you Anymore That can be a problem Right So that's sort of a scarcity It's a space station It's tiny Now the whole premise of the game Is predicated on one question So with this world And with all these resources At your disposal What did you do today? That is the promise And let me tell you Watching people play this game It goes into a dark place Really quick Yeah, it's pretty cool Because sometimes you play And people tend to start off wacky I've played games about cannibalism I've played games about dentistry I've played games about Cooking plus cannibalism Food is a very common theme in this game I want to start a bakery And think about this A whole scarcity world In this world If I give you a donut You probably really like me It's like, give you a donut Unless you're gluten tolerant But in this world If I give you a donut You could print a donut anytime In fact, taking the donut It's just pain in the ass If you give someone a gift And they accept it You get like a huge boost In this game Because who the hell wants gifts Right And there's actually differences Between stuff you made by hand And stuff you just printed out And it's like Are you really good at printing Are you really good at making stuff There's all kinds of things So this is a game that actually Makes you really think about The sort of ramifications Of a post-scarcity society And it does it exceedingly well And weird sci-fi comes out of this game The other thing about the game Is you play it with these Multiple decks of cards Every player has a deck of cards And it says right on the box How many of each card are in the deck And you flip them over One at a time To sort of resolve the conflicts It's like, oh, I drew a hazard card Shit Oh, I drew a genetics card Good I needed that Because I'm using my genetic thing On this test This conflict, right And the thing is You know how many are in there You can look in the discard piles You're like, shit I know there's no more greens in the deck The next thing I do It's probably going to fail miserably Right But I need to finish the deck So I can shuffle it again So I can win at something So I can choose Like, oh, I know I'm going to fail here Right Or maybe I'll get people to help in On the next thing I do So I know I don't fail at it So success and failure Are ebb and flow currencies Just like in a lot of good stories The characters are failing and failing and failing And failing and failing And then suddenly they succeed at the end And the bill boat throws Gets the ring And Gollum doesn't eat it Or if they're succeeding and succeeding and succeeding And then the critical plot twist happens Because they ran out of success It makes that ebb and flow happen Every time you play the game Thousand and one nights Yo, dog This game is crazy This is a game where you play characters Who themselves are playing characters In a role-playing game Within the game So You're in a sullen's court Thousand and one nights You're not the sullen The sullen is this You know you talk to the sullen He's not really a character It's just sort of like this Imaginary object in the game That you worry You don't want to make the sullen upset And you also don't want to get Executed or kicked out No, you play a character Like, I was playing the Don Juan The poet, the court poet I'm this pretty boy, lover boy That's the dude I'm playing Yeah, I didn't play in that game But our friend Pete did And he was the eunuch Mustafa bin Mustafa Great name Not racist at all Now the way The way you make characters in this game Is you write down For each sense, the five senses Something about your character He smells of lavender He sees power in others Whatever you want You have to focus everything Based on the senses And for every other character Sitting around the table You write what you envy about them So Mustafa bin Mustafa Envy my virility I envy his physical strength It forces you to have A already existing internal relationship With every other character So when you get to sit down And actually play the game What happens is all of the characters Are sitting in the Sultan's court Talking to each other Doing their thing Just doing their thing So now it's you in the real world And you have a character The character is Mustafa bin Mustafa Whatever Talking to the other characters You role play this out Eventually, during the role playing Somebody will in character say Let me tell you a story About that That character All of the characters in the game Have new characters in that story You might think it's hard to do But it's actually incredibly easy Like once you sit down The book is a tiny book You think how can this tiny book Make this happen? It's never failed to work Even people who are usually Not good at role playing Always get it right They remember every character's name And not just the character That they are's name The character in the second story's name Right? Can't even remember D&D character's names But I can remember these guys' names Except Tristan For a couple of times now You don't even know anything About forgotten realms No, I know about you Talking about forgotten realms All the time This is a big part of my life In my youth The other cool thing about this game So you're playing these characters Playing characters And part of the reason it's easy Is that because you're playing a character A character is always Simpler than you At least I hope it's simpler than you Otherwise you spend way too much time Writing that backstory So as a result You have a very simple focus You have this very simple lens Through which to view The secondary character That that character's playing Coupled with the fact that the character's Playing a character In the context of the selfless court You get into situations where The eunuch wanting to Take the wind out of my sails Starts to tell the story Of Don Juan You know, the epic lover And he assigns himself The role of the epic lover He assigns me the epic lover The role of the eunuch To put me in my place So now you've got a story Where you've got a guy Role playing a eunuch Who is telling a story In which the eunuch Is role playing to Don Juan And then you've got a grimm Playing a Don Juan Who is in that story Role playing the eunuch So I come out of the stage When I'm introduced Herptider I'm the eunuch Big and stupid I sure wish I had balls I insulted him at the second level The book also tells you To eat figs and dates and olives And lounge while playing We did that Because in New York You can get Turkish delivery This game is amazing And I actually just recently Got re-printed Recently re-printed, new edition Yeah Worth every dollar Go Don So Dred Dred is the best So Dred, again Only tells one kind of story The survival horror story Good thing that's a really common story Yeah, maybe everyone wants to play A zombie game A Cthulhu game That's the thing lately Sigourney Weaver alien game Awesome, right Any game where You know, you know You know, you know Which project Anything like that Anything where it's haunted And people are dying, right People are getting killed off Throughout the story Dred is your way to go But they're being killed off One by one Yeah, so you know Whenever you go to see A survival horror story Like, you stick with alien I think you might spray them, right It always has the same Pattern to the storytelling, right Everything's kind of chill Something scary is going on Tension builds Tension builds Someone dies Tension levels off Tension builds again Tension builds again And it was just a cat And the tension builds again Oh, yep, someone got eaten Yep, yep, yep You just keep going like that Until usually there's One end or zero people left And then the end, right So Dred Does exactly that game And only that game How does it do it? With a Jenga tower No dice No dice No card Think about it A Jenga tower Tension builds Tension builds Tension builds It falls down So Scott, I want to kick in the door I hear that girl screaming On the other side Alright, give me two pulls Whatever You kick in the door What's in there? I find the girl And I rescue her And we board it up behind me Okay You want to act The zombies are now bashing on The door that you walled up Alright, I try to fortify the door With the stuff from the fireplace You're going to need three pulls There's not much in that fireplace Now look at this Jenga Now if you play Jenga Over time It gets more And more Rik and tension Is building And building and building In the beginning of the game I pull out a shotgun And kill all the zombies I see And it's easy Yeah, it's like, oh Yeah, I kill the zombie I just get killed again In the end of the game It's like, start the car One pull And I'm looking at this thing Like If I choose not to pull I fail At what I wanted to do Right, so for example It's like, oh You're not going to pull To start the car No, okay Car doesn't start Zombies are now surrounding the car You're trapped inside Now what? Yeah, not to look I'm so good for him Yeah, you should say Yeah, it's the next time I ask you to pull If you knock it over And this is a clue I don't think finger Is worth everything I know Your character dies In the most horrific Same appropriate way possible And then you get a snack Because everyone else is going to keep playing Yup It happens No, at the same time You can look at that tower Look at the GM square in the face And smash it Yeah, I mean you look at this thing It's so wobbly And I ask you for two pulls You know you can't make the two pulls Right, and you know It's just going to get worse Yeah, now zombies are piled up On the car so high The suspension breaks It's like If you smash it You succeed In the most glorious way possible Come up And then die In the most horrific Same appropriate way possible That's the whole game I mean there's a character creation Which is like a questionnaire system Where the GM basically writes questions And you answer them And those answers are your character And the GM can sort of make leading questions Like, oh You know what happened to your lover Last season, right So you can make up all this stuff About a lover And you sort of open But you're also restricted You can come up with some clever ways Of doing unexpected things But it's mostly the Jenga Tower Best game So shock Oh snap Social science fiction It's actually a new shock It's shock human contact Also very good So this game Has a lot of crazy stuff going on For one, you play two characters At all times On the front side of your paper You're playing your character On the back side You're playing any of the character To your rights Remember we talked about games with no GM This is one of those games Well it's not that there's no GM It's those five players There's five GMs There is no single GM Right, you go around in a circle You're the enemy of the person to your right And the person to your left Is your enemy And you're you You still interact with the other people So you don't want to just restrict it To three players But it's mostly you And the people next to you Right, but everyone Is the GM of one thing And one thing only So when we played I decided the game should have space pirates So I was the GM I owned space pirates So in the course of the game There's a question Like hey How many space pirates are there in that sector? Oh, there's about a million That's totally space pirate land That's their home base My issue The issue that I was the game master of Was gender politics It's that kind of game The social science The way the game starts You come up with a list of five issues And everything centers on those issues You make the world And then play in it And there's rules for that Also, you set up The kinds of conflicts That can happen In our game All conflict No matter what it was Had to be framed as Either a space battle Or sex And this worked Like every time there was a conflict So basically you would get to your turn You would probably have a conflict With someone else to your left or right Somewhere around, right?  Okay, if you're not Yeah, if you're not reading Mouse guard, that's a problem You should This role-playing game Makes the mouse guard comic Just happen in your living room I know it'll probably cost you Like ten dollars more Than it costs me to get a mouse guard But I'm sure you can get it Digitally maybe For the same price Comixology or something Read mouse guard Holy shit This game just makes The mouse guard comic happen So easily and so quickly That gets almost amazing Right, and the key mechanic In this game Is that it's a turn taking game Not in the same way The other ones are turn taking It's GM turn, player turn GM turn, player turn And starts with the GM's turn So when the GM's turn The GM throws stuff At that mouse Right, it's like Oh, little mouse Now it is time for you To deal with the badger Oh yes, the badger is chasing you What will you do? Oh, you survived barely But you lost your sword When you stabbed the badger Now what will you do? As it rains It makes everything muddy Yes, you are tiny mice Mud is a big problem A big problem Well, you escaped Down to the beach Where there is no mud But there are crabs That's what we do About the crabs That's what we do About the crabs Oh, you cut off their ice top Oh, you managed to escape Okay, that's all I can think of now I'm the GM It is now your turn, mice What will you do? During my turn You little mice Earned some number of clicks Based on your role playing Your role playing well enough You can earn more clicks And the thing is checks, actually It is checks Checks You earn checks I wasn't going to correct you on stage Whatever You can use the checks During the mice turn To do stuff So it's like, okay, mice It's your turn Would you get three checks? What do you do to three checks, mice? Okay, one You're going to get a new sword Yeah, you left that one in the badger Yeah, so I thought Two, what else? Oh, some shoes Yeah, you're going to go buy shoes To deal with, you know, the mud That's going to happen again And three Oh, you're going to heal that wound You got from the crab fight Yeah Oh, is it my turn again? Oh, you're on the mice beach resort And it's high tide Oh, what now, mice?  But every single roll in this game Is those shit Especially when you only get like two or three And you earn the check And you're going to make a roll for it It's like, okay I earned the right to roll the dice To try to get shoes I didn't get the shoes I don't get the check back When we played D&D I would just like literally fall asleep During combat I was like, oh, I played pacifist My character runs away and hides Until it's over and I fall asleep And no one was really paying attention When it wasn't their turn But I think something You were in that boat too In this game When someone's like I'm going to roll some dice Everyone kind of stands up Like, oh, we should roll some dice They stand there And everyone watches silently While you prepare to roll a new dice Big deal Big deal The burning wheel Is anyone here I'm just curious Have you heard of the burning wheel? Oh, no, okay 9-0 This is the game It's the game We have a little bit of time Short story time So many of you Have probably had that sort of The feminine mystique But it's the gamer mystique That you're playing D&D With your friends Not having a good time At that point Because combat's in a six hour And you don't really Have an input in the combat And you know that guy Right?   I don't have a picture of the character sheet Okay, so at the top Of the burning wheel character sheet The first thing In the character sheet is beliefs And instincts Three of each And it's pretty much says On my character sheet You are the human thief You need to get money Or else the mafia boss Is gonna chop off your feet I think it was arms Doesn't matter Hands, something He was gonna chop something off And I didn't want that to happen I'm reading the album Because that's what I do On that count I'm one of those people I love nothing more than This is for four hours Role playing high-eleven Court bullshit So I'm reading the album Sheets like That dwarf's family abandoned that sword And they will not get it back Ever Your uncle, blah, blah, blah, blah And I look at P Who hasn't even looked at his character sheet Who's the dwarf? And I'm like You don't deserve that sword We don't know the rules of this game All we read is the little belief section On the character sheet We don't know how to play this game We don't even know what kind of dykes we need So he looks at me He looks at his character sheet And goes Looks back at me And says Your father betrayed my father This starts getting pretty heated And Luke Crane We realize he's back So we stop We're like Okay, we're ready to start And he says Oh, proceed The game tricked us into role-playing Just from the character sheet Oh, and by the way That shit isn't just like flavor takes There's rules about that stuff There are so many things We don't have time to get into Every aspect of Burning Wheel Burning Wheel is like It's a big book, right? Most of these other games We've told you about Except maybe Mouse Garden Which is sort of Burning Wheel based Are little tiny books, right? Like little tiny mice Yeah, Burning Wheel is a big book About half of it is just the character Like life pads and things For making characters But it's still big You need to be hardcore To learn all the roles of Burning Wheel I don't even know all the roles Of Burning Wheel, right? But you can play With just pages one through 75 And ignore the rest So here we're going to go through A bunch of the kind of core Mechanics of this game That are interesting And that you might find in lightning Yeah, and the other reason We use this game Is because it's the one We're most familiar with This is the one we play Every other week And also because A lot of these mechanics That are in Burning Wheel It's sort of a collection Of all the good things From all the indie RPGs Just talking about indie RPGs Like the thousands of them But this one really grabs Like sort of like the best Of out of everything So item number one Traits You play the D&D game When you write down My character is 6.8 His eyes, he's an elf His eyes are, I guess, purple With gold flecks I guess that's the popular Of eye color Does that ever matter?  Natural one Is something horrible happened That's the story that you tell, right? And Burning Wheel Makes that happen every time Because like Mouse Guard Every role matters And D&D You want to climb over The town wall to sneak in, right? Alright, I roll my D20 You roll your climb test Okay, you succeed or fail If you succeed You get into the town By climbing over the wall If you fail Alright, you fail Maybe this falling damage Maybe In this game If you fail Failure matters Failure scars your character If you get stabbed with a sword You might never walk again Right There are two rules That make this happen Rule number one Is any failed role has a consequence If it wasn't a consequence You should've just said yes It's called say yes Or roll the dice If a character wants to do something Climb over the wall The GM either says yes You climb over the wall Continue, right? Or roll the dice We're gonna find out And if you succeed You succeed And if you fail Oh, do you fail Something bad happens When you fail It might not be immediate But something bad will happen For every failed role There will be a consequence And then usually Another role to deal With the consequence, right? Rule number two Let it ride Right? DnD, I take 10 I take 20 Let it ride is like No, you failed to climb over the wall You may not try to climb over the wall again Unless it's a completely different circumstance Right? Like you got a rope Or you It's now daytime in the town Someone's helping you Never again The Game Master Continuing to roll Make you roll stealthy Until you eventually fail And you can do the thing He's been planning to do all along Right, it's like You succeeded in your stealthy You are now stealthy Until the situation Changes pretty significantly You're just hit period Now we're only about five minutes left So we're going to move a little more quickly Three more really interesting mechanics One, currency, buying stuff That's a stat I roll that just like everything else Do I want to buy a sword?  My favorite of which is Ugly Truth, best skill in the game But there's also Persuasion, oratory Course, persuasion, and Stentorious rhetoric Stentorious persuasion Stentorious platforms Stentorious ones are off of the dwarves Mostly Burning Wheel is the be-all-end-all Of everything we're talking about right here King Arthur Pendragon Is the exact opposite of Burning Wheel In every possible way And is just as good It basically simulates King Arthur's reign The book on the left Has the rules of the game The book on the right Has every year from Before King Arthur was born Until way past the end And you just go page by page Nice simulator Does your king survive to adulthood? A railroad is just built in If you're vengeful And you want to forgive someone You might not be allowed to You just can't The game's just a rail Of Arthurian legends And notice some of these Go together, right? If you're more forgiving You're less vengeful And vice versa But how about the one If you're more pious You're less worldly You might want both of those But you can't Lady Blackbird Is the same game every time You have a set of characters With setback stories You have a setting It faces the ship from Firefly This is Firefly's Star Wars The game You start with these characters It's always the exact same situation And you play it out And it always ends somewhere Crazy different Every time you play it Also skyscrapers If you want it It's set in the steampunk world Where a planet exploded And there's all these floating Islands And you use airships To get around The mechanic that's interesting Is the Hey, this is just like That time we did that thing So if you're in the middle Of a situation And you notice guys You turn to the friend with you And you say, yo Escaping from these pirates This is totally just like That time we had to get away From your mom's pirates Yeah, the skyscrapers So the The characters' backstories Are so simple And they're given to you You don't make anything You don't make a character at all During the game You add to the character You enrich the character In the course of play Which is great Because there's no preparation Like other RPGs You just sit down Boom, play Three out of four times I've played this It turned into a romantic comedy And in one of them Everybody died Dogs in the vineyard Your role play Is Mormons In the middle of nowhere And really You're not actually Mormons It's some other Fictional religious Really religious kind of sect Going on But the main mechanic In this game Is the bidding You bid higher On every conflict And it's like How badly do you Want to win this So you bid it up Sort of like in poker It's like I'll raise I'll raise I'll fold I'll take calls So we're arguing And then we bid We'll gunfight And then he wants to escalate To like murdering my whole family Maybe at this point I'd back down Right, so the conflicts That are a bigger deal End up being a bigger deal And the ones that are less Of a deal No one raises And you move on quickly Actual Dungeons and Dragons No, it's a new Dungeons and Dragons If you play old Dungeons and Dragons It is nothing like New Dungeons and Dragons If I had to say The primary now The thing that matters the most In old Dungeons and Dragons It's the map Right, we're talking About BCMI Dungeons and Dragons You know the Moldvane and Menser ones As someone on the Internet And that Dungeons and Dragons Right, it's a lot more Like playing Nethack With paper You draw the map As you reveal it Your torch lasts for three rounds Your torch went out Take the map away From the players Because they can't see Right, that's old D&D Right, it's not So much a role playing game You know It's definitely not A combat game But it's definitely Not a combat game You avoid fighting Like the plague You get hardly No experience for fighting You get all the experience For treasure Right You want to get in Get the treasure And get out So there's a new game Which is kick-started By the same people And the same group That made Bury Real Called Torchbearer Which is bringing back That it doesn't have the map Instead it has inventory Tetris like XCOM Right But it is that same Dungeon Crawl Of the old D&D Of going Get the treasure And get out I'm holding a sword And a lantern You want to pick up the treasure Yeah I put down the sword And pick up the treasure Alright, now there's A bunch of cobbles I put down the treasure And the lantern And used two-handed swords Coals are running away With the treasure It's old D&D But they minimized the mapping To let you focus on All that other stuff Action Castle Here's the deal We got it really quick This is our last game We're two minutes old We're so unprofessional We're basically out of time Right here This is a game It's like an old text adventure And we played this At our first packs No way We lined everyone up In the room And one by one You play your role You were in a small cottage Yeah, let's do three turns Alright Welcome to Action Castle Poor chance You're in a small cottage There's a fishing pole here Exits are out Your turn I'm sorry I don't understand what Your turn I don't see everything to kill Your turn I'm sorry You can't go left You get the idea Right? The person running the game This is a text adventure There's a video Scouting right in this Four game in Tycho At the Q&A I actually rated them At a packs East Q&A And was just like Welcome to Action Castle Your turn I don't know what to do Game didn't know what to do Your turn You have a hundred people Taking turns playing The same character One guy's like Kill self Game over At one point Some of the guys was like Steve Jackson was in line And the guy in front of them Is like Reset game It's like Reset game Steve Jackson's like Load game He's like Back to that line At one point A guy was like Save game It's like waving You have two save games remaining I'm afraid we have to wrap this up So If you enjoy Any of those board games Any of these tabletop games And you want to try them Email us We have some business cards We can give We don't have enough for everyone Find us around the con And we will totally We are not doing anything For the rest of packs That is on our schedule We will totally answer the questions We're probably going to be In tabletop For the next two days And we'll be in Melbourne For the next week So that's that Thank you all It's not written in the U.S. I'm sure they're going to pay for that It's going to happen all the time now I'm not giving it on my cards That's what you guys think about fate It's alright I am


Based on your opinion about self-control, what kind of effect would self-control have on our daily lives? Having self-control is a sign of a very rich manner and every person could have this kind of attitude. I mean, the more one tries, the more self-control one will have over themselves. One of the advantages of this is that you'll reach a point that your self-controlling spirit will no longer leave you alone. And that, in turn, will lead to a controllative behavior. Hence, we can all achieve this kind of treat by training every day, starting from 5 or 6 minutes. According to the narrations in this regard, if someone did a good deed, they should ask God for more blessing. And if someone acted the other way around, they should repent to God and pray for mercy.