I thought some of the answers to the #AprilTTRPGMaker questions worked as blog posts of their own, but some were too brief. But combining a few of the smaller ones together seems like a valid blog post to me.

1. Who are you?

I'm Dan Maruschak. I think it's important in life to figure out what's really true, even if that's uncomfortable. That leads me to probe ideas and be skeptical of things. I know enough psychology to know how easy it is to deceive yourself, and I don't think I'm immune to that. I'm much more of a "big picture" thinker than I am detail-oriented -- I find trying to keep track of lots of information simultaneously to be mentally exhausting. I tend to think in terms of systems and interactions (I'm an engineer by training and temperament) so I'm much more partial to "blank slate" designing than I am to hacks or games built on frameworks since I think those tend to bring a lot of distracting cruft with them. I'm interested in RPG Theory, but I think theories should work like in science where they provide principles you can actually use to do practical stuff, not just say fancy-sounding things.

2. Where ya at

When I answered this question on Monday I was at the Meadowlark Prairie Overlook in the West Eugene wetlands in Eugene, Oregon. I try to start every day with a long walk, and since that question was location-based I figured I’d post from the most interesting and picturesque place I was likely to be.

3. How did you start creating TTRPGs?

I blogged the answer to this one here

4. Describe your work

I blogged the answer to this one here

5. Favorite game you've worked on

I'm not sure I have a great answer for this question. First off, I frequently find questions about "favorites" hard to answer -- I don't know if I have a favorite food or favorite color of favorite animal even though other people seem to. There are things that I like and things I dislike, and there are gradations within those categories, but the differentials don't tend to be so steep that clear, single "favorites" emerge for me. Personally I'm somewhat skeptical that identifying "favorites" is a very useful activity for people in their lives, but it's an easy conversational frame so it gets a lot of attention. But maybe I'm just bad at this thing that is easy for everyone else.

Second, I have a complicated relationship with each of my projects, so rank-ordering them would probably be tough for me in this area even if it wasn't tough for me in general. The most fun I've had with a game project happened during one of my playtests of Final Hour of a Storied Age, but that game also has a lot of negative emotions tied to it due to my frustrations with not being able to convince people to help me get over the last hurdles. My satirical game Sources and Methods was fun to create, but I think it's somewhat silly and frivolous -- it's got more than a tiny bit of "game design as performance art" in it, and the anxiety of engaging in political stuff in highly polarized times wasn't great.

I suppose the best answer would be Last Year's Magic. Although I had a bit of an initial freakout when I got the previous Threeforged designer's game to work with, I think I did really solid design work that captured some of the spirit of what I was handed and alchemized it through my own design thinking to include an aspect of myself as a designer. It's also got some humor and satire elements that I seem to keep including in my games that I think work well as jokes, but I'm a lot less nervous about negative reactions if the humor doesn't land with this one. The fact that it got a lot of positive buzz while the authors were still anonymous during the contest was gratifying, too -- I tend to be extremely self-conscious so the ability to see people's reaction to my work without it being filtered through their reaction to me as a person was nice.

6. Favorite game mechanic?

I blogged about the Raise / See mechanic from Dogs in the Vineyard.

7. Your workspace.

Here's a photo of my standing desk in my home office (really, a somewhat converted dining table, with a leaf from a different table incorporated as an additional laptop stand). A few years ago my conventional computer was getting too flaky to use and one of my monitors died, so I decided to get a laptop. I have it on this stand setup so I can use the screen kind of like a conventional monitor. The bright light from the window is making the room seem a bit darker in the photo than it is in reality.

Over to the right side of the desk you can see the rulebook for Dogs in the Vineyard which I had out in order to compose the post I wrote yesterday. On the shelf to the right of that you might be able to make out some other geeky stuff -- there's a Thing action figure, behind him is where many of my digest-sized indie games are stored. On the top of the shelf at the base of the lamp is a Lego Doctor Strange that my nephew got me for my birthday a few years ago, and a figurine of a cat wearing golden armor that my niece made for me one year as a Christmas present.

The list of questions for #AprilTTRPGMaker

(from Kira Magrann's twitter)