There is little, possibly no hope left in me that discussing role-playing as phenomenology has been time well-spent. "Sporadic cynicism" indeed. But every so often something happens to disperse it. In this case, it's Dustin DePenning, author of Synthicide, whom you may have watched in play with me over in Actual Play.

Ken Oswald is a game and comics retailer in Alabama, who'll be giving an ambitious introduction to role-playing later this summer, He contacted me for sort of a brainstorm, let's compare notes session. The question is, how might a non-role-playing, or sorta-semi, heard-about-it audience be best oriented? Without manipulating toward specific products, and without falling back on the familiar hobby framing-terms.

I like those diagrams so much that I feel lonely about it, and I was getting so irritated with being too personally talky during labs. that I was pleased to find the solution to both. "Bring your own," I said, and led a little curriculum through making them.

This is an excerpt from my conversation with Ken Oswald, who contacted me regarding a bunch of role-playing topics. He was especially interested in the references he'd run across about Sean Demory's 2002 game le mon mouri, so here is the bit where we went through its system diagram and talked about its content.