Zac has not retreated from his call that IIEE (intent, initiation, execution, effect) is the "beating heart of the activity," and Manu - the very soul who prompted this discussion at the Forge fifteen years ago - is still on task. Armed with these stalwarts, we embark upon another Monday Lab to investigate best practices.

Zac began it with this message:

I've been working up a Design curriculum for role-playing for a long while, so when Justin Nichols approached me for a game design discussion that leaned toward mentoring, I accepted without reservation.

Usually I wait a week to post Monday Labs, partly to get enough time to edit properly, partly to keep at least something on a regular cycle at the site. But this time I couldn't help myself, it's been only two days and here you go.

The question being, what is the anchoring procedure for playing Tales of Entropy? When it is so easy to go awash and awry when one's character twists into what you didn't anticipate, or when one is now cast as Narrator with no idea of where to go.

Something has to make sense, to begin, to change, and to end. And that is the Grains. Neither "my character" nor "the plot" will work.