This entry is part 2 in the series Epigrams Of Life & Gaming

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About the “Epigrams Of Mike” series:

An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. Usually under the hashtag #Musing, I have the habit of occasionally tweeting notions and thoughts and philosophizing; the 140-character limit of twitter (and yes, I know there are ways around that) by definition makes those tweets epigrams. I’ve been documenting the best of them (in my opinion) with the intention of discussing them here. Because I’m not constrained to 140 characters, I’ve been able to clarify some that had been compressed severely in order to fit twitter’s limits – but they are all still very short.

These can be thoughts that run deep, or that are succinct to the point of being razor-sharp. Taken all at once, they can be overwhelming, and each can receive less than the attention it deserves. So I’ve broken them into batches of ten or twelve. I’m not going to present them all at once, instead relegating this to the status of an irregular series. After each epigram, I will try to expand on the thought propounded, or discuss the point raised.

Not all of these are directly applicable to RPGs. But all RPGs involve people, and that makes them all at least indirectly relevant.

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Diverse interests = diverse twitter followers = diverse perspectives. Call it the Insight equation.

I’m interested in a lot of different subjects. Science, technology, history, psychology, medicine, computers, philosophy, writing, aviation, disasters (and learning from them), music, urban myths, art, drama, crime, fantasy, sci-fi, comics, politics, anime, formula one, other motorsports, social media, and of course roleplay games. A lot of these other subjects have emerged from the latter hobby, and a lot more of them have fed back into that hobby.

Because I use the one twitter account for everything, the things that I tweet about are equally diverse, and my followers on Twitter reflect that diversity. Because they come at things from such wildly diverse directions, on any given subject you are likely to get a diverse spread of opinions. I have my own opinions, but I listen to all of these, because I find that doing so helps me make a more informed judgment of my own. I frequently gain insights as a result that would never be possible without such a diverse foundation, and I am able to transmit those insights to others.

What has been most astonishing is the crossover. I’ve had motorsport fans contribute to roleplaying questions and promote articles from Campaign Mastery that they found to be of interest. I’ve had RPG players discover formula one, or discover some fascinating new scientific discovery because I’ve told them about it. I have a lot of people who read what I tweet – and some who read what I write – not because they are into the hobby themselves, but because they are fascinated by what I write. That’s incredibly gratifying.

A lot of Twitter accounts are from people who seem unwilling to admit to more than one interest. I know some people who divide their lives up with a separate Twitter account for each interest that they may have. I think that both groups are missing out.

And it doesn’t just apply to social media, either. A diversity of friends in life outside of twitter, outside of social media in general, only adds to the richness of my life experience – and that makes me better at everything that I do, indirectly if not directly, eventually if not immediately.

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We all have slightly different core values. It comes from being different people.

This goes to the very heart of what we mean by being an individual. It poses this rather existential conundrum in two respects. The trivial is the question of definition; let us say, for example, that I state (and show by my actions) that I value taking responsibility for my choices. What exactly do I mean by that? To what extent will I take responsibility – a private confession to anyone injured, a private confession to a third party, a very public sack-cloth-and-ashes display? Or no confession at all, except in my own mind and heart? Are there limits – things that I won’t confess to, no matter what? Things that will lead to one mode of confession but not another? Is taking responsibility about making restitution or learning from a mistake? And what happens when I am restricted in my range of choices by circumstance, or by other values? It must be clear that no other person can ever know exactly what I mean. We can agree upon a vague and general approximation, but that’s as far as it goes.

If that’s what I consider to be the more trivial contribution of the two aspects of the question, then the other one must be really major, right? Here it is: Relative Value Assessments.

I’m sure that some of you are now thinking “What? Mike’s lost it, he’s messed it up, there’s no way that ‘Relative Value Assessments’ is more significant than the question of personal definition.” But I stand by that assessment. Follow my logic, if you will:

“Relative Value Assessment” refers to the weight and priority we place on one value, and under one set of circumstances, relative to another. There are three contributing factors that lead to that assessment. The first is an inheritance from our parental figures in the course of our upbringing, especially the observations and events of childhood, shaped by the personalities and flaws of those parental figures. The second is the sum of our adult experiences, and the lessons (if any) that we have learned from them. And the third is the personality of the individual itself, beyond what has been derived from our past experiences as they are shaped by the other two factors.

The first two are essentially learned, or arrived at intellectually, and those are the only two that contribute significantly to the element of definition. But the third – that is something that is inherently you, something that defies comprehensive self-analysis, simply because there are so many circumstances which can factor into such a weighting. The personality may be shaped by learning and experience, but the personality plays no direct role in the question of definition; its sole area of impact is in the assessment of morality and relative value judgments. Everything that a character is, and feels, and has done, goes into the assignment of Relative Values. It is also more subtle and far harder to quantify and analyze, relative to differences in definition.

Relative Value Levels are the purest reflection of the internal complexity of an individual, and that makes Relative Value Levels more important in terms of individual core values, and in terms of individuality, than the matter of Definitions, which can be verbalized and articulated and discussed, with varying degrees of effort required, in a way that we can never articulate and discuss as a universal rule our personal relative value assessments. And that is the thought that is encapsulated in that simple pair of phrases.

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Insanity is just a state of mind.

I don’t really remember the context that led to this thought, so I will have to reconstruct it. I do remember thinking that it was wrapping a more serious thought in a veneer of lightness and humor, and that it had a neatly-encapsulated double-meaning.

Insanity is not an especially helpful or diagnostic term, let’s establish that up front. It’s a buzzword tossed around by laymen to describe generically a whole host of issues, some psychological, some psychiatric, some biological, and some chemical in nature. It is this generic meaning that I had in mind when I wrote this epigram. In a nutshell, the term is used to describe any form of thinking that markedly differs from what the mainstream considers “normal”.

And that’s the problem. The standard is arbitrary, and based on consensus, not on rigid medicine or science. But we all think a little differently from each other, and we all sometimes have extreme reactions to sustained or traumatic stimuli. We’re all ‘technically’ insane (by this standard) from time to time. On top of that, we also use the term, or synonyms for it, to describe all sorts of other behavior. “I’m a little nuts before my morning coffee” – “Queue-jumpers drive me nuts” – you know the sort of thing. This denudes the term of any residual value that it might have held. That’s one of the two meanings – that the term itself is meaningless.

The other meaning is a little harder to grasp. There’s an implication in the aforementioned usage of the term that the sufferers are somehow flawed or weak and these are at least partially responsible for the conditions they suffer from – or at least, there was back in the 60s, 70s and into the 80s, when I was growing up, in exactly the same way that racism was justified under the theory that there were biological differences due to skin color. For some reason, that conditioning never “took” in my case, and such prejudice is something that I have struggled to understand ever since. I can do so, intellectually, to at least some extent, in terms of flawed reasoning and blind prejudgment, but simply can’t wrap my head around how people can seriously think that way.

The deliberate inclusion of the word “just” is meant to convey my total disagreement with the assessment from those days – and which I still observe from time to time – by trivializing the opinion of those people who still hold these dangerous and outmoded opinions.

Mental illness is a condition, triggered by some internal or external factor. With the right treatment – and we’re still trying to work out what those are – and with the removal of that factor (something we are only partially successful at) – sufferers can be just as “normal” as the rest of us. Which means that they are just the same as everyone else – they simply have a medical condition to cope with that affects them. And that’s the other meaning that I was trying to convey with this statement.

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Which Quote Defines who I am? My own. All of them. QED.

There are people who try to start topics of conversation on twitter that get a lot of responses. There are lots of reasons why they might do so, and none of them are particularly important to this statement; suffice it to say that on rare occasions, one catches my attention, but more often than not, I find them to be superficial and empty of significance, a vanity exercise that doesn’t tell those who read it anything of substance.

On just one single occasion, one of these questions managed to tick both of these boxes, moving me sufficiently to respond. The question is the one quoted at the start of my response. Most people responded with standard snippets of pop psychology or quotes from famous people. A few interpreted it as asking which of their recent tweets best exemplified their personality or philosophy.

Well, I’ve written more than 350 articles here at Campaign Mastery, averaging perhaps 6000 words each (perhaps more), and at least 1000 responses to comments averaging probably 200 words each, for a total of 2 million words at a conservative estimate, and even if you put them all together they wouldn’t tell you everything about me. They would tell you a lot – even the ones that aren’t specifically about me or my life – but nowhere near everything. I can’t be summed up into a single catch-phrase or statement of philosophy, and I protest that oversimplification in others.

But rather than simply protest, or belittle those who responded with something specific, I chose to make the point with more subtlety and finesse.

It is sometimes said that “you are what you eat.” I disagree. But “you are what you write”? That’s a different story. If you are honest in your self-appraisals, you write from the heart as much as from the head – and everything that you write tells a little more about you.

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Science Fiction is about the way the world will be. Space Opera and Fantasy are about the way we wish the world was.

Having protested at oversimplification in the previous item, I have to admit that this verges on committing that same offense. It’s true to a certain extent, but that’s as far as it goes. As such, I thought twice about making the comment in the first place, and thought about it a couple more times before including it here.

Science Fiction first. It’s an umbrella term encompassing such a wide diversity of material that it refuses to be pinned down. Anything that attempts to predict the future or the way technology or scientifically plausible physical phenomena will impact society or the lives of people is science fiction. Moreover, the accuracy of those forecasts is extremely pliable; subsequent scientific discovery does not invalidate it or remove it from the category. The science can be flawed, or even unexplained; science fiction encompasses “science fantasy” which has a premise science pulled and twisted completely out of shape. And it includes space opera, which falls somewhere in that spectrum of diversity, perhaps a little closer to “science fantasy” than hard science fiction.

At the same time, it’s not good enough to simply stick a rubber alien mask on someone and call the results science fiction – something that seemed lost on a lot of film and TV makers in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Nor is it enough to drop a lot of technobabble into a script and call that science fiction, either – not good science fiction, anyway. Everyone has their own definition, and the sheer scope is what caused us to be infuriated by comments like “I don’t like science fiction. I prefer [X]” – where X might be westerns, or action-adventure, or mysteries, or drama, or comedy, or romantic shows, or whatever, because Science Fiction can encompass examples of all of these genres, and some examples of those genres also happen to be science fiction.

Nevertheless, at it’s purest, science fiction is about the future and how it will affect people, and that makes it – even if only incidentally – about the way the world might be, in the best expectation of the authors. And that (hopefully) includes how the world will be. So the first statement is true – but only to a certain extent.

But the real point of the comment is the second part, and how it contrasts with a serious and sober attempt to foretell the future described by the first part.

The darker our everyday lives, the more we need a little light at the end of the tunnel. In times of economic distress and misery, music becomes harder-edged and more rebellious, because it provides a means of venting anger and frustration that makes life endurable. And such periods are when escapist movies and TV hit popularity peaks. We all need a little magic in our lives, and when real life denies it to us, we find it somewhere else.

Romantics don’t prosper in romantic periods, times of high adventure, as much as practical people who can make the romanticism work for them. But when the world is mundane and gray, we need a little color to brighten it. And that’s the (hardly original) thought that I was expressing with this statement.

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You think you’re intellectually open and then you hear a 4-girl doowhop group performing Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”…

This statement was triggered by a musical quiz show, which included the afore-mentioned doowhop group. Never mind that it just seemed so completely “wrong”, or that they did it very well; it was just so unexpected. No matter how intellectually open you might think that you are, there is always a new thought that is so radical to your experience that it stuns you, and that’s what this was trying to express.

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Everyone’s entitled to, and receives, special gifts. Success in life is finding your uniqueness.

This is one of my personal core beliefs. Everyone is born with the capacity to do something better, more skillfully, more naturally (relative to the amount of training they receive) than others; if they are lucky, there may be many such things. To achieve satisfaction in life, all that is necessary is to discover what those innate talents are, and learn how to monetize them sufficiently that they can become more than a hobby.

Of course, it’s never that easy. Some talents will monetize easily, for example a knack in investing; others will not. Roadblocks of various sorts will undoubtedly occur along the way.

One of the key themes of the personal biography that I provided not long ago (Dice And Life: Bio of a gamemaster (A 5th Anniversary Special) Part 1 of 2 and Part 2 of 2) was that in many ways it seemed that (almost) everything that I had ever been naturally good at came together to create and sustain Campaign Mastery. Does that mean that there aren’t aspects of this that I find difficult? Not at all – I’m lousy on the business side of things, for example, and I lack some of the education in style sheets, making them a pain to work with. That just means that the job is bigger than the scope of my natural talents and expertise; it doesn’t in any way diminish the fact that almost everything that I’m good at is part of that job.

From satisfaction comes a level of success that you (hopefully) find sufficient. It may not be measured in dollars and cents – but the result is something that you are proud of, and that generates self-respect.

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Like viruses, words breed explosively under the right conditions and lie dormant when food is scarce.

Any writer will understand this one. There’s a whole article that could be written based around using food as an analogy for whatever it is that produces the written word – inspiration as vitamins, and so on. When conditions are right, you can produce hundreds or thousands of words in the same time that it takes to force out a dozen in more impoverished literary circumstances.

And yet, that wasn’t what I had in mind when I penned this epigram at all.

The spoken word has power to “breed explosively” too, inspiring others. The hallmark of the great speeches of mankind’s history is the influence that each has exerted through subsequent years, often beyond the circumstances to which they were directly intended to apply. “I have a dream that all men were created equal” comes to mind as an example. These days, it’s about more than race, it’s about gender and relationships and the rights of all minorities. There are certain scenes in the West Wing that always remind me of the power of a great speech.

But that wasn’t what I was thinking about when creating this statement either.

No, what I was thinking of was the way an internet meme goes viral, and can then lie dormant until it is discovered to apply to an entirely different subject. Some memes, like cat pictures with witty statements, have found such broad application that they are still common, years after the first LOLCat appeared. But others have a more finite lifetime. One example was LOLCat-style images of Gollum, which were popular during the height of the Lord Of The Rings movie trilogy, died away, and then resurfaced with the announcement of The Hobbit.

Similarly, I expect a lot of old Star Wars -related memes to crop up again when the new trilogy first appears.

These memes flourish when they have something to say, and vanish when the subject has been exhausted; they require fresh topicality and a receptive audience to reinvigorate themselves.

It was while trying to formulate a general statement to describe the phenomenon in sufficiently short a space that I realized the other ways in which it could apply – that it was true about the struggle of writers to get into “the zone” where the words just flow out onto the page, to the viral spread of popular catchphrases like “Go ahead, Make My Day” or “[name], I am your father”, to the power of speech to inspire us for generations to follow.

Having such a broad application suggests to me that this statement may have hit upon one of the singular truths of human modes of communication, and one that puts the original subject into a broader context. That’s how it earns its place in this list.

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If you learn from your mistakes, you need never fear failure; each is a steppingstone to success.

For me, it’s not enough to parrot quotes from various sources; you need to understand the meaning that each has to offer, and then to find a way to reiterate that meaning in an original way. The goal is to spread the meaning beyond the words. Often, the results are not all that inspiring, but occasionally I get it right, and come up with something that is worth sharing. “Learn from your mistakes” is a common-enough catchphrase, but it doesn’t have a great depth; it doesn’t self-evidently explain why you should do so. Perhaps it is assumed that we will all instinctively acquire that insight.

Enough people seem to fail to do so, despite near-certain exposure to the phrase, that I don’t think instinct is a reliable guide. So I reformulated it. I thought long and hard about leaving out the part of the epigram that follows the semicolon, but decided that while the result of doing so was more pithy and quotable, it made the same mistake as the original, it didn’t explain “why”. So I kept it in its slightly longer form.

This is something that I bear in mind every time I make a mistake (and it happens, I’m just as human as everybody else).

But this statement also puts success into a different context, by implying that the most successful people are those who have made the most mistakes – and learned from them. This is also something that comes to mind whenever I hear anyone described as an “overnight success”; the implication of such a description is that they have achieved that success without having earned it through struggle, perhaps bypassing the learning experience with natural talent.

I regard talent as “potential”; it still requires practice and mistakes and experience in order to apply it. Sometimes talented people put the fruits of their labors into public view before they have learned enough to do so; the results are things like songs with catchy choruses and excruciating verses. This is a phenomenon that occurs far more frequently in modern times, thanks to the internet; there is a greater requirement for self-criticism, and the ability to critique your own efforts impartially is also something that needs practice.

It’s never enough to describe something as “no good”, or to say “I don’t like [x]”; those opinions need to be justified to be assessed by others. And that leads back to my philosophy of reviews. A good review is one that gives me the information I need to make up my own mind, regardless of the opinion of the reviewer. A bad review is one that makes sweeping or bald statements and never explains them. It doesn’t matter if the subject is a movie or a TV show or a book or a piece of music.

“As a general rule, I don’t like Rap Music. But there are exceptions to that general statement, where the specific things that I dislike are overcome by things that I do like.” And that’s a great example of a bad review, because it doesn’t give you enough information to decide whether or not you agree. If I were to follow that up with a list of rap that I liked, you could place the statements into context. On the other hand, if I wrote “I find that most rap vocals create a conflict between the monotony of the delivery and execution of the lyric and the melodic attributes of the music, which often makes the whole unpalatable to me”, you have an immediate sense of what I don’t like about rap music, and what aspects of some exceptions are enough to span the resulting divide – songs with strong melodic components to the rap will be songs that I like despite their stylistic origins. From that statement, you can assess immediately how my personal biases have influenced whatever I’ve had to say about a specific work, or a specific artist. You don’t have to agree with me to make my statements useful to you in a review.

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We like randomness in our lives only when we feel in control of it and its consequences. Is it an oxymoron?

Randomness – unpredictability – challenge – adventure. They all go together. Life would be very dull if there was none of it. And yet, we enjoy such things fully only when they are compartmentalized and controlled, when we can feel secure in the knowledge of our skills and our capabilities. You need confidence to cope with the unexpected.

Yet, we gain confidence by finding and overcoming the obstacles and challenges that are set before us. If it is never challenged, there is no way to determine whether the confidence is really justified.

It’s from this truth that the statement emerges, “Its when the chips are down and the odds stacked against you that you see what you’re really made of”.

In answer to the question posed, therefore, I would have to say “no”; the appearance of an oxymoron derives from the word “control”. It’s not so much a matter of “feeling in control” as it is having the randomness compartmentalized into areas where we have confidence. Take the most confident person out of their comfort zone and they will experience trepidation, uncertainty, and doubt. They may not let those emotions stop them, and may not even show them on the surface, but they will be present nevertheless.

Think back over moments when you were anxious about something – it might be a test at school, or while playing sport, or when you lost a job without warning – and ask yourself whether or not you felt in control of the situation, whether or not the challenge was one that you were confident of meeting. I think you’ll find a direct correlation between the level of anxiety and the lack of confidence you felt about overcoming the challenge.

We like to be tested – but on our terms and by our rules.

Perhaps this stems back to childhood; it always seems easier to gain the approval of parental figures with success than with failure. If it were left up to the child, we would never venture out of our comfort zones; but it rarely is. Other people are in charge of our schooling and our activities, and we are often pushed further than we are comfortable with. Analysis and understanding were my fortes, especially when it came to academic work; memorization was never high on my list, and any form of athletic prowess was a foreign country. I scored top marks in History in high school without remembering a single date. When it came to art, I was brilliant so long as I was left to go my own way; I enjoyed discovering the techniques of historical artists, but when it came to memorizing facts about artists and art styles, I was not great (to put it mildly). The consequence was that I sought ways of doing more of the things that I was good at, and less of the things that I wasn’t.

These same forces continue to influence us as we mature. The parts of the job that I’m good at vs those that I’m less successful at achieving influence the campaigns that I run, the adventures that I create, and the characters that populate those creations. Some aspects of the game get greater emphasis than others, as a result. Some players, who are also good in those areas, enjoy the games that I run; others, whose strengths lie elsewhere, prefer a GM that lets them play to their own strengths more.

Understanding this epigram, and its ramifications, is a window into self-discovery and self-understanding, into knowing why some things make us happy and some things are not what we consider fun, and into why we have made the choices in life that we have to live with. That makes it much deeper than it appears on the surface.

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The best we can hope for is that at the end, we have made enough of a difference that we will be missed.

This somewhat maudlin epigram derives from reflections on the passing of a friend of mine (Remembering Stephen Tunnicliff) and reflecting on my own life and how I would be remembered if it came to an end. I’m proud of my achievements, but most of those no-one knows about. Most of my greatest victories and successes were won with no-one knowing they were even happening.

Success in life can be measured in many ways; Ebenezer Scrooge was clearly successful. Most success requires a substantial effort; very little is handed to us on a plate. That effort comes at a price, and it’s the consequences of the prices that we have paid, and how they have influenced others, that puts context onto our achievements. Scrooge was not a great role model, and neither was the children’s knock-off version, The Grinch. Their transformations came about as they became aware of their own mortality and the question of what mark they had left on the world was put to them, and they discovered that too much of their humanity (using the term loosely in the case of the Grinch) had been sacrificed to achieve their success.

When it comes to valuing success, the measurement is not made in objective terms – not in the long run, or from a retrospective position. A life is measured in subjective ways, in values, and the general consensus is that values are worth more than any material success. Material success improves lives only until the money runs out; it is a finite resource that is consumed. Values success can be spread for free, inspiring others to do likewise; it costs nothing, so it has unlimited growth potential. That means that the general consensus is justified, and that the real mark of success is in terms of the achievements in improving the lives of others.

Achieving enough in this respect that our contributions will be missed is therefore the ultimate goal for which we all should strive. Success in doing so is therefore the best that we can do with our lives.

If the previous Epigram concerned understanding the past, this is about preparing for the future, for a world in which we are no longer a part. And it puts a somewhat different spin on the oft-quoted statement “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

Campaign Mastery has enabled me to touch the lives of a great many people. The Kudos and accolades that I receive from time to time confirm my own opinion that what I’m doing here is worthwhile. And that’s a great feeling to have.

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Every moment of every day is one you’ve been waiting your whole life for – whatever you do with it.

This was another reformulation of a standard line – the same one that I quoted a couple of paragraphs ago – but this deliberately turns that statement on its head, to deliver its meaning from a different angle. The original statement is more concerned with not wasting time, with living life more fully in the future, and about taking advantage of opportunities.

But I regard every moment as an opportunity. I choose to spend some of them in enjoying myself; I spend some others in self-indulgence; and I expend some on the needs of living in a real world. I’ve often said that I have a lot of trouble doing nothing, or in spending time in places where there is nothing to do; that’s not “relaxing” in my book, because I am aware that each passing moment is one in which I could be doing something, and those moments will never come again; they are in finite supply with an unknown number of them in stock. It’s not enough to take advantage of opportunities that are presented to you; every moment is an opportunity to better yourself, to prepare yourself, to provide for yourself, to enrich the lives of others, or to enjoy yourself. And none of those – in reasonable balance – is time wasted.

This epigram is about valuing the moments, about connecting your past to your future.

You can never make a “clean break” with “a past life”, because you always carry the sum of your experiences – good and bad – around with you. Even if a total change in environment brings out aspects of your personality that you had never shown before – and that’s usually the objective of “a clean break” or a “fresh start” – the old experiences and what they brought out remain with you. You can acknowledge them, and learn from them, and turn a negative into a positive – or you can pay the eventual price of them with nothing in return.

I put a lot of effort into Campaign Mastery because I appreciate the time that my readers have to invest in order to read what I have written. I never want anyone to say that one of my articles was a waste of their time. Because that means that writing it was – so far as they were concerned – a waste of my time.

Value the moments. If you spend time reading something, find something to take out of it that is worth that time. If you spend time writing something, make sure it is worth the time that you have spent. If you play a game make sure that you enjoy it. Campaign Mastery’s goal is to help you do just that. Which is a great note on which to end this article.
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This article might be finished, but I’m not out of epigrams yet. There will be more; all told, I have well over 100 insights like these twelve to share. Be sure to check out the next batch – whenever they appear!

  1. Epigrams Of Life and Gaming: Selection #1
  2. Epigrams Of Life and Gaming: Selection #2


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