The career of Formula One legend Michael Schumacher holds some important lessons for RPG GMs.

Ferrari f310, Image by Ralph from Pixabay, cropped by Mike

I made the time-out logo from two images in combination: The relaxing man photo is by Frauke Riether and the clock face (which was used as inspiration for the text rendering) Image was provided by OpenClipart-Vectors, both sourced from Pixabay.

Backstory

A video on the achievements of legendary F1 driver Michael Schumacher inspired this article when I connected a couple of stray thoughts together.

Having roughed out the content in my head, I decided not to write it, to do something else instead. I quite literally had second thoughts as to how useful or relevant it might be.

And then I had a fresh insight, a new angle, and third thoughts entered the picture, and, well, here we are.

Schumacher Achievements

For those that follow Formula 1 even casually, it’s hard not to know of the legendary achievements of Michael Schumacher. In his time, he set no less than 31 records, including Seven Championships (a record now shared with Lewis Hamilton). He won his first two back-to-back racing for the Benneton team and then moved to Ferrari, where he achieved an unprecedented FIVE more consecutive titles.

Along the way, he scored 91 Grand Prix wins, 155 Podium finishes, 66 pole positions, and 77 fastest laps. In 2002, he stood on the podium at every one of the 17 races that season; he had the most consecutive seasons with a win (1992-2006), and he won the French Grand Prix no less than eight times.

It has to be remembered that if Formula One is not the most elite racing series in the world, it is at least equal with others as the Pinnacle of motorsports, attracting the best drivers and the most competitive teams.

Perhaps his greatest achievement was in the 1994 Spanish Grand Prix, when early in the race, his gearbox failed leaving him stuck in 5th gear. For most drivers, that would have spelled the end of their race; Schumacher not only did most of the race in that gear, he finished an astonishing second!

Early Days

And yet, it almost didn’t happen at all. Schumacher started competitive Kart racing at the age of 4, and won the direct-drive Karting European Championship in 1987 at 17 years of age.

Graduating to junior formulae, he dominated in Formula Konig in his debut season before moving on to German Formula 3 in 1989. He finished third that year, and won the title the following year – and then his career seemed to stall.

With no F1 seats available, he was recruited into the World Sportscar Championship, which is generally NOT regarded as a leading feeder series into Formula 1 or the other sporting Pinnacles – it’s a second-tier series, or at least it was regarded as such by the Elites. While he became a race-winner in that series, for the most part, he was not dominant. Virtually no-one in F1 Fandom knew his name.

The Golden Opportunity

For the 1992 Belgian Grans Prix, the Jordan team were in trouble. One of their drivers had gotten into a heated confrontation with a taxi driver and sprayed him in the face with mace or pepper spray or something similar. Whatever he used was illegal in England, where the incident occurred, and he was promptly arrested. Meaning he was not available to drive the race.

Eddie Jordan was notorious for his color and for spending as little as possible. Somehow, the name Schumacher floated across his desk, and – since it was for a single race as a fill-in – he decided to take a chance. It didn’t hurt the cause that Michael had sponsors who would pony up at least part of the cost of running the car for the weekend.

To appreciate what happened next, you need some appreciation of where Jordan stood in the F1 pecking order. This was their first season at this level; their car was good, sorta, and their drivers were a promising young talent (now in jail) and a long-past-his-prime older driver. Usually qualifying around 8th-10th, reliability had seen them regularly challenging for the points (i.e. top 6) before being sidelined with a mechanical failure. Nevertheless, they had been one of the talking points of the grid all year. Their record for the year was 10th, 13th, 8th, 4th & 5th, 4th, 6th, 6th, 5th & 6th, 7th & 9th.

Jordan 191 driven by Schumacher, image by nakhon100, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped & resized by Mike, original image

Schumacher seized his opportunity with both hands, and qualified 5th. At the start, he overtook Jean Alesi for 4th and was closing up on the three cars in front when his clutch failed and he coasted to a halt. Whether this was a failure of the car or over-exuberance by Schumacher was never made clear. But – especially for a first-time driver – it turned heads.

There was something about the cars, and their power levels, and the downforce and traction they provided, that just clicked immediately with Schumacher.

The following race, he had been signed up as a regular driver for Benneton and rewarded the team with a 5th place. Betrand Gachot, the promising up-comer, was replaced by a name Americans will know – Alex Zanardi, another up-and-comer at the time. Schumacher repeated his 5th place and followed it with another 6th – scoring points finishes in 3 of his first four races. It was a sign of things to come.

Lessons For GMs

When he was in cars that exploited his talents and mitigated his weaknesses, Schumacher shone, immediately. When he was in cars that did not, he was mediocre.

So it is with GMs and Game Systems. Some combinations just click into place effortlessly, some are hard work, and some are totally incompatible – that GM’s mind and talents simply don’t work in the way that the game system expects them to, and the two are constantly engaged in a cold war.

It doesn’t matter how much the game system seems to fit the description of what the GM wants, in terms of genre and style; it simply won’t deliver, and the exercise is going to be one of frustration.

Some people think that there is a similar connection between Genre and an innate resonance with GMing style, but my experience suggests otherwise – given the right campaign concept within the overall genre, a GM can still shine.

But even a good campaign concept in a genre that the GM is familiar with can’t rescue a mismatch in the game system.

Some Characters Make Things Worse

Game systems are complex, multifaceted things. Most have some core elements that are ubiquitous within play; if you have a problem with those, there’s not a lot that can be done about it. But if your problem is with a specific part of the rules, then it can appear as though everything is hunky-dory until a character – PC or NPC – taps into the vulnerable point in the GM-Game System relationship.

This presents a dilemma to the GM – ditch the game system (which is otherwise working just fine), change the problem area, or ditch the character. Or do nothing as the campaign flounders and limps.

Some personal examples

AD&D 2nd Edition & Fumanor

When I first conceived of the Fumanor campaign, it was intended to operate as an AD&D campaign. My prospective players were a bit “meh” on that idea – in fact, I had been shopping the campaign around for about 10 years at that point – but were willing to take it on if I switched up a gear to 2nd Edition. They were even willing to provide (on loan) the necessary rulebooks.

So that’s what I did, and for a while it looked like things were going fine. Slowly, though, I became aware that the characters were progressing a lot faster than I intended. Encounter levels were geared to challenge the party, and that aspect of things was working well; they weren’t too easy, they weren’t too hard. But the rewards that the players were earning from those encounters were out of line with expectations and risks.

Initial attempts at solving the problem failed, and by the time they had been unsuccessfully tried, the problem had reached crisis levels.

Rolemaster & Fumanor

Drastic action was needed, and so the decision was taken to switch the whole campaign to the Rolemaster system. On paper, it was the perfect solution. Ways were found to translate the characters from one system to the other, and away we went.

It was an unmitigated disaster. Prep time required skyrocketed out of control, and even with that prep done, the results failed to meet anyone’s expectations. And when the prep wasn’t done, the results were even worse.

The experiment lasted for only a few months and it was an uphill slog getting them to last that long.

D&D 3.0, D&D 3.5, & Fumanor

The players and I had several long discussions about what wasn’t working, and why. My solution was to go back to my original AD&D proposal, but my players still weren’t sold on that. Instead – on a trial basis – they suggested shifting to D&D 3.0, which cleaned up a lot of the elements of 2nd Ed that had been causing problems.

The game system and I just clicked into place immediately. It gave me flexibility where I wanted it, it let me implement the campaign tweaks that were needed, it compensated for the characters being 8-10 levels more advanced than expected in campaign design terms. It was Formula 1 to my Schumacher.

When the slightly-more-evolved version known as 3.5 came out, shifting to it was a no-brainier. And even when 4th ed came out, there was no desire on anyone’s part to change. The entire campaign, and its subsequent sequels, were played out under the 3.5 banner.

Paulo Lumierre & The Adventurer’s Club

When I first hooked up with the Adventurer’s Club campaign, it was as a player, not a co-GM. Paulo Lumierre was a hypnotist modeled on Derren Brown and some of the things that he had demonstrated being able to do in his television specials.

The way Hypnotism works in Champions 4th Edition is as a power called Mind Control. You roll an attack where the equivalent of your To-Hit is based on your mental stats instead of your physical ones (this is called an Ego Attack). Similarly, the target’s defenses are based on their mental stats. If the attack succeeds, then you roll however many d6 you have in a power called Mind Control. Your objective is to get multiple times the target’s Ego stat; the more multiples you get, the greater your control over them.

The version of the power that I constructed was laced with restrictions and limitations – you can’t tell a hypnotized person, “You’re a chicken” and expect it to work, it’s more “You think it would be fun to pretend that you’re a chicken”. It’s like making them feel that it’s a joke and they are in on it. I had to be within just a few feet of the target – there were hefty range penalties on the attack roll – and so on.

Paulo broke new ground in that it had a mechanism built into his “Power” to address susceptibility to hypnotism. If the first Mental Control roll (4d6 in his case) was in the bottom 1/3 of results, then the target was Resistant and could never get more than a superficial control result. If it was in the middle, then he got an extra 4d6 Mind Control against that target; if it was in the top range, then he got an extra 6d6 again.

The average Ego stat is 10. A stubborn or narcissistic target might have 15-20.

4d6: low of 4, average of 14, high of 24. Bottom 1/3 was or less, Top was or more. 10% of the time, I’d get in the bottom 1/3, and 10% I’d get in the top; the rest of the time, I was in the middle. So 90% of the time I’d get nothing more, and while some weak-willed people might get x2 or x3 their ego, there was a significant chance that I wouldn’t even get 1x, especially if they were stubborn.

Most of the time, I?d get another 4d6, taking the total to 8d6. I’d get 1x the average ego virtually 100% of the time and 2x 96% of the time. 38% of the time I’d get 3x it, and 0.74% of the time, I’d get 4x. If the target’s Ego was substandard – 6, say – then those numbers become 100% x1, 99.99% x2, 98.63% x3, and 82.11%, x4. If they were high – 14 for example – then they are 99.92% x1, 54.05% x2, 23.77% x3, and 0% x4. Maximum ‘Human Normal’ is Ego 20: 96.11% x1, 0.74% x2, no chance of x3 or x4.

If the character was susceptible, I’d get a total of 14 dice. Against a low Ego: 100% x4. Against Average: 100% x1, 100% x2, 99.92% x3, and 93.10% x4. High Ego: 100% x1, 99.98% x2, 87.85% x3, 15.61% x4. Maximum ‘normal human’ (Ego 20): 100% x1, 93.10% x2, 5.02% x3, virtually 0% x4.

Villains can have higher Ego values if the GM wants them to. We usually limit ourselves to 25, maybe 30 if it’s part of their defining “Shtick”. There was a low enough chance of significant control over one that it was virtually impossible for the character to ruin an adventure. If I got close enough, I might be able to put a flunky to sleep or even turn them against the master villain, but the character was smart enough not to even try attacking the villain directly.

The clever bit was that these values for the number of dice were permanent – if I later went to re-hypnotize the same NPC, I would immediately get the same number of d6 against them, even if it was a completely different adventure. You don’t gain or lose susceptibility or resistance, it’s an innate part of you.

I had no problems whatsoever running the character. The GM of the campaign at the time, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to grasp how it was limited and restricted – what I could and couldn’t do with it. Instead, he started to impose ad-hoc immunities to the power – “It?s a mutant, it can’t be hypnotized” was probably fair enough (and they were dangerous enough that I wasn’t inclined to get that close to one, anyway) but “He’s a cop, you can’t hypnotize him” went too far.

We were discussing all this in the car on the way home after my second or third session as a player and some of the problems that I had perceived in his knowledge of the game system; I offered to help him if he wanted assistance, and the next thing I know I’m co-GM. And what was expected to be a 6-12 month long campaign, starting way back 2004, is still on the books today, 21 years later.

Marcus Phillips & The Adventurer’s Club

Which is not to say that it’s all been smooth sailing. Ian Gray started the campaign with a female super-spy character employed by the British Library – a sort of “Jane Bond”. But he did his usual superlative job of constructing the character and it quickly proved to be the most combat-effective of the PCs. After a while, he got tired of the character and dropped out of the campaign for a few months while he thought about new PC options.

What he came up with was Marcus Phillips – at least, he thinks that was the name, it was a long time ago. Marcus was a field tester of military-grade hardware – every adventure, we would give the character a certain number o build points in gadgets to test and he would have to find a way to try them out in the course of the adventure. Because these were prototypes, we could “build in” all sorts of funky flaws and failure modes, so a small Gadget Pool could go a long way. I think there was even a mechanism that let us ‘save points’ from one adventure to the next so that we could afford to throw more expensive hardware his way from time to time.

As a concept, nothing wrong with it. And I had the Champions 3rd edition supplement “Gadgets” to draw on for ideas, so we seemed good to go.

Unfortunately, too many of the gadgets in the supplement were either (1) Magical or (2) too powerful or (3) too expensive or (4) too limited or (5) not in keeping with the 1930s game setting, something none of us realized at the time. It wasn’t very many adventures before the well ran dry.

The Champions system is great for a lot of things. Ad-hock creation of gadgets is not one of them – if it’s for a Villain, we have an unlimited budget (at our discretion) and don’t need to specify full game mechanics. When it’s for a PC, neither of those cards is on the table. We quickly ran out of viable ideas and the flaws started becoming repetitive.

Neither of the co-GMs (Blair Ramage and myself) could come up with goodies fast enough to feed to beast. Our ‘intuitive grasp’ of the mechanics – well, my intuitive grasp of the mechanics, because that was always something that I brought to the partnership – had reached its limits.

The character didn’t even last long enough to develop a really distinctive personality. This was no reflection on Ian, or on the PC that he had created – it simply pushed us into an area of the game mechanics we weren’t equipped to cope with very well.

Through mutual consent, the character went away and was replaced with a Polish mining engineer, and all was well in the campaign. But Marcus remains one of the ones that got away.

The Rules-As-Written Metric

How do you judge – in advance – whether or not a game system is going to be a good fit?

When I came up with the Zener Gate campaign concept, I looked at potentially a dozen different rules systems. These were culled down to a short-list of four:

• Triumphant Super-Heroic Role-Playing;
• Villains & Vigilantes 3.0;
• OVA The Anime Roleplaying Game;
• and, from out of left field, Maid, the Role-playing game.

None of them were quite right, and ultimately I chose to develop a bespoke game system for the campaign – I did it right here in the pages of Campaign Mastery. And it worked – with only minor tweaks, these rules sustained, and remained in place for, the entire campaign.

Reflecting back on the decision-making process that led to that decision brought a relevant insight:

The greater the players insistence on rules-as-written, the more those rules have to match GMing style and abilities perfectly.

The more a game system has to be cut, bent, folded, stapled and mutilated to get it to do what you want, the less likely it is that it was ever a good match for you in the first place.

The more that the rules-as-written accommodate the campaign that you want to run, the more likely you are to ‘click’ with it. If they are flexible in the areas where you want to get original and creative, that’s a big tick. It’s not the sole criteria but it’s a very good start.

And that brings me back to contemplating “Old-school Gaming”.

Old-school Gaming

When AD&D was king, it was expected that GMs would modify and tweak the rules, especially to cover anything needed on which the rules weren’t clear. There was greater flexibility to make the game system dovetail with the intended campaign.

This gave rise to perennial water-cooler discussions about House Rules and their inclusion – discussions that continue to this day to some degree.

As game systems became more advanced, there were less and less things that weren’t addressed within the game mechanics, and less and less scope for adjusting the mechanics to fit the campaign. Some even advocated changing campaign concepts to better fit the mechanics.

Old-school gaming opposes all of that. Simpler mechanics that get enhanced in the areas where a given campaign demands enhancement, mechanics that get out of the way when you need them to – that’s one of the strongest attractions of these systems.

And that just ‘clicks’ with some GMs.

For Balance: Criticism

Getting back to the base narrative of this article, I have to admit that in his championship-winning days, I wasn’t a huge Schumacher fan. I had massive respect for his abilities as a driver, but those abilities seemed to be married to a win-at-any-cost attitude that – to my eyes – severely damaged his abilities as a driver. Like most Australians, I advocate a hard-but-fair ethos on the sporting field – that’s why Sandpaper-gate aroused such animosity in the general public here. This wasn’t how we wanted our team to win, it wasn’t how we wanted to be represented on the sporting field.

There were persistent suggestions of cheating by the team in the 1994 season, and when it was proven that they had the capability of doing so, those suggestions became outright suspicions.

In the British Grand Prix of 1994, Schumacher was penalized for overtaking Damon Hill on the formation lap. He and Benetton then ignored the penalty and the subsequent black flag, which indicates that the driver must immediately return to the pits. He was disqualified and banned for two races.

By the time of the season-ending Australian Grand Prix, Hill and Schumacher were separated by just a single point. Whoever finished in front of the other, assuming both scored points, would be the Champion. During the race, Schumacher made a mistake and hit the wall; he then appeared to deliberately steer his car into the middle of the track so that when Hill rounded the blind corner, the pair collided. With neither scoring points, Schumacher was Champion. Even today, there is no clear consensus as to whether or not this appearance of impropriety was reality.

In my eyes, Schumacher had the talent and ability to win championships without the need for such ‘tactics’.

In the 1997 season, Schumacher – now driving for Ferrari – was again leading by a single point going into the final race, and was again leading the field. Towards the end of the race, Schumacher’s Ferrari developed a coolant leak and loss of performance indicating he might not finish the race. As his rival that year, Jacques Villeneuve, approached to pass the stricken Ferrari, Schumacher deliberately turned in on his rival. Villeneuve limped back to the pits for repairs and subsequently finished fourth, enough to claim the title. Schumacher was given no penalty at the time despite public outcry, but two weeks later was stripped of his second place and disqualified for the entire season.

I have to admit to not agreeing with this late penalty. I would rather have seen Schumacher relegated to a last-place start for the two or three races at the start of the 1998 season; if he was good enough to win from that position (and he had done so in the past), so be it. But an after-though penalty exacted no real pain and would taught the driver nothing – but that’s just my opinion.

There were numerous other incidents along the way, some caused by Schumacher, and some by the team. But the cumulative effect was to sour me on the undoubtedly-brilliant German, both as a person and as a racing driver.

Schumacher with a wink and a smile. File:Michael Schumacher Berkedip.jpg: Michael Schumacher by Andy Whittle derivative work: F1fans, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Second Coming

At the end of 2006, Schumacher retired from Formula 1. In 2009, a freak accident caused serious injury to his former Ferrari team-mate Felipe Massa and Schumacher came close to filling in for the popular Brazilian driver; a neck injury sustained earlier in the year ultimately proved too tall a handicap to overcome, and the ‘unretirement’ never eventuated. Schumacher later described this as his ‘toughest moment’.

The possibility clearly whetted his appetite, and at the end of the year it was announced that in 2010, he would drive for the Mercedes team. This was the team’s first season back in the sport since 1955.

But this wasn’t the Schumacher of old. With nothing to prove to anyone, he had loosened up, and seemed to have become a genuinely nice guy with a fun sense of humor. He seemed to have shed the ‘win at any cost’ mentality I spoke of earlier, and seemed a much better person for the change.

It was during this period that I became aware that in 1994, following the deaths of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenburger, Schumacher had relaunched the Formula 1 Driver’s Association, a representative body enabling the drivers to collectively negotiate with the heads of the sport over safety matters, serving as its president until his retirement. I gave him belated kudos for that initiative.

In later life, he displayed commendable philanthropy, serving as a special ambassador to UNESCO and giving millions to charitable causes. He was also an active participant in many road safety campaigns.

The Sad Final Chapter

On December 29 of 2013, he was skiing with his 14-year-old son when there was an accident leading him to fall and hit his head on a rock, causing critical injuries despite wearing a ski helmet. According to the doctors who examined him, had he not been wearing a helmet, he would almost certainly have died immediately.

Although reports on his condition have been zealously guarded by his family, it is known that he suffered serious brain damage, and is at least partially paralyzed.

There have been statements made that he does not want his current condition to mar the fans memories of him at his best. As a result, he has completely withdrawn from the limelight, preserving his legacy as one of if not the greatest racing driver of all time. Personally, and again this is just an opinion, if he did not have the oft-reported trouble communicating, I think that he would have turned the injury into a powerful advocacy for disabled rights, securing an additional legacy. It’s an ignoble ending to a spectacularly noteworthy career.

Even his enemies and fiercest rivals will concede that he deserved better. That sad, there was a report at the time (still unverified) that he sustained his injury as a result of preventing his son from a serious fall. So there may be a touch of heroism about the ending of his story, too.

But RPGs are not F1

I’ve included the last two sections in an attempt to present a complete and balanced picture of Schumacher as both a person and a sporting legend. They hold no direct relevance to the main theme of this article. Having done so, let me now return to that theme.

Schumacher had no control over the rules and restrictions under which he raced. Those were always the domain of others and outside his control. Were that not the case, could he have ‘tweaked’ those parts of the driving environment that held him back?

When it comes to RPG mechanics, we – as GMs – are not so hamstrung. That gives us great power to reshape the rules as necessary to achieve that ‘best fit’ between our personalities and skills that is an ideal world. We can reshape game systems to play to our strengths and shore up our weaknesses.

But there are limits to this power. In fact, there are three of them that are noteworthy restrictions.

1. Player resistance to rules changes – I’ve touched on this already. Most players have no problem with additional mechanics to cover situations not envisaged by the writers of the game system, especially if they are rooted in established mechanisms; it’s when you start changing the rules-as-written that resistance can begin to mount. If the players can see that the RAW are not working, they can be tolerant of changes that are clear improvements – but the less this is the case, the stronger their resistance will be.
2. Correct identification of the aspects of the rules that clash with our styles or campaign intentions – This can be trickier than it might seem. It’s easy to focus on an obvious problem and miss the possibility that it’s only a problem as a consequence of some more subtle and more deeply-rooted issue. RPG mechanics are often a conceptual spiderweb, with many different strands conflating to produce a singular point of intersection in the playing experience; superficial changes can thus look promising without correcting the underlying issue. For example, the problem might appear to be “attacks succeed too often”; is this a problem with the attack mechanics, with the bonuses, with the weapons, with the interpretation of tactics into mechanics, with the magic system, or with several of these things? Is the problem actually “PC attacks succeed too often” or is it “All attacks succeed too often”? And is a more realistic game balance actually desirable or is it better to make things more dramatic? Is the problem that attacks are too easy, or that defenses are too weak, or is it better addressed by restricting the damage done by attacks? What seems like a simple issue can be anything but – and only correctly identifying the problem permits a correct solution.
3. Limits to our imagination which restrict our ability to find viable solutions to the problems we do identify – Even if you correctly identify the problem, and it’s something that the players will support fixing (or will at least tolerate it), the hard limits of a failure of imagination can still bring you unstuck. Ultimately, many astronauts felt that this was the true cause of the Apollo 1 fire – no-one thought the test was dangerous, no-one had adequately tested egress from the capsule under the conditions experienced, and no-one realized that Velcro could burst explosively into flame in a pure oxygen environment. Way back in 2009, I identified the Piety subsystem that I introduced as one of my greatest mistakes as a GM – what I didn’t realize until just a few minutes ago was that there was nothing really wrong with the system itself, the problem was that there were no limits to how much Piety a character could accumulate. Adding such a hard limit (and permitting some narrow exceptions) would have solved all the problems and preserved the good things that the system was trying to promulgate within the rules that applied to that particular campaign. It’s too late now, of course!

We have the capacity to rewrite the way the world works in support of our genre and campaign visions. It’s a power that’s easily abused, and often difficult to use correctly – and that feeds back directly into player reluctance to accept anything but Rules As Written.

That power, and past abuses of it, feed directly into both Edition Wars and the basic appeal of Old-School Gaming in my opinion. That’s the reality, within which we must all operate. And I think that’s the reason for the reluctance to embrace AD&D as the system of choice for the original Fumanor campaign.

Wrap-up

We want the PCs, by and large, to be Schumachers within our campaigns, rising above the worst adversity that we can throw at them. We want our campaigns to be hard but fair.

The more effortless our integration of game-play and game-mechanics, the more of our attention we can turn to the other elements that make a campaign compelling, entertaining, and generally-wonderful. Until you experience the natural harmonizing that is possible when everything just ‘clicks’, you don’t realize just how big a difference it can make.

GMs should never change things for the sake of changing them. The more clearly we can distill the reasons for a mooted change, the more likely we are to get that change ‘right’, i.e. to the betterment of our games.

That’s what we can learn from the remarkable record in Formula One of Michael Schumacher.

Readers may be surprised to see another Time Out post – especially given the two-part guest post that preceded this one – instead of the next installment of Trade In Fantasy. Work on the series continues – so far, I have over 13K words done for the next part – but its’ not yet at a suitable break-point. It’s getting there,. but it’s not quite there yet.

It may be ready for next week, but I’m anticipating throwing another filler post up instead – a game setting that I thought up last night, inspired by a TV advert of all things.

I can only say that I think it will be worth waiting for!