So, what's your take-away from these journal entries I've posted, and the cards? Do you fear my design powers because I was thinking about descriptor based characters more than twenty years ago? (What was the first RPG with descriptor-based characters, anyway?) Or do you look at the writing of my 18-year-old self, my mixed use of past and present tense, my awkward grammar, and at my strange choices for the physical descriptors, and find the whole thing less than remarkable?

Actually I'm hoping to make a non-obvious point by having posted it. What did I do with this game design? I left it in a box. Partially complete. Never playtested. Never published. And because I found it lacking in enduring merit? (Not hardly. I've held on to it for more than twenty years.) Or because I lacked passion? In fact I never did anything with it, or designed anything else for more than fifteen years, because I just had too much gamer baggage holding me back. Every descriptor gives you an additive 5% chance of success...good lord! As a gamer I was arrested at 18 and didn't get beyond it until I was almost 34. And I wouldn't even have managed that if I hadn't found a mentor and a community who helped me overcome my baggage.

So my non-obvious point is an exhortation. I wasn't born from whole cloth as the designer of My Life with Master. I was born into it from my own gaming pain and then delivered from my arrested state by mentorship. This game, with its descriptor-based characters, could have been honed to a blisteringly innovative and fun rpg. Or alternately, I could have done nothing further as a designer my whole life. My non-obvious point is that creative excellence needs mentorship...and there isn't enough of it in our hobby.