ToV Game Master's Guide, Part 1

I started reading the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide (ToV GMG) last night and read the first 30 pages. I also completed the "How to Be a GM" and "Adventures and Campaigns" sections, with some excellent advice here.

The 'How to be a GM' section is a treasure trove of practical advice. It's a 'blue collar' guide that breaks down the nuts and bolts of game mastering, from understanding game dynamics to managing interpersonal issues, maintaining player agency, and even advice on note-taking and pacing. Even if you're well-versed in these areas, the practicality of this section and its ability to set you up for success before gameplay make it a must-read.

It's a common misconception in the hobby that 'being a Matt Mercer equals success.' However, the reality is far from it. YouTube and scripted "let's play" shows can give people terrible misconceptions about gamemastering and make it seem more like TV and play-acting. Success in game mastering involves a lot of preparation, social skills, coordination, and the ability to keep the game engaging and balanced while respecting player agency and keeping stories on track and progressing.

The game master is the movie's director, producer, crew, set builders, supporting cast, special effects people, grips, sound people, and everyone else on set. It isn't a movie since the players are in control, but the metaphor holds regarding building a believable world for the players to play in.

There is more to being a game master than most know, and the first part of the GMG tackles the issue and lays out everything clearly, which is a huge help to new game masters. The hobby still has a game master shortage, and one great GM can sell dozens of players on games and books.

If Wizards thinks they can get an AI to be a DM, just watch those insane AI videos and realize that a machine can't keep a narrative story consistent or even sane for one minute. This takes real, living people, and the ToV GMG's first chapter is akin to a Game Mastering 101 college course. Training current and future GMs is player acquisition and retention since they are the "face" of your business.

If you want the Game Mastering 201 book, check out the Kobold Guide to Gamemastering, which contains about 150 pages of excellent articles and advice. Even if you have been doing this for 40 years, don't think you "know it all" because even I found a lot of great ideas and inspiration for games just by reading these. Reading the experiences and stories of other game masters inspired me in my games, and even if you know it all, their enthusiasm will spark yours and bring that energy to your craft.

Storytelling is an art; listening to other artists discuss the craft is beneficial.

A lot of "how-to game master" books and OSR games skip over the basics or sound "blah blah" when discussing the dirty, gritty, dealing with other people, and "at the table" topics. The ToV GMG dives straight in, lays out all the roles and responsibilities nicely, and creates an environment that lends itself to success when running a game.

Even I, who has been game mastering for most of my life, learned a few things and was inspired to run games by reading this chapter. It is nice to see a company that cares about your success and training the next generation of game masters to enjoy the hobby. It won't just become an "AI-run" activity without a soul behind the story and disappear into the machines. Once you let AI run the show, the hobby is dead.

The tabletop RPG hobby is still "real" and is a form of storytelling between living, breathing, feeling, and thinking people. The competition between D&D 2024 selling its soul to AI and Kobold Press banning AI and going all-in on the traditional game is more significant than just the OGL. This is a battle for the heart of roleplaying.

Next time, chapter two, Adventures and Campaigns...

Too Hard to Referee?

I have seen a discussion lately about some games being hard to referee, specifically D&D 5E. What makes the game hard to referee specifically relates to overpowered or broken character builds and expecting referees to "adjust" for that. You will have OP builds blowing through everything, the rest of the group sitting there bored, and you are expected to raise the challenge level of the encounter (causing the rest of the party to feel worthless) or buff the rest of the part with magic items (which makes everyone OP).

And if you can't adjust, you are a terrible referee.

My D&D 4 Experience

The last DM-ing for me was D&D 4, so my experience is not current, but I see everything they are complaining about. At low levels, D&D 4 was great, and my experience was the DM was the person who told the story, set up the encounters, sensed when things were going well or poorly, and tweaked difficulty on the fly.

At high levels, D&D 4 was horribly broken for us. Endless combats and missed attacks. Piles of hundreds of hit points. Characters felt like they were getting weaker as they leveled compared to the monsters. The constant MMO gear grind where every item came in +1 to +6 flavors for no reason, and the books wasted hundreds of pages on lists of things you never used or wanted since one or two were OP and required anyways. The constant rebalancing of monsters in every monster manual. The insane power creep of later books. The Essentials disaster that soured us a little to D&D 5. The stacks and stacks of turn-based conditions to track, we had piles of paper condition trackers and dozens of colored dice and counters just to keep up with it all. The over-use of stun-locking and turn denial powers.

We had one encounter where we all started laughing at the giant boss monster getting knocked down, over and over, unable to get in any actions, and everyone at the table knew the game was over. Not just the game that night, but D&D 4 as a whole.

This was a broken game.

In the beginning, it started out great.

 As we leveled up and added books, the entire game blew up.

My players hated the feeling. I hated the feeling. And we walked away from D&D. It felt like the game before Wizards rebuilt D&D as a collectible card game, but it failed horribly, and they moved a new team in and went back to basics.

It was hard to referee because I hated being the one responsible for patching balance issues. As the DM, I would get blamed for following the rules on CR and encounter balancing, and if the game felt broken, it was my fault for somehow messing up something that "should" have worked. Wizards would not ship a broken game!

Yeah, they shipped a broken game. Every time you bought a book, they patched it a week later online and made your purchase a waste of time. They rebalanced monsters constantly. Sorry.

Was D&D 4 even play-tested?

It felt like it wasn't, and our high-level games felt horrible.

But everyone is guilty to one degree or another. D&D 3.5 was similarly broken with OP builds. Pathfinder 1e had its OP combos. D&D 2E started out as AD&D but mutated into an OP splat-book mess. Pathfinder 2e makes a heroic effort toward balance and playability; we will see how that goes. And I sit here, wondering has D&D, or its descendants like Pathfinder 1e, been chiefly broken for the last 20 years? In most cases, I could just say yes and be right.

Pathfinder 2e, Not Perfect, but a New Start

I feel Pathfinder 2e went the better route by being the tabletop figure combat game, and ultimately that feels like a more balanced and maintainable structure. This also feels better for referees, and if I was "being expected" to run a D&D 5 game - this late in the game's lifecycle - and know all the balance issues, OP classes to watch out for, and how to tweak encounters. The library of add-on books and rules a majority of the player base wants in a game...I just could not do it. Maybe if I started with D&D 5 years ago, I would be able to do it, but not now.

As a referee, I do feel better about Pathfinder 2e - it is a newer game, I can jump in, they feel on top of balance issues, and the rules are designed for tabletop play. I think I could referee that with fewer issues than an end-of-cycle game with a large group of players expecting experienced referees. Currently, I collect and read Pathfinder 2e and hope to play someday.

I feel the whole "hard to referee" feeling comes from not refereeing a game, but managing encounter balance given the plethora and number of class and option books this late in the D&D 5 lifecycle. It is not really uncommon for games with this much content available either, as managing encounter balance in late D&D 4 was a massive pain - especially with all the rebalancing going on. Since Pathfinder 2e is a newer game with less out there, it is easier to balance encounters.

If it stays this way or gets worse depends on the publisher and the game, honestly.

5E: The First Edition I Skipped

Life came at me, and I was forced to skip 5E entirely. I was going to start playing this with my brother, but he passed on, and I could not get into the game. Perhaps it was because it reminded me of him. So I looked into other games, explored B/X, tried a lot of OSR games, and focused on other things.

The most popular edition of the game in history that we played since AD&D was the one that got away.

I am not sad; many things in D&D 5 are not really my thing. The character protection, ease of healing and gaining spells, and relative video-game mentality of the game's resources and the wounding system just feel like a turn-off to me. My brother even felt those were way too generous. The art as well seemed very pop culture and for younger audiences, which feels sadly like an issue in Pathfinder 2e as well since they are aiming at the same target market.

We liked a little risk and danger in our games, like in the old days, so if he were around, I feel my current choices of Castles & Crusades (C&C), and even the Savage Pathfinder games would be more to his liking. The former is for the classic OSR dungeon feeling, and the latter is more for pulp adventure.

Not to say 5E is bad; millions enjoy the game and more power to them. I just missed out, and a lot of what's in there does not really appeal to me.

I understand how hard it is to referee a late-cycle D&D edition, especially with the many options and books you need to juggle, and you can always cut down the books you play with and support to simplify things. I also refereed a Pathfinder 1e game with three shelves of books, so yeah, I know the complexity and how tough it can be for referees.

This is why I like the B/X games and OSR favorites like C&C. Simple sets of rules that stay out of the way and encourage roleplaying. Not too much in the way of complex character builds and combat options. Story first games.

Your 15 Minutes of Adventure Are Up

D&D 3E introduced us to this wonderful concept of the 15-minute adventuring day. It goes something like this:

"Hey guys, I used all my spells in that last encounter. Let's go back to town and rest."

Now, this existed before 3E to be fair, and this issue has really been seen more with D&D than other role playing games. Part of the problem is D&D itself, adventures are designed around a series of encounters with CRs that are supposed to balance play and use up resources at a predictable rate. This does not always work, and I feel CR misleads us in a number of ways:

• Randomness leads to greater or lesser resource usage
• The CR system is too simplistic to deal with the complexity of the game's classes and powers
• Players don't care about balanced fights and "burn down" every encounter

The first one is interesting, and yes, a series of bad rolls will double or use up your entire excursion's resources (spells, potions, powers) and you are stuck. Since the rest of the encounters in the dungeon were carefully balanced around you having some resources to deal with it, it's game over man, time to bug out. One encounter drops your party resources to zero, and if this is a "one time only" dungeon with an objective (like most should be), you have lost. That's it. Bad dice have let the bad guy get away with the princess, and that's the knocks of a story-based game.

Yes, the d20 with its wide variance is partially to blame here, it isn't the best die to use if you want a strong average, but with D&D it's what we got.

Another side note. D&D 4E tried to solve this problem with at-wills and encounter powers. the designers of D&D 4 were trying to solve a lot of problems, and this one they did a pretty good job at (tactical miniatures wise, not role playing wise). They introduced the concept of regenerating powers and healing surges, and that kept the party going into the next part of the story. For story-gaming, D&D 4 had a lot of nice improvements over D&D 1-3 and D&D 5. Mind you, the design of D&D 4 did not lend itself to roleplaying all that well, but as a tactical miniatures game where you played stories, it was interesting (counting the first 3 books or so before everything started going to the lower planes).

The second point is also interesting. In some ways I feel the CR system is overly simplistic and it does not take a lot of factors into account. One the other side, if it did the CR calculation system would be something as complex as calculus to figure out encounter balance. With Pathfinder, I have seen reports that modules designed against earlier versions of the game are now too easy with the power creep introduced in later books, and that encounters need to be toughened up to be a challenge again. Old CR does not equal the new CR, and the rating slips as time goes on.

Burn downs. This I have been waiting to talk about, because every player coming from an MMO knows about this one, and this is how most videogames train players nowadays. When you are in a MMO, in each encounter you 100% burn down all your powers and abilities in order to beat it. It does not matter if it is a hall fight or a boss fight, you keep pressing every button, keep hitting every power as its timer comes up, and maximize your damage output to 100% in every fight. In the old Everquest, this wasn't the case and you had to practice careful resource management through a zone. Past that, most modern MMOs make you burn down as fast as possible in order to get through a fight.

The reason? It's flashy! It's more exciting! It solves players from complaining the dungeon is too hard and filling up your customer service system with too many tickets.

So many videogame and MMO players are trained to burn down.

Now, many players get it when they begin playing pen-and-paper. They get the careful resource management game. The games fight this though, and try to make things easier on players by giving them infinite-use attack cantrips (D&D 5), or multi-shot built-in class attack powers (Pathfinder). D&D 4 had infinite-use at-will powers and auto-recharging encounter powers. Even 3E had a plethora of multi-use wands, scrolls, and other items that let you blast away with rechargable wands of magic missiles and fireball staffs. You see the burn-down starting to creep back in.

Player power has increased dramatically over the last 15 years of D&D to keep up with the MMO arms and expectation race.

Personally? I find burn downs boring and resource management more compelling. I like story-based play (a separate topic entirely), but I appreciate games that force you to make hard choices.

In old-school gaming like Basic Fantasy or Labyrinth Lord, giving a magic user infinite ranged attack cantrips would be unthinkable. Today, shooty and flashy are the new thing and the new norms. In the past, you didn't doll up with magic items and carry around enough rechargable magic items to blow through days of content. If your DM was stingy, you pulled the "go back to town" thing. If he wasn't, you loaded up for bear with enough magic to blow a hole in the side of White Plume Mountain.

In older editions of D&D and today's OGR games, the magic item economy is sparse, and you don't get into it as much. A wand of magic missiles is rare and special. A +1 sword is Excalibur. You survive on your wits and a player's ability to coax room descriptions out of the DM's head to avoid the trap of doom in the next room. Then again, the story in old-school games was a lot like today's 'sandbox" games. Do you survive? What do you do? Old-school games focused on the stories of the characters in that personal survival story, and not the DM's or module writer's story.

I blame Vampire: The Masquerade back in AD&D 2E days for this "module as story" stuff really. Vampire showed us a wonderful roleplaying game focused on personal stories, and AD&D had to follow suite and try to make dungeoning "story gaming" as well. Vampire did story gaming elegantly. AD&D had a lot more trouble making that leap because of the abstraction and resource management, and that theme of "story dungeoning" has stayed with us ever since, even across 3E's magic-card-if-i-cation of the rules.

So this pesky resource management game is getting in the way of completing tonight's story dungeon! Let's punt, take a mulligan, and head back to town to ignore this archaic D&D resource management system and continue on, shall we? If you are going to be in any way realistic about this dungeon master and reset the encounters, make us roll for wilderness encounters, or make us 'lose' the story for taking a break in the middle, then I guess you are a horrible dungeon master who hates well-told stories and famous module designers, right?

I am being sarcastic, but I have had those feelings come up at my table before so they are there.

There is an internal struggle here that I feel D&D has never gotten over. There is a simulation side to old-school D&D with the resource game, and if you have never played an old-school game, I recommend you do to see what I am talking about. It is a different game. Health does not auto-recharge. What you take in is it for possibly 100 rooms. The game is simple and deadly. Characters die frequently. You struggle. There is a mental game going on where you pry descriptions out of the DM, be clever, avoid fights, and survive.

3E and Pathfinder? Stuck in the middle of storytelling and resource management. Deck-building RPGs at heart.

4E and D&D 5E? Storytelling games at their heart and trying hard to shed old-school D&D's resource management game. Heavily MMO-influenced with recharging and infinite-use powers, with D&D 4 being the more MMO game, but D&D 5 shooting for the feel of 2E's story-dungeoning feel.

None of them are bad, and players love each for different reasons. This is not an argument one is better than another. You play what you love. But, you need to understand what each one brings, and where the conflicts are. If I ran D&D 5, I would go for more story than resource management, because that's what that game does best. I would adjust the story if players felt their party needed to take five, and advance the story in a logical way that reflects them having to take a breather. The show would go on. There wouldn't be a 15-minute adventuring day because the story reacts.

In old-school games? Yes, you can bet I would come down like a ton of bricks on a party that wasted its resources in wasteful burn-downs and had to retreat to town. Old school games are the Old Testament of resource management sims. Roll for wilderness encounters to and from the dungeon. Roll for wandering monsters all the way down to the point you left off. The dungeon's residents react and adapt to the last incursion, setting up traps, moving to rooms deeper (or to ones you thought you cleared), clearing out, or calling for reinforcements. You take a 15-minute day, and I will make you regret it for the next 15 days, but that is the old-school dungeon master's job.

The trouble comes when the game's designers try to please everybody, and tell you that the game is good for all types of play. It's cool marketing speak, but it isn't true. Some games do things better than others, and that's okay. Another problem arises when the game's designers put in systems geared to resource management when the game shines in story-based play. I can't blame them, the marketers said 'make it appeal to everybody' so sometimes you get systems in games better ignored than used. It happens, and game design isn't a perfect science.

Know what you like. Know what your players like. Most importantly, know what you expect from a game, and how a game shapes that experience.

Legend: Play Test Report #1

We had some fun with the Legend system over the weekend, and I wanted to share our experiences.

The combat system is fun to play and run, it has this 'medieval armor simulation' thing going on, and it also allows for way more player involvement than your standard D&D or Pathfinder combat. It does feel like combat is very old-school with hit locations and sectional hit points, but we were amazed at the constant choices the game gave you when it came to offensive and defensive special moves.

Players had choice in how they wanted a blow to land, or what special way they wanted to put an enemy at a disadvantage. Enemies had this choice as well, which makes the game very deadly and tactical. It all depends on skill and being able to get a roll good enough to start pushing the combat the way you wanted it to go, with the possibility out there of a lucky hit sending your entire plan into the garbage bin.

My players preferred it instantly to D&D and Pathfinder's combat system, and had a lot more fun with it the first couple fights.

I can see this system not surviving players used to D&D on the first night, it is shocking to see your "average Joe" go down in one hit. It is also very satisfying to dispatch an goblin with a bonk to the head with a club, knocking the monster out. It is a system that takes time to learn and get good at, and there is a point where you know how it works but not how to be great in it that could lead you down the path of frustration.

As a simulation-ist combat system, it is a blast and incredibly fun to play and learn. It also is an eye-opener for players used to the "hit it and forget it" style of D&D, where atomic rolls happen and have little lasting impact other than taking the enemy's hit points down by a couple points.

And then we hit a small snag.

We had an issue where a player reported he felt he needed armor to survive, and felt the game forced him down that path. This was a tough one to deal with, because of the simulation-ist nature of the game, of course you need armor. It was true then in combat, and it is true today. But it didn't fit his character concept of an Assassin's Creed style character to start dolling up in plate armor. But this character got taken down in a single blow because he wasn't wearing armor. But isn't that realistic? But is that fun? But that's how this game works, and to be honest, D&D forces you to wear the best armor as well. But I don't like feeling forced to wear plate armor for a game benefit. But soldiers need armor and helmets! But I feel something is wrong, and I am being forced into this. But your character is an average low-level guy. But it still feels wrong.

You can see where this went.

Stealthy lightly-armored assassins are possible in this game, but I got the feeling this type of character only opens up at higher levels of play. You are not going to start out a ninja in this game, and you will be lucky to survive your first encounter with rats. If you are fighting anything intelligent with weapons and smarts, be prepared for a 50-50 fight if you are matched in numbers. This is very much a "medieval weapon simulator" at low levels, and you need to don the ye olde armored vest and helm in order to survive. It feels a lot like Warhammer Fantasy in that regards.

Part of it feels like a collision between not knowing the combat options well enough to be able to survive, and having a lower-level character in play who frankly can't survive being hit with a wet rat on a stick. This is one of those common points when learning a roleplaying game where you understand the dicing and game systems, but not much about how the rules can help you survive. It is that 'deadly phase' where you do all sorts of stupid stuff later on you would laugh at (if you are still playing the game and didn't get discouraged), and this takes real effort to get over and achieve that golden chalice of 'system mastery'.

This is also the time where players flee back to other games and go with what they know and feels right. It is the danger of unfamiliarity, and wanting to play a game that gives that immediate gratification and supports notions of character concepts as seen in video games, TV, and movies. If a game supports the notion of the Assassin's Creed character better and easier (at low level) than this game does, then that game is a better game. Right?

There's a danger in fantasy that caters to fantasy, where the fantasy is so divorced from reality that some player's notion of what's real becomes the fantasy.

For a game that is more focused on delivering a semi-realistic experience such as Legend, it is a problem. Expectations are all out of whack, and players come into the game expecting what they see in video games and in the movies to be the 'game reality'. This applies to in-game choices, such as an expectation of all armor choices to be of equal value, even 'no armor' versus plate. Video games give us this option and put clear benefits behind wearing no armor, such as increased movement, dodge rates, and a package of other benefits making the 'no armor' choice equally attractive when compared to 'full armor'. If it is this way in Call of Duty then it should work the same way in tabletop games, right?

But you get on a real-life IRL battlefield a thousand years ago or today, and the notion of 'no armor' being a equal and valid choice to adequate protection starts to seem pretty silly. Yes, some soldiers are lighter armored than others on every battlefield, but the ones up on the front lines (in every age) typically wore good stuff. To be fair, Legend has some benefits for the 'no armor' choice, but still, armor is generally a good thing to have, and this comes from real life medieval warfare simulation and history.

But it is a fantasy game!

But this game is supposed to be realistic.

But games are supposed to be fun! Realism does not equal fun.

I like realistic combat simulators, in both RPGs and computer games. There is a tactical challenge you are trying to overcome, an impossible world you are trying to survive in, and a set of behaviors you are bleeding through in order to beat the system and come out on top. I am reminded of classic games like X-Com, Jagged Alliance, and others that gave you those tough and deadly choices to make, and many hard lessons to learn. Easier games may give you that 'feels good' easy-mode story and action focused experience with the same weapons and scenarios, but this doesn't 'feel right' to me.

I like story-based and action-based games for lighthearted fun and movie-like entertainment as well. But I like hard-core tactical realism also.

It is a problem I don't feel we are going to get past with this game. I hope we do, because I like the system a lot. I just see other games being easier for players to get their 'expected fantasy experience' from, and Legend becoming an interesting experiment.

Maybe it's me as a referee, maybe I am playing this too hard-core. Maybe I should be fudging dice rolls, or handing out tons of hero points to spend for cinematic action. A hero point can take the place of a helmet in this game, so maybe players should have that many to throw around.

And so it goes. I think the real issue here is my expectations as a referee versus my player's expectations as fantasy gamers.

The Network Effect: Dungeon Masters Run the Game

As I see it, referees run most every traditional pen-and-paper game. There should be a special website you can go to register to be a dungeon master for DnD, and you should get all of the books and materials needed to run the game for free. Before you laugh, stop and think about it. Would there be weekly pen-and-paper games anywhere without a referee?

It is a unique that most very pen-and-paper game has built in the dependency of having a referee in order for the game to be played at all. Let's take away the "referee as a playing participant" for a moment, and just use the referee as someone that runs the numbers, controls the monsters, and lets the players know what happens next in the module - sort of like a computer (much like DnD4's referees). It's like every computer game needing someone in the home office manually scrolling the Mario level, spawning monsters, and advancing the game to the next world.

Modern Boxed Games

Modern boxed adventure games do without a referee, and even have the players round-robin control of the monsters. There are rules set about how monsters attack, when goals are completed, and how the game works without a referee. Games like Magic the Gathering or Warhammer don't need referees either, although competitive games tend to be easier to run without one. Cooperative games without referees are gaining popularity, and many of the modern boxed games we review are like that.

This brings us to the 'network effect' another one of those terms introduced into the pen-and-paper lexicon back with DnD3's introduction. What the network effect means is this: you will play the game that most of your friends are playing, because it is hard to find a game otherwise. In the 50's this was called peer pressure, and of course you needed to have your officially licensed Davy Crockett musket and coon-skin cap, because all the other kids had one. It is a situation that lives in the dreams of marketers and product managers, for sure.

The Network Effect

What makes the 'network effect' so powerful is the previously discussed 'system lock in' - you can't find another game because people don't want to spend money on them or spend the time learning them. Combine this with the game literally being controlled by a select group of hard-core players, the referees, and you have setup a system that lives and dies by how many referees in the world that are willing to spend the time and money to learn and run your game. Referees should get the game for free, because you are asking so much of them, and one good referee can bring a whole group of players into the hobby.

It is a bit of a cynical view, I admit, but there is a lot of truth to the legacy that is setup around the DnD3 rules set and the descendants of those rules. The worst part about the OGL and the DnD3 ruleset is the lack of support in the license for anything other than tabletop play, so every game that comes from this hierarchy is limited in how it can be played - more on this in a later post. What is interesting is that the 'referee is required' mantra is being repeated in the next edition of the game, when a lot of the modern tabletop games are actually moving away from having a referee to play.

I will admit being a referee is one of the most enjoyable and satisfying parts of playing for me, but we need to think outside the rulebook when we do a true next-generation design. Every player at the table should be able to just pick-up-and-play, and referees should be an optional way of playing, and I dare even say they should not be the preferred way to play. Good game design can overcome this, to take a game to the next level.

Referees in Monopoly

Like roleplaying, a referee can be introduced into any game, even Monopoly. Technically speaking, a referee is someone who introduces story situations and out of the rules elements to the game, decides difficulty and success, and hands out optional rewards for completing those goals. In Monopoly, a referee could rule that everyone goes to Vegas, and the players get to bust out a deck of cards and play blackjack with the game's money for the next 15 minutes. This is incredibly fun, but the core assumption is the game still works when the referee is removed. The referee-less aspect of the game is preserved, and "no referee" is the default mode of play.

Boxed games covering fantasy and all types of adventure are re-discovering the magic in making everyone a player, and moving back to the Monopoly standard of play. The fun happens when you make having the referee optional, and the referee does not have to worry about the manual parts of the game (like moving around the board), and be the creative fae spirit introducing random stories and challenges to the game. Making a game play without a referee actually frees the referee up to work incredible magic.