Do Not Anger the Gods

When the servants of the gods fight, they use more than earthly wood and steel. Taking a blow from them can have strange consequences.

d12	Legendary Critical Hit
	Target knocked unconscious for d6 minutes, slammed into 3d6 years of an alternate life of quiet contemplation and service to the being they were just fighting.
	A mighty blow breaks the target's forearm. d6 musical instruments within a league of here also break. Any song or music played within sight of this spot sounds melancholy and out of tune, and brings misfortune (-1 to all rolls) to anyone hearing it for the remainder of the day.
	The target's name is now a curse. Anyone who hears, reads or utters it suffers -1 to all rolls for the remainder of the day.
	The attack causes a deep gash that never fully heals. Every few minutes, a drop of blood falls. As it touches the ground, it sprouts into a delicate, white flower. If the petals are boiled into a tea, whoever drinks them knows what the target was doing in the moment when the droplet fell.
	Weapon impales the target. It is part of them now, as much as the bones in their body.
	Eldritch strike kills the target's dream body. They may no longer sleep. If they try, their empty body rises, possessed for d4 hours. Roll d6 to determine the possessing entity. On a 1-2, a harmless and playful wisp. 3-4, a harbinger of the being that dealt the blow. 5-6, an infernal spirit that lies and taunts.
	Cratering blow knocks the target flat on their back. A hole opens up in the ground, d6-1 paces from the target. Earth and stone crumble away, widening it by ten feet per year, and deepening by thirty. This continues until the target dies.
	A fearsome, life-ending blow misses the target by a hair. Even so, the psychic wake of the attack is so devastating that it symbolically kills the target. From this moment on, no one remembers anything the target says or does. To the rest of the world, it is as if they have died.
	The target is unharmed, but a distant loved one dies instantly. For the next year, any damage done to the target by any enemy doesn't harm them, but harms a friend, ally, or loved one instead.
	The blow splits the target into two halves, which live on separately. Roll d6. On a 1-2 the separate piece is the head, shoulder and one arm. On a 3-4, top and bottom half. On a 5-6, a split down the middle, from head to groin.
	Astral strike alchemically inverts the target. Their clothes and armor turn to flesh: this is now the target's real body, wrapped around a body-shaped sculpture of leather, metal and wood.
	Weapon strikes the target's sternum, shattering their rib cage. Knife-like bone darts shoot in every direction, causing d6 damage to all who fail a save vs. dragon breath. The target must choose: live on as a ribless human worm, or expire in a shower of innards.

Incident Report

On Monday, July 20, the Mentor™ learning service suffered an outage that lasted from 4:53AM until service was fully restored on Wednesday, July 22 at 6:11PM.

At Mentor, we don't consider this an acceptable level of service. We sincerely apologize our valued users, institutional customers, and the family and friends of Kyle H. We commit to doing better in the future. This incident report explains what happened, as part of our commitment to openness and transparency.

The roots of the incident start some three months earlier. In April, an automated A/B test of a curriculum modification was proposed by our internal TeachSmart AI. This is normal, and such tests are conducted daily to improve learning outcomes for all Mentor™ students.

Unfortunately, this modification (CT-665.9) was unusual in that it recommended that students begin their learning sessions with a prayer to 'Entity Bezaal'. At Mentor, we have several procedures to ensure that controversial or problematic curriculum modifications don't make it to the public, including random inspection of proposed modifications by our Trust & Safety team.

However, CT-665.9 was not selected for random inspection. This itself is also not unusual; M&L (mindfulness and learning mindset) modifications are inspected at a lower frequency than core curriculum modifications. As a result, CT-665.9 was rolled out to a subset of our students immediately.

CT-665.9 performed well, but not spectacularly, for some time after the test began. Apparently July 19 is a special day to Entity Bezaal (we cannot print the exact name of the celebration), and the invoking prayers suddenly achieved a much greater effect. Learning outcomes in the A group showed a 31% improvement, which is unheard of for an M&L test.

At 5:40 PM on July 19, our Trust & Safety team reviewed the content of CT-665.9 and removed it from production.

Shortly after, at 7:10 PM, a group of individuals breached the Mentor facility in Denver, Colorado, which houses both our primary data center and the offices of our Trust & Safety team.

While Mentor has a strong commitment to both electronic and physical security, our associates on-site at that time initially believed they were facing a group of costumed LARPers from another department. (We believe in a good work-life balance at Mentor, and LARPing in the office had occurred there previously.)

This misunderstanding became obvious at 7:17 PM, when the intruders' greater invocation (we cannot print the exact name) melted the inner wall of our production data center. Mentor employee Kyle H attempted to hold off the intruders with a fire extinguisher, allowing other staff to escape to wade through the caustic mucus and escape.

At 9:47 PM, our secondary incident response team arrived on site and attempted to regain control of our Denver facility. This was initially impossible because of the inhuman strength of the intruders, even after the arrival of Denver police. At 12:02 AM (the morning of July 20), however, this faded abruptly and by 12:50 AM July 20, all floors of the were secured.

Several members of the Northfield High School math team are now in custody (They can't be identified because of their age.)

By Wednesday, our response team had vacuumed up enough of the caustic mucus that we could resume full production operations. Regrettably, Kyle H had been magically transformed into a cone snail during the fighting, and was accidentally crushed by the secondary incident response team during this process. Our condolences go out to Kyle's family and friends; his brave actions on that day saved many lives.

Effective immediately, Mentor is putting in place several enhanced procedures to make sure we don't experience this again.

• LARPing is no longer permitted at Mentor offices or events
• Basic fire extinguisher safety courses will be made available to all employees and contractors
• On the recommendation of TeachAI, all employees will begin their shifts with a prayer to counter-entity Ademilos, may his tentacles surround and protect us.

Again, we apologize for the interruption to our services. Our users have come to expect only the highest in educational outcomes from Mentor, and we regret any disruption this outage has caused.

All hail Ademilos!

An Era of Standard RPG Terminology

Now that the core of Dungeons & Dragons has been effectively open sourced, a lot of retro-clone designers are breathing a sigh of relief. You can't copyright mechanics, but that hasn't stopped numerous lawsuits in the past. Those days seem to be over!

I thought it might be nice to look at some of those now-free core mechanics that have been with the game since its very early, dungeon-centric editions.

* * *

First up is the Hit Die. This is really the heart of Dungeons & Dragons. The image of this iconic, twenty-sided die is almost synonymous with the game itself. You roll the hit die every time you want to see if you hit something, which is often. After all, this is a game about hitting things!

Next we come to the classic Hit Points. Like many D&D terms, this has been pulled into many other games, tabletop roleplaying games, boardgames, and even video games. The hit point is the location on your enemy where your blow has landed, crucial for understanding if you've poked the bulette in the eye or just bounced off its thick armor yet again. Most ordinary humans have a d6 for hit points, but larger creatures with lots of limbs (looking at you, hydra!) often have many hit points.

Another immediately recognizable term is Armor Class. Right after determining the hit point of an attack, you will need to look up if the target is an armor class or not. Fighters, Paladins, and even Clerics are all armor classes, but Magic-Users, and Thieves are not.

Dungeons & Dragons is a game with no take-backs. If your character dies, your progress is lost! Sad as it is, this is part of the game. Savor the experience! But the game does give you one last chance: if you have a sack of gold or treasured magic weapon, you can make a Saving Throw to try to pass it on to another character.

If you do survive the dangers of the dungeon, ask the DM if you reached any Experience Points. Experience points are the backbone of any long term campaign, allowing the PCs to grow and evolve their abilities. Many DMs like to situate experience points all throughout the adventure. Some prefer to have an experience point after each major accomplishment in a campaign. Some prefer having only one, and require that you go back to town to level up. Neither is better, they're just different play styles!

These are the basics, but as time goes on, successful adventuring groups will have to pick up some clever tactics if they want to maximize their chances. Chief among these is making a good choice about who is standing where, the party's Alignment. Parties with good alignment have a significant advantage when dealing with surprise traps or encounters. Chaotic alignment is much riskier, but can be fun in its own way. Make sure to discuss this with your group before entering the dungeon, as mismatched alignment can be a total party kill.

* * *

Like it or not, the world's most popular role-playing game has seeded the industry with terms that affect the very thought process of game design. By embracing this, instead of constantly renaming the wheel, I look forward to a decade of games that can move past the arguments of the past and use common terminology for the benefit of all.

Death Star Safety Research

In a galaxy far, far away, safety research is a thankless job.

Final year Academy projects don't write themselves, however, and so it fell to Partho Borc to dig deep into the question that had been bugging him ever since the Battle of Yavin.

How on earth did firing a proton torpedo into an exhaust port lead to the destruction of a moon-sized battle station?

The conventional wisdom was pretty straight forward, a deliberate weakness built in by a bent Imperial weapons designer, okay. But what about the shutoffs at level 22? What about the pressure cascade blowback valves in the core sheath? What about literally dozens of mechanisms that would make that  kind of catastrophic failure impossible?

Because of the Death Star's hasty construction schedule, its system designs wouldn't be novel. No, most of the major subsystems have had to be right off the rack, just upscaled versions deployed in clustered configurations. Nothing truly new. All tried and true stuff, very little innovation.

Even a team of designers working day and night to undo centuries of established safety mechanisms would have needed several years to put it all together. And all that before construction started. To say nothing of all the parallel work producing the control procedures, operating manuals, training courses—it just didn't add up.

One guy did all this? Forget it. There was no way the official narrative could be true, and Partho knew it. Something else had undone the Death Star.

Unfortunately, that's about all he could uncover. Safety research was a vocation with poor prospects, and he had little pull to get the information he needed to prove his theories. "Nobody cares about shielding, Parth!" his parents would nettle him. "Why don't you go into something with some upside? What about repulsorlift window cleaning?"

* * *

Partho's break came by accident. One night in the student lounge, far drunker than he usually let himself get, he overheard some third-year xenocultural studies students use the term, "Reactor Shielding Cults."

If he'd been sober, he'd have been too shy to go over, but his inebriation led him into a conversation that changed the course of his academic career.

It turned out that xenocultural studies had its own dead-end lines of inquiry, one of those being the shielding cults: a peculiar pattern of mystical beliefs that repeated itself across the galaxy. The specifics varied quite a lot from species to species and culture to culture, but the one thread that linked them all was sabotaging reactor shielding.

Seventeen completely unrelated religions had holy historical figures whose most famous act was destroying a power reactor. Eleven others hadn't just wrecked reactors, but claimed various mystical powers that had allowed them to do it at a distance, or in the future, with their minds, with or without certain tools, or other non-tool objects.

Weird, sure, but like safety research, a total career dead end. They'd been fully chronicled and holo'ed by the Republic forty years before, what was left to even write about? You certainly couldn't get anything actually published.

But— but! And here's the thing. By the time of the Battle of Yavin, at least three of them had commercial ties with organizations that held Imperial contracts to service Death Star I. They were there!

* * *

Getting the remaining pieces took Partho years, but bit by bit it fell together.

The full picture was breathtaking: no fewer than forty seven mystical traditions were involved in the destruction of the Death Star. While Skywalker and the Jedi took most of the credit for the rebel victory, they were really just there for the showy bit.

Six other "prowess cults" had prophecies that culminated on that day, and each of them celebrated themselves as having primary responsibility. Jana, last of the Shureen, finally listened to her trainer's words and achieved yellow-grade Shur manipulation while Shur-punching the primary reactor's force-field generator through eight levels of metal flooring.

The trio of Briwew adepts who had snuck aboard the Death Star only days earlier used the power of the three-thrum to addle the brains of every clone in the Yavin system, making effective aiming impossible. How many stormtroopers or TIE pilots landed accurate shots that day? In the view of the Briwew, this brave action made rebel victory all but guaranteed. How can you lose against an enemy that can't aim?

It wasn't just the prowess cults who believed themselves to be the lynch-pins that day. Mechesoteric orders had compromised thousands of Death Star subsystems as well. A group calling itself the Veen, whose legends claimed its ascended adepts could etch integrated circuits by hand, had apparently done a number on the Death Star's internal monitoring systems. In combination with the shift schedule suddenly one-way encrypting itself, some days you could walk from one end of the Death Star to the other without ever meeting a guard.

Lights didn't work, turbolifts would stop on the wrong floor and then shut down. Turbolasers would decalibrate during target practice and blast hapless observation towers into fragments.

Worst of all, an order of psycho-netic priestesses had sabotaged the toilets, causing them to either flush at bowel-wrenching triple pressure at random times, or flip into reverse and blast an entire trash compactor's contents into the room. For weeks before the Battle of Yavin, not even the Moffs had been able to take a shit in peace. It was mayhem.

* * *

Partho was ecstatic. Looking at the entire picture, it was clear that the Death Star never stood a chance. But the real discovery was much broader than just one megaweapon! Long-standing xenocultural data showed that it took an average of nineteen years for mystical space wizard orders to produce chosen ones in times of need, nearly twice as long as the Death Star's construction time.

Forty seven separate mystical orders had all spontaneously begun producing chosen ones in anticipation of the Death Star. It was almost like an immune system built into the fabric of the universe. Build something big enough, and dangerous enough, and a hundred heroes would show up out of nowhere to screw it all up.

Partho could hardly contain himself. This would be the greatest discovery in safety research in.. well, ever. Not just safety research! Building a super-weapon that you could actually use would require whole new fields of study. Anti-prophetic architecture. Heroism dynamics. Xenocultural barometrics. Shift schedules written out by hand on whiteboards.

Finally, safety research would get the attention it truly deserved, uniting military security and system integrity planning under a single banner. Partho's hands trembled as he realized what this all meant. With this insight, you could once and for all rule the galaxy in a reign of terror that no plucky band of heroes could ever undo. Partho Borc's name would echo throughout the ages, as the man who finally made galactic empire possible.

But sadly, it was never to be. In a galaxy far, far away, safety research was a thankless job. Nobody listened.

You couldn't even get these people to install railings.

Scorched Earth NPC Relationship Table

Integrating player-written character backgrounds into your campaign is real work. Sometimes they just write so much, who can keep all those names straight?

Why struggle? Let the dice be your friend! Every time they bring someone up from that dog-eared sheaf they keep bringing to game night, just roll d6:

d6	Whatever happened to so-and-so?
	Moments after you last saw them, they joined up with the enemy. Life as an entry level hobgoblin is hard, but it also has a kind of simplicity. They don't really think about the past. Cudgel, rusty helmet, raawr, you know?
	They died, pretty much right away. Their surviving relatives and friends remember the PC as a bit of a dick to them in their final years.
	One day, their home just fell into the earth, and they haven't been seen since. Coincidentally, the hole is the entrance to that dungeon you were planning on using next!
	It was never reciprocal, and the NPC is honestly having trouble remembering the PC's name. I mean, it's great you thought we we were close or whatever, but I think you read too much into it. Please don't make it awkward.
	Nobody can remember the NPC. Who? Are you sure? There's no magic at work, just an overactive imagination.
	After a brief, high fever, they erupted into a brightly colored fungal mat. Nobody's been able to clean it up, the stench is unbelievable.

Nothing at the Bottom: MOSAIC Strict RPG Design

This blog post describes an experimental RPG design principle, Mosaic Strict. I'm defining this principle because I'm curious what kind of games result from applying it. (I have no idea!) I'm defining it very carefully because we live in a fallen world and shared understanding is fleeting.

MOSAIC is a set of criteria that might be true of an RPG text:

• Modular
• Optional
• Short
• Attested
• Independent
• Coreless

If all the criteria apply, then that text is Mosaic Strict. If only some (or none) of the criteria apply, then it's not Mosaic Strict. There are no partial points, it's all or nothing.

(If you use a hash tag for some reason, please use #MosaicStrict capitalization so screen readers handle it properly.)

Modular

Mosaic Strict RPG texts are meant to be used together with other RPG texts; each text only describes a portion of the rules that will probably be in use. One might describe an initiative system, another how combat works, another how gutter mage rituals work.

Anyone trying to have a pleasant evening of gaming will probably need to use several of them.

Modular: Any game text that explicitly claims to be
an entire, complete RPG is not Mosaic Strict.

This doesn't mean that all Mosaic Strict texts necessarily work well together! Any given pairing might be hot garbage. That's fine, because they're all..

Optional

Mosaic Strict RPG texts are all optional; you don't have to use them. Each play group will decide for itself which one(s) they are using. If a game text describes itself as mandatory, or necessary for the use of a certain gaming experience, it is not Mosaic Strict.

Optional: Any game text that describes itself
as necessary for play is not Mosaic Strict.

Please note that the modular and optional tests aren't about the rules of a text and whether they're "really" modular or optional; this rule is about how the text describes itself.

Short

Mosaic Strict optional rules are concise enough to fit on a two-page spread, no more than 1500 words.

Short: Mosaic Strict game texts are no more than 1500 words.

This includes any and all words that are part of the publication, such as words in illustrations, the document's title, subtitle, headings, subheadings, byline, copyright notice, Mosaic Strict attestation (see below). If the text is longer than this, it's not Mosaic Strict.

Attested

If the game text doesn't explicitly say that it's Mosaic Strict, it isn't.

Attested: Mosaic Strict texts say they are Mosaic Strict.

This rule exists for three reasons:

1. Mosaic Strict game designers, if there ever are any, have a slim chance of finding one another if their work is labelled
2. It might help confused readers of your Mosaic Strict optional rules understand why it refuses to use the term saving throw for no good reason
3. It makes the acronym work

Independent

Now the easy stuff is out of the way, here's a tough one, the rule that is really what Mosaic Strict is all about:

Independent: Mosaic Strict texts do not refer to the mechanics
or quantified state in any other game text.

By mechanics I mean any procedures (do this, then do this next, roll these dice, use dice at all) that tells you how to play. By quantified state, I mean any use of numbers, tags, attributes, binary or multi-state conditions (alignment, prone, not prone) to characterize what's going on in the game world.

Mosaic Strict texts don't refer to any rules whatsoever from other documents. Mosaic Strict texts do not build on one another, they don't assume you're using alignment or levels or that you have a Strength stat described in another document, none of that. There are no mechanical connections whatsoever between Mosaic Strict documents.

This means that a Mosaic Strict game text that describes a turn order for combat cannot assume that characters have Dex scores, or that the game is using 2d6. The combat turn order document could define those things

Now, game worlds have things that can be counted or quantified: money, a PC's height in inches; light switches flip on and off. A game text can refer to quantified things that exist in a setting and still be Mosaic Strict.

A two-page spread about being a wizard could say that you need $13,333 to join the magic society and that you must devour 13 white cats to be able to cast a tree-climbing cantrip up to three times a day and could still count as Mosaic Strict; these are all in-game quantities.

A game text that references any mechanical quantity from another text is not Mosaic Strict.

Coreless

This isn't a separate rule, but a consequence of Independence that I need to be really clear about: There are no core rules and no character sheet at the bottom of Mosaic Strict, no standard interface of compatibility.

Coreless: assume nothing else is in use beyond free-form play

A game text could define a character sheet and still be Mosaic Strict, but any other document that requires its use is not Mosaic Strict.

A game text could define a universal resolution mechanic and still be Mosaic Strict, but any other document that references that resolution mechanic is not Mosaic Strict.

There's no central document or required rule at the heart of it all, only free-form play role-play and whatever assumptions a particular group brings with it.

A Few Clarifications

Q. Is this gatekeeping bullshit?

A. No! Or at least, I hope not. I intend this in the spirit of the 200-word RPG contest: a very specific set of rules to see what comes out of it. My first few conversations about this convinced me there's a powerful temptation to do almost what I'm describing, slithering back into much more normal game design, so I want to be really, really clear about what I'm talking about.

Q. This sounds stupid, how does this make a better game?

A. I doubt it will!

Q. Is there any Mosaic Strict actual play so I can see what the fuck you're talking about?

A. No. The Mosaic Strict criteria are meant to apply only to RPG game texts. They don't apply to play styles or culture, design aesthetics, genres, or anything else—just the text of the RPG.

This means that if a bunch of people get together, grab three Mosaic Strict documents (one for being a wizard, one for stealing things, another for driving too fast in a jalopy) but bring along their 5th edition play assumptions and experiences and use a d20 for everything, the criteria of Mosaic Strict have nothing to say about their play experience. If a group is playing Call of Cthulhu mashed up with cool take on slime infection in a Mosaic Strict two-pager, we don't say that their session was Mosaic Strict or not.

All play experiences incorporate elements from the players that are not in the rules. Mosaic Strict only applies game texts, not play experiences.

No Samite For You

You've done it—you've won the favor of the Powers. Called to collect your reward, you wade into the shallows of the hidden pool to draw out the holy weapon of the land. What smiting you will do!

But being a humble land, no shimmering samite awaits you. Sorry!

Roll d6	Holy weapon of this place..
	A wide-bladed sword, so corroded that the edge is a jagged crumble. It carries the weight of aeons, so any attempt to sharpen it is blasphemous. Anyone who tries just cuts their hand, and the blade will get no sharper. Still, hitting someone with it just feels so right.
	The pitch-fork of the oppressed. The handle is slick with lake-slime, but the tines gleam with the righteousness of class warfare. The balance is shit, but it goes through plate armor like butter—especially the good stuff.
	The living cudgel of the lake-keepers has had a marvelous fucking time in the lake these last three hundred years, let me tell you. It's now a sizeable tree, and pretty happy where it is. An intelligent weapon, it will happily talk your ear off about what it feels like having algae nibbled off your nethers by fish. (Amaaazing.) Every swish of the breeze makes its branches hum with vorpal potential. Hmmmr. Wrrrrm. Wait—you wanna what? Who are you, again?
	A sturdy hat pin. Different ages call for different heroes.
	The ancient world's most wicked sorcerer was smothered in this chamber pot. It was full at the time, of course. Refilling it is an exercise left to you.
	A heavy rock, covered in algae and kinda slippery. It takes two hands to even pick up, let alone heft around. Don't even think about throwing it. This is a weapon straight from the earth, a legend in the first age of men. In fairness, that was a long time ago.. it makes more sense in context.

Arms Race

Morgan stopped by with a tip about weapons tonight.

"Dad, don't go into battle with a sword that works against your armor.  Your enemies can copy your sword.  Then you get to battle and it's like, da de dah, I'm fine - and everybody's dead, no winner."

"Uh, okay. .. What do you take to battle if your enemies have the same armor you do?"

"Better armor.  (Duh.)"

The Danger of Mediocrity

Hypothesis: Offend enough people and you're in trouble - but if you're really offensive, just describing what you've done violates too many taboos for you to get famous.

Graffiti

Three Year-Old Magic

This morning at breakfast, my three year-old, Leah, performed an incomprehensible magic trick. She's holding her hands behind her back, waving them around, then she's shouting "Ta-Da"! I have no idea what was going on in her mind, but she seems pretty pleased.

"Honey, you need to explain what you're doing so people can understand your trick."

To demonstrate, I make a fist and hold it up. "There's a penny in my hand, and I'm going to make it disappear!" I hadn't anything in my jeans pockets, so I'm just pretending - my fist is empty. Maybe I'll get a laugh out of it.

Morgan, my six-year old, perks up.

"Show me the penny! There's no penny in there."

After years of my lame daddy-magic tricks with pennies, Morgan now questions every step of the way. There's no way she's going to believe there's a penny in there unless she sees it first.

"You're right, Morgan," I say, "there's no penny in my hand. See, Leah, people need to understand what you're doing and believe it, otherwise the trick doesn't work."

I'm not going to fool anyone, but now I'm in the mood so I continue with my impromptu routine.

"Look, Leah, I'll make it disappear!" I say, holding up my still unopened fist. "I'm going to squeeze it down to nothing!" Loosening my grip, I poke my finger in one side, then in the other, ostensibly pressing the penny down to dust-speck size.

"Now that it's too tiny to see, I'm going to blow it out like dust!" I hold my fist to my mouth, blow through it, then theatrically fan open my fingers, showing my empty hand.

"Where's the penny?" I ask.

Leah thinks for a second. She wasn't born yesterday. She's turning four in a week, she's been around the block a few times now. She's seen this sort of thing before.

"It's in your ear!" she exclaims!

Service Level Agreement

How BlackBerries Caused the Credit Crisis

Ever been to one of those meetings where, halfway through someone's crucial point, the suit pulls out his BlackBerry? As the tiny screen draws him in, he stops listening, and his voice dwindles to a murmur.

"Uh huh."

"Uh huh."

Turns out that's not the only thing dwindling. His IQ is shrinking, too. By one estimate, multitasking shaves up to 40 points off your IQ.

Okay, so your boss isn't paying attention - but think: across the whole subscriber base, this could add up to quite a lot!



It's easy enough to estimate how many IQ-point hours have been lost to this tiny device. Let's say they're used an average of 20 minutes a day, and that there's been linear growth in the user base. That works out to .. 520 billion IQ-point-hours lost.


520 billion?! That's the equivalent of 35,000 very bright people available full-time for thirty years. That's one hell of a mental handicap.

What could that be doing to society?

Fortunately, a lot of his huge deficit of this is harmlessly discharged on things like, oh, forgetting to flush the toilet, increased golf scores, and walking into telephone poles.

But what about the rest? What might go wrong if you hand out IQ-depleting devices to management teams everywhere?

I admit, this is far from conclusive, but I think I might be on to something.