Gamethink

d20 has left the Building

2004-12-29T17:39:00.000-08:00

Over on James Maliszewski's LJ Blog the Schizonomicon they are discussing the possible publishing of Pulp Call of Cthulhu. And many are wondering why they chose not to include d20 rules in it now. Well d20 has left the building.

I am not saying it is anywhere near dead as a game system. I think sales of WotC product will continue to dominate the sales charts for a long time to come. Along with the other folk like Green Ronin who do inventive things with it will probably keep making money with d20 related products, but the added sales from simply putting a d20 logo on a product are long gone.

Most retailers are very weary of any new product now and many consumers are have been playing d20 for over five years and perhaps are growing tired of it. You also have to factor in that if you dual stat stuff like Holistic Design did with Fading Suns you tend to annoy people who liked your game before. They get the impression that you are doing less for them when they have supported you from the beginning. You also have to ask is it worth doing the extra work in stat blocks for d20. Will this add to my sales?

I know in recent months at the store I worked for the only d20 we were selling with any regularity was WotC, Conan, and Warcraft. Green Ronin stuff would sit a while but would sell eventually. Mongoose had almost completely died and everyone else tended to be a special orders.

RPG games are a smaller and smaller market for shops that sell games. The store sold more things like Settlers of Catan (and its variants), Munchkin, and Carcassone. These board games turned over more often than most RPGs. I think RPG manufacturers need to worry about selling more units overall than rather or not they include d20 stats.

Iron Developer III: Return of the Iron Developer

2004-11-15T07:14:00.000-08:00

I am currently planning on re-instating my Iron Developer event at Origins this year. I took a year off for various reasons, but was sorry I did for other reasons.

As a refresher, the original Iron Developer events essentially worked like this: Would-be Iron Developers showed up on the day of the event armed with nothing more than their wits. A secret ingredient, in the form of a physical object, was revealed, and the players, sometimes in teams of two to three, sometimes alone, spent two hours developing a game concept. Afterwards, the players presented their games and were judged on various criteria. The players with the best concepts went on to a 'best of the best' run-off on the last day of the event.

This year, for the return, I want to increase the difficulty. I am firmly in brainstorming mode at this point and am going to throw out several thoughts any or all or none of which may get incorporated into the new event. (They are listed in no particular order.)

* Increase the number of requirements from one (or two in the final challenge) to three to five. This would likely include one to two genre requirements, then two to three miscellaneous requirements (physical objects for inspiration, types of mechanics, ???).

* Include a improvisation component. Or more specifically, have the audience or the players themselves propose genres and other components, some or all of which are then incorporated into the challenge.

* Require the game be playable at the end of the process. This would likely mean giving the players more time, away from the stadium, to develop their game before judging.

* Include a specific core mechanic. This would be to facilitate having a game that could be run (by me if necessary) in the 'play' event.

* Self-publish the winning game via PDF.

* As noted above, have a separate play event where the winning game is played and/or where the top to games from the previous round are played and judged.

* Junkyard Developer - wherein the player-developers are handed a box of random pages from various discarded/out-of-print/public domain games, and need to use a certain amount of them in their own design.

* Trading Games - Wherein the player-developers, after making their first two hour development pitch, trade-off games for completion. In this case, I can see running the initial event as before, with multiple teams and judging at the end of two hours. Then breaking the groups into two larger teams to finish work on the top two games. Then, as a surprise twist, handing the teams the concepts of the *other* top developer.

I think those are all my brain-storms for now. Any thoughts would be appreciated. I can see problems with several of them, but I will save self-critique for another post on another day.

A Potential Game

2004-10-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

Anyone out there remember Aria by Last Unicorn Games?

Over the weekend, I think I came up with an intriguing variant to the Aria concept. Based on the statement "As you change the stories, you change the culture", the idea is that the players play the characters in (cultural) stories. They tell these stories with the Storyteller over and over, with changes (intentional or otherwise) creeping in over time. After each telling, the play group takes time to interpret how that latest telling impacted the culture overall. Advance time a generation and tell the stories all over again in the next session.

Now - telling the same story each session sounds pretty boring, so I imagine some complications. First, (based largely on the Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde) the characters in the stories are *aware* that they are characters in the stories and have lives within the context of the story outside of those depicted in the story. Thus, in additon to the conflict inherent to the stories, there can be other conflicts affecting the character lives in the 'story world'.

Second, to inspire change, the characters can change importance in the story based on their performance in the latest iteration. I imagine a system where every player has a number of 'chits' based on thier importance that they can use to influence the story. At the end of the story, they use their chits (used and unused) to reward the characters for a job well done. I imagine a system where you (as a player) can give no more chits to yourself than A) you give to other player characters, B) you have left 'unspent' at the end of a story, or C) both.

Third, if the characters are aware - then there is the potential for chacters from other stories to invade. Also consider 'narrative' monsters and natural disasters that the 'real world' is never aware of. Monsters that attack the form and function of language. Word storms, metaphysically looking like whirlwinds or tornadoes, that jumble words and stories.

Obviously, this needs a lot of fleshing out - but the concept itself is intriguing - at least to me.

And now - I've got to run!

D&D and Surfboardds

2004-10-06T04:11:00.000-07:00

This is a post I've been meaning to put together for some time now, and now am going to try to collect my thoughts in about 10 minutes.

There are days that I believe that producers may be using the wrong model or example when attempting to do 'strategic planning' for gaming. If you look at the major players in the field, I get the sense that they think they are producing a commodity like tennis shoes: they assume nearly everyone needs them and that they just need to reach the target audience, they assume that the same basic design will work for everyone with some relatively minor tweaks to meet special needs, they assume that they can earn brand loyalty and raise prices because of that loyalty.

I think a different model may be appropriate. I think that the gaming industry is more akin other hobby industries. Take surfing for an example. (Now, I'm _not_ a surfer, so this is based only on my perception and used for illustration.) I will admit, there are likely a small number of mass-producers of surfboards and I suspect that obviously limited target audience can support a small number of mass-producers. These mass producers can act, more or less, like I described above. However, I strongly suspect that when you get into the serious surfers, many of them move away from the mass produced boards. My guess is that there are a major more numerous set of small board producers, operating off the beaches they surf, or did surf, themselves. These small shops hand-produce or at least hand-modify the boards they sell.

To wrap up quickly, as I'm out of time, what's my point? I think there is a place for the big players in the industry. But I think that there is also a very important role for small players. I _want_ someone to custom craft a game for _me_. I'm willing to pay more for a game that meets _my_ specific ideosyncracies. I want to run down to my local game shop and say, "We're changing the direction of our campaign, can you craft some new rules to meet our new needs?"

Is this just a dream, maybe. But I think the prevalence of PDF publishing makes it less so that it was a few years ago. Will someone open a 'custom games' shop in the future, probably, but until then....

Hang Ten!

Notes on Working with Open Content

2004-09-26T18:41:00.000-07:00

1. I made $57 as my share of sales for the monstrous advanced classes in August. I expect it'll go down some for September because I just plain didn't write much at all, but will be back up in October.

2. I just sent this e-mail off to Louis Porter, Jr., of LPJ Design. I've added hyperlinks for your browsing pleasure.

I just wanted to make sure to say "Thank you!" for the way cool Prototypes series of d20 Modern advanced classes you've been publishing at RPG Now. Ron Felice and Jason J. McCuiston have done some wonderful writing there - I love that the cinematic and comic book inspirations are clear, but not constraining. Each one has room to go in some fresh direction.

I made use of the class features for several of them (Freelancer, Gun Priest, Neo Ninja, and Urban Saint) for a Man in Black writeup as part of my own Monstrous Advanced Class series. Several of them made me think "yes, that's a tidy and elegant way of doing something I already knew I wanted to do", like the Neo Ninja's constant stealth ability, and some made me think "hey, that rocks, and I didn't think about it before, but that totally fits my project as well", like the Gun Priest's maelstrom attack. Thank you very much for your generous open-content declaration; I hope you and the authors find the use to which I put the material interesting.

Looking forward to future releases! (And now I'm really motivated to check out Haven, too.)

This seems to me an example of open content working well. In some cases I used Ron's and Jason's material straight, in others I modified it. But I didn't have to reinvent the wheel in any case, and I got some ideas that simply hadn't occurred to me at all. They get credit, and insofar as anyone gets inspiration from me, their ideas remain in circulation that way as well. Likewise, if anyone finds my work a solution to their problems, they can work faster and cooler, too.

It's possible that the advantages of this are only fully obvious to people who've worked in gaming. But to get credit for your stuff, to have a better chance of it not passing into oblivion so quickly, and not to have to go about obfuscating your borrowing, it's all very pleasant indeed.

Tracking the Wily Intermediate Freelancer Pt. 2: Working on Spec

2004-08-31T21:38:00.000-07:00

In doing general research regarding magazine writing, I've discovered that it is generally a bad idea to work on spec - meaning that you write the entire article and attempt to sell it to a magazine instead of querying, getting approval and writing with the secure knowledge that money will be made. However, I am discovering that the RPG world is, as always, a different animal than the rest of the publishing world.

(I still can't convince my mother that the tiny amount I make writing RPGs is industry standard for someone with fewer than 10 titles. She insists I need an agent. I imagine the look on an agent's face when she figures out what 10% of $.0X a word is. But I digress.)

Back on topic, it seems that you cannot get an assignment writing for RPG publications - just write the piece and send it in. Dungeon, Dragon, Knights of the Dinner Table and Eden Studios Presents all seem to work this way, according to my research. (please correct me if I'm wrong)

While it would no doubt be impressive to developers for me to hand them a copy of Dungeon and show them my 20K word adventure, I have a fear that if I write an adventure and it's rejected, that's a hell of a lot of time and effort wasted. It's not like there's a bunch of RPG magazines I can send an adventure to after one rejection, especially if it's focused on a gaming system like D20. If I wrote a women's health article and failed to sell it to "Shape," I could still send it to "Self," "O," or any number of magazines. My RPG choices are narrowed to keeping the stuff and running it for my gaming group or publishing it online.

Is there another way? I have plenty of RPG work I can show to a magazine; would they respond to a query? Or is the answer just to suck it up and write a bunch of stuff that might not get published?**

Mur

** "Ah," you must be thinking, "This Intermediate Freelancer is a whiny one." You may be right. Gaining experience in this field makes me feel as if my number of questions has multiplied. Before, when I scored an assignment or two, I was bowled over with my only question being "Golly, can I really write all that?" Now I look to get more, and more diverse, work, and am finding the prospect daunting. And to anyone who is keeping score, no responses back from any of the contacts I made at Origins, except from Eden who told me to submit (on spec) to Eden Studios Presents. Hence this post.

the Rock Soup RPG

2004-08-22T20:07:00.000-07:00

Something my gaming group has only done twice, but had quite a good time doing is playing the Rock Soup RPG.

The whole idea started is one of the usual suspects in our gaming group never threw a character sheet away. From one-shots and never got off the ground games. And characters she played for a year or more were in the same beat up manila folder. Characters sheets from Paranoia, CP202, Vampire, 1st ed D&D, Top Secret SI, Middle-Earth Role Playing and well you get the idea.

One night Chuck (another of the usual suspects) joked that someone should take the character sheets from the folder randomly pass them out and try and run a game with whatever people ended up with. This got the wheels turning in my head and a few weeks later I tried it.

When everyone arrived at our house I asked if I could see the folder I drew out one more character sheet than the number of players there that night. I then shuffled them as best I could and passed them out. It has been a few years but if memory serves we had characters from Champions, Cyberpunk 2020, Paranoia, Gamma World, and two others that I can't remember any longer.

I ran a game where the players were "champions called from across time and space" to defend the multiverse from the Daleks. I tried to use the rules native to each game system when possible, but the whole thing was made up on the fly so there wasn’t a lot of strict adherence to the rule. But more of an attempt to just have fun. The night broke down into high comedy when trying to rescue one of the players from a 1920's hospital they realized the only person that could drive a car was hiding in the trunk. Eventually they saved the multiverse and went home.

We tried it one more time with less success than the first, but it was an interesting experiment to try a couple times. I wanted to give it one more try, but the owner of the manila folder cleaned it out so it only had character sheets for active campaigns.

If anyone tries this please let me know. I would like to hope that someone else will play the Rock Soup RPG.

Pricing

2004-08-10T17:24:00.000-07:00

Software developer Eric Sink recently wrote an article about pricing software that seems thoroughly relevant to rolegaming pricing, too. Check it out.

Scene Framing

2004-08-08T23:46:00.000-07:00

I owe a debt here to a variety of folks, most particularly Neel Krishnaswami, for insightful observations in recent years. None of what follows is intended to look as if it sprang full-grown from the brow of Zeus.

There are a lot of ways that roleplaying games operating in a chosen genre differ from stories and shows in the same genre. One of these is pacing: the rpg version of the scene will almost always start sooner and end later than the other versions. It's customary for those of us with arty pretentious ambitions to sneer at the socially incompetent masses for their need to game out all the details, and I have done that in my time, but I'm mellowing in my stance about it. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to make sure your character (and your influence on the story) doesn't get hosed because of conflicting assumptions. What's played out is much easier to agree about than what's glossed over, summarized, or otherwise pushed off screen. That's as true for a group with a lot of trust and shared creative framework as for any other.

It struck me just recently that game mechanics like inspiration (in Adventure) and hero points (in the cinematic Unisystem) provide a good tool here.

The point of including the stuff around the edges of the scene is to make sure that characters have the information and resources they need, the chance to set up plans, and so on. Well, hero points let players declare such things, and come with guidelines for the cost of increasingly significant interpolations. I think that in a game run with each scene in a tighter frame, it might work to simply give the players more points to spend - probably not in a hard-and-fast conversion of expected play time versus increased points (though if anyone were to work out math for that, I'd be glad to see it), but with a significant boost, perhaps enough for one or two really major changes or a bunch of smaller ones for each scene tightened up this way. Then play starts at the first exciting, dramatic, or other worthwhile moment; interpolations are handled in compact flashbacks, the narrative version of zooming in for a sudden reveal, and like that.

(I also wonder if it would help to declare a caption or summary for each scene: "At the Bank", "Two Conversations", "The First Assassination Attempt". The sort of strong-genre story I'm thinking about here has a familiar structure amenable to themes and variations, and it seems like it'd help players use their resources effectively if they know at least some of what's coming. There's still room for surprise.)

Has anyone tried deliberately running in this style? I'm looking forward to trying it out myself.

Dissecting a Character Sheet

2004-08-03T19:57:00.000-07:00

One of the vital ingredients of any RPG is the character sheet. It’s actually one of the first things I look for when considering a new game, since it gives me a summarized glimpse at what the game considers important that a player should have handy. It also gives me an idea on what the company considers good layout, and a messy character sheet often speaks of messy content.

A character sheet is also a window for the rules system, and although it won’t be possible to glean the actual rules, it will at least give someone an idea on what the game is about. Going over the sheets of some games, there are some common elements to all of them that can be used as tools for deciding what a game should or could have in its system.

Personal Information: The character’s description in mostly non-mechanic terms. Name, height, weight, hair and eye color, etc. This area also includes the description of the character’s general classification within the game system, such as race and class in D&D as well as clan, tribe, etc. in White Wolf games. It also describes in-game associations and allegiances.

Personal Attributes: Some games dispense with this, but it’s a major staple of RPGs that a character has a set of basic characteristics describing him or her in general terms, giving a quantitative expression to basic talents or aptitudes. These characteristics represent innate capabilities that can be applied in many situations or in a wide spectrum of task resolution challenges, applying a value to the challenge, providing a target number for the dice and/or combining with other, more specific values. In D&D, these are the six abilities (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Wisdom, Intelligence and Charisma). In the Storyteller system, these are the nine attributes divided in three categories: Physical (Strength, Dexterity and Stamina), Social (Charisma, Manipulation and Appearance) and Mental (Intelligence, Perception and Wits). In Tri-Stat, they are the three stats that give the system its name: Body, Mind and Soul.

The various systems bear many similarities, as there are only a few logical ways to describe a character, but also note how each game stresses its focus by stating what defines a character. Tri-Stat stresses simplicity as it divides the attributes in three broad values, while Storyteller adds the social aspects missing in D&D attributes.

Task Resolution Capabilities: Also known as ‘skills’ in most systems. These represent definite areas of expertise that characters do not have for free in any measure; they must be purchased during character creation to define what the character knows what to do. D&D 2nd Ed. was sorely lacking in this area, using weapon and non-weapon proficiencies to cover what other games rightfully devote more space towards. Task resolution challenges involve pitting the characters’ skills against a particular difficulty for the dice to match and surpass. A system like Nobilis dispenses with the randomness, simply stating that a character automatically achieves something that falls within his expertise. The challenges tend to involve fairly mundane tasks (even if sometimes dangerous in-game). Some systems include the character’s combat abilities into this area, considering combat just another possible challenge.

Combat: Even a social-oriented game like Vampire has its area devoted to combat. In a very tactical game like D&D, it has its own terms and values while in Storyteller and Tri-Stat these are folded with the task resolution capabilities above. However, the character sheet almost always include an area where a player can write down the numbers he needs to conduct attacks and defense, including the information of weapons, techniques and combat-oriented powers.

Life: While dependant on combat mostly, the life area of a character gives a numerical gauge to the threat of character death. The player subtracts numbers or crosses boxes to represent the wounds or reduction in vitality his character is taking. Once this gauge is depleted, the character is either dead or dying.

Inventory: An area to write down the character’s equipment, such as weapons, armor, gear and other goods independent from the character. Some items have their own characteristics, which some character sheets contemplate by including their own format in a separate area.

Special Abilities: This area would describe the special abilities and powers characters possess that make them different from other similar characters. They are blank lines in games with several options, while they can already be written down in the sheet if they are few (such as Spheres in Mage: the Ascension). These abilities can be mundane, like D&D’s feats and many of Tri-Stat’s attributes; or they can be superhuman, like D&D’s racial traits and spells, Vampire’s Disciplines and Whispering Vault’s Servitors.

Character Resource: These are special traits that represent a pool a character can draw from to achieve certain effects during play. This pool can be tied to activate one of the above special abilities, or may be more open-ended and allow for a variety of effects. The character resource depletes with use or with time, and depending on the system, it can be renewed. The rate of renewal of a resource is balanced to its utility in the game as well as on its focus. In D&D, a character resource is a bard’s music ability, a monk’s stunning fist uses or a spellcaster’s spell slots. In White Wolf games, Willpower is a generalized resource and each game adds its own like Blood (Vampire), Psi (Trinity) or Essence motes (Exalted).

Character Description: A more in-depth treatment of the Personal Information fields, Character Description may be cosmetic or mechanic, depending on how much the game system pays attention to things that describes a character’s personality and history. Few sheets contain this information except in expanded versions that go into detail about the characters’ family, loyalties and even appearance. Some systems add mechanics to this, such as Storyteller’s Backgrounds and some of Tri-Stat’s attributes. Wraith’s Passions and Fetters are a prime example of mechanic-driven in-depth description.

PDF vs. Paper: Reviewing in an Increasingly Electronic Market

2004-07-24T16:53:00.000-07:00

Recently I had a request turned down for a pair of complimentary books to review. This is from a respected publisher whose books I have been sent and reviewed in past, and the publisher had been happy with the results. Then I had another request turned down, again from a respected publisher, but not one from whom I have been sent anything before, although I have reviewed one or two of their books. In both cases, their reasons were the exactly the same. The cost. They wanted to cut down on the expenses incurred, not only of the books sent out, but also of the cost of postage and packaging.

Instead they offered me a PDF version of the books that I asked for. Although I was grateful for the offer, I had to decline. Initially, this was because the computer I use could not handle PDF documents of the size that these books represent. Yes, by the standards of the day, the machine I most often use is antiquated. Yet there were other reasons that why I declined both offers, which I want to explain and explore in more detail below, but before I do, I want to make clear that I am in no way angry or upset at any of these publishers. They have every right to take the decision that they have, and indeed, they are right to do so. Further I respect them for doing so, but remain saddened that our “semi-professional” relationship has been forced to end.

Yet this change in complimentary product format, from the paper to the electronic, has the potential to change how someone who reviews games actually works.

The position of the reviewer with regard to the games industry is currently rather vague. Certainly, there is no such thing as the ‘professional’ reviewer, and for the most part, it is a game’s fans that write reviews after they have bought copies from their local gaming store. But there are a few people, myself included, who will approach a publisher, and ask for what is in effect, a free book. In an act of trust, the publisher sends out the requested book, and in return, the recipient is expected to read it, write a fair review, and see that it is published somewhere online, since there are few magazines that publish gaming reviews these days. In all but a couple of instances, the book itself, and the kudos that goes with being published, is the only payment that the reviewer will receive for his efforts.

This lack of payment, which has come about because of the death of the RPG magazine and the immediacy of the Internet, also means that there is no capacity within the industry, or even alongside it, for the ‘professional reviewer.’ And barring Ken Hite’s mini-reviews in his “Out of the Box” column, reviewing games remains solely the province of the amateur.

But the move from offering complimentary product in paper to electronic format changes this vague situation further. First it does not actually give the reviewer a copy of the product that the publisher wants its customers to buy at their local gaming stores. Arguably most of their sales will come from the print edition, and not from its PDF version made available from vendors such as RPGnow.com and RPGdrivethru.com. Unless it was designed in that format that is, such as the many titles released by Deep7 and Politically Incorrect Games. Surely publishers want reviews of their games and supplements in the format that they will make the most sales from?

Secondly, receiving a PDF version of a book is actually a disincentive for the reviewer to want to review the book, because his reward for doing is greatly lessened. What the publisher is doing, is passing the physical costs onto the reviewer, who must pay for the paper, the ink, the binding, and so on. Since it is unlikely that the reviewer has access to a professional book printing service, the resulting product will invariably be of an infinitely inferior quality compared to the book he could have instead purchased, or indeed, been sent by the publisher. And while it might be cheaper for a publisher to send the reviewer a PDF document, let us not discount the dangers of piracy that come with that format.

So if the primary motive for this change is one of cost, is there a solution? Perhaps a tighter relationship could forged between publisher and reviewer, with the publisher building a stable of still independent reviewers that they know can be trusted. And again between publisher and the intended destination for the review. Either might work to reduce the number of wasted review copies that get sent out, and ensure that the publishers get results from doing so

Perhaps in my case, I should buy a bigger computer, either that or move to the USA to cut down on the postage and packaging costs of getting a book across the Atlantic. In the meantime, it remains to be seen if I will be reviewing the books that I have asked for.

The Church of What's Happening Now

2004-07-22T23:51:00.000-07:00

This week I made my first foray into PDF publishing, with Monstrous Advanced Classes: The Vampire. It was a very interesting experience, and very different from how conventional RPG writing goes. It's been a while since I posted, and I'm going to bore you all with some happy burbling.

The biggest difference is the sheer immediacy of it. I've been watching James Maliszewski having fun with his Dozen This and Dozen That products, and thinking about what I could do that would be comparably fun for me. On Friday, I got an idea. On Tuesday, I finished writing it up and sent it to Phil Reed to see if he'd like to publish it. He did, and on Wednesday it went up for sale. On Thursday it was #44 on the monthly bestseller list for d20 products.

In the sort of gaming work I'm used to, it's always a matter of months from completing the writing to a book going on sale - editing, developing, producing, printing, and distributing all take time. When I'm developing a project, it can easily be a year or more from conceiving and outlining a book to the point the public gets to see it. So working in gaming means always living in a sort of temporal discontinuity, knowing things you can't talk about. Everything that's now out exists in a context you can't fully share, since it's not your individual secrets and choices about confidentiality. I must say that I really, really like being able to get such immediate response to an idea, and to have no worries about accidentally leaking it or anything like that. This time I get to talk about an idea while it's still fresh in my own mind, and comments from customers and bystanders can influence how I handle future entries in the series.

There's also a, um, purity of essence about the whole thing. A single advanced class entry would be one part of one chapter in a typical book. When I asked for advanced classes in Gamma World books, I asked for three or more (depending on the project), and that seems fairly usual for d20 books. Here it's just itself. I hope to reuse the format, and working out the structure of the thing was a significant part of the writing time (particularly realizing that I wanted lists of options for qualities rather than fixed progressions). But I could and likely will customize it for each one. This particular document has no need to do anything but fit with d20 Modern mechanics in general and the attitude I want for it in particular.

Working with open content is a lot of fun. Gamma World, which has been the bulk of my d20 effort so far, is of course all closed, being proprietary and licensed, and the Scarred Lands work I've done has been released in accordance with White Wolf's policy of deeply finicky open-content declarations. I don't know if the intent was to make it too tangle for others to want to use, but it seems to have had that effect. Since the Monstrous Advanced Class series is purely mine, though, I could and did choose to make it all open. I'm hoping others make use of it; I'd love to see what contexts it may fit. And I had fun drawing on the open content created by my friends Gareth Hanrahan and Jim Kiley. I could have done it without their neat stuff in (respectively) OGL Horror and Adventure! d20, but my work is the better for it, I think. Reinventing the wheel has been part of gaming from the beginning, and I can do it about as well as anyone, I think, but it's tedious as well as wasteful. Judicious (and legitimate) reuse of open content let me focus more on the stuff that's distinctively mine.

Finally, I hadn't realized just how much of a rush I'd find having a copyright statement list my own name instead of a corporation's. I don't mind doing work for hire, when it's a project I'm interested in...but yes, as someone who thinks of his work as both art and craft, it gives me great pleasure to feel that I genuinely do own this one. Phil Reed made it look spiffy and deserves the cut he's getting for that and the advantages of selling it as a Ronin Arts product, but at the end of the day, it's mine mine mine and I feel better for it.

There's a recurring note here, and it's "fun". My association with White Wolf got badly strained over the last year or so - and I'm not claiming to be the pure unsullied victim here, as I had misfortunes of sorts that made problems for them and also made some just plain unwise decisions at various points. All that's the tale for another time. The point here is while I never stopped enjoying working with my authors and their manuscripts, very little of the rest of the job was very satisfying. Doing MAC: The Vampire was very satisfying, and provided me a strong reminder that I was in fact not foolish to ever get tangled up in gaming, that I can do it well, and that, yes, it feels good to do it well. All of that is very good to have in mind as I embark on the next phase of my writing career, in and out of gaming.

D20 Sacrilege?

2004-07-08T06:38:00.000-07:00

I realize I have been remiss in my posting duties. For this, I apologize. I can only offer one excuse - City of Heroes. As predicted, this game is attempting to eat my soul. I have managed not to lose wife or job yet, but the temptation to just lock myself down in the basement with standing orders for the pizza guy to pass food through the window once every couple of days is distinctly there....

***** ***** ***** ***** *****

My Exalted: Sixth Age game (a campaign for Mutants and Masterminds) is continuing a pace. The PCs have stopped a behemoth (who turned out to be a golden age Lunar trying to get their attention), obtained a manse (the Lunar's secret lair), and hearthstone bracers (belonging to the Lunar's deceased partner). They fought a battle against Task Force X of the Vigilance League on a Super Brdige project that was designed to never be completed and unknowingly befriended the ghost of a Golden Age Solar.

This week is *Lunar Week*. The PCs are going to start on the stepps of the ruined Lincoln Memorial and learn just what's dwelling in the forests that are dominating the East Coast. They are going to help settle a rebellion and learn the fate of the original Green Man (they met and fought his replacement last session). And maybe, just maybe, they will gain new allies in the process....

What does all that have to do with the topic? Well, running this game (as well as the Gamma World game) has got me thinking alot about the D20 system. On many levels, I love the crunchiness that D20 allows me. I love tweaking my own character or the ability to spend hours poking at creature stats to get them 'just right'. But in practice, I *dread* the actual stat'ing of NPCs and opposition. Writing down and tracking all those details, all those options. So much so, in fact, that we ran the last episode of Ex:6A diceless. I just talked them through the session and described combat rather than worrying about what the dice said.

I've also noticed that for players unfamiliar with D20, leveling doesn't really happen without a lot of involvement of someone else. Not that this is necessarily bad, it means that I understand their characters perhaps a bit better than other player's characters, but it does take up what should otherwise be playing time.

This leads to my sacrilege. I have half a dozen or so NPCs to stat up for the next session (probably for each of the next few sessions). I find myself wanting to ignore points, levels, etc., and just stat them in "Over The Edge" format. That is, pick a handful of defining traits, apply modifiers to each of these traits, assume base modifiers for any other rolls, and run. This completely circumvents one of D20's strengths (the crunchiness) but somehow feels more satisfying to me for the way I run games.

Does anyone have any thoughts and feelings on this? Has anyone done anything similar and if so, what have been your experiences?

Thanks,

Doc Blue

Wire Paladin, San Francisco

2004-07-06T14:17:00.000-07:00

Paramount Home Video has released the first season of Have Gun, Will Travel on DVD.

If you aren't familiar with the show, track down a copy for rent or purchase, and watch the first two episodes. Don't worry, the web page will wait.

Back?

On the surface, the character of Paladin would be great for inclusion in an RPG. Suave, educated, an honorable man, and one of the deadliest gunmen in the world, without being overly enamored of violence. But too often, this way lies destruction.

Most of us have seen it. The GMNPC, the person the GM really wishes he or she could be, who is great at anything they set their hand to, and comes in to solve the problems, leaving the PCs to side, impotent and useless. So how can we integrate a Paladin or Paladin-like character into an RPG without ruining the game?

The answer is that the NPC has to be turned into a commodity. An asset, something earned by the players, or purchased, which can be used in extremis.

So, let's look at one example. If we were to cast Paladin into the World of Darkness, the character would be a superb Toreador 4 or 5 dot Mentor. By integrating the appearance of the NPC into the mechanics (a player has chosen to pay the points, and in an ideal world, has built parts of the character concept and other purchase decisions around this relationship) we justify the appearance of the GMNPC, and put it under some degree of player control. Moreover, the game world also brings with it a whole set of obligations (both on the player, and on the NPC) as part of this background, and the player has the option to use additional merits, flaws, or backgrounds, to exert further control over the shape of the relationship.

Now, let's consider the case where the players are not purchasing a pre-existing relationship during character creation, but are rather earning one during the course of play. This is trickier -- there isn't the explicity social contract of "I bought this as part of my character, and you agreed to it", instead, the players are being presented with an opportunity, for good or ill.

The players could first observe Paladin in San Francisco (or indeed, have their early interactions in San Francisco, or a setting-appropriate equivalent), which is a far less explicitly adversarial situation than coming across a gunfighter.

Conversely, the first interaction could be witnessing the Paladin involved in a gunfight (those familiar with it might consider the introduction of Calo Nord in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic). This has higher risks, the players might decide to get involved, potentially on the wrong side. This could result in serious injury or death to the PCs, or, depending on how much of Paladin's survival in similar situations the GM decides was due to having others decide not to get involved, the death or serious injury of the NPC. If the players don't get involved, they have information. If they do get involved, things may get trickier for the GM. It is important for the GM to think about consequences -- if the players ever feel that they are being forced into letting an enemy GMNPC survive to keep the GM's pet plot alive, it can be detrimental to the gaming group.

The players could first encounter Paladin on the other side. Since the GMNPC in question is always willing to talk before fighting, the players would have a chance to convince him they were on the side of right (or, for that matter, be convinced that he was). If, however, your players are inclined to shoot first, and think later, this is probably not a wise introduction.

The players could find Paladin in need of help and assistance, and therefore place him in their debt. Again, know your players. If your players are the sort who would be more inclined to kill him, and keep the high quality firearm, and any spare assets, this is probably not the best way.

However the introduction is handled, the earned relationship is perhaps best expressed as one of near equals. The players may owe Paladin a favor, or he may feel he owes them one, but neither should be a supplicant of the other. Even in the mentor relationship given as the first example, where there would be an in-game power imbalance (mitigated by any other backgrounds and merits), because the player has paid for the ability, there is less of a feel of supplication or GM fiat.

Finally, since Paladin is often away on business, the GM has a useful and credible means to keep him from being the eternal crutch and easy get-out-of-trouble card.

Tracking the wily intermediate freelancer

2004-07-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

So I entered this year's Origins con with the following stats:

Number of books contributed to: 8 (6 on the shelves, 2 to come this year)
Number of words written: 163,000 words
Number of books currently contributing to: 2
Number of words contracted: 60,000
Number of years in da bidness, 3

I have no idea whether this is good or bad. It just is. Last year I felt I had lots of work, and yet by June of this year I only had two jobs. I sent out emails to developers I knew and companies I'd like to work for. The developers I knew said, "Sorry, not hiring," and the companies just didn't bother to return emails.

Last year at Origins, I had a Clever Plan for meeting people and shmoozing and I felt It Could Not Fail. You see, I got into the bidness because I Knew Somebody. A good friend got me my first job, and put in good words for me, and (hopefully) I've carried it on from there. This dear friend decided he would introduce me around to people he knew at Origins to help me get me more work. Well, the people he introduced me to were so excited to see him and ask what he was up to, they barely spent enough time to shake my hand. One even mocked my only credits being from White Wolf, "Oh, everyone's written for them..."

This year I went in alone. I surveyed the dealer's room on the first day, trying to figure out who to talk to. Well, in my excitement of being at Origins (because, you know, I do go there to play games and shop as well), I did little more than look around. I was intimidated. I'll admit it. I had no idea how to shmooze.

Some industry professionals were holding talks this year, one in how to get into the freelancing bidness, another on how to keep freelanceing once you have some credits. I went to this second talk. These were all names I knew, Ken Hite, Spike Y. Jones, Matt Forbeck, but had never seen in Real Life. When it came time to ask questions, I asked mine about networking. I have my 8 books and my two publishers, and I've never missed a deadline, so how do I get more work? How do I schmooze Origins?

The answers were interesting. The best way, it seems, is to buy people beer at the Big Bar on 2 (the Hyatt bar that everyone hangs out at). Considering I know many more names in the industry than I know faces, I felt this was a dodgy idea, but I wrote it down. Other ideas, such as heading to Vegas to attend the GAMA show, seemed impossible for me at this stage in my life. "Honey, I'm heading to Vegas for a couple of days, you don't mind watching the toddler, do you?"

So I decided to hang out at the bar. I have no problem with that, honestly. After the talk, I managed to talk to Ken Hite and Spike Y. Jones. Ken told me that Steve Jackson games isn't hiring now, which I appreciated because it's better to get the news up front before you start your spiel. Spike was helpful, and I didn't as much schmooze him as just listen to his advice, talking about how the industry isn't terribly good right now. I saw Matt Forbeck later in the show, but never got the chance to talk to him.

The first night, I saw no one but women who put sticky glittery decals on their cleavage, drunken gamers and some of my friends.

The next day I opted to spend some time running around the booths playing Button Men, as exhibitors were open to being challeneged to games in order to collect stamps. While playing a guy at Pandahead, I noticed they were selling d20 books. One of the women offered me a groovy pandahead temp. tattoo, and while I was having my (incredibly long-lasting, as it's still here) tattoo applied, I asked if they hired freelancers. Ta da! They did! She seemed really interested, so I dropped off a card. Huzzah for me, I schmoozed!

I actually spent a lot of my time either gaming or in talks (superhero discussion, game design, etc), and found myself not spending a lot of time in the dealer's room making friends. The forays into the Bar on 2 still proved unfruitful, as I tried to find my "new friends" from Pandahead to buy them beer, but I never saw them. I never saw any of the guys from the panel, and most everyone else was only identifiable by their company shirts. Bar schmoozing was proving unfruitful.

Saturday was my last day in the dealer's room, as I had to head home early Sunday. I realized I had either procrastinated or been too busy, and suddenly I had 20 minutes to schmooze. I ran by Kenzer Co. to complain (politely) about never receiving a rejection letter for a piece I had sent their magazine last fall. They said they moved offices and it was probably lost. They gave me a calender and a card, inviting me to re-submit or just submit something new.

I ran by Eden and met a very nice man who was in the art dept. who promised to pass my card along to the design dept.

I asked at Fantasy Flight, but was referred to their website.

Only four. But I got information about Green Ronin and WotC, and plan on trying them too.

So, once I got home, I got to work doing the follow-up, "Great to meet you at Origins!" (or "sorry I didn't get a chance to meet you at origins" as the case may be) emails. So far:

Pandahead: Sent. No reply.
Eden: Sent. Art guy forwarded on my stuff. Design guy wrote back in a day and said "not hiring, but you can contribute to our Eden Studios Presents." I know little about this but will look into it.
WotC: Sent (today). No reply (obviously).
Fantasy Flight: Not Sent. They want a writing sample and I need time to decide what is the best thing to send them.
Green Ronin: Not Sent. Fantasy Flight is my priority at the moment.
Kenzer: Like Eden, this work will be on spec instead of contract, and I plan on writing another post discussing that...

I look at my list and wonder if I didn't do a good enough job looking around for different places to schmooze. The Bar thing never worked out. I guess this still separates me from the experts. People aren't seeking me out for work right now, so I have to work harder. Sad thing is, I only have two cons left this year, and one is not terribly gaming oriented (dragoncon). So I guess I have to work on the kick ass "hire me" letter.

Which leaves this post unresolved, but that's the life of an intermediate freelancer. You want more jobs, and even if your current developers like you enough to use you again, that's still only so much work. Branching out is necessary, and I'm still not sure if I've got the hang of it. I will update, good or bad, as the information comes.

Next post, discussions on working on spec... this has me thinking...

[Reposted from LJ] MNPR:RPG, By the Numbers (1 month)

2004-06-28T08:08:00.000-07:00

Still sick. Gah. Can barely think, so apologies if my math's screwy below. Oh, and no Origins Award for me; many congrats to all who won!

Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot: the Roleplaying Game was published on May 27, 2004. The "90-day sell cycle" will end on on August 27, 2004. This period is generally regarded as really the only open window for new game products; after those 3 months, sales decrease (unless the game is a really hot- or consistent-seller -- AKA "evergreen"). At least, that's my understanding of the industry.

However, I'd like to do a quick and dirty "one month of release" look.

MNPR:RPG sales for this 30-day period were:

RPGNow: 15 copies.
Complimentary/Review Copies: 17 copies.
Total copies in circulation: 32 copies.

So far as I can tell, out of the 17 comp/review copies sent, there's been 1 review published here.

Currently, MNPR:RPG is #29 on the RPGNow "Best Selling Non-D20 RPG This Month" list. Also, the game has no purchaser comments at RPGNow.

I'm going to pull the curtain aside below with the money details, in a public forum. Oooh, scary!

MNPR:RPG had a development cost of less than $20 (art supplies for my incredibly detailed stick-figure drawings), and has made that back already.

Overall gross has been $90. Minus $20 for art supplies means net profit is $70.

If I had written the game for the industry standard flat rate of 3 cents a word (MNPR:RPG being 31,692 words), I would have made around $950.76. Thus far, I've only made about 7% by doing it myself than if I would have done it for someone else. On the other hand, so long as MNPR:RPG sells copies, I will continue to accrue earnings from it.

Then again, I need to sell 147 copies (at $8 retail per copy, minus the 25% RPGNow percentage for distribution, I make $6 per copy sold) to equal that flat fee payment. I need to sell more than that to make the game a better deal for me than work-for-hire.

Maybe now, with the numbers out there for all to see, it will become clear why I pimp so hard, and why I really wish folks would pony up their reviews, make mentions of my games in their LJs and to those friends that they think'd be interested, and so forth.

Every single copy sold is vitally important to the bottom line of ASMP (i.e., me). The money is not the reason that I'm in this industry. However, if the money for self-publishing is less than what I can get for doing WFH, why should I self-publish?

About the only reasons I can see are: 1) controlling my own IPs; 2) being locked into the full revenue stream, no just a flat payment or small royalty; and 3) having a need to have something out in the public eye.

But I won't be quitting my day-job anythime soon.

[Reposted from my LJ] Some Quick DI Numbers

2004-06-23T07:18:00.000-07:00

We're coming up on the 5 months worth of release of Dead Inside, so I thought I'd kick out some quicky numbers. I'll probably do a more detailed breakdown next month at the 6 month mark; feel free to comment ion this post to let me know what you'd like to see in that analysis. (I'll also probably do a one-month breakdown for Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot: the Roleplaying Game then, too. Note that its sales are much, much lower than DI's.)

Okay. DI has sold 88 PDF copies and 29 PoD copies, for a total of 117 copies sold. (Additionally, there are 76 complimentary, review, and traded-for-swag copies [1] out there; this brings the total number of copies in circulation up to 193.)

[1] Around 25 of those copies were for playtesters and such. DI's had about 15 to 20 reviews published in various places -- blogs, websites, review sites, the City Paper (alas, not all are linked from the webpage, still collecting them), let's say 20. So, 76-45 = 31 copies were just gifts to cool folks from me, traded-for-swag, or sent to reviewers who never ponied up. Not that bad a spread, after all, as I stuck with PDFs for the comp copies in general.)

Some guesstimations on stuff through the distributor channel, to illustrate the infinitesimal size of the game industry:

Higher Tier Game Publisher average sales: 3000
Small Press non-d20 average sales: 500
DI sales (to date): 117
- DI's Percent of HTP sales: 3.9%
- DI's Percent of SMnd20 sales: 23.4%

This means that each individual purchaser of DI has a dramatic effect on the bottom line of Atomic Sock Monkey Press.

Three Little Words...

2004-06-23T04:25:00.000-07:00

A couple of nights ago, Bruce and I were having a conversation via email about the first of the WotC D&D Adventures for 3rd edition, The Sunless Citadel. I played it a few years ago, and found it to be just another boring dungeoncrawl (something I despise). Bruce, on the other hand, felt it was a lot of fun to GM, and both he and his players had all found it thoroughly enjoyable.

When I asked him why he enjoyed it so much, one of the things he replied with was that the NPC kobold, Meepo, was a hoot to play. I didn't even remember Meepo from when I played it, so it must have been something that my GM had glossed over. So I commented that it must have been one of those run-time, "you had to be there" kinda issues. Bruce felt that some of the potential for the fun was written up in Meepo's description, but even after I read it, I couldn't see it.

This exchange got me thinking: is there a good, easy way to describe an NPC in an adventure such that a GM can easily figure out what the writer was intending and can quickly bring the NPC to life at game time?

NPCs are a tricky thing for writers to create. They have to be complete enough for a GM to be able to run competently at game time, but also brief enough so not to drown the GM in information. Given this, how can an writer give the GM a solid idea about how to play an NPC, without having to resort to long-winded descriptions and directions which may not suit the GM?

This afternoon, I was reading through some notes for a writing course I bought a couple of months ago. One of the chapters was talking about how to create characters for stories as quickly as possible, while still making sure that you have a solid, three-dimensional character.

In the briefest form, it requires four things: a nickname for the character, and then three words that sum up the character's personality. With the right keywords, someone can easily get a solid idea about what the character is like.

The character's nickname is important because most of us often get labelled with nicknames by our friends (or sometimes rivals) that sum us up pretty well. Quite often they sum up what we look like, or what one of our most distinctive habits is. To give you an example, I used to be known as "Mumbles" (because it's something I happen to do a lot), while another one of my friends was known as "Lurgi", because he tended to get sick all the time.

If you saw an NPC described with a nickname of "Beanpole" or "Scarface", you'd already have a pretty good idea about what he or she looked like. If the nickname was "Bubbles", you'd could take a reasonable guess at what their personality was.

Now, characters's personalities can usually divided into five categories: Really Good, Good, Normal, Bad and Really Bad. Of these five, both Really Good and Really Bad are normally really boring, as people can't relate to them (although sometimes they can be useful as charicatures in RPGs sessions, particularly in pulpy games).

The different categories determine what sort of keywords you choose to sum up your character:

Category	Traits
Really Good	2 Positives and 1 Neutral
Good	2 Positives and 1 Negative
Neutral	1 Positive, 1 Neutral and 1 Negative
Bad	2 Negatives and 1 Positive
Really Bad	2 Negativesand 1 Neutral

A trait is basically a keyword - either a noun or adjective - that can some up a major aspect of the character's personality. Traits, as mentioned in the table above, can be divided into Positive, Neutral and Negatives.

Positive Traits are those that benefit not only the owner of the trait, but also those around them. Some examples might be "altruistic", "jovial" or "caring".

Negative Traits are ones that are normally considered to be disagreeable or not desirable (for example, "violent" or "sulky").

Neutral Traits are — as one might expect — traits that could go either way depending on the circumstances. In some cases, they might actually be an advantage, while in others, they could be a pain in the butt; often, they are considered somewhat controversial. "Impatience" is something that falls into this category, because an impatient person might not be willing to accept the status quo and would take action when needed. On the other hand, they can also stuff things up by going off half-cocked.

To give you a few examples:
Bubbles: Good Character; Happy (positive), Friendly (positive), Shallow (negative)
Stinky: Neutral Character; Hard-working (postive), Talkative (neutral), Overindulgent (negative)
Knuckles: Bad Character; Brutal (negative), Abusive (negative), Loyal (positive)

Why do good characters have negative traits and why do bad characters have positive traits? Basicalyl, it's all about character weaknesses. Nobody is good or bad all the time. Most of us have aspects to our personalities that let us down. Good people have negative aspects that manifests as character flaws that can get them into trouble. Bad people have a positive trait that can sometimes be used as a weakness by the PCs to gain some advantage over them at a crucial part of the story. Normal characters have a mixture, as one might expect.

How is this useful? Well, for a start, it's a very quick process. It doesn't take much to come up with a nickname for a character, and then three keywords to sum up their personality. If a GM had lists of traits split up into appropriate classes (something that I'll admit that I don't have right now, but think wouldn't be too hard to come up with), a GM could put together an NPC's basics in a few seconds while the players were arguing about something else.

The other real benefit for both writers and GMs is that even though the technique is brief, it provides a powerful way of describing a character in such a way that both can (hopefully) have a solid picture of how that NPC should be portrayed.

The technique is also system independant and could be used for any gaming system. Stats for the NPC could be created as needed, but this technique can also provide personalities for those NPCs that the PCs may interact with only briefly (for examples, secretaries or shop-assistants).

2004-06-20T15:31:00.000-07:00

So Bruce asked me to write about what it’s like to do art for a game—how you get selected, and how much time you get, and what sort of revisions are necessary, and so forth. And this is an interesting subject, and since I’m a freelance illustrator, one of the few elements of gaming that I can speak with relative authority with.

Caveat: This is one woman’s experience, as a freelancer. Working in-house is different, other people’s experiences are different, I work mostly with small presses, so don’t take it as set in stone.

To start at the beginning, you and the art director get in touch somehow. Sometimes I’ve sent submissions and query letters, sometimes they’ve seen my work online and think my style would fit something they’ve got. There are books written on this process, so we won’t dwell on it at the length we could. But at some point the art director sends you an e-mail (or more rarely calls) and says “Hey, got some work for you.”

And I say “Sure, send me the details.”

At this point, you may have noticed that I’ve already skipped the “how you get selected” part, and it’s largely because I don’t know. Sometimes the art director tells you that they love your stuff, or where they saw it, or that your style is just what they need, sometimes they don’t. (My favorite reason so far has been “You seem willing to draw un-politically correct things, and I’m having a hard time finding people who will do scantily clad women in fur boots.” I cannot express the joy that reason gave me.)

The time you get varies a LOT. A month seems to be the standard, but it can vary wildly, between “However many of these you can get done in six weeks,” and, on one memorable occasion, “My artist bailed, you’re the only person I know who can do this, can you get me a cover in two days?” Usually, however, you get around a month to the deadline.

I treat this deadline as if it were the commandment of my god, and I try to leave a week buffer for revisions. If they’re slow on revisions in the last week, it can occasionally straggle longer, but I do everything possible on my end to get the art in on time because most of the art directors I’ve worked with would rather have serviceable work by deadline than a masterpiece two weeks late. This is the other part of how you get selected—get a rep for making deadlines and being easy to work with and you get repeat business, and a lot of help-my-other-artist-flaked business too, which, while hectic, tends to make you a friend for life. That’s commercial art for you—less muse, more deadline.

The actual art is simple enough. The director sends me an idea and the size. I.E. “We need X number of quarter page color illos, 4 x 5. #1 is a Cthonian Chickenslayer. We were thinking maybe an attractive woman in fur boots with a string of dead scaly chickens hanging from her arm. #2 is a Wibbling Gribble, a type of hairy monster found in canyons that looks something like a fuzzy barracuda with hooves. #3…” Very occasionally, they will just send the text description for the monster/character/whatever, but depending on the AD, you’ll get a description of the image they want, and it will be brief.

I do a set of rough composition sketches--basically glorified stick figures--and send them back. They approve them or ask for some tweaks, I tweak and refine into a sketch that has, like, faces and things. On a cover, there’s generally more back and forth, and I’ll do multiple versions, on interior illos not so much. After awhile you get a feel for the AD and you may skip various steps. In the end, I do a color, painted version, they approve or ask for tweaks, and when it’s all done, I pop it up on my server and all is right with the world.

Then, ideally, they pay me.

Now, you might have noticed that at no point in that did I read anything about the game, play the game, or have a copy of the game-so-far in my free hand. At most, I might have seen the description of the monsters, and even that’s pretty rare. Generally all I know about a game at the outset is the one line summary they send me in the first contact, which is usually “We’re doing a sourcebook on the Yakuza,” or “This is a cyberpunk game, etc.” Now and again I’ll get a chunk of flavor text suitable for back covers. Generally, however, the total amount of correspondence for any given painting is significantly less than the length of this post.

This isn’t always the case. Occasionally, people will send me chunks of sourcebook, and say “come up with some things to illustrate from here.” This does happen, but fairly rarely in my experience—three times that I can think of in seven years. It’s far more likely that I’ll know practically nothing about a game while I’m illustrating it. I may find out more in the course of illustrating by asking questions about the setting—i.e. “Hey, can I throw some of X in here, or will that not fit the setting?”—and more tends to come out in the discussion, but a fair amount of time, if it’s not a big, established company with a set milieu, the first time I’ll learn a lot about the setting will be when I get my contributor copy.

Now, it may seem like I’m complaining about the lack of info, and this is really not the case. Much of what’s written for games is not much use to an artist—I need to know what the critter looks like, and the environment to show it in, not the blow-by-blow history of how it evolved and who uses it for what religious rituals. I generally don’t need the life story of a character, and the odds are pretty good that I won’t read it—my time’s usually pretty short, and I’d rather get his hair and eye color. Stats, of course, are totally useless for my purposes—you can’t paint Con 14, Dex 12. If it cannot be directly translated into visuals, it’s just not going to do me that much good, and so a lot of art directors quite rightly don’t bother with them, and just say “Look, we want a critter that looks like this, in a scene like this,” and we go to it. But there are downsides—if I don’t know that your monster snatches bunnies out of the air, I can’t suggest or paint the interesting and dynamic painting that’d be, and you’re gonna get the critter in standard D&D portrait pose.

So, that’s the art end, at least in my experience—long and rambly though it was!--and hopefully, for all the writers out there, this may explain a few things. And if anybody has questions about things I didn’t address, or any chunk of the process that we glossed over and that you want exhaustive detail on, or visual examples of the various stages of a painting, just say the word, and I can fling the dubious benefit of my experience at it!

Character: Level-Up vs. Play-As-You-Are

2004-06-20T15:21:00.000-07:00

So, I've been thinking of what the impact of two variants in character development are on the gameplay, underlying rules, and hobby in general. I'm calling these two variants Level-Up (LU) and Play-As-You-Are (PAYA).

The majority of RPGs are LU games (starting with D&D and working up), though many -- especially superhero games -- are PAYA. A number (GURPS, some Storyteller games, etc.) fall between the two -- let's call them COMBO.

In LU, the character starts weak, but over time becomes more and more powerful.
In PAYA, the character starts powerful, and remains that way.

Now, what does this mean for gameplay?
In LU, beginning PCs are rather incompetent, with the future badassery held out as a carrot lure. Beginning characters get killed by normal rats, asthmatic kobolds, and street-sweeper droids. They fail at skills they are supposedly highly-trained at. They have limited mojo (spells, psi power, drama points, superpowers). In a word, they are lame.

In PAYA, PCs start tough and stay tough, but there's no real future joy-joy to look forward to except for minor tweaks and mild improvement. But that's cool, a PC hits the ground running, can survive small threats, kick a moderate amount of ass, and succeed at what they try most of the time.

There are always rules. . .
In LU, there's a bunch of rules that don't come into play early in a PC's career, mostly involving their special, developing mojo. This is good, as there's not a lot for the player to know starting out, and the learning curve is spread out over the life of the character: as a player learns how the rules system works, he sees how his character takes advantage of it. Additionally, LU characters don't require a high-detail concept, and the personality develops as one plays.

In PAYA, the PC is thrown into the middle of things, and must needs instantly learn everything about the rules system, at least those bits need for chargen or where his competencies come into play. This can be tough on a newbie, and cause information overload. It's also a lot of work to build a character (from a point-build standpoint) and may require the player having a character concept in mind -- which sucks for a newbie, becuase they're not sure what all this gaming stuff is about. They're put on the spot to be creative in a field they don't understand.

What does this mean?
Here's hypothesis A: The LU concept keeps a large number of newbies from getting into gaming because the beginning character sucks. Those that do, however, really sync up with the "get stronger as you go" concept, and enjoy the LU process.

Here's hypothesis B: The PAYA concept keeps a large number of newbies from getting into gaming because there's too much for the beginning player to keep track of. However, those that manage it, enjoy the ability to be cool.

Here's hypothesis C: Most COMBO games that split the difference between LU focus on the wrong combination of stuff: the concept and info-heavy aspects of PAYA chargen, and the elimination of cool power-ups later in a character's career.

And finally, hypothesis D: To maximize newbie interest in gaming, the fusion of LU and PAYA games should be the reverse of COMBO games; let's call this mixture COMBO-2. A COMBO-2 game would include:
1. Minimal amount of basic rules to know to play; advanced rules are spread over the future life of the character. This will reduce the number of newbies getting turned off.

2. Minimal amount of character concept to pre-exist before chargen; possibly including a "roll randomly" or "select a" from a limited but evocative list of character classes/packages. This will speed the start of play, and reduce the number of newbies quitting before they start.

3. PC should be competent -- if not greatly more competent than an average person under the system, at least slightly more competent -- from the get-go. This will improve the numbers of newbies who come back to the table for another go.

4. PCs should have the ability to constantly revist chargen to show developments in personality, if desired. This empowers the player and GM to adjust the character to fit what's important in play and in the campaign; the ability to refine may be able to stand in for a constant, slow improvement via levlling. The character gets better in mild ways as the character gets more defined. This is the build-point for stunts and tweaks.

5. PCs should have the ability to "power-up" substantially -- not simply tweaks and stunts off of their existing powers, but a noticeable jump. (Compare Luke Skywalker from SW to ESB to RotJ.) This will give players something to look forward to, which will help them come back to the game regularly.

What say you?

CU

Behaviour Maps

2004-06-13T19:20:00.000-07:00

One of the common misconceptions about roleplaying games is that it is possible for a gamemaster to develop a storyline for a game session a priori. People often think this because they are used to seeing stories told to them in books and films and thinking that the sequence of events that the characters experience – the story – can be mapped out. Unfortunately in an RPG session, the players have a choice over the direction the plot follows and it is remarkably easy to move beyond the series of events that the GM has planned. This forces the GM to try to make the players stick to the unseen script or to throw the whole pre-planned storyline out completely. So if the storyline of the game isn't something that appears until after the game has been played, what tools can the GM use to help guide selection of events that the characters will experience and still the flow of events coherent?

In his book Fuzzy Thinking, Bart Kosko presents the idea of a fuzzy cognitive map. It's a directed graph, where the nodes in the graph represent conditions within a system and the directed lines between the nodes represent a causality link. The node at the source end of the line is said to directly cause a change in the node at the target end of the line. Normally, each of these lines is annotated with either a "+" or a "-" sign, denoting whether the source node causes either an increase or a decrease in the target node.

Figure 1: Fuzzy Cognitive map from Fuzzy Thinking by Bart Kosko

One of the examples Kosko provides in Fuzzy Thinking deals with cocaine sales and its flow on-effects (see Figure 1). Kosko and one of his colleagues wanted to test whether the political policy being put forward at the time would have any effect on the war on drugs. They developed this fuzzy cognitive map and ran it through a computer program that would calculate the rise and fall of each node's value over time, given the changes in the rest of the system. In the book, Kosko starts by increasing demand for cocaine, simulated by increasing the value in the "Drug Usage" node. Because of the directed links between nodes – which represent causality links between the concepts the nodes represent – this causes an increase in the "Cocaine Price" node, which in turn increases the values in the "Cartels" node and the "Street Gangs" node, while actually decreasing the value in the "Drug Usage" node. The increase in the "Cartels" and "Street Gangs" nodes increases the "Drug Availability", which in turn increases "Drug Usage" and "American Police Interdiction" (amongst other things).

Around the time I was working on the early ideas for the communities chapter of the Gamma World Player's Handbook, James Maliszewski posted an entry on the late Rock Scissors Blog, dealing with the need for rules governing melodrama in games. For some reason, this got me thinking about Kosko's fuzzy cognitive maps and ways they could be used in gaming as a GM tool. I found the idea of one concept creating a causal increase or decrease in another to potentially have useful ramifications for a GM running a free-flowing game. This led to the development of the Community Behaviour Map, which first appeared in the Gamma World Player's Handbook and later in the Advanced Player's Guide, both from Sword and Sorcery Studios.

Put simply, a Behaviour Map tries to encapsulate likely responses to a given event by having nodes which represent specific conditions or behaviours. The causal links to other nodes, which – as in the fuzzy cognitive map – can either be causal increase or causal decrease depending on the situation. It's important to realise that a "+" sign on a link means that if the effect in the source node increases, then the effect in the target node will likewise increase. Similarly, if the effect in the source node decreases, then the effect in the target node will also decrease. Conversely, if the link has a "-", an increase in the source node effect will cause a decrease in the target node effect, while a decrease in the source node will result in an increase in the target.

To use the behaviour map, a GM would determine which node a particular event is related to. She would then follow the causal links and think up ideas that match either the increase or decrease in the node at the other end of the link, depending on the link's sign. These events would then be presented to the player(s) as the consequences of their actions. For those who subscribe to the use of "bangs" (as first presented in Ron Edward's Sorcerer RPG), the subsequent events be used to provide the bangs for the character or characters involved. Once the character responds to the secondary event, subsequent events will flow on from there as described by the behaviour map.

Figure 2: Drug Usage Behaviour Map example

For example, Figure 2 describes a very simple behaviour map dealing with the results of a character taking drugs (to follow on from Kosko's example in Figrue 1). Let's say that when the game begins, the character in question is a lawyer, who is happily married, has good relationships with his friends and employer and is reasonably well off financially.

Now, as an opening event, the character is at a party and is convinced to take a few hits of cocaine by a friend. This event plays into the "Drug Usage" node. After the party, this guy goes home to his wife, and as he comes down off the hit, he starts getting paranoid. He acts strange around his wife, who gets upset with him. (Drug Usage decreases Good Relationships). His wife may continue to hound him for a couple of days, putting more pressure on him, so he decides to get another hit of cocaine, so he can feel good (a decrease in "Good Relationships" increases "Drug Usage"). But the second hit starts to make this guy addicted to cocaine, which increases his involvement with crime ("Drug Usage" increases "Crime Involvement" and "Addiction") but it also costs money (increased "Drug Usage" decreases "Finances"). The additional spending and evidence of drug use both continue to put more pressure on this marriage. And the game can continue to play out from there.

Choosing the nodes in the Behaviour Map takes some trial and error. I've discovered that it's best to have the nodes represent something "concrete", such as "Drug Usage" or "Good Relationships" rather than describing an action on those concepts. In my original draft of Figure 2, I had "Pressure on Relationships" rather than "Good Relationships". However, I replaced the node description when I realised that I couldn't model, for example, a friend taking the character aside and trying to get him to give up the drugs; an increase in the "Good Relationships" node should result in a decrease in drug usage.

Some nodes should also work in opposition to others. There should always be a mixture of "+" and "-" signs on the causal links. If you start to find that when you're creating a Behaviour Map and all your links have one sign, that's usually an indicator that you may have at least one of your node concepts wrong. You should revise it so that you can get the conflict back into the map. After all, it's conflict that drives a good story along.

Behaviour Maps are not intended to be used to the exclusion of all other GMing tools. They do not, for example, provide any indication of where a particular character – either player character or GM character – fits into the storyline. Instead, they can be used in conjunction with other GMing tools such as relationship maps or Coterie diagrams to assist the GM in coming up with events at game time. They are merely a guide to help provide inspiration, rather than being something to constrain the free-flowing nature of the story as it develops in play.

Drive Thru RPG, Part 2: Drive Thru RPG in Particular

2004-06-13T15:29:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, I tried to lay some general groundwork. Obviously there's disagreement about the theoretical issues, and I knew I wasn't going win over all hearts and minds. So I'm going to move on now and write about my experiences buying and using some products from Drive Thru RPG.

The Drive Thru RPG Website

"Unappealing" seems a good summary of my reaction. It's got the sort of background that you used to see a lot on web pages, against which text would be completely illegible and which makes anti-aliased graphics like drop shadows in logos look bad. Text is all in cells with yellow backgrounds and thin black tops containing text in white. The front page won't display in my preferred browser width of about 700-800 pixels (preferred because it lets me see other things going on behind it); many but not all interior pages do fit. The brick background isn't present in pages listing information for a single product, and they're much more legible (and faster-scrolling) because of it. The whole site is fairly sluggish; how much of that is because of unexpectedly heavy load, I couldn't say, but it has the general ambience of less than optimized design.

It's also remarkably like the Chaosium site. A friend tells me a standard e-commerce package makes it easy to produce that look. Pity. I would much prefer something like that of Shadowrun (for a fancy style) or Holistic Design (for a simple one).

Fortunately, a lot of information is available on the front page, including the most recent additions and a list of the contributing publishers, so it's not hard to get to any particular product.

In Praise of Customer Service

I'm not sure I've ever gotten better customer service from the tech support at a website. Wow. I ran into a big problem early on, and the guy who took my mail went far beyond the call of duty in the speed and thoroughness of his answer. Just amazing, fully solving a problem that he could have dismissed and been entirely within his rights. From everything I've read online, too, the folks there have remained gracious and prompt even in the face of sometimes ghastly provocation. this is the sort of service you can't really buy - it takes people with a whole lot of clues and good attitude, and I sure hope they get properly appreciated. Just amazing.

Buying and Using

This is the nitty gritty. What's it like to buy and use something from Drive Thru?

Buying from Drive Thru is a lot like buying from just about any online vendor. They take enough information to bill you and (presumably) to contact you if there's a problem. You can pay either by credit card or PayPal; I've done both without problem. They allow multiple credit cards and billing info to be associated with a single account. When you complete a purchase, you get a page with download links for each product.

Now, I set up Acrobat 6 before doing my first downloads. Within Acrobat 6 there's a menu command to activate it as a reader for products with DRM restrictions. I have an existing account with Adobe, since I buy from their website from time to time, but on a whim I set up a new account for this purpose. It has only my e-mail address and a password - no personal contact info, no billing info, no nothing else. The activation process involves going to their web site to set up the account, then downloading some little stub of data that does something in the background and generates a "you've been activated" message when it's done. You need to do this once for each machine you propose to use Drive Thru products on. I am, to put it mildly, not a computer guru, but I followed instructions about tracking incoming and outgoing packets on my computer, and I established that there's no contact made with Adobe upon opening or using Drive Thru files once they're downloaded - the activation info is stored on the machine itself.

That done, I downloaded from Drive Thru. Each transfer is a two-step deal: another small stub of data comes down, and it fires up Acrobat and does the transfer of the actual product from within it. Drive Thru's system is not 100% reliable at detecting the presence of a suitable reader application, but gives you the option of downloading anyway. The downloading happens as a single multi-part action; I don't know if you could save the stub and get the file later, and haven't actually been motivated to try.

Reading and printing go exactly as with any other PDF. I'm having some trouble setting new bookmarks, but then at the moment I'm using my Frankenstein backup machine; I'll check that on the new one once it's back from the shop. I don't have any problem setting or searching for text in notes. Highlighting also works fine.

I've mentioned this before, I think, but Acrobat 6's search options are wonderful. If I were developing an active line with a lot of releases to refer to, I would try to insist that the line be released in this format so that I could let Acrobat find all the necessary references for me. It's just a wonderful convenience. It'd be really handy for some kinds of GMing, too.

Copying and pasting worked pretty well. I didn't realize that the line breaks would be hard ones, so that I needed to do some manual reformatting on chunks to share with friends. (I was doing this to explain why Spellslinger is so cool that they must go buy it and that I must run it. Circumstances interfered with yesterday's planned game, but run it I will! End of plug.) I also pinned down precisely what the copying restrictions mean, and will cover those in the round-up after this section.

Backing up the files is easy. You can do it in Acrobat or outside it, and stick stuff on external hard drives, mac.com's iDisks, CD-ROMs, etc etc. You can nuke a file off the computer and restore it from backup and you will not have to reauthenticate it. I haven't tried nuking all of the Acrobat reader and reinstalling it; I'm assuming that would call for re-validation (more on that in a moment, too). You can also take CD-ROMs and such over to other machines and load them up. If there's a validated reader on that machine, up they come. If not, you get a prompt to go do something about it. It is not necessary to be online while reading, or indeed at all once the file's downloaded to any of your validated machines.

So in practical terms it's pretty much like having any other PDF once you've gone through the hoop once per machine.

Restrictions

But what does this scheme keep you from doing? Well, here's what I've found. I vouch for all of this from my own experience except the bit about Windows, which I'm not in a position to test myself, but it comes from a source that gave me information I could and did verify in part.

Number of Machines: There is indeed a limit of six machines. I don't have six computers, so I enlisted the help of trusted friends and gave them the log-in information. (The e-mail address at Adobe needs to match what you give Drive Thru RPG, apparently, but otherwise you're at liberty to tell Adobe something or nothing at all else.) Sure enough, after six machines have been validated, you get cryptic error messages.

Un-Validating Machines: Adobe's own FAQ says you can't. A post at Drive Thru says you can, by calling an Adobe customer service line. Drive Thru is correct. I did it. I gave my name, e-mail address, and password to a guy there, indicated which machine I wanted deactivated, and it was deactivated in a few minutes. This ought to be automated.

Copying Text: I'm told that some companies have already turned off this restriction, but it's present in the files I have, and apparently in most of what's for sale at Drive Thru. The language of the FAQ and other advice is very unclear, I think, but I've tested it enough to feel confident in saying the following. You can copy up to 10 pages' worth of material in a 10-day period. Any fraction of a page counts as a page for this purpose. So you could copy 10 snippets of a page or less each, or 2 snippets of 1.01-2 pages each, and so forth and so on. Yes, the timer does accurately reset at the end of ten days; no, I haven't tried fooling with the system clock to see if that works. Oh, and the text tool naturally copies just text (with basic formatting), but screen shots work for those times you might want to show art, maps, etc. to players.

Printing: On local machines, no restrictions at all. If you want to take it to a print bureau or something, you'll want to see Jeff Mackintosh's explanation for Windows and OSX machines. I got as far as verifying that I could indeed make the PostScript dump. Beyond that? Dunno. I don't buy PDFs to print out at print bureaus, so I can't say.

Thoughts and Comments

There are some - a lot of - questions to which there's no universally right answer. What matters is that you know what you want and do what's satisfying for you, while allowing a little bit of room for experimenting from time to time.

One of those questions is how much longevity of entertainment goods matters to you. Among my own close friends, I know that attitudes span the gamut from "if I ever enjoyed it or think I ever might, it must be preserved as close to intact as possible" to "once I've enjoyed it or realized I won't, out it goes right away", with all kinds of shades, changes of emphasis depending on the kind of good, and so on. Nor do I think any of my friends are being nimrods about it - each one has good reasons for acting the way they do and seems to be enjoying the results of their preferences. So that's all good.

There are certainly risks to e-books, particularly with this sort of DRM scheme, that there aren't to print books. You may lose print books to fire, flood, and many other disasters, but the collapse of the publisher won't affect you. Adobe has been around a good long while in software terms, but they could go out of business, and even if they stay around they could decide not to support the e-book venture anymore. That would leave you with your existing registered machines fine until you upgrade the OS, lose a hard drive, whatever. For that matter, you can have happen what I did: make a purchase, and then have the computer die that night before your regular backup. It's important to back up purchases promptly if you're at all accident-prone like I seem to be this year.

Given routine attrition and happenstance, I think it's reasonable to expect that files from Drive Thru RPG will only last as usable data for a few years, before something corrupts the data or keeps you from getting at it. The question is, is this a problem? And the answer is, it depends.

For me, it's not a problem. I've been selling, giving away, and throwing out old game books that I have no sensible expectation of ever using because I value an uncluttered apartment more than I used to, along with the removal of occasions for disappointment and regret. I'm quite happy to buy some of them as e-books, which I can read when I want to but can store in ways that don't add clutter. The CD-ROM backups go into the same carry cases as my other CD-ROMs, and I have a goodly quantity of hard drive space for active use.

Likewise with the DRM restrictions. I don't have six computers, and I'm not primarily interested in PDFs as things to print out, so I have no interest in whether it's economical to print them out. I want them to read and mark up on my computer, since I'm comfortable reading on-screen. I like OSX's anti-aliasing and I spend a lot of time at my computer, and at this point all my gaming is online, so having my books right on my machine lets me play more tidily. Any of those things could be different for you, and you'd be perfectly justified in deciding that Drive Thru's offerings are less valuable to you as a result.

In the midst of a generally unproductive forum argument, someone whose post I can't now find offered up the idea that Drive Thru's offerings may make more sense when thought of as software than as books. I like that. If I buy a utility program for $5-20, I'm usually not heartbroken if it stops working a major system update or few down the road. There are apps I try out, like, buy, and then end up not using much, and I'm not heartbroken about that, either - the ones I use a lot make up the difference in my sense of satisfaction. One Weatherpop covers several DragThings, to grab some examples from my own experiences.

Well, same deal here. I'm paying 50-70% of cover price for something that lacks books' independence and durability, but is more searchable and portable. It's not a full replacement for a print book; it's a digital artifact with its own strengths and weaknesses. If you're out to get something that will act just like a book, you're better off buying the book, just as it's not making best use of a word processor to confine yourself to perfect emulation of a physical typewriter. I think that e-book advocates pushing the "it's just like a print book" line are missing the point, which is precisely that e-books are not like print books.

Summary

For me at this point, it's a good deal. I wish that the Drive Thru site looked better and loaded faster, and I would like to see a simple comprehensive FAQ with no blivets or lacunae, but even so, I'm a happy customer and I have no problem recommending the site to people interested in e-book versions of rolegaming books.

Drive Thru RPG, Part 1: Digital Rights Management in General

2004-06-11T02:16:00.000-07:00

Drive Thru RPG is a new service in the roleplaying game world, with several publishers selling past and present books in PDF form. Participants include currently prominent companies like White Wolf and Eden down to obscure and nearly-dead ventures like Fantasy Games Unlimited. There has been, to put it mildly, some controversy about it. I am a happy customer, and wish to offer my assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the operation. This was originally going to be one very long post, but I came to my senses and realized that it made more sense as two separate posts. this one is about the general concept of copy protection, and the next one will be about my experiences with Drive Thru.

Digital Rights Management and Piracy: Some Basics

It's very easy to copy electronic works, and to move them around. Bits are pliable that way. The problem for would-be sellers of electronic works is that this applies just as much to copying and distribution that may cost them sales as to the transactions they want to support.

The word "may" in the previous sentence is crucial. The most important thing to know about possibly illegitimate copying and distribution is that we collectively don't know much about it. A great many claims and counter-claims fill the ether, and gradually there's some accumulating actual data, but even so, there's a lot more speculation than anything else. I'm going to get anecdotal here.

In college I knew some guys who are very active in the BBS-connected computer game pirating scene of the time. That was for games running on the Apple II and Commodore, of course. The thing that struck me early on was that the hard-core guys had far more games than they could ever possibly play, and indeed they didn't even really know much about a lot of the games they had. They actively disliked many of the ones they did know something about. Low-level pirates would seek out copies of games they wanted to play, but for the high-level guys, I realized in conversations with them, the size and timeliness of the collection itself was the point. The games were the units of currency in their transactions, rather than the objects of pursuit in themselves.

Over the years, I've crossed paths with other pirate communities, most recently some of the traders in illicit copies of roleplaying games, and I see the same dynamic at work. They're not collecting games to play, they're collecting games for the sake of their collections. It's very much the same dynamic as any collecting community, really, except that there's the added frisson of doing something that the original supplier of the goods doesn't want you to do. That's the major distinguishing factor, really: an e-book (or computer game, or whatever) trader who tries adding significant quantities of authorized freebies to their stock comes in for substantial scorn. The goods must come with the frisson to count for scoring.

Obviously there's no real way to stop people who have that attitude and any degree of determination. They interpret any fresh barrier as a challenge. They define themselves by an adversarial relationship, and nothing the designated adversary can do can resolve it. Offer more stuff for free? That'd be a surrender. Sell stuff that can be easily swiped? Then they'll swipe, after purchases with (in many cases) fraudulent credit card information. Develop protection schemes harder to break? They'll get to work on new tools.

The thing is that these hard-core folks are few. They generate a whole lot of traffic, but...well, think about how much volume a few folks ranting on street corners can generate compared to all the surrounding conversations, but how unrepresentative they're likely to be. You may need to plan a community to take the fact of the ranters into account, but you musn't think that they're significant or indicative except as a nuisance.

Beyond the folks who define themselves as adversaries, there are a lot of folks who have nothing against buying things and are quite happy to support the creators and publishers of work they like, but who nonetheless share some things around in ways that sellers might not prefer. There are some sellers who feel that any such sharing that doesn't result in some income for them is a lost sale, but I think that's ridiculous. I do a fair amount of sharing around myself, and what I find is that people do in fact tend to buy what they end up using. One of the major roles for the unauthorized share is the opportunity to thoroughly preview a work, in more detail than online snippets or in-store browsing can provide. If the work proves neat, it gets bought. If not, it generally ends up tossed. A sharing that doesn't lead to a sale is often the remote equivalent of having a friend in your living room borrow a book, read it, and decide not to buy.

I'm sure that some sharing does in fact take the place of sales. But then some sharing leads to the discovery that, hey, this is cooler than the recipient thought, and generates unexpected sales. At least some data suggests that this is true for music, that file sharing ends up not mattering at all most of the time and occasionally boosts sales. I suspect but cannot prove that it's true for e-books as well, and I'm not asking readers to trust my intuitions just 'coz I'm a cool guy.

Whether I'm right or not, as I understand it, the goal of most copy-protection schemes is to deter casual sharing. The principle is a familiar one: law enforcement, personal security, and a lot of things are all aimed not so much at making hard-core violators go away as at not providing tempting targets. Motivate the would-be violator go somewhere else. The tricky part for the designers of such a scheme is to make it do that without being too much of a nuisance to actual paying customers, and people likely to be customers if not turned off.

Is Digital Rights Management Immoral or Anti-Capitalist?

I've seen both these charges made in the last week, and I'd like to answer both very simply: No.

But while one-word answers are fun, they often need more context.

First, let me lay out the terms of sale I prefer. I'm in favor of simple outright sale whenever possible: you buy it, and it's yours to sell to someone else, give away, recycle, destroy, whatever. Once the transaction is concluded, the good becomes basically invisible to the seller, gone out into the world and not to be seen again except under exceptional circumstances like recalls. I like my stuff to be, well, mine.

On the other hand, the rhetoric I usually espouse about the merits of free markets boil down to the idea that if the participants are satisfied and it doesn't impose harm on others, then it's okay (again, except under really strange conditions). My wanting to buy a thing a certain way does not create an entitlement that anyone else sell it to me that way or indeed at all. That means that your engaging in a purchase I wish you wouldn't, because it encourages more sales on terms I disapprove of, is not harm of the sort the law should step in and put a stop to. It's just part of living in a society in which we are not guaranteed the fulfillment of our desires.

I don't see any conceptual necessity that all sales be the sort of simple purchase I prefer. Rental is of course a well-known conceptual category, and related categories like checking out books (and other stuff) from lending libraries. In principle, the idea of sale with conditions is not terribly remarkable. The terms may be undesirable, but there is nothing innately antithetical to morality or the functioning of a healthy free market in the existence of terms beyond simple sale. Insisting otherwise is giving too much authority to a set of preferences simply because they are our own. But part of the primary point of marketplaces is that more than one designated set of preferences can be catered to.

For me it's a practical issue: are these terms reasonable? Do they interfere with my using the goods the way I want to? Do they give more power to the seller than I feel comfortable with? What are the risks of failure on the seller's end complicating things for me? I'll address these in part 2, when I describe just what Drive Thru actually does.

Sounding off

2004-06-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

In a comment at the bottom of my last post, Meeks asked if the contributors could post up a brief description of where we sit in relation the gaming world.

Well, speaking for myself, my name's Geoff Skellams, and I'm an Australian freelance RPG author. I've had stuff published by (the deceased) Dynasty Presentations, Polyhedron, Microsoft, Fast Forward, Sword and Sorcery and White Wolf. I guess you could say my main claim to fame recently is being the author of the community system that appears in the Gamma World Player's Handbook and the Advanced Player's Guide.

I'm also one of the founding editors of the DEMONGROUND modern horror/conspiracy ezine.

Whether all of that makes my ramblings worth paying attention to I leave as an exercise for the reader :)

In search of consistently good gaming

2004-06-01T21:55:00.000-07:00

One thing that I have been searching for over the past few years is a set of tools to provide me with consistently good gaming. I've found a few bits here and there that have helped, particularly things such as Chris Kubasik's excellent Interactive Toolkit series.

But despite the appearance of things like Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering, I haven't really come across a good reference for helping someone like me, with a preference to gaming that is more like interactive fiction writing.

I have attempted, in the past, to look at place like the Forge, which apparently has some discussion about such things. However (at the risk of inciting another anti-Forge riot, which I assure you is not my intention), I have trouble with the language used (as in, it confuses the hell out of me) and find that if the information that I am looking for is on the site, it's so buried in the threads on the board that I cannot find what I want (especially if I don't know the words used to describe the concepts).

Having seen some of the recent threads on RPGnet about kickers and bangs, I believe that some of the ideas I'm looking for may be contained in some of the games that Forge members have produced. Unfortunately, this doesn't help me, mainly because such games are difficult to find in Australia, and I'm not particularly inclined to buy a game simply because of what may only amount to a couple of paragraphs of GM advice.

So, what I would like to do is find a website that has a collection of essays on how to improve your gaming, written in simple English, and preferably with examples. Alternatively, if there isn't one, then help create one, so that others who are in the same boat as me may perhaps find answers to some of the questions they have.

Does such a site exist anywhere? If it doesn't, is it worthwhile investing time to write up some simple-to-understand pieces that may help gamers-at-large have more fulfilling gaming experiences?

Commonplaces: David Cronenberg on Sources

2004-05-29T23:23:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Ringwood Ragefuck, this excerpt from Inner View: Filmmakers in Conversation:

Q: Your works from Stereo in 1969 to Videodrome in 1983, with the small exception of Fast Company, were all from your original screenplays. But since Videodrome, all four films have been collaborations and adaptations, no original screenplays, and your next will be based on the play "M. Butterfly." Do you make any sense of this?

Cronenberg: Not really. I can't find anything in me that has any recognition response to this. In the Middle Ages, you know, you got no points for originality. In fact, it was just about proscribed. You always built from the past, and you elaborated that into your own unique version. When you're young, I suppose there's a great ego necessity to say, "Hey, it's all original, I did it all myself!" It might simply be that. Even then, I knew that where the material comes from is almost irrelevant. Does it matter that it's [from] a newspaper article?

Q: There's a kind of friction that comes with adaptation and collaboration, which you don't get from your own original work. [...] I don't mean friction in a negative sense, I mean friction in terms of heat -- your consciousness is up against the consciousness of someone else.

Cronenberg: Yeah. There's a Hollywood version of collaboration, which can also be positive.

[...]

But you run up against other things anyway, which is why I don't think it's that different from an original script. As soon as you start to introduce characters that fight back -- you want to get rid of them and they won't go! -- you're always collaborating with yourself, with projections of yourself. That's why I feel the metaphor of [Naked Lunch's] Bill Lee's typewriter -- giving him orders, pushing him around, telling him what to write -- is like normal writing to me. Whether there is another human being in the room or not, it feels the same.

I don't think I'm trying to rationalize anything here. As time goes on, it doesn't matter whether it's a dream I start with, or a newspaper article, or a story someone told me, or a story someone said actually happened, or a biographical incident, or somebody else's fictional work. It all seems like intake; it's narrative and conceptual intake and then you do something with it. Now, when you're starting out and you really have a lot to prove, and you have not yet necessarily found your cinema voice, and you are desperate not to dilute that, because it's so fragile, there might be a real pressure not to collaborate. "I'm the only guy who wrote this, I made it up, I didn't get it anywhere else." But what I'm doing now might be more pure and honest and straightforward than what I did then.

Rolegaming, A Postmodern Pastime

2004-05-28T23:13:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things to do is to put things together in ways that others may not have thought to connect them. (Another of my favorite things is to have someone else do that for me, which is a lot of why this weblog is here, for posters and commenters to show me new things.) It's in that spirit that I want to first take on a bogeyman of a term and then link it to our general topic.

"Postmodernism" can refer with good reason to a bunch of different things. Postmodernism in literature isn't precisely the same thing as postmodernism in architecture, for instance. It's also used as an umbrella term with varying degrees of justification. At a glance, terms like "poststructuralism", "deconstruction", and "social constructionism" may not be readily distinguishable, even when one comes at them with good will. And very often good will is lacking when pundits get going about various postmodernist sins. This is not going to be a detailed primer, however.

At the core of postmodernism is an outlook about the pool of ideas from which creators work. Every creative field goes through three distinct stages - not once, but again and again.

First, there's the general proliferation of new ideas, new tools for working them over, and the whole deal. Very often, new tools open up the field, as photographic equipment has done several times. In other cases, it's just plain someone having fresh insights. The point is that folks are trying a lot of things for the first time (and the second and the third), to see what's possible and rewarding.

Second, there's the stage of characteristically modernist approaches. New ideas keep coming, but more and more of the cutting edge is concerned with the increasing refinement of things. This is where the most rigorously purified work appears: in art, blank canvases; in music, random noise, silence, and totalizing formulas like serial composition (where you can only use a note again after you've used all twelve in an octave once); in literature, the stream of consciousness, removal of plot in favor of epiphany, and so on; in architecture, the glass-walled skyscraper. In every field, the drive is to push some concept as far as it will go, and to free it from attachments to any other. Now, a whole lot of really good work comes out of this. But there comes a point where you've taken something as far as it'll go.

Third, there's the stage of characteristically postmodernist approaches. The postmodernist creator turns away from purification in favor of synthesis, looking back at the pool of possibilities and seeing how they can fit together now. There's a renewed interest in popular as well as scholarly versions of the field, and in its interaction with others. There's also a commonly applied term which I think creates some confusion, and I'm going to suggest an alternative.

The postmodernist revisiting is often described as "ironic", but this isn't entirely helpful, because "irony" is itself another one of those words subject to too many interpretations. I think it's more useful to describe it as aware. The first time around, you do things and they work or they don't, but you're out there experimenting and reflecting and pressing on. When you return to those things later, you have a perspective shaped by what's come in between. You know, this time around, that if you push those ideas too far, they will all hit a wall. You've seen what comes of the apparently great ideas with ghastly consequences, and of the apparently worthless ideas that someone else did wonderful things with. You can come at it with the best of will, but not with ignorance or innocent. You will remember as well as speculate, and there will always be a part of you separate from the old material because of experience.

In time, of course, the pool of ideas is worked over again, and something fresh comes in to shake things up and start the cycle again. The postmodernist stage isn't the last word for a field; things will change and either the field will go through the cycle again, or the field will be subsumed into something not yet thought of and that will go through the cycle.

There are a bunch of ways to think about gaming, but one of them is this: it's a postmodernist engagement with its source material. Gaming is, I think, an innately impure activity, combining narrative and strategy and simulation and a mess of things all in a big bowl. The proportions vary, but if you get too much of any one of them, it stops being a roleplaying game and turns into writing fiction, playing a wargame, or something else. Rolegaming requires keeping it all up in the air somewhere. It also creates a necessary version of the detachment that postmodernism encourages: you play your character, but you remain a player, and even the most immersive player for whom there is nothing but the character during play is the gamer before and afterward. Analysis on multiple levels of engagement follows naturally from the very fact of being a gamer and having a character. You're operating in a critic-like way all the time, whether it's what you emphasize at the moment or not.

What's interesting to me about this is that common gamer preferences match up well with prevailing trends in postmodernism in other fields. Wiseassery and the like in commentary? Yup. Check out any issue of McSweeney's for a lot of that. The drive toward mutant combination and hybridization? Oh yes. Synthesis and syncretism are fundamental to postmodernism. Anachronism in the definition of a setting and in the approach of players to its worldview? Compare Salman Rushdie's portrayal of Mohammed, or any of a great many contemporary-swinging-hipster-types loose in semi-historical fiction. And so on through the roster of common gaming motifs.

Much of this holds even when, sometimes especially when, the gamers in question are also given to denouncing the sins of postmodernism. They're doing it themselves without realizing it, and in some moods the cultural analyst in me takes this as particularly significant - what people choose to do often reflects their individual values, while what they take for granted reflects their community.

Folks who'd like to read up on postmodernism should probably check out Umberto Eco, because he thinks clearly and writes with admirable beauty. Postscript to the Name of the Rose and Six Walks in the Fictional Woods are particularly relevant for laying out the conceptual framework and a whole lot of interesting ways of thinking about prose, and by extension any sort of creative labor.

Network Externalities and the Self-Publisher

2004-05-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

As a frequently-embittered freelance writer, my thoughts regularly turn self-publishing as a way to overcome many of the frustrations I feel as a faceless drone in the game biz hive. Like most writers, I have far more ideas than I have the ability to produce them, particularly if I have any interest in turning even a meager profit for my efforts. Unsurprisingly, I've been concentrating my efforts of those ideas that have something resembling mass market appeal -- or at least what passes for it in the current climate. The problem is, at least for me, what constitutes mass market appeal and how can a self-publisher ever hope to take advantage of it?

Looking realistically at things, my initial self-publishing efforts will have to be PDFs. That's because there's very little initial financial outlay and, if I do my homework, maybe, just maybe, I can earn a sum that pays for my time and effort in a vague approximation of my lower end per word rates. If I'm successful, I can think bigger in the future or perhaps even catch the eye of an established publisher looking to go a little farther afield in his offerings.

Now, the accepted wisdom in the game biz these days that the best way to do this is to go the d20 route. It's the game most gamers know. It's the one most gamers play. It's the one most gamers buy. I can't argue with that in most respects. However, unless you're Monte Cook, how much better do d20 PDF products sell than non-d20 PDF products? My guess is not significantly better. If that's true, as I suspect, then a self-publisher might as well go with a system that suits his project better rather than trying to alter his project to suit a system. Admittedly, that's good advice under any circumstances, but bear in mind that I'd actually like to make some money through self-publishing. If it could be shown that a particular approach would increase my sales by a significant factor, I would certainly do it.

Obviously, I don't think anyone can answer my questions definitively or, if they can, I doubt they'll come forward and share their information with us. That's too bad, because one of the things that I believe would help the industry, from top to bottom, is a better sense of its actual financial health rather than vague numbers, rumors, and innuendoes. It's very hard for anyone to plan an effective business strategy when there's so little information to go on. At least, that's how it seems at my minuscule end of the spectrum. I don't want to leap blindly into a briar patch, but neither do I want to sit on the sidelines forever, especially when I keep getting the sense that there are indeed openings for newcomers who have new ideas and approaches, as well as cleverly done examples of old favorites.

On Planning....

2004-05-24T17:27:00.000-07:00

This post is part of a work in progress.... Actually, _three_ works in progress, and that's sort of the point.

I'm in the process of planning three very different 'role-playing experiences' for three very different audiences. (I choose the term 'role-playing experience' very carefully. It's hard to avoid semantic difficulties, so I'm trying to describe things in a new way.)

Let me describe the three basic premises I'm working on:
1) I'm working on an experience for two to three experienced gamers.
2) I'm working on an experience using role-playing as a teaching and personal exploration tool.
3) And I'm working on an experience for a toddler.

From last-to-first.

3) My son is not quite three-and-a-half years old. He loves super heroes. And he loves to play super heroes. So, being the gamer-geek dad that I am, I want to work him toward role-playing. Because to be honest, I love playing super heroes too, but I call it role-playing.

2) In addition to being a father, a gamer, and a statistician, I'm a Christian. And as such, recently, I was inspired to put together a bible study series/role-playing campaign that follows the life of Christ, has traditional role-playing elements, and also provides an opportunity for youth to explore how they feel about and react to things. I anticipating this being a bit of a mixed group, but generally low on the experience side. In fact, I'm planning as if none of the players know games.

1) I tend to be a bit of a Junk Yard Gamer. I like to mix-and-match settings and ideas and mechanics. That's where the idea for Exalted: Sixth Age came from, more or less. E:6A is going to be a Mutants and Masterminds game, set in an alternate modern age, using chunks of the Exalted backstory, and more or less justifying the Super Hero myth. My players are experience gamers. They probably know the M&M mechanics better than I do.

So looking over these three projects, I realized there are some common themes.

*) Mechanics. Every game needs mechanics. No, scratch that, every game needs a _system_. (A system combines both the hard-and-fast rules and the style of play as was well-stated elsewhere.) For the game with my son, I need to keep the rules simple and provide flexibility for him to do what he wants without losing my mind to the "cants". I also need to provide the ability for expansion as he grows and wants more rules. For the 'study', I also want simple mechanics, but I want something that grows organically as the players learn more about themselves and thier characters. I envision a system that allows 'facts' about the characters to be added on the fly. (EPICS is one inspiration here.) Finally, for the experienced gamers, the system was easy - but we got immediately down to the level of simulation of Exalted characters - did we want characters true to the Story Teller rules or more super heroic characters inspired by the original. We ended up with a much more comic book or manga feeling character direction.

*) Setting. Character interaction doesn't happen in a vaccuum. It needs to happen somewhere. With my son, I doubt he will care much, initially, where things happen, but I need to know what sort of world that Batman and Buzz Lightyear can hang out together in. For the 'study', I actually intend the first session to be about world and character creation, Genesis and geneaology. I want char gen to be short, but I want the players to decide what adventure means to them and to design the setting as a group. Char gen will be simple, basic - even superficial - ideas about who a character is to be expanded on in the coming sessions. This experience will be highly experimental and require lots on improvisation as I will want to tie themes from each session's bible study into the story, even if the role-playing setting seems utterly unrelated. For the experienced players, setting was easy - the modern day. But then I started to alter the landscape to make America look more like the inside cover of the Exalted book, but to do so in a comic book-y, anime-like way. D.C. was destroyed and abandoned, the capital is now near Cheyenne mountain. Vast swaths of forests dominate most of the East Coast instead. Lava men attempted an invasion in the past, leaving scattered islands leading off into western sea. California was broken off by a super-villain and now stands as an indepedent island. Each piece lead to another piece of the backstory. Which leads to my third point.

*) Scope. How big, how long, how vast? The game for my son will need to have short 'sessions' except when he doesn't want to quit and will need to be infinitely expandable except when he's bored of it. Easy, eh? The 'study' experience is going to be carefully planned. Right now, I'm figuring on 12 sessions, the Genesis and Genaeology session, 9 story sessions, a Climax with a stomache-churning cliff-hanger corresponding to a study of the Passion, and an uplifting conclusion corresponding to a study of the Ressurrection. I can envision a second 'season' following the lives of the early Church post-Ressurrection, but that's a project for another time. For the experienced players, I just learned one is going to Grad School at the end of the summer. So this may very well be a very short term game. Which got me thinking. When Blue Planet first came out, I wanted to do a world-tour of sorts, focusing on each possible character type. I'm thinking of something similar for E:6A - Six Sessions each with the same PCs. The first would focus on the PCs as Solars. The second would feature interactions with Dragon-Blooded. Then Lunars, Abyssals, Sidereals. And then a final session wrapping up the campaign. A major story arc told all the way through. Very comic book mini-series.

So this is a good start. I've got three situations going, one or two where I may need to write a game-system of sorts from scratch. A spectrum of definition, improvisation, and pre-planning. I'm interested in thoughts, comments, and suggestions. If there's interest, I will expand on any or all of these as time goes by.

Classes, Skills, Lifepaths

2004-05-24T05:53:00.000-07:00

A remark here a short while ago, noting how role-playing games have evolved from war-game simulations, and from the desires of old-school grognards to play out the lives of their units' officers, touches upon my thoughts regarding class vs. skill-based characters.

D&D, of course, introduced the class-based system, where a fighter was good with weapons, a magic-user made use of a spellbook, and a cleric lifted her holy symbol. Vampire, with its storyteller system, was the first game that I'd ever encountered that didn't have classes, but rather had skills into which you could put starting points to get good at various tasks. I think my gaming groups in college all thought of Brujahs, Toreadors, Nosferatu and so on as being 'like' classes, defining to some degree who we were, in the same way that being a fighter simply meant that you were a knight in shining armor or a duellist, but not a thief or a magic-user. Indeed, my friend Chris W, who took to Vampire like a drowning man to a floating ring, being a Brujah meant wearing his leather jacket to a game, while being a Toreador meant wearing his black 'poet shirt', and being a Nosferatu meant hunching over and speaking with a strange accent. The clothes he wore helped define his 'class' -- rebel, artistic poseur, skanky sewer trash. My brief foray into Palladium's game system with Talis was a weird mixture of class and skill based systems -- I was a mecha pilot, but there were some other things I could do because I'd put points into certain skills.

Sometime around then, I remember a certain type of game became popular at school called a Rosenberg Game, in which people were expected to play themselves in a game. This became complicated when the game in question was Shadowrun -- certain people objected to metamorphizing into trolls rather than elves, some thought they should be shamans rather than mages, some thought they should be deckers rather than techies, and it became clear that a narrow and limited set of classes didn't really fit the human beings. It was fine, in a sense, when we ourselves chose to be a fighter or a troll -- it was not OK for someone else to give us a classed character the way they perceived us.

Yet the problem also showed up in a Champions-based superhero game, where some terrorist set off a genebomb on campus, and all of us mutated into superheroes. Now we were supposed to go out and fight crime -- in Hartford, all places. Of course we all wanted research and streetwise and intimidation and all these relevant skills. In point of fact, most of our real-life skills, like English literature, or ancient and medieval philosophy, or even Computer Repair, were really quite useless in the context of putting the smackdown on evildoers.

D20 Modern seems to resolve some of these class vs. skill problems by having generic types of classes -- strong hero, agile hero, charismatic hero, wise hero, and so on. Indeed, many games seem now to have a hybrid system, allowing a player to pick first an archetype of some sort, and then choose skills first from a featured list and then from a wider selection. Yet this tends to diminish the role in gaming that professions have in our society -- you wouldn't ask an interior decorator to build Hoover Dam any more that you would ask a civil engineer to teach Shakespeare. We do specialize, as human beings.

Is there a way to 'grow' a character more organically? Cyberpunk used to have a Lifepath, and Traveller had something similar, which allowed a PC to develop year by year. Older characters were more experienced, more skilled, but weaker in some ways. Younger PCs had more energy and vigor, but less experience and less skills. A PC could unlock a door and say something like, "just a little skill I picked up in the army." But what if that character said, "just a little something I picked up in seminary"?

Ideally, PCs are trouble magnets. Do trouble magnets come in specifically defined archetypes, as class-based systems would suggest? Or do they come as a result of having certain skill sets that make them useful as trouble-shooters and problem solvers?

Commonplaces: Clint Eastwood on Directing

2004-05-20T18:38:00.000-07:00

As of this afternoon, at least, there is no aesthetic or critical theory of roleplaying games that can deal at all adequately with what most gamers do and want to do. I don't have such a thing up my sleeve. I do, however, have a standing interest in comments from interesting people working in other fields that bear in some way on aspects of gaming as well as their own fields. I'll post some of them from time to time, and will be interested to read cool or engaging snippets that other contributors may wish to share, too. I think that identifying more things that rolegaming is somewhat like will help us figure out what it is.

This one is from Clint Eastwood, in one of the screens-of-text special features on the Pale Rider DVD:

I believe in professionalism. I don't expect to tell an actor or actress how to interpret their part. I prefer to create a comfortable working atmosphere for them to do what they do best. In that environment I think you get results you can use. I like to work fast. I prepare myself and I expect the people I work with to be equally prepared. I know what I'm looking for in most situations. I don't think a lot of takes will help bail you out of something that might be unclear to begin with.

Thoughts Under Construction

2004-05-20T05:41:00.000-07:00

Prose can be deceptive, particularly in the hands of good writers, as many of the folks hanging around here are. There's something about the mere fact of being set down with good phrasing and nice typography that suggests "This is a finished concept." Keep in mind that sometimes it ain't so, though. There will be posts that do reflect extended consideration and substantial police, and that do stand as little essays. But not all of them will be that way. Sometimes we take a stab at writing something down to help sort through the jumble of ideas that don't quite seem to add up harmoniously, and someitmes we've just been struck by something and want to get a discussion going.

As nearly as I know, none of the Gamethink contributors feels particularly close to a grand manifesto about the nature and destiny of gaming, or even about some particular part of it. Every post is about what one of us thinks about a subject at the time of posting. Whether it means anything more than that depends on the individual and the topic. Please read with the willingness to believe that we're willing to revise and extend our remarks, even as we do make an effort to offer up thoughts worth considering in their present form.

Thanks!

Asian-inspired Media and Gaming

2004-05-19T16:50:00.000-07:00

During an idle chat with friends, the topic came around Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. My two friends, one a wargamer and the other a roleplayer, showed their disgust for the movie, citing how unrealistic they thought it was, and how ridiculous the action sequences were. Being a fan of wuxia, I countered, asking how walking on walls was less realistic than pointy-eared pretty blondes hitting little green men between the eyes at half a mile of distance. In the dark.

This got me thinking into how different the accepted tropes of Occidental and Oriental fantasy are. The same people willing to believe that a One Ring was capable of bringing doom to all existence were not willing to accept that a martial arts manual contained the secrets of invincibility.

Extending the comparison to other Asian fantasy media, we see that there is a difference between its accepted fundaments and those of Western fantasy. Aside from the fact that they arise from very different mythological and religious environment, one of the things that struck me most is the source of power. In the West, power comes from outside; it is a Holy Grail, an Excalibur, a Stormbringer or a One Ring. In Asian fantasy, power comes from within, it is the Shaolin teachings, the control of inner force, the purity of one’s heart and purpose. In the West, magic is the province of wizards and is generally a forbidden (or forbidding) field of study; in the East, magic is accessible to anyone, as exemplified by the accountant in A Chinese Ghost Story who is taught a simple Sanskrit incantation and is able to clumsily defend himself against the supernatural.

A hero in the West is usually someone appointed by destiny or outside circumstance, or is ‘special’ in a certain way (Frodo gains the Ring, Merlin foresees the coming of Arthur, Achilles is the child of Tethis, Anakin Skywalker has bunches of midiclorians in his blood, etc.), while a hero in the East works hard for his role (Sun Wokung is born as a particularly bright monkey, but still must train for years to become the Monkey King, Tsao Tsao grows slowly towards being a great general, Ogami Itto is a kickass swordsman but little else, etc.)

The distinctions are not die-hard and I’m sure I’m missing examples that could counter these initial observations, but I think they stand as a general trend.

Now, how does this apply to gaming?

Asian pop-culture is currently embarking on a direct assault on Western media, and such media also includes role-playing games. It would be tempting to say that Oriental Adventures is the leader of this influence, but it’s not; OA is merely D&D with samurais and ninjas, and the monk core class is just a guy who fights well unarmed.

The true influence can be seen in games like Feng Shui and Big Eyes, Small Mouth which directly uses the elements of Chinese cinema and Japanese anime to create a game, and Exalted which appropriates distinctly Asian tropes in its own setup, such as gigantic swords, spectacular displays of power and, of course, giant robots. And now we’re looking forward to Weapons of the Gods, adapted from the comic of the same name by Tony Wong.

What Feng Shui, BESM and Exalted did that OA did not was just not take the dressing of Asian media/culture, but go straight into the underlying elements and use them, either directly or making them part of the greater whole. The rules and systems reflect the difference of focus between Western and Eastern fantasy: what do the characters gain versus what can the characters do. While magic items exist in both fantasy paradigms, they play a lesser role in Asian fantasy (Weapons of the Gods excepted somewhat), and the variety and strength of the powers that Asian heroes gain put the powers of Western characters to shame; Sneak Attack simply cannot hold a candle to Light-Foot Kungfu, and Elric may lose Stormbringer, while Wong Fei Hung cannot lose his devastating No-Shadow Kick.

To make a game with a truly Asian flavor, the rules must reflect this; the characters must be able to do impressive things, but learning such techniques costs them greatly in terms of either effort or sacrifice. Once this can be captured, the rest of the genre trappings can be added at will, from mystic martial arts to angsty cyborg maidens.

Wishlists for Awards

2004-05-19T12:14:00.000-07:00

For several years, friends and I have talked about doing some gaming awards of our own, hoping that in simplicity and focus we can add to the ranks of awards whose recommendations mean "Hey, you should really check this out." Among those who've come before us are James Wallis and his Diana Jones Award, which can go to any thing or person in gaming at the mysterious judges' discretion (shadowy cabals and how to make them work for you!); Andy Kitkowsi and the Indie RPG Awards he coordinates with such good-natured enthusiasm; and EN World's Ennies. And, of course, there are the Origins Awards, which are, um, subject to some skepticism in some quarters as reliable indicators of excellence.

Now, I've got some pretty firm thoughts about what I want to do, and I'll be laying that out in an upcoming post. But this here is a solicitation for comments. Based on what you know now of gaming awards - and if you haven't checked out the indie or EN World rosters, you should - is there anything plausible that you'd like to see someone doing that nobody is right now? What level of seriousness/whimsy is good? How much do you value rigorously defined categories, and how much flexibility, comprehensiveness, or vagueness? And so forth and so on. Lay it on me. I don't promise to do anything you ask, but I'll be listening.

Publishing Schedules: Picking the Right Time

2004-05-18T17:24:00.000-07:00

Just a quick thought from the Token Retailer

One of the things that has always confused me is why smaller game publishers wait till the end of the summer with GenCon for their biggest releases.

This August we have the new World of Darkness & Vampire due out. Along with the new edition of GURPS coming as well. Throw in there anything the from the board game folk like Rio Grande Games, Mayfair Games, and UberPlay, it is going to be hard for someone with no advertising or buzz to get noticed at GenCon. When I order new games for the store I spend the most of my time & budget on things I know will sell. When I have multiple releases from the from the big companies like WizKids, Wizards of the Coast, White Wolf, & Steve Jackson Games. That is who I will be paying the most attention to, because they make the most money for me. A store's budget is also constrained by the fact I have to re-order product as well. If I need another copy of Munchkin, Settlers of Catan, or the Players Handbook I will get that first rather than a copy of a new game.

There is also a window of opportunity after the summer season for pre & post Christmas releases as well. Especially for a board or a card game. People with gift money are looking for something to on school break. Or to play with relatives perhaps. This also works well if you want to follow up an earlier release with an expansion or supplement.

Its far better to get your game out in early May or June when you might be noticed by the retailer. And it is far less likely to get lost in the mass of other games that come out at GenCon or even Origins for that matter.

These are the things that dreams are made of....

2004-05-18T16:21:00.000-07:00

Time for me to beat a dead horse briefly, namely on the issue of roll-playing versus role-playing or combat versus conversation.

It is no secret to most readers that role-playing games, as we know them in America, at least, evolved from war gaming. That is, some folks decided they wanted to play officers of their armies and act out what they did, and thus role-playing was born. Long story short, I believe that this origin is a large part of the reason why many rpgs spend so much time and effort on developing combat rules and combat options and cool powers for combat. You get the picture.

However, at the same time, role-playing games, by and large, and I know there are exceptions, profess to want to encourage character interaction of the non-violent type. Still, most, and again I know there are exceptions, fill one chapter with a list of skills or the equivalent - only some of which are socially oriented - and another with combat rules.

I think this trend is changing somewhat with PDF games. A number that I've thumbed through lately seem to give a more balanced look at the comabt versus non-combat, including My Life With Master which seems largely to treat all conflict with much the same mechanic. I think this is a good sign and potentially a way for role-playing to evolve. I've looked for years for ways to simplify combats down to single rolls like other skills, but have recently started going the other way. That is, finding ways to expand any skill use to the same level of complexity and thus the same level of importance (at least in terms of the amount of session time used) as combat.

Now the key to this, of course, is to use this idea frugally. Not every die roll should turn into an hour-long dice-fest. But, if you limit multiple die roll resolutions to only the big plots, for combat or non-combat, then it should be effective. It also has the side effect of letting the chef hang out with the street samurai and both feel equally important. Sure, the street samurai dominates straight-up combat, but how much more fun is it if the chef can distract the foe with a gourmet meal first?

Anyway, in closing, I think if role-playing is going to survive and thrive, we need to do what the creators of games like Over the Edge, Feng Shui, or Vampire did before us. Think differently. Come up with new ways to describe the resolution of events. New ways to explore interactions between characters. New ways to role-play! Assuming I don't slack too badly, I will try to bring some of my more mechanical, more detailed ideas to light in this forum. Some derivative, some impractical, but designed to get us thinking. Heck, I might even do a rant on statistics and gaming some time....

Doc Blue, Two-Fisted Statistician

Emotional Involvement

2004-05-17T23:24:00.000-07:00

The other day in a conversation, Bruce commented that he has this theory that roleplaying campaigns are more fondly remembered by those involved if there are a couple of really excellent sessions and some mediocre sesssions than if the game is just consisently good.

Over the past six months or so, I've been lucky enough to be part of two really excellent chatroom based games. I'm playing in one (The Defence League, an MURPG game run by Blue) and GMing one (Capstone Cabin, a D20 Call of Cthulhu game). Both of them have had the sort of gaming that I have been looking for for years, but haven't managed to really find in a face-to-face game (although an Unknown Armies game I played in a few years ago was pretty damn close).

Bruce's comments got me thinking about what it is about these two games that hooks me in so much and why they have been so memorable for me. The conclusion that I came to is that both games require a high degree of emotional involvement on the part of both the player and the GM. There is a lot of in-character dialogue, some of it becoming quite heated at times. As soon as this happens, the emotion level of the participants goes up quite dramatically, becoming quite intense. Because of this, both games are looked on fondly by those involved (to the point where my CoC players are reminding me that they're still keen to resume as soon as circumstances permit).

The more I think about this idea, the more it seems to fit the idea that games that have a couple of really excellent sessions are the ones that are the most fondly remembered. In the really excellent sessions, I would suspect that the emotion levels on the part of the people involved is quite high, either because of in-character drama or arguments or because of the way the dice have fallen which has made a successful outcome of the session impossible to predict until the last minute. The weaker sessions would simply be forgotten about because of the lack of emotional involvement in comparison to the good sessions.

I also suspect that games that somehow consistently encourage an increased emotion level on the part of the players — I'm particularly thinking of games such as Feng Shui, Exalted and Adventure here — are the ones that people will tend to rave about more. They are also likely to be the games that are remembered by the players simply because the sessions are simply more intense.

Of course, this is just a theory on my part, and I can't really think of a decent way of testing the hypothesis. Still, perhaps it's a jumping off point for discussion, and perhaps something that people might be able to use to their advantage when working on new material.

Crossing the Digital Divide: Stealing tools from the online world for our own pleasure.

2004-05-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

After many, many years of avoiding it, I have finally drunk the koolaid. I am now spending a vast number of hours a week playing in an online Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game. Specifically, I am playing City of Heroes, by Cryptic Studios.

It is glorious. It is glorious because it has an easy system which still contains depth. It has a system of missions, simple ad hoc team creation, in depth Supergroup creation with perks, and a mission tree that truly gives one the experience of following a plotline, but maintains the freeform aspect.

I am not here to review this game.

I am here to steal from it. Specifically, I am here to steal its character creation system. Because with all apologies to Champions, Marvel Universe, Brave New World, Marvel Super Heroes, D.C. Heroes, Aberrant, Mutants and Masterminds, Silver Age Sentinals, Villains and Vigilantes, Supervillains!, Superhero 2044, Heroes Unlimited and the plethora of other superhero games past and present than I'm forgetting, character creation in City of Heroes is the most satisfying character development experience I've ever seen.

It's not the powers, per se. There are limits that few tabletop RPGs would impose on a new character as far as power creation goes. Still, there is an element to that kind of thing in the game. No, it's the visual character developer that makes this thing a best in show.

In short, the costuming options are vast -- and if we include color schemes as 'options' seem practically infinite. With no training whatsoever, a person can create almost anything he can see in his mind's eye. No drawing skills are needed. You just... create.

How well does it work? Well, putting it through its paces, I created old RPG characters of mine, plus costumed a number of fictional characters from my Superguy days, plus created some original characters. And you can find the results here,, here, and here.

The game encourages one of the gamers' old vices, as you can see: character creation as a seperate and enjoyable element of the game. I remember back in my Champions days I used to create characters for hours at a time -- and using the 'humanoid outline' templates that they included with the game, I designed a few hundred costumes. This gives me that same experience, and improves on it tenfold. I'm downright happy just sitting back and designing characters and the costumes they wear.

Ladies and gentlemen, the game that can bring this experience to its players will rule the world.

The 'easiest' and most effective way to bring this experience to players is to actually create it as software and bundle the program with the game. I quotate that because it's only easy in terms of the end user -- he runs the software and jumps to it. Windows users around the world can jump right in with both feet. What's more, by handling the setup in a CoH style, players can be indoctrinated into the game -- CoH requires you to actually create your character's powers before you get to the shiny, shiny costume generator. As a result, the character isn't just a model in a costume, but is a character you're actively thinking of. Obviously, the software should be tailored to help players make their characters, probably with a 'beginners' mode that lets them do simple clicking and an 'advanced' mode that lets powergamers and grognards exploit the system to its fullest extent. Finally, after you're finished, you could print your character out -- both stats sheets and (to be blunt) model sheets of the character in various poses and from various angles.

This would be something people would love. This would be a game you could get kids to buy in Barnes and Noble, so they could make the characters and enjoy it.

The problem is, sophisticated software design is an expensive and time consuming process. RPG companies don't, as a rule, have the resources to create a tool like the one we're describing. And character creator software hasn't been a fantastic seller to date, as people have noticed -- in large part because the killer app we're describing isn't the ease of the mechanics -- it's the actual physical character designer. And that is a lot of money's worth of development.

So, what's option 2? Resource pooling. If several companies banded together, they could put together a standalone tool that had seperate modules for many different games. Alternately, a software company could license mechanics from several different RPG companies. Then, you'd have a common tool that people could run, with a menu of choices of genre and system. Keep in the hook that forces people to actually create RPG characters, but include modules for gothpunk, SF, Fantasy (many varieties), Horror, etc. etc. etc. By licensing from several different games, you get to include visual libraries based on those games. The basic engine could therefore have Drow alongside Cthulhu investigators, superheroes alongside Travellers in Imperial uniforms, and the fantastic alongside the mundane.

The problem of cost remains, of course. The graphics engine would take a lot to develop. If only there were a way to get rid of the heavy lifting....

Which brings us to option 3....

Licensing.

Cryptic's already built a seriously cool engine. Right now, as is, any Superhero game would kill to be able to bundle a standalone character designer based on it -- especially if it gives printing options. What's more, it's certain that creating 'costume' options based on different genres and games would be vastly less expensive with the heavy lifting work already being completed. Hell, the most expensive parts of the cost -- the animation of all these new options -- wouldn't even apply to this case.

So, let's say Alter Ego software, who makes Metacreator and who also made the GURPS (and I believe Hero System) character creation systems licenses Cryptic's engine. They've got the mechanics engine already built. Cryptic has an graphics engine that could be likely easily adapted. The core design needed would be interface -- something to make these two very different functions seamless. And then let's say the major companies begin licensing the software for bundles -- heck, White Wolf could bundle a Gothicpunk version with different tweaks for Vampire, Werewolf and Mage, for example, while bundling a Fantasy version with Arcana Unearthed and Everquest d20, and a Superhero version for Aberrant (hope springs eternal), tweaked for Gamma World or even for Exalted....

One way or another, however, being able to harness the sense of wonder involved with making your OWN heroes (vampires/travellers/mutated hellfish/doomed 20's pulp investigators et al) needs to get harnessed once more, for the 21st century, if we have hopes of broadening out of the niche. And it seems like the tools are right there to be ~~stolen outright~~ copied or licensed by tabletop companies.

Welcome to Gamethink!

2004-05-16T11:09:00.000-07:00

Greetings, Mr. and Mrs. Reader and all the ships in the ether!

Last year I ran an enjoyable group weblog called Rock Scissors Blog, where interested friends and acquaintances gather to gab about rolegaming. It foundered largely for lack of time on the part of most participants. Since then, various other folks have gotten into the act, particularly the excellent crew at The 20 x 20 Room, which you really ought to be reading if rolegaming is a subject of interest to you. I took advantage of changing circumstances to rethink my purposes a bit. What do I think a new group weblog has to offer at this time?

Constituency

The members of Gamethink will all have some connection to the gaming business in some way - not just writers, I hope, but also artists, retailers, reviewers, and so on. My goal here is to serve up perspective informed by the commercial realities. I believe that the next few years are going to be busy and sometimes tight ones for rolegaming, and I hope to up the info quota for general discussion. Some things look really different when you understand how and why decisions got made in places the public doesn't usually see. I'm shooting here for perspectives anchored in practical understanding of the possible, for rolegaming as a commercial pursuit as well as a social one.

Attitude

Here I owe a debt to a bunch of folks, including the 20 x 20 crowd and also many of the posters at the Forge. Doomsaying is easy and often satisfying, but not necessarily very helpful. while I'm sure that Gamethink will host its share of rants, I want to keep the focus on what is now working and what might work in the future. We'll discuss new games (and old ones) in play, recruitment and retention concerns, aesthetics alongside marketing, and like that. I want to call attention to the good stuff that's out there right now, and to help build up the audience for neat new things. Whatever criticisms we have (and in some cases there'll be strong ones) should come together with a look at alternatives, something that frames past or present failure with room for improvement.

I don't know how frequently we'll get posts. Quality is more of a priority to me than quantity. Work in progress and partially formed ideas are fine, as are pointers to neat stuff that don't have much to say beyond "Wow!", but I hope to build a body of fairly substantial reading. One of the thing that bogged down Rock Scissors Blog, I think, was a glut of inactive members. (The psychology there is convoluted, but seems to hold true.) I'll be a little slower to add members this time, and a little faster to prune, so that if someone's listed as a member, you can count on seeing traffic from them once in a while.

So here we are, enjoying sundry features of the new Blogger edition. Blogger been very very good to me over the years, and I'm happy to be here. I hope you enjoy reading what will follow.