primitive kevin allen jr

Hey, all you shlubs who get here because you google for Primitive - it’s up now at Indie Press Revolution.

Man, I wish I got half the hits from people searching for, like, my games or something.

Kevin, you will be fearing the wrath of my Mouth of Ronom. Fear it, I say!

Seriously tho, it’s a rockin’ game of society-building and cavemen fighting dinosaurs. Even though the only time I played it, we apparently played it wrong. I guess you’re not supposed to end the game by getting beaten to death by your tribemates and then eaten in the middle of a swamp. Who knew?

This is (going clockwise) Kevin (sipping the drink) watching me as I try to, I beleive, beat Joe Prince’s Pteradactyl over the head with a club; Jason Morningstar is nonplussed; Gregor Hutton is duly impressed by my prowess; and Danielle Czege waits for her opportunity to strike.

Good times.

Lookin’ For Playtesters…

…again.

This time, for Countdown, my 2006 Game Chef entry. See the recruiting post here. In short, the game is for play-by-email play, so it shouldn’t be too onerous to play! Feel free to respond here with questions or interest.

Invert, Not Revert

So I had an awesome revelation while writing up my carry demo materials. So, how stakes resolution works in the game is that all of the player involved set their stakes if they win the conflict. If the players have a conflict with each other, it’s easy, they either win their stakes or the other guy wins his stakes. The GM can throw extra counterstakes into this, if he wants. Now, if the conflict is against the GM, he sets counterstakes for if the players lose. The GM never sets positive stakes for NPCs, just negative stakes for PCs.

Now, the easy and logical thing to do is just reverse the positive stakes, right? So the player goes “If I win, I diffuse the bomb and we make it to the checkpoint.” Reversing this would be the GM saying “If you lose, the bomb goes off and you don’t make it to the checkpoint.”

Blah. How lame is that?

Now, whats awesome is when you invert the stakes. “If you lose, you diffuse the bomb, so everything thinks that you guys are home free - until you get captured by the VC patrol thats been trailing you.”

See? You don’t want to negate the positive stakes, you want to take the potential success and turn it into a failure/further complication. This is awesome, because it makes it really easy to bring in stakes about intention and about setting and situation authority. You can turn conflicts into conflict not just about fictional events, but about whether the establishment of the fictional event is a positive or negative thing for the characters. It also aids in the progressive movement of those fictional events.

So there’s one thing about how I play that isn’t explicated in the text.

Ah Crap, He’s At It Again

The Imp Of The Perverse just got promoted from my “Work In Progress” folder to having it’s own directory.

Oh jeez.

The Tools & The Will

This is large part response to Clinton’s comment on this Forge thread. That thread is Important, by the way, but I’m not ready to talk about that yet. But this post, though stemming from Clinton’s words, is also something that I’ve been rolling around in my head, and that I’ve talked to a number of people about over the last month or so, I think. Anyway, Clinton said:

d) That (a) about playtesting? Do it more, and make a complete, well written, edited game that you’re excited about. Note I didn’t say “professionally laid out,” or “full of art,” or anything else about presentation. Make “untitled,” or “kill puppies for satan,” or “Burning Empires,” or “Death’s Door.” Make whatever you like presentationally. But don’t make a broken, incomplete game. It is sticking a poisoned dagger into the sides of the people who helped you get there.

We have the tools. The future is now, what with lulu.com, the array of small-run digital printers, the acessability of the community, Indie Press Revolution, and the culture of progress, mentorship, contents and feedback that is extremely easy to tap in to, if thats your bag. Anyone with half a brain and a little time on their hands can bring their game to market.

I’m going to be talking a lot about will here, so here’s a note on what I mean by will - will is both the wish or desire to do, and the capability to do. You can want to do something and never do it. That’s not will. The will to do something means that you want it, and you do it as a fullfillment of that want. (This definition is a statement, not something I want to argue about, by the way).

So. We have a number of levels of self-selection kicking in, right. Here’s what I think they are, from most basic to most advanced.

• Do you have the will to design a game? Designing is different from writing, or authoring, or the production process. You can play a complete game with a designer from the notes in their head, even if they never make it on paper. So, the first step, is people that have the will to design a game. This is the foundation.
• Do you have the will to author the game? This is the first cut, and it’s pretty much internal. Plenty of people have notes (including established designers - not everything I make notes about turns into something written, let alone published). Can you turn them into something written for others to consume? This is necessary.
• Do you have the will to get feedback on your game? This is the first public cut. This is much more than just posting a PDF and going “hey, what do you think?” It involves developing pointed queston, doing some self-analysis, and soliciting and engendering useful feedback. This is a hard, hard step. This can be and is skipped.
• Do you have the will to playtest? This is the second private cut. It’s either really easy or really hard. Some people don’t have the capability to do their own playtests (though, with IRC and forum play, you can approximate it, I think). This has the potential to be skipped, but I think rarely is.
• Do you have the will to get outside playtests? This is the second public cut, and it is a savage, savage beast, with fangs and dripping poison and fear and swarming flies of death. Unfortunately, it is absolutely critical to the craft of design. Double unfortunately, this is skipped incredibly often.
• Do you have the will to produce the game as an artifact and get it into peoples hands? Again, this step is incredibly easy these days, and it’s not really what I want to talk about in this post. This is becoming more and more necessary (in the sense that you need to have something else happening for your free PDF from your website to be played out in the wild).

Now, the issue that I’m seeing (again, as hilighted by Clinton’s post) is that it is really easy to go from public feedback, or from sheer authorship, directly to production without going through the other steps. Even private playtesting is losing value as the bar is raised by those with the will, time and status to get outside playtests of their games. When it was hard or expensive to get your game in print, I think the process selected against those without the will and drive to go all the way through the levels.

Yes, even traditional RPGs have been hamstrung by lack of playtesting before production over the history of the hobby. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about how, when you couldn’t easily produce, you could write all you want, but going through the playtest process indicated that you had the will to go all the way. Now, you only need the will to write and produce, because those are the easy things. You can do those yourself. You don’t need anyone else to do those. The path of least resistance now follows the “design->write->produce” track, not the “design->write->get playtests->get people excited->create a market->produce” track.

Not that I’m saying that games these days are crap, or any such nonsense. What I am saying is that, maybe we (and I use we consciously and meaningfully - this applies to me, personally, in a huge way) need to concentrate on playtesting as the BIG THING. Pushing the edge of game design was the BIG THING. Right now, physical production is the BIG THING (and I’m totally on board with that, as well). But getting critical feedback and a community of playtest needs to become a BIG THING, or we will continue coming home from Gen Con with broken games.

Deux Awesome

Awesome One: Go-Play.org I don’t know what it’s going to turn into, but it’s awesome.

Awesome Two: Hamsterprophet Productions forum is now live at the Forge. w007!

More Thoughts On Gen Con

Short one, I’m tired. But I need to get a little bit more down about Gen Con.

So, one thing I’ve been observing across blogs and forums, and not just Forge/indie-related ones, is the general positive response that people seem to have had to this years Gen Con. This is pleasing to me. I’m totally of the opinion that Gen Con seemed to rock mightily for everyone, not just the Forge/IPR booth, not just for story-gamers, but for everyone that attended. All of my memories are of people happily shopping, playing, or just wandering and having a good time. Of course, you can’t bat 1000, and I’m sure there’s people who went who had a bad time. But, my general sense, both from observation and from my gut, is that it was a positive and progressive event.

Progressive? Yes. Our hobby is at a time of great, and exciting, change. The self-pubishing scene is a component of that. So is the gradual collapse of the three-tier distribution model. So is the gradual rise of PDF sales. So is the success of Dungeons & Dragons Online and other gaming-relating MMORPGS. Of course some people and companies and structures are going to be burned by these changes. This is inevitable. But our hobby is metamorphizing, and everywhere I saw an emphasis on actual play.

The console games had demo sets set up. The boardgame manufacturers and retailers had mad play space. The Yu-Gi-Oh Master was there all day, every day. The Forge, I think, is spear-heading the fast-and-effective RPG demo. And sitting on floors, in the cafes, and all into the late hours of the night, there were people all over the freakin’ place, playing games!

Now, I haven’t been to Gen Con before. Maybe it’s always like this. But the emphasis on playing, not talking about, not trash-talking, not exalting, but just playing games was a HUGE refresh for me. I think Wick said something like this on his blog - the concentrated positive awesome of Gen Con was enough to totally wash away the slow-but-steady negativity of internet interaction over the preceding year.

It was a crysalis - I feel reborn. And ready to play.

And THAT is why I had such a great time at Gen Con.

Gen Con 06

I was going to try to write stuff during the con and then post it sequentially…that didn’t really work out. But here is what I did get down on paper, as it were.

8/9/06

11.01 AM

I am sitting in the Baltimore Airport, waiting for my plane to Indianapolis to board. I am surrounded by gamers. The three guys behind me are hoping that they can get into the exhibitor hall to look around tonite; I can see one fellow leafing through a players handbook; a teenager is hauling a backpack and a Games Workshop emblazoned army case. There are more subtle tells as well - the guy to my right is reading an R. A. Salvatore novel. Two other guys with beards are totally engrossed in PSP and Gameboy Advance play, respectively. Laptops abound, even for an airport. We also have a number of wrestling and ultimate fighting shirts - I’m willing to bet good money that they are among us.

The guys behind me say that someone should stand up in the front of the plane and get a show of hands for who’s going to Gen Con. That would be pretty funny.

Me? I slept like crap, but the burrito and airport coffee is giving me hope for the rest of the day. I bought a new book (The Dante Club) to read on the plane, but I have no idea if that’s going to happen.

A guy wearing a shirt with the Nintendo controller buttons across the chest just sat down. Rocking.

It’s simultaneously frightening and awesome that I am so obviously among my own, and that we’re all going to the same place for the same reason.

Say what you will about subculture mentality, but it’s awful comforting to feel like you’re part of something, y’know? I’m quietly reveling in that comfort, as it’s helping me not be so damn nervous about the days to come.

Schedule for the rest of the day: get into Indy, get to the hotel somehow (shuttle? I cross my fingers), try to hook up with Brennan, head over to the dealers hall to set up Forge-y things, and then at 6 we have our demo madness at the Embassy spearheaded by Clinton.

Boarding begins in 10 minutes. Until next time.

8/13/06

3.56 pm

Well, I meant to actually do a log over the course of the Con. But it just didn’t happen.

Every day I woke up, got breakfast, went over to the dealers hall at about 9 or 9.30, and then was solid busy all day until I went to bed (between 1.45 and 3.30 am). I just had no time - well, that’s a lie. I had no time that I decided I would rather type up stuff than play, talk about or recover from games.

So I’m in the middle of my layover on my way to Albuquerque (I’m taking a week of vacation there. Whoo-hoo!). There is no possible way to construct any kind of narrative about the last four days, so I’m just going to set down isolated chunks as they occur to me. And I’m definitely not going to be touching on even a sizable portion of the awesome that was my first Gen Con.

So, in no particular order: Gen Con 06!

Kevin Allen JUNIOR. That guys an award-winning game designer.

There is going to be awesomeness at next years DexCon. I’m very excited about the next 10 months. Y’all just wait….

The Yu-Gi-Oh Master. This guy had a throne, and he took on all comers all day long. They would play on a pedestal behind a pane of glass, and it was awesome. Apparently he gets custom cards from the company, and so all of the challengers are forced to enter their names into the annals of the defeated.

I realized on Saturday that I hadn’t seen anything on one side of the convention hall yet. There’s so much stuff there that you need to schedule time to actually go and look, and you have to keep track of all the places that you haven’t been yet, because it’s going to take multiple trips.

Thor stepping on Sen(k)owski’s head to make him let go of the totem.

Oh man! I was so going to get Thor or Dro or Tony and go to the Asmodee Editions booth and take on the dude who was running Jungle Speed demos. That would have been awesome.

Meeting cool people. Oh man. I feel awesome because I met so many great people at the booth, and I feel lame that there’s literally too many people to spend quality time with all of them. There were some people at the Forge booth that I literally didn’t talk to, not because I didn’t want too, but because I was too freaking busy. That is lame, and will be rectified next year. To anyone who thought I was being a dick - many apologies. It wasn’t you, it was me!

People who come into the booth want to know about our games. Once you realize this, selling becomes fun. I had an awesome time just talking about games to people - pitching them, yes, and trying to get them to buy it, yes, but these are AWESOME games that I like, and I love talking about how cool they are!

Buying jewel-y dice for Meg for Thousand and One Nights. Oh yah. I love that game.

Bad stakes-setting gets people arguing about stakes. Good stakes-setting gets people reaching for the dice. You’ll be seeing more about this later.

Oh! My buy list. With commentary:

- 500-count 5-color poker chip set, with two decks of cards and 5 dice in an aluminum, locking case: 25 freaking bucks, man. Now I have no excuse not to play Mortal Coil and Mountain Witch.

- Speaking of which. Mountain Witch! And Kwaidon, the japanese ghost story companion to it. I ended up playing in a really fun game of MW over two night at the Embassy Suites (run by Tim, which was neat), and it totally sold me on the game. I’m really looking forward to absorbing Kwaidon and getting a rocking game of TMW together.

- Thousand and One Nights. I couldn’t buy Mortal Coil again because I already own it, so this one takes my “favorite game of the con” spot. I just love the game. And now I own it. Reading the text makes me smile.

- Mechaton! I have my own Mechs (more pics to come), but now I have the rules as well. Victory.

- Primitive. Kevin Allen Jr’s awesome DIY game of cavemen. The really cool thing about it is that you can’t talk in-character, cuz the characters are pre-verbal. So over the course of play, you create your own language of grunts and gestures, and thats powerful. Though, we played this at Embassy as well (me, Jason Morningstar, Danielle Czege, Kevin….Gregor? I know there was at least one more person, but my brain is dumb), and we ended up turning on each other with clubs in the first ten minutes. After my character was beaten down for disrespecting the totem, Kevin just said: ‘And that’s how Primitive never goes.’ We rock. And the book is freakin’ hand stitched. That’s awesome.

- Push, the progressive roleplaying journal that Jon Walton edited. I just read it on my first leg, and it’s very, very interesting. I need to digest it before I say more than that, but the format is awesome, and it has some neat, neat stuff in there. I will be talking more about this one in the days to come as well.

- Agon, John Harper’s game of heroic greek combat. I know it’s fighty and greek and has cool tactile mechanics, and it looks like a lot of fun, and I want to play it. And the book is gorgeous.

- Best Friends. Gregor Hutton’s Ronnie’s entry, it’s basically Mean Girls the RPG. Character creation is so streamlined and elegant and powerful that it blows me away. I’m stealing it for something. And I think it would be a blast for one-shots.

- Don’t Rest Your Head. Fred’s game was on the rack, and I was all “who am I kidding, I want this game” One of my players will be really into it, and I’m sure I’ll be able to get some play in. I’m excited.

And that’s it! I actually wanted to pick up Faery’s Tale (not at the Forge booth, and I forget the publisher, but it looks mad neat) as well, but I was just crunched for time this morning. Maybe later.

My demo for carry is blistering. I had so much fun running it, and it sold games, and that was good. And Jeff and Judd recorded a demo that they’re going to put on Sons of Kryos! And that is so awesome. I’ll def have a link when that goes up. Oh, speaking of, they did interviews with the different strata of Forge boothers - I was in the “newbie” interview, which was all the designers who were there for the first time. You’ll hear it when they get it up, but the interview was awesome!

I also interviewed with Mike Sugarbaker of the Ogre Cave podcast, and that was really fun. I was knee-deep in a gin-and-tonic at the time, so I hope I don’t sound like an idiot on it, but it was cool meeting him and talking shop about the future of the indie community.

Also met Paul Tevis, and yelled at him for calling me Thomas. Anyway, he’s a cool guy, and I’m sure he’ll have awesome Gen Con material for his podcast as well.

Podcasting is capital-I Important for our community. I just want to make sure you all understand this.

I was unable to attend any seminars, which was kind of lame, but there was after-hours design talk in various ways, and I honestly was just having a blast running demos and selling games at the booth. So no harm, no foul.

Honestly? I don’t think there was any higher proportion of fat, unpleasant, smelly or otherwise undesirable people at Gen Con than at any other public social event I’ve been too. I mean, there’s the costumes, but that’s different. I was pleasantly surprised, is all I’m saying. Of course, I was primarily in the dealers room, so maybe other parts had other stuff, but yeh. I was happy.

None of you can stand to the Mouth Of Ronom!

I’m officially Jungle Speed-ed out for a little while. I’m going to need the break for a little while for the spark to come back. But I put in a lot of Jungle Speed hours in. A lot.

Grey Ranks. That’s Jason Morningstar’s new game that he’s working on, and it is going to be capital-A Awesome, once it works. I played in a playtest session, and the diamond is there, shining in the rough. I really look forward to its development. Not to be pretentious, but I really think that games like carry and Grey Ranks are pioneering a specific way to approach very powerful and painful real-world history in a way that both respects it and allows you to address it, and is an enjoyable experience. I really hope that there will be more of these kinds of games happening, because it’s important for the maturation of our hobby to have that. We need to become adults.

Anyway. I was planning to take a “design break” after Gen Con, but I have so many fucking ideas spinning in my head just from osmosis and from talking to people and from this bet with Kevin (Dex Con, man. it’s gonna be awesome!), that I don’t know if I’ll be able to. We will see.

Whoo. Anyway, if anyone has any questions about Gen Con, ask them! Maybe you’ll be there next year, or I mentioned something interesting, or you have a question that you think I can answer - but this post doesn’t just need to be me spewing my excitement. Or if you want to mention something cool that I forgot, fellow attendees, that would be cool too. Dialogue = awesome.

Battle Stations

All signals are green.

Time to rock.

Seeya’ll after Gen Con!

More Love

Paul Tevis of the Have Games Will Travel podcast had some nice things to say about both Timestream and carry in his Gen Con Survival Guide episode, and put them both on his “games I want to know more about” list, with some great company: Deaths Door, Mechaton (I will destroy you all!) and Kwaidan. Though on the podcast he said that I was Thomas Robertson, which was funny for two reasons. First, I am not Thomas Robertson. Second, I recently met the fellow in question IRL. So, funny.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to meeting Paul if at all possible. Along with the rest of you lugs.