Wow, Taxes

So, income from my independent publishing was a quarter of my total income for 2006.

Wow.

(To be clear, this is a testament to how little I make in my “real life”, not how much I make selling games).

carry AP

Great AP thread of carry at The Forge. I have some replies to it, and such, on the thread.

It makes me happy. Thanks Ron, Tim, Tim and Chris for playing!

In related news, any professional example-writers out there? For some reason, my play examples for everything I write are sucktastic.

Bullets

Gaming is good right now. Getting my medium-term itch scratched with a great Mountain Witch game. Storygames Boston continues apace. I’m kind of planning to arrange my entire summer around gaming, if I can, which is a very exciting prospect.

I go through three distinct phases with reference to the internet, I’ve noticed. One of them is total apathy, shading into “oh my god what is wrong with everyone.” One of them is hardcore participation, when I get my fingers into every pie on every forum and blog that I frequent. And one of them is one I’m deep in right now, which is sitting back, trying to deal with real life and actually playing and doing design work formost, keeping tabs on the Forge and Story-Games, but not really posting much.

This phase tends to coincide with a general feeling that people are way too involved with things other people say on the internet, and people should do more thinking and less typing.

In other news, I think that there’s a sustainable market for independently published, short print run, actual play-focused games. Expanding that market is something I’m not interested in (yet), but trying to serve it to the best of my ability is within my power.

I think that the key to being a producer for that market is for you to view your production as a hobby, and not your job.  If it’s your job, you’d probably be better served aiming for a different market.

But, it can be a serious hobby, with metrics of improvement and a long-term plan for growth and sustainability.

Just because you don’t make your living at it doesn’t mean it’s not serious. Just because it’s not serious doesn’t mean you can’t make some profit off of it.

Oh, and profit can be measured in things other than money.

—

All for now.

[Three Set Forth] (not)Actual Play Transcript

Our cast: Danny, playing Sir Ryan, an honorable knight. Sarah, playing Hilda, a peasant woman with strong hedge magic. Bryan, playing Squire John, Sir Ryan’s squire and the rejected would-be lover of Hilda.

—

Bryan: It’s my turn to play a Waypoint. Erm…[riffles through cards] oh! Ok, here. “An Unexpected Reversal Of Fortune.” Adversity 4, Action 3, Defense 0, Renown 2. I think…ok, here’s the scene. The three of us are riding through the Wicked Wood, after leaving that creepy goblin town at the edge of the marsh. We’ve been riding for a full day, and it’s getting dark. We come into a clearing, and we all realize that we’ve seen this clearing before…twice.

Danny: Heh, cool. Ok, I reign in my horse. “Hold, companions. It seems that some witchery is afoot…we have certainly passed this spot before.”

Sarah: I start rubbing my staff and looking around with renewed interest. “Are you certain? Could it not be that we are simply lost?”

Bryan: “My sense of direction is unfailing, madam. It is certainly a force not of this world.”

Danny: “Hilda, can you break this ensorcelment?”

Sarah: “Perhaps…if it is sorcery.” Ok, Bryan, is this a conflict?

Bryan: Yeh, totally. Oh, I know what happens! Ok, so Sarah, I’m using the base Adversity for the sorcery, whatever’s causing it. I have 4 dice.

Sarah: Cool. I’m using my “Counter-Magic” Edge, which is 3 dice, and I think my “Suspicious of magic” Facet totally counts here, so thats 3 more. Umm…I’m putting 3 into Action, 1 into Defense, and 2 into Renown.

Bryan: I’m putting 1 into Action, and the Waypoint has 3 already, so that’s 4. The other 3 go into Defense, and the Waypoint has 2 Renown dice.

[They roll. Sarah gets Action 6,4,2; Defense 3; Renown 4, 1. Bryan gets Action 5, 5, 4, 3; Defense 2, 2, 1; and Renown 5,3]

Sarah: I have a higher Renown score, so I declare first. Mmmm…I’m looking a little outclassed here. I’m going to start spinning my staff around my head, to generate some more magical energy…my staff is a Gear at 4, so I need to ditch a 4 or greater…[she takes the "4" out of her Action pool].

Bryan: Allright, as you’re spinning, both Sir Ryan starts to feel faint, a side effect of the magical energy being gathered. Squire John props him up as he starts to sag. [He pushes forward the "5" from his Renown pool]

Sarah: Ok, now I get to roll in my Gear. Three in Action, one in Defense. [She rolls, and now has Action 6, 3, 3, 3, 2; Defense 6,3; Renown 4; 1] So, that counts as my response, right? So your Renown thing is unopposed?

Bryan: That’s right. [He changes the 5 to a 6 on that dice and moves it to his Renown Victories pool] Umm….as Ryan’s lids begin to tremble, you feel a sudden pressure. It’s the magic reacting to your staff, trying to close in on you. [He pushes 5, 5 from his Action pool forward]

Sarah: I grit my teeth and push back against it. [She pushes her 6 and 3 from her Defense pool forward]

Bryan: You hold it at first, but it begins to close in…tighter…and tighter…[He adds the 4 to his two 5's]

Sarah: Hrm…ok. I stop spinning my staff, and the sudden lessening of my defense allows the building pressure to slam me off my horse. But as I fall, I let out a string of curses in the Old Tongue, which ride the magic back to it’s source and burn into the Magician’s brain! [She pushes forward all of her Action dice; 6, 3, 3, 3, 2]

Bryan: Wow, bold move! Well, my Action resolves…I have 5, 5, 4 to your 6, 3. Your 6 cancels one of my 5’s, and your 3 knocks one of my others down to half a Victory…so, I get 1.5 Action Victories [he turns one dice to a 6 and another to a 3, and puts them in his Action Victory space]. Now…uh…you feel as if from a long way off, the screech of whoever is sending this magic. There is a feeble bump from his defenses [he pushes forward the 2, 2, 1 from his Defense pool], but with an audible “pop” the bubble of sorcery over you bursts, and you all feel suddenly lighter.

Sarah: Awesome. I lose one “2″, and your others knock two of them down to half, so…three Action Victories total. Nice. I can use three Victories to buy an Edge level…I think I’m going to go ahead and create a new Edge, “Curses of the Old Tongue” I just thought of that now, but it totally works for my character.

Bryan: Very cool. I’m going to leave these 1.5 Action Victories in John’s Victory reserve for now, but that Renown totally gives me enough to burn a Facet! I’m gonna burn “Steadfastly Loyal” into the Story Arc. When he decided to support his master rather than go to his love in her time of need, thats totally something thats going to be a big deal later. [Bryan writes "Squire John: Steadfastly Loyal" onto the Waypoint card he just played]

Danny: Cool. I have an idea for an interstitial scene, and then it’s my turn for a Waypoint…

DeGeeking Conventions

Conventions are our trade shows.

Our trade is play.

Three Set Forth

This is my frankenstein game. Right now I’m loading DitV, Agon and Don’t Rest Your Head in a blender, adding some liberal doses of TSOY and Jon Walton’s brain, and seasoning with some “holy crap all of these books are going to have to pass through my hands”, with just a light touch of Burning Empires to top it all off. I have yet to hit frappe, but the smells wafting out of the blender are pretty sweet so far.

It’s a game for three players. It’s about three characters going on a quest. It’s GMless and fully competitional (if thats a word) but within a cooperative framework. It’s happening because I want to play Samurai Champloo in an RPG and don’t know how yet. I think it’ll support two-player play really well, too, which would be awesome.

It’s going to have badass fight scenes.  It’s going to have highly structured storytelling narrative arcs. The books is going to be interactive. It’ll be possible to pick up the game, read one chapter and start playing right on the spot (I think…)

It’s a game I actually know what I want it to look like (as opposed to about 85% of Imp). I’m really excited about it. I hope to have it ready to play in a couple of weeks.

Sweet.

The Most Poetical Thing In The World

“…the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world; and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.” - Edgar A. Poe, ‘The Philosophy Of Composition’

When you have a Jack in your resolution hand (all of the cards of the suit that your Trait uses, counted in both the Cross and your 4 Futures), it means a death must be involved. When you have Queen, it means the death of a beautiful woman. When you have a King, it means the death of that which you hold most dear. When you have an Ace, it means your own death.

The highest card among those is the one that you count; you can choose not to count it, and instead give it into your opponents futures.

You can probably also only use Malocchio’s and Lusus Naturae if you have a face card in your “hand”, but I’m still not sure how those work.

RPG Design Handbook: Chapter 2 (part 3)

(Previous Posts collected here.)

Chapter 2: Core Questions

Part 3: The Power 19

The third broad organization rubric for organizing your approach to a new game design is a set of 19 questions developed by Troy Costisick. This set of questions is the result of really digging into the Big Three and unpacking them, creating a set of smaller scope but more specific questions. These questions can be treated as a checklist, in order to make sure you are at least thinking about each of these elements of your game; they can also be treated as spurs, wherein you try to make sure your game addresses each of them in a meaningful manner.

Finally, they are a powerful tool to apply once you have finished a draft, or at least the core mechanics of, your game. Many of the questions are about specific procedures of play, and how they connect with your design goals. While trying to answer them before you have a lot of material written for the game may identify holes (as in “huh, I should have some kind of mechanic for reinforcing X”), doing it after will allow you to analyze how well the different elements of your design are doing their jobs.

Most of the questions are fairly self-explanatory, though I have a couple notes throughout.

The Power 19 Questions:

1.) What is your game about?**

2.) What do the characters do?**

3.) What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do?**

These three should seem familier - they’re the Big Three. A useful strategy in some cases is to answer the Big Three, and then once you’re satisfied with those answers, unpack and expand upon them by going through the next 16 questions.

4.) How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?

5.) How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?

6.) What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?

7.) How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?

These four are related to the Alternate Three, in that they focus on thinking about how you support your design goals with your mechanics and procedures of play.

8.) How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?

9.) What does your game do to command the players’ attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?)

10.) What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?

11.) How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?

12.) Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?

13.) How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?

14.) What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?

15.) What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?

16.) Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?

I think that this may be a question that you should be asking yourself over and over again throughout the design process. Why am I excited about this game? Is what happens in play reflecting what I thought would happen? It’s easy to get discouraged about your design, especially in playtesting, and keeping the answer to this question solidly in mind may be a helpful thing.

17.) Where does your game take the players that other games can’t, don’t, or won’t?

18.) What are your publishing goals for your game?

19.) Who is your target audience?

The last two are very important questions that directly target the publishing side of design; a huge topic that will be covered later in this book. (Though, my personal opinion is that publishing goals should be considered early in the process - but that’s another matter for another time).

Power 19 Criticism

The final component to the Power 19 is considering their limits. They were developed out of the Big Three and Alternate Three, which themselves are heavily rooted in the focused design school centered around the Forge. The questions carry a number of assumptions behind them, including things like the centrality of character; the power of carrot-and-stick reward systems; and a certain slant towards innovation and uniqueness in design for it’s own sake. This is not to say that every game created with the Power 19 in mind will end up looking or playing the same. Far from it!

Rather, it means that it can be ok to answer a Power 19 question with “This isn’t applicable to my game” or “I’m not considering this as a design goal.” The important thing is that these answers are considered and conscious answers. If answering the Power 19 is making you feel like you’re twisting your game into a new shape in order to do so, then maybe you should go through and “unanswer” some of the questions, until it feels natural again.

Conclusion

All three sets of questions are powerful tools for aiding your game design. Considered seperately or in combination, their main utility lies in making you think about your design in both a conscious and critical manner, with an eye towards setting and then fulfilling your design goals. While specific design methods and techniques may, and probably will, still need to be created and put together in order for your design to work like you want it too, these questions will help you identify the holes in your design and brainstorm how to fill them. Finally, the sets of questions are important both for what they make you think, and for how they make you feel - if your design does not “fit” into them well, consider that it may very well mean that your process or design goals are working from a different set of assumptions - which means you should dig until you discover those assumptions, so that you can harness them to help you in your design.

For more information on The Power 19, check out What are the ‘Power 19′? pt 1 and What are the ‘Power 19′? pt 2. Also, for a discussion of the assumptions underlying the Power 19, see this post at the Story Games forum: Design Tools: P19 as Propaganda.

Dreamation AughtSeven, Part Deux

Whew. I’ve actually been, like, working on games the last couple days (not to mention real life work), so my desire to get this post written has ebbed. But if I don’t get it down tonite, I’ll probably forget so many things that it won’t be worth writing.

Now, where was I?

Ah, yes…

Saturday

So, with a solid 3 hours and 15 minutes of sleep under my belt, I dragged my ass out of bed and wended my way down to the game room for my 9am session of carry. Surprisingly enough, I had four players; Don, one of many Matt’s, Jeff (who has played the game before and in fact ran a session of it at a NC Gameday event(!)), and Greg.

Don played Daniel “Locker” Jones, with a Burden of having persistant shell shock and continually seeking releif in drink, drugs and faith; Matt played Efram “Chameleon” Osgood, with a Burden revolving about being scared to go home to his pregnant girlfriend who doesn’t answer his letters; Jeff played a trigger-happy and authority-hating Anaconda; and Greg played my favorite iteration of Cowboy so far, who saw the war as his ticket out of the pig farm, but now he was lost and adrift in a country he hated.

Our story ended up revolving around one of the Fodder characters, Elmo “Saint” Smith, and how his general irresponsibility and drug pushing contributed to the devestation and capture of the squad by the NVA. We had a lot of really solid Burden-addressing scenes and conflicts, and the first Action scene of the game saw I think the largest amount of fallout I’ve had yet - 31 points for poor Don to spend killing his own squad.

We had a really solid sequence in a Vietnamese village that started with Cowboy impaling a VC assassin on his bayonet (but he was justified in the eyes of the others!), and ended with I think all of the characters addressing part of their Burden’s and leaving the village peacefully.

Anyway, another solid game, and I was pleased that we managed to hold it together that early in the morning.

I grabbed lunch with Adam and Jeff (of the Sons of Kryos), who I kind of forcibly introduced, but we had a nice lunch talking game design, geek culture and all the wierdness that is the SCA.

I took a double booth shift that afternoon, and ended up talking a bunch with Shreyas and Bill White (Mr. Ganakagok). Sold some games, too, though I wasn’t pushing too hard. Dreamation isn’t a big sales con (or so we thought….), and I didn’t really feel comfortable trying to pitch people on stuff unless they obviously wanted to know more about a particular game. There was definitly a sale pattern, where sales would peak right before and right after the scheduled game sessions, as people either decided to pick something up before they forgot, or had gotten out of an awesome game and decided to grab it right away. During the game time, it was much more relaxed.

Oh, and did I mention that the first printing of carry sold out after my morning game? Which was unfortunate, because some people (Dave!) wanted to get it, but weren’t around until the afternoon, and it was gone gone gone. It’s the worse kind of good, and I should have more soon - but hey, I sold out! Hooray!

Anyhow, it was ticking down to my 8 pm slot, which I had scheduled to run Timestream. But, what with the no sleep and the sitting down all afternoon and the having two intense sessions under my belt already, I was really not feeling the good vibes, especially for a scenario that I haven’t run before and wasn’t sure was going to be fun. But I was all “well, only Adam and Shreyas are signed up to play it anyway, so I’ll cancel and we can playtest one of their games instead!”

Then I went up to my paper on the big board upstairs, and uh-oh…..4 other signups! The hell? After some waffling, I decided that it was actually more pressure to try and make a 6-person game work, and I just wasn’t up to it. So I tracked down those I knew, and made sure to talk to the other people when they showed up, and it was fine. Except one woman seemed really angry, but it didn’t feel like it was because of the game being cancelled, it was more that the game was cancelled. If you get me.

Oh, and the IGE party was in there as well! I ate Kat Millers With Great Chili… and chatted and was generally satisfied.

So, I cancelled Timestream, and played Shreyas’s game Snow From Korea with Shreyas and Adam and Russell Collins instead. The game is really fun, and once Shreyas makes it less broken it will be even funner. I really liked how once all the cards are on the table, you can look down and you feel like you’re in a Shogunate playing silly one-up-manship games until someone freaks out and kills someone else. It’s grand.

And then after that I took a couple minutes to regroup, and then sat down with Shreyas and Kevin Allen Jr to mock pretend playtest the skimpy beginnings I had for The Imp of the Perverse. I had character sheets (well, the idea for ones, at least), what more do you need to play a game? I mean, seriously.

Anyway, it turned into a cool mechanics jam where we played around with the Conflict Matrix until it turned into something that worked, and it really helped in unjamming my head for working on the game in general. I’ve been thinking about it and writing on it and chatting about it pretty much non-stop since then, and when it’s done it is going to be unlike anything we’ve seen so far.

Kevin is the little demon in my head that breaks down my inhibitions and shows me that I can go for it a million percent. Shreyas is the little angel on my shoulder that tells me I can actually do it. And they both lead by example.

Man, Saturday was long!

After Imping, we settled in with a big ol crowd of people and chatted, and we all eventually ended up playing Jared A. Sorensen’s Action Castle! (an implementation of his Parsley rules). It was….uh….”fun”

And then I went to sleep.

Sunday

Woke up, went out to breakfast with Mayuran and Kevin and Terry, who I had seen around but not really met, and it was nice to kinda talk to her a bit. Then I had to get stuff together, and track down Mr. Keith Senkowski and practically force money down his throat in order to buy a great print of one of the images on this page (4th from the right on the top).

And then a long string of goodbyes and promises to get down to NYC to see people in the not-so-distant future.

One 3-hour car ride with Ben Lehman later, I was dropping him off and picking up my girlfriend from the airport in Providence, and that was the end of my Dreamation.

Whew.