Some #s

Total Sales for 2007

carry. a game about war.: 93 (96 in 2006)

Timestream Standard PDF: 5 (17 in 2006)

Timestream Basic PDF: 8 (9 in 2006)

Timestream Premier Edition (print): 13 (168 in 2006, mostly cuz of sales into distribution)

Timestream Reference Edition (print): 2 (28 in 2006)

Time’s Champions: A Stream for Timestream: 4 (3 in 2006)

Dolla Dolla Bills

This may be of interest to some of y’alls.

When I released Timestream, it was partly a grand experiment to see how different price points, for the same content but different presentation, would work out.

The Basic PDF is $8.00. This is because, though there’s two versions in the package (screen and optomized-for-print), they’re both in grayscale, and there’s no PDF hyperlinking (kind of by accident, but that’s how it turned out, and whatever).

The Standard PDF is $12.00. Again, with the two versions, but it’s much prettier, with the full-color interior border and color pics. Also, the hyperlinks work. So there’s a little bit of value-added, plus the increased prettiness. I decided that this was worth an extra 4 bucks to those who cared about such things.

The Reference version is $16.00. It’s in print, it’s a grayscale interior, and it’s coil-bound. I really, really like coil binding, because it’s easy to reference at the table. So, the idea is that it’s a little less pretty, but it’s more utilitarian, and cheaper. I figured, since I’m charging 4$ more for the pretty PDF, I’ll charge 4$ more for the next “step up”. By accident, it’s also pretty much at the standard markup from the print cost (which I discovered later, when I started doing short digital print runs).

The Premier version is $26.00. Same content as the reference version, but the full-color interior (by which I mean, color borders on every page!) color pics, perfect binding, etc. So it’s more of a “real book”, right? I was gonna charge 20$ for it, keeping with my 4$ markup pattern, but then I printed them with the intent of going into distro (via Key20), and, um, that would have lost me a lot of money. I managed to figure out how to get the full-color down to something manageable, with the help of Lance at Avalon Innovations, but the 26$ price point is the lowest amount that gives me a whole dollar margin on sales in distribution. So, like, whatever, I priced it there, and I decided to see what would happen.

carry, on the other hand, is just the one version, with no plans for any others, and no fancy printing shenanigans. I looked at other games on the market, thought for a while, and decided to price it at $15.00. I was going to put it at 20, but I felt wrong about doing that, because, while I don’t think that anyone who would buy it at 15 wouldn’t buy it at 20, I don’t expect anyone except me to play the game more than once. So, 15 bucks for one evening of entertainment, that sounds fair to me, and I make enough off of that to pay for things.

Interestingly enough, while sales of all versions have slowed to a trickle, the general trend for Timestream is that the Premium far outsells the Reference, and the Standard PDF outsells the Basic PDF.

So, there’s some thoughts, from the publishers end, about pricing my small-press games.

It’s Back

carry. a game about war. is back in print.

Sorry for the delay.

You can get it now from Indie Press Revolution. I’ll be selling some direct pretty soon as well.

And there’s an apology thing that will be happening once I get it together, to say sorry for taking so damn long to get more books out. More details soon.

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.

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.

Dreamation AughtSeven

I wish I had a cord I could plug into my brain and just download my experiences into this magig box, because to adequetely capture the weekend will take a whole lotta typing.

First of all, pay attention to Judd’s Dreamation 07 link collection. Ok, good.

As per usual with these recap posts, I am simultaneously overwhelmed with how much I could say, and finding it difficult to actually write about anything. The weekend blends together so much, what with all the no sleeping and the seeing great people and the paying attention to stuff we’re making up together. But I’ll try to hit the most significant events.

Thursday

The drive was uneventful, and I arrived with plenty of time to hang out and say hi to those who were already there (pretty much just Ben when I got there, but over the next hour or so some of my “con friends” (Jeffery, Rob, Matt, and so on) starting trickling in). I had a game of 1001 Nights at 8, and it went swimmingly. 6 players showed up, well split between “I have this game and haven’t had a chance to play it” and “I have no idea what this is but it sounds cool.”

Because we had so many people, I determined that each courtier should take only 2 Envies, instead of all 6 (in the rules, you take one for each other courtier). This had the potential for suck, but we ended up creating two intersecting webs of envy, and the game played out just fine. A fine fellow by the name of Dan brought an audio recording device, so there should be audio of our stories made available at some point. Which is so awesome I can’t really even express it.

Hung out afterwards with people until about 3 am, then went to bed. It was really funny - because nobody took point on getting the complimentary con suite organized, everybody assumed it was full and got their own rooms. So it turned out that, of the two full rooms made available to us, I got a full room to myself for pretty much the whole convention. Hilarious! I volunteered to spearhead the room-filling effort for next time - if the Dexposure people are kind enough to provide it, the least we can do is fill it.

Friday

I got up early enough to hit the morning slot in case something opened up, but all the games were full and Brennan was just setting up te IPR booth, so I helped him with that and generally hung out. People really started rolling in throughout the morning, and it was really funny to watch the ebb and flow of people lining the railing opposite the booth. It’s like an indie gamer geek gauntlet of fun. Bret Gillan took a bunch of pictures, by the by, and you should check them out on Flickr.

This is the part where I say that I met a bunch of cool people (which I did!), but I don’t remember any given meeting in particular, because there was such a mob of rock that I can’t pick out details. But, if any of you happen to read this, link me to your blogs and LJs and stuff! People are fun.

Moving on - I played Ganakagok at 2 with Bret, Emily, and Jeremiah until the wise eye of Mel White. I really, really, REALLY like this game, and I would have bought a copy on Sunday except that Bill took them all away on Saturday night. Damn you Bill! We created a fabulous story, wherein my ivory-carving craftsman found love with Bret’s reluctant maiden, only to have her die in my arms at the hands of her jilted suitor. At which point I set him on fire (the suitor, not Bret), and then watched the end of the world frozen in ice at the top of a mountain peak. This was all while Emily and Jeremiah’s characters led the people to the southern continent and joined with the southern people, only for their descendents to lose all memory of their origin - a fate worse than if they had died with Ganakagok’s melting.

Tragic and cold and beautiful. Great game, and on my must-play list.

Then we made a crazy dash to get Vietnamese for dinner, and despite the best efforts of New Jersey urban planning and construction managed to make it. Good food, GREAT dessert, and the always wonderful company of a whole pack o’ cool people. We made it back just barely in time for my 8.00 game of carry.

So I ran carry for Adam Dray, Dave Cleaver and Joshua Newman. We moved downstairs to a free table in the atrium because the roleplaying room was so freaking crowded (woo!), and we ended up by a TV tuned a news show. I was sitting with my back to it, and about 2/3 of the way through the game Adam goes “wow, this is so surreal - they’re showing pictures of dead soldiers behind you.” It was a total moment.

The game went well, everyone was engaged and Joshua, in particular, was very affected by the events of play. His Burden revolved around a Vietnamese woman who he had raped and was now pregnant (though with his best friends baby, a fact that underlay a lot of their interaction but was never made explicit, even after the baby was born). Adam’s Burden was a conflicted mess about racism (he wanted to be accepted, but he hated the “white devil”), and he played Big White, who hasn’t ever been played in my games before. He ended up pretty much taking over the squad and drowning it in blood. Dave’s Burden was about his cowardice and how he wanted to live up to his father’s standard. He took Shirley “Temple” Jenkins, the newest guy to the squad, and he had a really great character arc wherein he dealt with his cowardice and decided that it was his responsibility to take care of the rest of the squad.

Despite the mechanical shakyness of the 3-character game, the session went very well, and everyone seemed to be very pleased.

Then I stayed up all night shooting the shit and talking about publishing with Luke, Judd, Joshua, Kevin Allen Jr, Rob, and assorted other folks. Another 4am bedtime.

Next up; the next two days, and I think I have some pictures…

Carry Errata

The only appreciable change (other than typo corrections and layout tweaks) is this:

Par. 3304-c (page 45) originally read:

c.     If the winner’s action pool included any Burden Dice, the winner MUST spend points inflicting fallout on each of the Grunts that provided a Burden Die, if he has the points to do so. He then gives their Burden Die back to them.

Replace it with:

c.     If the winner’s action pool included any Burden Dice, the winner MUST inflict fallout on each of the Grunts that provided a Burden Die. This does NOT cost fallout points. He then gives their Burden Die back to them. The winner may shell shock, wound or seriously wound each Grunt without restriction, but he may only do one of these per Action scene.

It’s one of those changes thats minor but not really. It worked out really well when we played it that way at JiffyCon, and I think it’s more in line with how I want the Burden/Ranking Officer/Action Scene feedback to work.

Haha Wow

So I’m doing a proofreading edit of carry for the second print run, and guess what! one of the examples is wrong!  Not in a huge way, but definitly in a way that directely contradicts the rules text right next to it.

Wow. I feel like a total shmuck.

Writing rules text is hard.

Honored

Yet again, the Sons of Kryos kick my ass with their fabulousness.

Jeff named our game of carry as his #2 favorite game of 2006 (AP thread). Wow. I’m honored.

Judd named our Dreamation 06 PtA Hare and Hound as his #1 pick, which I played in as well. Just read the AP thread already! … and in linking, I reread the thing. And got chills all over again.

That game STILL has power over me. Damn.

Static

…page, that is. Up above you can see I added a seperate page to index the RPG Design Handbook stuff.

Oh, and I need to do another print run of carry. Many thanks to everyone who’s picked up the game. I hope y’all get to play it. I’m going to be doing a typo correction re-edit, and I’m adding one rule (it’ll be posted everywhere once I have the wording correct in the text). Feel free to point out typos and other weirdnesses with the text in the comments, if you have a mind to.

Happy New Year, everyone.