Spiel x Press Review of Timestream

German gaming mag Spiel x Press has published a short review of Timestream. Many thanks to them, and to Christian and Harald for the translation help. The review in the original german can be found here in PDF form; below is the translation.

The stream of time is unchangeable. Or maybe it isn’t? In the roleplaying game “Timestream” the protagonists can influence the stream of time immensely. Time travels are possible, time can be slowed down, and different situations can be lived through over and over again.

The details are left to one’s own imagination in “Timestream.”

“Timestream” is not a highly professional product of a large company. Accordingly, the focus of the Timestream rule book does not lie in impressive illustrations and the optical design, but in simple rules provided in a way as to be understandable. Timestream does not commit itself to a specific world or specific mechanics that are needed to time travel, but leaves these parts to the individual play groups. In this way, each roleplaying group can play time travel adventures according to its own preferences.

For this reason the rule book of Timestream is kept simple and general. Characters are created quickly, there are only three rough classes of characters and few attributes, which leads to not getting lost in rules but focusing on on the playing-out of the story.

Timestream is a roleplaying game that has its strenghts–such as flexibility and simplicity–but also its weaknesses. For example, an evening of Timestream means quite a bit of work for the game master. To pull an adventure out of nothing without a lot of background is tedious, and that in a roleplaying game about time travels almost any unforeseeable event can happen doesn’t make the whole thing any easier.

Anyone who wants to play a time travel and time manipulation game without fighting their way through endless constructions of rules and theoretical foundations will be in the right place with Timestream. The whole game is kept very simple, and while it’s not an optically professional product, it’s thought through very well and piques one’s interest.

So I think I’m going to get working on some situation generation tools for the game. Seems like that would be good thing.

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.

Battle Stations

All signals are green.

Time to rock.

Seeya’ll after Gen Con!

General Update

Played another game of Mechaton, three players this time. It was awesome. I still have pics to post, sometime, of my game the other day. I rebuilt some of my Mechs today to be even more awesome. Once I have the actual setup rules, it will be even more awesome than that. I can’t wait.

Played the first solid now-we’re-actually-playing session of Burning Wheel. It’s hard to remember that we have more than four hours to play, so I don’t need to push straight towards the awesome every second. Damn Con games are ruining me. I also need to internalize some of those rules - looking crap up takes time.

I really, really hope I’ll have my books in hand for Gen Con. I will be one sad puppy if that doesn’t happen.

Ideas for indie game events at Pandemonium are bubbing in my head. Post-Gen Con, some of them will hopefully be coming to fruition.

Ken Hite gave Timestream an unanticipated nod in his latest Out Of The Box. I yet again squee with fanboyish glee.

Haha, I’m having some blockage in regards to my latest game idea. Serves me right! I need to give the ol’ noggin a rest, but its so hard. So hard.

Oh yah - I also wrote a game about Owlbears.

Mercenary

Lots of shtuff in the blog-o-sphere is making my brain swirl today. We got Phil Reed on “Forge Games” Are Not “Indie Games”, the announcement that IPR got the Ogres Choice Award for Most Influential Company and this RPGnet thread titled The Forge Manifesto?.

I self-identify as an independent RPG publisher. I’m pretty secure in that self-identification, so lets leave that aside for now.

Am I an indie publisher? Am I a Forge publisher? Where do I lie on the “fringe <–> mainstream” continuum?

More and more, I’m looking at these questions less and less as identity concerns, and more and more as marketing concerns.

In a marketing sense, Indie Games are a brand. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, eh. Personally, I think that the self-publishing community is healthy and prolific and self-supporting while being mutually supportive, and thats awesome. Are there people that buy Indie Games like theres people that buy d20 Games? Yes. Definitely.

Do I want to market to those people? Thats the question that I’m trying to answer with each of my products. Being an active member of the Forge and Story-Games and an infrequent poster to RPGnet, and my games being carried on IPR and Key20 positions me in a certain way in the community. Honestly, if I wanted to deny the Indie label and try to refocus my outlets to other market segments - that would be a lot of work. Would it get me more sales? I don’t know.

And let’s not forget the fact that IPR as a whole probably grosses more than many “second-tier,” if not first-tier, large-press RPG publishers. Let’s not forget the fact that a number of individual independent publishers probably move more books in a year that these publishers, and that they make money on every sale. So it’s not like the Indie label is a bad one to have, in terms of moving product.

But it’s a little sad, that in the end, it all comes down to the green.

The Book As Artifact

Here’s a honest question: are there any large-press games that are being produced with an eye towards how the book itself, as an artifact, informs play?

This is one of those things that really excites me about the creator-owned design and production process. We can make books that, by their physical makeup, interface with the imagined content that playing that game generates. One thing I’m really hankering to check out at Gen Con is Keith Senkowski’s Untitled. I’m also very curious to flip through Shock:. The cover is gorgeous and evocative, and I can’t imagine that the content is any less.

I know that Ron has posted about how he put Sorcerer together the way he did because he wanted picking it up and flipping through it to be a different experience, from the get-go, than picking up a standard-size game book. I think InSpectres has a good physical presence at the table, personally. Small and unobtrusive and glanceable.

Carry is laid out in a manner inspired by military field manuals (credit where credit is due - I may not have gone through with it were it not for Keith’s prodding). It’s pretty stark and serious and no-nonsense. I think it works. I’m very curious to see reactions from people who pick it up sight unseen.

This is one element of a larger concern that is becoming stronger within me. Production is an element of design. As I start to conceptualize new projects, I’ve been thinking about how the final product will look, and work, as a part of how the game itself will play. At this point, I can’t even imagine saying “Well, maybe it’ll be 5.5×8.5, unless I get a high enough page count, in which case I’ll go for full-size, maybe with a hardcover.”

Where am I on the spectrum with this? And what kinds of other concerns that relate physical book design to the gameplay experience should I be incorporating?