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January 28th, 2008
04:37 pm - The Ethics of Open Content
So there was a recent thread on RPGnet, I found out about some accusations about me that I was disturbed by. The accusations have to do with System Reference Documents Page on my site.
As explanation of the page... In 2000, with the release of Wizards of the Coast's SRD, I started up a separate page of open content that did not use trademarks like "D20 System" or "Dungeons & Dragons". At first it was just the fantasy SRD from WotC, which I converted to HTML for easy browsing, as well as spell and monster data as XML or MySQL. I later added the Modern SRD and fantasy 3.5 SRD (from Wizards of the Coast) as well as other open-content sources from a number of publishers -- including the Anime SRD (derived from Mark C. MacKinnon's BESM d20 system), the "action-oriented SRD" (derived from Mark Arsenault's Action! System), the "runic SRD" (derived from Matthew Sprange's RuneQuest - based on original material by Greg Stafford), the Fudge SRD (derived from Steffan O'Sullivan's Fudge system), and the FATE SRD (derived from Fred Hicks and Robert Donoghue's Fudge variant FATE). All of these were converted the content into HTML for easy browsing.
My intent with this was as a resource for people developing open-content games, that this would be a like a library of open content to draw on. By having a bunch of open-content mechanics in one place in an easy-to-browse (and human-readable) format, it makes it easier to compare and contrast, and avoid re-inventing the wheel.
The Specific Controversy
A fellow RPGnetter informed me by PM that Chris Helton was making some claims on RPGnet about my SRD collection, specifically about my collection of OGC from Green Ronin that I labelled the "True SRD". In a recent RPGnet thread, he commented about "Except that violates some of Green Ronin's IP from Blue Rose, and the compiler won't take it down despite requests." ("True20 Licensing Fees To Go Away" - Jan '08) Also, I found that a few months earlier he had cited a source for this, saying: "In fact Nicole Lindroos has said that the 'True' SRD has a number of Green Ronin's Product Identity in it." ("Thoughts on & Questions about the True SRD" - Jun '07). I have not received any official notice from Green Ronin about any such OGL violation. However, they have stated that they are opposed to free sharing of their open content (see below).
Also, in the discussion several other posters suggested that I was an asshole or an unbelieveable jerk for posting open content from Green Ronin.
What I've Done
I've been maintaining my SRDs page since 2000 when I posted various parsings of the original fantasy SRD from Wizards of the Coast. I also had been a fan of the Blue Rose RPG when it came out in early 2005, and created my Blue Rose fan pages with various content and utilities. In June of 2005, I first asked on the Green Ronin True20 boards about the idea of creating an archive of some of the open material. The discussion thread is archived as "True System Reference Document" (GR forums, June 2005).
In that thread, I asked if there was moderate position where some of the open-content material might be released. The response from Chris Pramas was no -- they did not want any of their open material ever being shared. I stated that I disliked this position, but that for the time I would do what they wanted.
At that point, I had an archive of the open-content system material for Blue Rose, that I used for my own interest. However, in keeping with what they wanted, I kept it in a password-protected directory. I would occasionally give out the password, telling people "This is open game content, but don't repost it because the creators don't want their open content freely shared." After a while, though, that explanation felt pretty hollow to me -- particularly after the original source line (Blue Rose) was closed.
So towards the end of 2006, I removed the password protection from that directory. I didn't announce this anywhere, but I did list it mixed in with the other SRDs on my SRD page.
The Ethics
There are some general ethical questions here.
Is it legal?
Yes, all the SRDs are legal following the terms of the OGL. Regarding the True SRD, Green Ronin openly disapproves of it, so presumably if they felt there was a legal violation they would inform me of it. (By the terms of the OGL, I would have 30 days to cure such breach.) There were two claims in the RPGnet threads of violations. (1) was that my calling it the "True SRD" violates the trademark clause, because "True" is too close to Green Ronin's trademark "True20". Of course, Green Ronin sells the True20 System knowing that it relates it to WotC's D20 System. (2) was that the use of nationality adjectives like "Aldins" in the favored skills/feats table of Chapter 1 constitutes a violation of Product Identity (PI) of Blue Rose. Blue Rose declared "character and place names, histories, and description" to be PI, but this doesn't strictly include race names or nationalities.
Isn't it wrong because it hurts the companies?
I can't really tell if or how much it may hurt companies involved. Making the open content easier to browse and access could hurt sales of books containing that material. For example, a group might only buy one book, and simply browse open content for additional reference. On the other hand, having the open content there could raise interest in the books, and help sales.
But supposing the former is true, should I take down open content to encourage buying books that have it? I do feel some desire to help companies, but on the other hand I think gamers and designers benefit from being able to browse open content. As a parallel, I do post negative reviews, which hurts companies, but I think it is good for the field as a whole.
Is it wrong if the company objects?
While I'm concerned about harm to companies, I'm less concerned about their demands. In particular, I don't want to punish generosity on the part of companies. That is, if one company is helpful with making its open content accessible while another complains about any sharing of its open content, I wouldn't want to punish the former. So if I'm going to take down open content, it should be on the basis of harm rather than how possessive the company acts about its open content.
The Questions for Me
The question for me is whether I should change or remove my SRD collection. My previous behavior has basically been to keep open content material offline for some time (1 to 2 years), which allows for a fairly large window of profit. Offhand, that seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Still, I'm open to opinions.
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December 11th, 2007
10:44 am - First Thoughts on D&D Fourth Edition
This being a blog about RPGs, I've sort of avoided the elephant in the room at this point, which is the upcoming 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. This was announced back in GenCon Indy in August, and will be debuting in June 2008 (with some preview material leading up to this). The ENWorld site has a fairly nice Unofficial D&D 4th edition info page that collects significant descriptions by topic.
As a side note, by my count there have alredy been nine major releases of D&D -- the original booklets, three versions of the Basic Set, two versions of AD&D, the "Rules Cyclopedia", "3rd edition" and "3.5".
Mechanically, there are to be a host of changes under 4th edition, unlike the "3.5" update. My impression is that the biggest change is trying to undo what Mike Mearls called the "five minute workday." This means a bunch of resources (mainly spells) that recharge once per day, which means that the party runs out of resources and has to hunker down and sleep after just a short period of adventuring. Second biggest is a push for less of the "Christmas tree" effect, meaning how higher level characters have to be loaded down with more and more magic items to be considered balanced. Mostly, though, there seems to be a lot of tweaking of small bits of balance. James Wyatt described: The reason there's a "sweet spot" in the current game is that it's the approximate range of levels where, purely by coincidence, the math of the system actually works. In those levels, PCs don't drop after one hit, and they don't take a dozen hits to wear down. In those levels, characters miss monsters occasionally, but less than half the time, and monsters miss characters only slightly more often. It's pure chance, really, but it means the game is fun. Outside of those levels, the math doesn't work that way, and the game stops being fun.
In Fourth Edition, we've totally revamped the math behind the system, and that's a big part of the way that we've extended the sweet spot across the whole level range.
What's Its Target Market?
I think a big part of the aim of making D&D4 easier is to try to draw in new players. To a large degree, I think that D&D3's success was in recapturing former players who lapsed during the nineties or even those who were only part of the eighties D&D fad. However, that base is aging. It seems to me that 4th edition is trying for younger players who are interested in fantasy games. In particular, I suspect that there is some fraction of World of Warcraft and other MMORPG players who might be amenable to tabletop RPG play. D&D only needs to get a few percent of the millions of WoW players to make a huge difference.
With only vague rumors about the new rules and background, I can't say about whether they're doing a good job of distinguishing the tabletop game from online games.
Broader Significance
So what will D&D4 mean for role-playing as a whole? D&D is about half the RPG market, so it will by definition have a huge effect. The more interesting question, though, is what other people will do in response.
Even compared to 3rd edition D&D, this seems like much more of a huge, corporately-organized development project that leverages WotC's size as a company -- whereas D&D3, while big and well-playtested, was more the brainchild of three designers. I think the intent behind this is make a unique niche for D&D4, discouraging publishers from going head-to-head with it via close OGL products like EverQuest and Conan were for D&D3. If successful, there would be the fraction who make supplements and adventures for it, and those who make distinctly different games. I'm not sure if this will work, but I think at least there will be less cleaving to the system of D&D4 than there was of D&D3.
Storytelling Games?
Ryan Dancey has been making a number of industry predictions on his blog. Of particular note is his call to "Redefine The Hobby" to be "storytelling games" rather than roleplaying games. I would take all this with a big grain of salt, since he is trying to sell "Ryan Dancey's Storyteller's Guide to D20 Games". Still, it is interesting.
He posted on theRPGsite post on industry scale, as part of a general thread called "Regarding Ryan Dancey's Claims About Story and RPGs". He guessed the indie RPG market is equivalent to ten publishers selling 2000 units per year. That's seems potentially optimistic, but not outrageous. For comparison, here's Fred Hick's latest sales to date (2231 for SotC and 1053 for DRYH) and Chad Underkoffler's "Back of Envelope Numbers" for sales, and Vincent Baker's lumpley games in 2006 (700 copies of DitV).
I think that indie storytelling games will continue to grow incrementally, possibly joined by a few non-indie games of similar style. However, I don't think they're going to be a major force in the market -- and I don't think that D&D4 is particularly going to change the state of things either way. Still, there is interesting reading on his blog about related topics.
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October 12th, 2007
01:33 pm - More on D&D for Girls
So as a followup to my earlier post, "Cerise Magazine, September 2007 and 'D&D for Girls'".
Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress
I did read Shelly Mazzanoble's book, Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to the Dungeons & Dragons Game, now that it is actually out. Unfortunately, I lost my copy of it, so I'm not prepared to doing a long formal review. However, there were two reviews by others that I should mention.
Robyn Fleming gave a mixed but overall positive review of the book in the October 2007 Issue of Cerise -- which also has many other worthy articles. On the other hand, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) bluegargantua gave it a rather scathing review on his LJ -- though he did put in some caveats after his wife defended the book.
Personally, I'm somewhere in between. I did like descriptions of the play sessions, but the introductions about the game itself were painful to me. I realize that I am not the target market. Nevertheless, I am fairly sure that if I gave it to the 11-year-old I know interested in D&D that she would quickly become disgusted after reading about Mazzanoble having the DM make a character for her, since she was put off by the complex rules and math.
Judged solely as a gateway for girls to be introduced to the game (i.e. a guide to playing as billed), it seems quite limited to me. There is not much concrete information, and it is written to a narrow audience. On the other hand, I think it has something of a dual purpose. It is a sponsored marketing piece, not just to get new paying customers of D&D products, but to change the image of D&D players more broadly. It raises the visibility of not just female D&D players, but "girly-girls" (as Mazzanoble describes herself).
Astrid's Parlor
On a less mixed note, I am fairly pleased with how the new Wizards of the Coast forum Astrid's Parlor is turning out. It is named after Mazzanoble's original D&D character described in the book, and is intended for topics focused on or related to female gamers. There remain some detractors, but it is far more promising than my original Cerise article would have suggested.
Marketing Games to Girls: The Bigger Picture
I did note two recent articles on the topic of marketing games to girls, via the IRIS Network Forums. These deal with the computer/console game market primarily, but I think that could have an influence on the tabletop games industry -- at least in showing what is possible.
First is the UK Times Online article by Leo Lewis, Nintendo's women gamers could transform market. It is about the market in Japan, where the article reports, Japanese women have overtaken their male counterparts to become the biggest users of Nintendo's Wii and DS machines in a seismic shift that the company said would "transform the video games industry."
Second is the GameDailyBiz article by David Radd, "Game Marketers Increasingly Targeting Women". It focused on an interview with Maleea Barnett, former VP of Atari now working for NeoEdge Networks, a company that focuses on advertising-supported online video games. They study users to put in targetted ads, and their most recent press report notes that hottest trend in gaming is the market of women in her late 30s or early 40s who playing on an average PC -- as opposed to men in their 20s playing on expensive consoles.
Jane Austen Playing D&D?
On a related note about D&D marketing, I came across an interesting reference. I am almost finished with the Naomi Novik's terrific new novel, Empire of Ivory -- the fourth book in the Temeraire series. As I turned it over, I noticed the top quote on the back cover read:
"Enthralling reading--it's like Jane Austen playing Dungeons & Dragons with Eragon's Christopher Paolini."
It's attributed to a Time magazine review of the first Temeraire book, His Majesty's Dragon. What's intriguing is that a Time magazine reviewer was giving a favorable view of the book by comparing it to playing Dungeons & Dragons -- and further that the book publisher then decided that it was the best quote to sell the book with. There are plenty of people who find the quote offputting, but I guess not so many since it is apparently selling quite well. From a search on the web, I found what I guess is original article on the web, Lev Grossman's 5 Great New Books. The full mention is: A British naval captain boards a French warship (this being the Napoleonic era) and discovers a dragon's egg in the hold. This does not surprise him. In his reality, dragons are in common use by the military; popular breeds include Winchesters and Regal Coppers. But dragons bond at birth, and when the egg hatches at sea, our hero, Captain Laurence, must become the dragon's rider--which distresses him, since, as everyone knows, "no woman of sense and character would deliberately engage her affections on an aviator." Laurence's induction into the strange, insular world of 19th century dragon riders and his unfolding relationship with his highly intelligent mount, Temeraire, make enthralling reading--it's like Jane Austen playing Dungeons & Dragons with Eragon's Christopher Paolini.
I've liked Novik's series a lot, but trying to picture Jane Austen playing D&D just leaves me blank. Anyway, I just thought I'd share that bit.
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September 12th, 2007
03:37 pm - Cerise Magazine, September 2007 and "D&D for Girls"
The September 2007 Issue of Cerise has been out for over a week now. Cerise is a monthly webzine intended as a resource by and for women gamers.
There are a bunch of articles in this one of interest, including:
Related to that, I also have a news article of sorts there regarding Shelly Mazzanoble's new book, Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to the Dungeons & Dragons Game, and the controversy of a set of threads on the Dungeons & Dragons boards. The article is entitled
It's not my best work, written quickly after a specific request for an article on the topic in the IRIS Network forums. And in the three weeks since I wrote it, there is now a new sub-forum in D&D 4E boards called Astrid's Parlor. It doesn't have a fully defined mission statement yet, but at least it now has a set of posting guidelines.
The top-viewed topics include the designated thread for complaints about the forum ("The 'I Hate Astrid's Parlor' Thread") along with content like "Art of Females" ; "The Cult of the Chainmail Bikini" ; "The merits of emphasized roleplaying in attracting female gamers" ; "Pink Dice" ; "Are female gamers different?" ; and "Races that Appeal to Female Gamers". There is a fair amount of activity, and it shows some promise -- but it is clearly still dealing with the early stages of dealing with gender issues. Still, given what I first reported on in the article, I think the forum is a good sign.
A few other feminism-related links over the past several months, while I'm at it:
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May 3rd, 2007
09:11 am - Cerise Magazine, May 2007
Via ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) feminist_gamers, I noted Cerise: May 2007 and Call for Submissions. Cerise is a monthly "gaming magazine for women"(that covers video games, tabletop games, and live action role-playing). (For those like me who didn't recognize it, cerise is a shade of red that comes from the French word for cherry.)
In the first issue (May 2007), the articles focus on video games -- but that just means that we need people to submit tabletop RPG and larp articles for the June issue over the next two weeks (submissions are due by May 15).
There was an interesting article by Lindsey Galloway that studies the history of the girl's games movement following the breakout success of Barbie Fashion Designer in 1996. However, the efforts to create girl-targetted games foundered after that, which she analyzes is due to a stereotyped and exclusionary direction of the effort. It ties in my mind a bit to a discussion on Levi's Gamecraft forum -- The Micropress Trend and in particular the followup thread Micropress [split] that was kicked off by Mike Holmes comment "All the female gamers who are going to play are in now, you see... there's no untapped demographic left."
As far as demographics, I was reminded of a February interview with Ryan Dancey as Fear the Boot Interview Episode #1. He said that "Most people who play tabletop role-playing games were 18 years and older. We found that they were from middle to upper-middle class incomes. We found that they tended to live in suburban areas, as opposed to rural or urban areas. About 20% of them were women." His analysis was that hobby games thrived where people did not have easy access to other venues. i.e. In a city, people would tend to go out rather than play tabletop games at home.
I'd take what he says with a big grain of salt, but it's interesting to reflect on. I am doubtful that anything is going to change overnight, but I think there is room for the RPG demographic to change and expand.
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March 27th, 2007
10:29 pm - Indie RPG Awards Covered in Dragon #354
So, my thanks to Michael Fiegel, who covered a bit on the Indie RPG Awards in Dragon #354. (Alongside coverage of chadu's Zorcerer of Zo game and edible dice.)
Mark Delsing posted a picture of the mention in a Story Games thread, "Dragon #354 features some indie".
So that raises the stakes that this year's GenCon ceremony needs to live up to.
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January 31st, 2007
09:30 pm - Ken Hite's Outie Awards for 2006
Apropos of my recent post on The Games of 2006, Ken Hite has posted his Out of the Box for January 2007 with his world-famous Outie awards -- as already discussed on Story Games as "Outies", and by an ecstatic chadu as "I've Got A Golden Ticket".
Best New RPG
Honorable Mentions: Tim Gray's Questers of the Middle Realms, Merwin Shanmugasundaram and Andrew Kenrick's Dead of Night, Robin Laws' The Esoterrorists, and Patrick Sweeney's Faery's Tale.
Second Runners Up: Fred Hicks, Rob Donoghue, and Leonard Balsera beef up Spirit of the Century and Bill Bridges' Promethean: the Created.
First Runners Up:Fred Hicks' Don't Rest Your Head and Brennan Taylor's Mortal Coil
Winner: Chad Underkoffler'sThe Zorcerer of Zo
Best Licensed Thing of 2006
Honorable Mention: Jon Zeigler's GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars.
First Runner-Up: Mike Pohjola's Star Wreck Roleplaying Game.
Winner: Luke Crane's Burning Empires.
Best Sui Generis RPG of 2006
Second Runner-Up: Shreyas Sampat's Mridangam (found in Jonathan Walton's journal Push)
First Runner-Up: John Wick's Wilderness of Mirrors
Winner: Jason Morningstar's The Shab-al-Hiri Roach
Best Supplement of 2006
Honorable Mention: Rob Schwalb's True20 Sorcery and Steve Long's The Ultimate Skill
Second Runners-Up: Judd Karlman's The Dictionary of Mu and Monte Cook's Ptolus
First Runner-Up: Robert J. Toth's Damnation Decade.
Winner: Will Hindmarch's Requiem Chronicler's Guide.
Best Retread of 2006
Honorable Mentions: Dave Pulver's GURPS Bio-Tech and Chris O'Neill and Dan Landis' Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition.
Second Runner-Up: Bruce Cordell and James Wyatt's Expedition to Castle Ravenloft.
First Runner-Up: John Chambers' Exalted Second Edition.
Winner: Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon 5th Edition.
Most Improved Retread of 2006
Winner: Greg Stafford's The Great Pendragon Campaign.
Most Blatant Plugs of 2006
Dubious Shards and Tarot of Cthulhu: Major Arcana
(Minor technical complaints about this Out of the Box posting... It's mis-titled as "1/25/06"; it's attribution looks wrong; it's missing a bunch of links, and it doesn't appear in the OotB Section Page.)
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January 16th, 2007
11:53 am - "Tumult, Chaos and Confusion" in the Industry
So Ryan Dancy-- former VP at Wizards of the Coast who oversaw much of the D&D3 release -- has posted a pessimistic view of the hobby games industry on his blog, as "Predictions: 2007: The Game Industry".
Basically, he predicts that by the end of the year, Wizards will cancel most of its game lines except D&D, Magic: The Gathering, and the Star Wars Starship Battles game -- with nothing in the hopper; White Wolf will move to focus on MMORPGs; and Privateer Press will be the marginal winner with growth. In general, there will be "tumult, chaos and confusion". Little of this has to do with role-playing, as he has already pegged it as a failed slice of the larger hobby gaming pie which includes miniatures, wargames, and collectible card games. He defines a hobby game as "a game where you spend substantial time preparing to play the game and a significant portion of the value proposition of the game comes from the out-of-game experience."
The definition in itself is an interesting one. He also predicts a new platform will emerge -- by which he means a type of game that is distinct, like tabletop RPGs are distinct from collectible card games, which are distinct from miniatures games. As he defines it, a platform is typically a combination of a style of play, a type of component, and a sales & marketing engine.
While it does seem a bit overly pessimistic, I don't completely reject it, since I don't know much about the larger hobby industry. I would note that my son did get the HeroScape game from Milton Bradley for Christmas, which is mainly an excuse for a bunch of painted plastic miniatures and a lego-like hex playing board. I suspect that role-playing as an activity will be fine, but it may be less dominated by the current line of releases from the larger companies. I am curious about adapting the use of miniatures into games which are not strict wargames, but I doubt that will be a big thing -- certainly not within the next year.
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January 11th, 2007
09:29 am - Indie RPG Award Nominations Open
So, the Indie RPG Awards Site has been re-vamped with a new look, and the nominations for the games and supplements released in 2006 have been opened.
Just go to the site and click on "Register" to send in info on your favorite Indie RPG or RPG supplement of 2006.
I'd like to start some sort of blog or forum for announcements regarding the awards, including threads for each of the newly nominated games and supplements(). I rather like LiveJournal, so I could create a community or account here, but I'm not sure what would be most appropriate.
EDIT: Aargh! My apologies. Having directed people to the form, I immediately updated and broke it by mistake. The form should be working now, though. (9:30PM PST)
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January 8th, 2007
05:10 pm - Indie Game Sales in Oakland, CA
So on the Story Games board, Chris Hanrahan of Endgame (a gaming store in Oakland, California) posted a thread on "A full year worth of sales..." where he reported on his overall numbers.
There he reported that his story games (i.e. indie RPGs associated with Indie Press Revolution or the Forge) had about $6,200 retail worth of product, roughly 13% of his total role-playing sales. The top seller was 37 copies of Dogs in the Vineyard, which compares very favorably with 10 copies of True20 or 12 of Shadowrun 4th edition.
He also reported that RPGs as a category in his store were up 24% from 2005, which is a hopeful sign. He does note that there has been a lot of promotion of indie games. However, contrary to what those opposed to indie games might say, the promotion doesn't appear to have hurt the sales of other non-indie games. He was skeptical of the numbers from Comics & Games Retailers (as reported on by Ken Hite in his 2005 State of the Industry back in March, say). It will be interesting to see how their numbers for 2006 come out.
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December 19th, 2006
09:49 pm - The Geekness of Gaming
So there's an interesting discussion on the geekiness of gaming on Story Games. James Nostack started the first thread, "De-Geeking Gaming", on approaches to make gaming "less geeky" -- but discussion quickly ran into problems of what geekiness is. Then Sara McAtee started a spin-off thread, "To geek or not to geek? What's the real question?", which questioned the reasons behind the drive to "de-geekify". This touches on something which I've been meaning to talk about since Gen Con, where I and many others had a long talk with Ron Edwards about negative impacts within gaming culture. That has been an infamous issue in the past, so I'm not going talk about the discussion there except that it made me think.
So we're familiar with the basic issue. In many mainstream circles, the connotation of role-playing is a forty-year old, overweight, bearded man living in his parents' basement who talks obsessively about fantasy topics like ninjas or dragons. Even when the few mainstream celebrities like Vin Diesel or Stephen Colbert talk about their gaming, they have to deal with similar stereotypes.
So what would change this image of gaming?
Well, I don't think the problem here is the ninjas. Forty year-old balding, fat, bearded guys living in their mothers' basement probably aren't going to get a lot of respect regardless of whether they're playing six-hour fantasy games or two-hour soap opera games. If you want the image to change, you need to change the demographic of players. That means appealing to more younger kids, and also to women of all ages. If you can think of ways to appeal to thin people and rich people, that wouldn't hurt either.
The single data point that I have on this is that in Scandanavian countries are about the closest I've seen to having RPGs be mainstream. In particular, Denmark seems to have had outdoor larping become an "in" thing for kids. But in terms of activity, they have embraced much of what is often called geekiness over here. You have a lot of larps which involve speaking and acting in character, not to mention costumes. Tabletop RPGs are strongly represented too, though. Both have a lot of fantasy/sci-fi content.
As Ken Hite put in his Ropecon 2006 Con Report, The crowd was much younger, girlier, and sillier dressed than an American game convention, which I take to be a result of Finland's very high percentage of LARPs and freeform groups (about which more anon), which have attracted a goodly number of younger girls in silly costumes. Not that, I hasten to add, there's anything wrong with that. Indeed, given my choice between goth girls garbed as butterflies of death and tubby bearded guys sporting self-indulgent T-shirts, well, call me a rebel but I think the Finnish way may just have something going for it. At the Knutpunkt conventions, I remember in particular conversations with Claus Raasted, who is a Danish larp organizer who had also starred in a reality TV show as a larper. He felt that the costumes and physical activity made larps something more accessible to outsiders, as there was more visual stuff to watch and a demand for physical fitness. Note that he's not terribly positive about the "freaks and geeks" scene within the U.S.
On the other hand, the de-geeking thread has many suggestions for changing the footprint of tabletop RPGs by new game designs: i.e. session length, length of prep time, burden on the GM. A few other suggestions include adding a board or other physical representation, and calling something a "story game" or simply a "game". There was also the suggestion to have genres other than fantasy, sci-fi, and horror. I approve of many of the suggestions for new games on the grounds of variety. Even though I enjoy many fantasy and sci-fi themed games, I like having more choices in genre such as historical, soap opera, war story, sports, and so forth. I would also like different footprints.
A number of low-prep pickup tabletop games were suggested including Emily Care Boss' romance games Breaking the Ice and Shooting the Moon; Meg Baker's storytelling game A Thousand and One Nights; Joe Prince's boxing game Contenders; Gregor Hutton's suburban sniping game Best Friends; Nathan Paoletta's Vietnam war game Carry; and Ron Edwards' romantic break-up game It Was a Mutual Decision. I have the first three of these, and I really liked my first play of them. However, I haven't actually played them since GenCon which doesn't bode well for the footprint.
Of course, there's room for other footprints as well. I was impressed with trying out Dead of Night as a pickup game. Something like it might have potential to be close to the party game "Werewolf" with more of a role-playing angle. I also loved the Parlor Larp series, which were excellent resources which filled a similar role to "How to Host a Murder" but were still distinctly role-playing games. I'm also interested in the upcoming new edition of "Land of Og" being written by Robin Laws (patricks posted a playtest report).
I think that there's an awful lot in here which is more about the content and the marketing rather than the format of design in terms of play time.
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November 28th, 2006
06:29 pm - Favorite Indie RPGs, pre-millenium
A little while ago, I was pondering my own history with independent games. In grade school (through '87), I generally played D&D or Champions -- though we'd often fudge the rules a bunch or outright toss them.
However, when I got to college at U of Chicago in Fall '87, my first exposure at the student Games Club there was to a system called "Spellcrafter" developed by Richard Garfinkle. It was a homebrew in that it was published simply as a spiral-bound copies at Kinko's. However, it was a nicely laid out and illustrated book -- and he later came out with a Gamemaster's Guide mostly with advise in addition. The system was a hit-point-less mechanic with a generic contest variant that included decreasing the opposing attribute ("wounding"), and it went to the next degree from Ars Magica by having three categories of magical proficiency: shapes, substances, and manipulations.
Through college ('87 to '91), we played several Spellcrafter campaigns as well as lots of Champions and Ars Magica and a few others, though often with a long list of house rules. In grad school at first, it was similar with systems including Amber, AD&D for the adventures Ravenloft I&II, and more Champions along with others.
Then from reading Usenet newsgroups starting around '93 or so, I got started on published independent systems, including David Berkman and Andrew Finch's Theatrix, Greg Porter's CORPS, and Steffan O'Sullivan's Fudge. I then started on variants out from this and many of my next games over the next few years were homebrews only loosely based on published systems. I originally called my Star Trek campaigns (in '94 - '95) a variant of CORPS, but I soon wrote up my rules in LaTeX as their own system.
Moving to California in 1998, I was introduced to another indie system, Bob Portnell and Guy McLimore's Simply Roleplaying as well as Russell Impagliazzo's "Strange Brew" system. I wrote up a minimalist system for my Water-Uphill World game, and an RQ variant for the Vinland campaign. However, I also got started on the Buffy RPG system played as written, and also kept up some published systems, including GURPS, Champions, and a brief try of D&D3.0.
I started reading The Forge in '03, which introduced me to many new games. I've tried out Shadows in the Fog, My Life With Master, Soap, Dogs in the Vineyard, Polaris, The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, Don't Rest Your Head, and others. Most of my gaming was still non-Forge-related, but it did influence me by piquing my interest in playing games as written and the RPG community. Post-Forge-contact, I more often played games which stuck to the system as written (at least initially), and my house rules were more minor.
I am still disappointed that many people use the term "indie" to mean only a subset of 21st-century games, as I expressed earlier in my post on "The meaning of 'indie RPG'". I've added a wiki page for the term "TheoryTopics/Indie RPG" on the Theory Topics Wiki. However, on the wiki principle, please feel free to revise and add commentary on alternate definitions if you disagree.
So for the comments: what are your favorite pre-millenial independently-produced RPGs? My list includes CORPS, Theatrix, and Fudge -- as mentioned earlier. I'd also strongly consider Thieves Guild, Macho Women With Guns, The Morrow Project, Time and Time Again, and Spookshow.
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09:27 am - How Should I Criticize?
I'm back from Thanksgiving vacation now. Sometime soon, I'd like to start on releasing a bunch of reviews. However, I have some issues with my own reviews which I'm struggling with. A few weeks ago, I commented about this in response to Paul Tevis' rant in Have Games, Will Travel, #77, in a post on his HGWT77 Forum Thread. Coincidentally, Nathan Paoletta recently started a Story Games thread, "Giving Thanks, or How Shall We Criticize?" -- which has some excellent discussion of pros and cons.
The larger context of this is that I feel there are a number of low standards among gamers. This includes both mainstream and small-press games. In particular, I'm disappointed by a lot of things about role-playing games. Even in my favorite games, there are usually a bunch of things which annoy me. I feel that if I let these things slide, then things won't improve in the hobby.
So in principle, I feel like tough criticism should be a good thing. And indeed, as a reviewer, I tend to be pretty tough. But I feel like this gets me into trouble. I remember in particular one of the players came to my Truth & Justice game at GenCon Indy -- and he said that he was surprised I would run it based on my review of it. And that turned out to be one of the funnest con games I've run.
So there's a balance somewhere which I don't think I've quite worked out. I want to push designers to strive for better, but still recognize excellence. However, I don't think it comes across well in my previous reviews (cf. my List of Reviews). However, I come across as very harsh in general, and I don't per se want to drive people away from designers I'm reviewing. If I'm reviewing it, it's because I'm interested in the game.
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September 22nd, 2006
04:39 pm - The meaning of "indie RPG"
I've ranted a bit about the term "indie RPG" on other forums, so I thought I would note here about this. (cf. my "Rant about "indie" as a term" on StoryGames and "Why Indie gaming grows" on theRPGsite.)
So a bit of history, first. The term "indie RPG" was pretty obviously coined to be a parallel to indie music and indie movies. That's a shortening of independent, which means that it is created and controlled outside of the established distribution system. The term was popularized among RPGs by The Forge. Previously, games were usually distinguished by being "small-press" or "free", but not "indie". It's worth noting that while RPGs have an established three-tier distribution system, it is smaller and less entrenched than the movie studios or record companies. So it's not as clear what games are independent from.
To resolve this, The Forge has promoted "indie" as meaning creator-owned. A similar definition as creator-controlled was adopted by the Indie RPG Awards. That is, if whoever wrote the text retains control over the final product, then it is indie. That is a very strict definition of indie compared to other fields, but then, RPGs are a much smaller field. This has been prominently posted on the front of The Forge since it started.
Non-indie games, then, are games where the work is written and then control of the product turned over to someone else. This included the big companies, namely Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf. However, it also includes Mongoose Publishing, Green Ronin, FanPro, Eden Studios, Alderac Entertainment, Steve Jackson Games, Atlas Games, Chaosium, Columbia Games, and various others. The latter are all relatively small companies, but as far as I know they don't give ownership of the games published to the author. For example, Atlas Games came out with "The Infernal" for Ars Magica by authors Erik Dahl, Timothy Ferguson, and Mark Shirley. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet good odds that head John Nephew still controlled and owned the publication rather than the authors themselves.
Now, there is a good question as to whether being "indie" in this sense makes a significant difference in games. After all, there are plenty of good games on both sides of the fence -- and plenty of bad games as well. In my view, the key issue is that the RPG field generally doesn't recognize authors/designers. This is quite unlike the fields of novels or music. Often, the author/designer of an RPG won't have their name on the cover. When RPG awards get handed out, they generally get handed to the company, and often the author isn't even listed. Notably, the Origins Awards do list the designers with the final awards, but not with the nominees. The ENnies have just this year started mentioning writers for some products, where previously they listed only company. Others, like the Ogre's Choice Awards, continue to list only company. Similarly, if you go to the RPGnet Reviews or ENWorld Reviews pages, only the company is listed with the review (though authors are listed in the full review along with other details like page count and price). Among other books, usually the author will be listed, with the publisher only noted with other details. I feel this is absurd. If an RPG is good, you ought to recognize the person who designed and wrote the darn thing, not the people who put the cover on it. I feel that not recognizing authorship and design goes with failing to look critically at the writing and content.
But here's what I ranted out in particular:
Increasingly, there are people who are using the term "indie" to mean "games similar to those most often discussed at the Forge". I find this particularly ironic since that flies in the face of what the Forge itself defines as "indie".
Indie games are not a new thing with the Forge. Browse through publishing by year and you'll always find a bunch of indie RPGs. For example, here's the list of reviews of indie games which were up when the Forge was young in 1999: - Army Ants; written by Michael T. Desing
- Badlands; written by Charles R. Capko Jr.
- Cosmic Synchronicity; written by Joseph Teller
- Dominion Rules; published by Dominion Games
- Orbit; written by Jeff Diamond
- Forge: Out of Chaos; written by The Brotherhood
- FRP Project; written by Chris Magoun
- Ghost Light; written by Doug Bolden
- The Guide to Adventure; written by Michael Ball
- octaNe; written by Jared A. Sorensen
- Puppetland; written by John Tynes
- Simplex; written by Pieter Simmons
- Stuper Powers!; written by Fred VanLente & Carson Jones
- Swashbuckler!; written by Jim Dietz
- The Window; written by Scott Lininger
You'll note that the author is generally listed.
Ron Edwards wrote his essay "Fantasy Heartbreakers" about nine games: - Fifth Cycle - 1990, Shield Laminating, by Robert Bartels
- Hahlmabrea - 1991, Sutton Hoo Games, by Dan Fox.
- Of Gods and Men - 1991, Non Sequitur Productions, by Jeffrey Konkol
- Darkurthe: Legends - 1993, Black Dragon Press, by Matthew Yaro and Colin Murcray
- Legendary Lives - 1993, Marquee Press, by Kathleen and Joe Williams
- Neverworld - 1996, Foreverworld Books, by Erin Laughlin
- Pelicar - 1996, Pharoah Games, by Lewis Nicolls (one of six listed authors, possibly the primary)
- Forge: Out of Chaos - 1998, Basement Games Unlimited, by Mike, Paul, and Mark Kibbe
- Dawnfire - 2000, Dawnfire Games/ Committed Comics, by Jason Marin
The thrust of his analysis was: "These are indie role-playing games. Their authors are part of the Forge community, in all the ways that matter. They designed their games through enjoyment of actual play, and they published them through hopes of reaching like-minded practitioners. It is not fair to dismiss the games as "sucky" - they deserve better than that, and no one is going to give them fair play and critical attention unless we do it."
All of these are indie games.
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August 23rd, 2006
02:26 pm - GenCon Info Posted
So my RPG blog has been a bit lax since GenCon, but that's because I was doing my writeups in a huge chunk. Also, I was editing together the announcements -- with voter comments -- for the Indie RPG Awards. So, first of all, head over to the awards site for the winners and comments:
Indie RPG Awards
As an interesting followup, robin_d_laws had a post on "Indie Explosion". Also, on the sales front, there was thread on the Forge on "Forge Booth Triumphant 2006".
Second, is my exhaustive convention report with details on the numerous games that I played, posted as:
GenCon Indy 2006 Report
It occurs to me that all of that is pretty huge document, and maybe I should break it up into separate files for each game. I'm not sure, though.
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August 3rd, 2006
11:53 am - Clarifications on Gateway Games
There was a lot of discussion in comments on the last two posts. I thought I'd compile a bit here. Again, a gateway game is a game which is fun for people who have never played a game of that type. It's not going to magically "convert" people -- nor is there a hard-and-fast scientific classification for which games are gateway games. I borrow the term from boardgames, where people commonly cite games such as "Carcassone" and "Ticket To Ride" as gateway games. A gateway RPG, then, would be easy and fun for people who don't know RPGs to pick up and play. To make the suggestions more specific:
(1) Games that I can recommend for parents to buy for their kids, even though I won't be playing with said kids. Most likely they'll be playing with their friends.
(2) Games that I can recommend to adults in areas who live in other areas. For example, perhaps I talk to an old college friend over email, and she notices that I have this big RPG site. She asks "Hey, what are RPGs like? Can I try one?" I'd like to be able to say something to her. I do not want to say "Look in some directories for people playing D&D near you and ask to join their group." -- because I do not feel that is likely to be fun for her. I would prefer to recommend something she can play with her friends.
(3) Games which I can have fun playing with a group of non-gamers. It's relatively easy to drop a single newbie into a group of experienced players. I did that last week when I invited our friend Shannon to our Truth & Justice one-shot. She had never played RPGs before, but the other five players had. However, if you have only five people who have never played, it's usually a pain that involves constantly saying "Oh, ignore that part" or "We'll skip over the real way to do things" and so forth, in my experience. It can be done, but is not fun for me.
Now, being a gateway game is not an objective, binary distinction. There are many people who picked up classic Traveller to learn to play. However, we can at least make some broad subjective distinctions. I love the Hero System, but it's not a good gateway game. Notable prior efforts at gateway games include the D&D Basic Set, Marvel Superheroes, and the Star Wars RPG. None of these are terrible, and I would at least consider recommending them in the situations I describe above. However, I think that better games can be created. Other games made a conscious effort to appeal to non-role-players but were more clearly unsuccessful, such as Everway.
Interestingly, tigerbunny_db posted an informal survey on RPGnet: "How Did You Learn About Gaming?". Obviously, it's anecdotal and not necessarily representative, but still interesting. I haven't done statistics on it, but it seemed like the most common start was with the D&D Basic Set -- and about half started by reading the book, not by joining an existing group. Let me start by my beliefs regarding a good gateway game:
(A) It should have a quick start-up time to get to fun play. This could in principle include making part of character generation fun, but more likely it means getting to actual play.
(A1) Ideally, all the materials required for play should be included with the game. As with Cheapass Games designs, this can use common household items like tokens, playing cards, or maybe a few d6s -- but not more.
(A2) Templates and/or archetype characters are good for this. A number of RPGs do this including Star Wars, Shadowrun, and Feng Shui. However, most do not including D&D3.5.
(A3) The rules might have various modular extensions, but you should be able to quickly learn enough for your first game without fudging like "Ignore this part" or "We'll skip initiative" and so forth. So, higher level spells are less of a problem -- but complex combat procedures are. Lack of rules is equally a problem: there should not be a point where the new players are left scratching their heads over how to resolve things.
(A4) A good introductory adventure(s) or clear set-up for such is a must, and ideally at least one that can be played in a single session (3-5 hours max). Without some guidance like this, my #1 and #2 goals are extremely unlikely. There are a number of good adventure designs -- including ones designed for convention play which are playable in one sitting. Single-session play is the norm for conventions, and I also play it often with my friends -- so I believe both that it is possible and that it has appeal to experienced gamers. However, it is vanishingly rare for a good, fast adventure to appear in the basic game.
(B) It should provide guidance for further play. Having a basic model/template for creating new adventures is vital. This doens't have to be a straightjacket, but it should be a workable formula. For example, D&D has a pretty clear procedure. Draw a dungeon map, then stock it with monsters, traps, and treasures. That's fine. Champions is similar: write up (or take from a book) a supervillain, get a hex map of a location, give them a plan, and go. The same goes for Dogs in the Vineyard. On the other hand, games like Over the Edge or West End's Star Wars RPG aren't so clear.
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Given those principles, we can look back at some of the prior efforts. In general, RPGs are not easy to pick up. They are focused on being played in long campaigns, with two hours or more of character creation. A majority don't even have easy basics like templates or sample characters. They either don't have an introductory adventure, or have one which sucks.
The eighties D&D Basic Set. It sold several millions copies, and brought many people such as myself into the hobby. It generated its own line separate from AD&D including five expansions, many adventures, and the Monstrous Compendiums. Many fans of the enjoyed its more unified, simplified mecanics to AD&D. However, it wasn't a very good design. It had slow character creation (compared to modern templates and such). Rolling for first level hit points meant characters were so flimsy that they'd die off incredibly quickly, forcing you to restart rolling up another one. It still required multi-session play leaving everything hanging.
There was Marvel Superheroes. Again, it sold well for over a decade including dozens of books in the line -- ending its run only when Marvel Comics themselves went bankrupt. It at least had pregenerated characters included, but rolling percentile dice and consulting a table for every roll is fundamentally cumbersome. The idea of a universal table isn't a terrible one (used in James Bond 007 and Rolemaster), but it's a poor choice for a quick pick-up game. In short, I don't think the game play was that good.
Greg Costikyan's Star Wars RPG was the best gateway game so far in Ken Hite's opinion. Again, a highly successful line which lasted over a decade until the license was pulled prior to the release of The Phantom Menace film. It had templates for quick character startup, and reasonably simple rolls (i.e. no table lookup). However, it was still designed for campaign play without having a clear model for campaigns or adventures. Whereas D&D suggested the GM prepare a map, and Marvel Superheroes suggested preparing opponent(s) and a location -- the Star Wars RPG recommends writing a plotline. This is problematic first of all because it invites problems with railroading. Moreover, since Star Wars was not an episodic series (like television or comics), there was no clear template for a plotline.
So going back to my original goals, what would I recommend? For #1 (friend's kids), I'd probably go with the Star Wars RPG despite the issues I mentioned, though I'd look for some good published adventures to buy along with the basic rules. I might also try the new D&D Basic Set (which I didn't cover here but which has fast-play characters and other features). For #2 (distant adults), I'd probably recommend the Parlor Larps series. They have some rough spots in editing but are pretty good. For #3, I think the Buffy RPG would be my pick, but there are many sloppy points in the mechanics and the poorly explained plot twist power. If the starting adventure is going to have conflicts, I want it to have interesting, comprehensible choices rather than just rolling dice back and forth until I say "You won" (which is how newbie fights often go).
In short, I'm not satisfied with this line-up, and I think there can be better. I think the field was actually rather better in the eighties when games often came in boxed sets, with usable components. You could hand the players book to the players, while you read through the sample adventure. Today game stores mostly have 200+ page hardbound core rulebooks.
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August 2nd, 2006
12:48 pm - Cage Match: Gateway Games vs. Personalized Instruction
OK, so jamused and cpxbrex in particular had some objections to my last post, "On 'Gateway Games'". As I noted in that post, most people currently in the hobby started out by being recruited into an existing group by experienced role-players. Done well, that is great. If you can have personalized instruction by itself, that will generally be better than having a gateway game by itself. On the other hand, given a random person in the world, they probably don't have a gamer ready to instruct them. Heck, many experienced gamers have trouble getting a group together. By comparison, a book which you can order (or PDF to download) is vastly more accessible to the average person.
More importantly, I don't see that there needs to be a cage match to the death between these approaches. There is no opposition here. In fact, they complement each other. People who try to design new gateway games will be playtesting them with non-gamers, thus introducing new people. Conversely, people who introduce non-role-players to the hobby using existing games will have useful observations for those designing new gateway games. I don't think efforts towards either sabotage the one. Gateway games can help out people trying to introduce those new to the hobby -- like first playing a simple one-shot with someone to give them an idea before inviting them to a regular campaign.
cpxbrex wrote: That said, then, I think that a child-friendly introductory RPG might be a good idea (as opposed to what I had been discussing, which was a more general "gateway game" that would serve to bring in older gamers, and which I think they'd generally find insulting). I do not think that any RPG in broad distribution (you might know more about this than I do) has specifically targeted a pre-teen audience, dealing with pre-teen themes in a way that would be amenable to both the audience and their parents (which must be seriously considered, of course, when making a game for pre-teens).
I don't see why a gateway game should be insulting. For example, two of the most common suggestions of gateway games among boardgames are Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne. I don't think anyone finds those insulting -- they're simply fun games which are easy to pick up. In fact, I would say that the distinguishing facet of a gateway game is that it should not be a dumbed-down game. The definition of a gateway game is a playable game unto itself independent of the "real game".
Another approach for beginners is to provide instructional materials for more complicated games -- like various "quick-play" demos for games or D&D for Dummies, for example. These are not so much playable games in themselves, but are aimed more at trying to get people to play the full game. Note that even though it is insulting, D&D for Dummies was still #11,309 in Amazon Books -- so well behind the Player's Handbook (#1,132) but at least ahead of the Monster Manual II (#16,028) or the Star Wars RPG (#55,464).
I also don't know of any RPGs for preteens in broad distribution (i.e. mainstream stores) currently, though there are a number of small press/independent games. The last that I recall was the Pokemon Jr Adventure Game, which used cards but had descriptions of encounters (in a railroaded manner) that the parent would read. That was for very young kids -- i.e. younger than those playing the Pokemon CCG. It included a die and some tokens and heavy cardboard cards. It went away as the Pokemon craze faded.
My kid is 6 and we play the Talisman board game together. Actually, I'd consider it something of a role-playing gateway. It has character sheets which track two attributes (Strength and Craft) along with your lives and gold. You fight monsters and collect objects and followers which go onto your character sheet. Not a role-playing game, but fun for him and introduces concepts used in tabletop RPGs. It's currently his favorite game. I'm not sure what would be a good next step, though.
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August 1st, 2006
12:38 am - On "Gateway Games"
A few comments here on the concept of "gateway games</i>" which came up in comments in both of my lasts posts on industry: "The Death of GoO..." and "Links and Thoughts...". First of all, to clarify a bit on what gateway games are -- I borrowed the term from board game discussion. See Alfred Wallace's "Musings On... 'Gateway' games" as an example of the concept as it is understood in board game circles.
Now first of all, some basic points which we perhaps should agree on:
1) Historically, most people learned RPGs by joining an existing RPG group playing AD&D or some other relatively complex game. They were taught the game in steps. For example, my wife got started on RPGs through Champions. I love Champions, but I also think is a terrible gateway game. Still, there are some people who this was not true for. I personally got the D&D Basic Set as a present as a child, and learned from what I read. I had heard that my friend Eric's older brother played it, and it sounded cool, but I never played with his group and had no idea how it worked.
2) Relying on recruitment into existing groups is inherently limited. Many people cannot find people to play with even if they already know how to play and are actively looking. Consider this RPGnet thread where a rural mother posted asking about finding an RPG for her son. With no one to GM for the kid, how would you introduce him to roleplaying? The channels are basically limited to what she can order in the mail.
3) There have been some attempts at gateway games which can be played out of the box. The most successful have arguably been Basic D&D and Marvel Superheroes. These did not revolutionize the industry, but Basic D&D was important (to some degree) for the boom of role-playing circa 1980 which has never really been matched. However, I think it was seriously flawed by being dumbed down. A good gateway game is not a dumbed-down version of a more complex game -- it is designed around itself.
4) There are other hobbies which take effort to learn -- such as knitting, guitar playing, and fencing. However, they also usually have a much longer history, and much greater resources for learning how to play. Fencing is taught in high schools and colleges, and has hundreds of years of tradition. Also, cpxbrex cited chess as taking time to learn, but I don't think that's particularly true. Two adults can get through a game of chess in two hours or so with no prior experience. They won't win any tournaments, but they can have fun. It also is taught in schools, has hundreds of years of history, and thousands of books on the subject, and (for example) programs distributed free. So I don't think it's a good comparison.
cpxbrex wrote: "Chess isn't going to die out, anytime soon, nor go or wargames -- most of these to play fully require a long time to learn to do it well." This is true, but there are many other games and hobbies which have all but died. Butterfly collections were once quite the rage to the point of the butterfly net being a cliche, but they have essentially disappeared.
5) An alternative to gateway RPGs is to have resources similar to the above hobbies. If I want to learn to fence, I don't go hang out in the basement of someone whose name I got on the Internet. I take fencing lessons from a licensed instructor. Now, I don't expect to see anything like that for tabletop RPGs, but we could attempt to move in that direction. Organizations like the RPGA and the Camarilla are an effort towards this, as are conventions. However, the state of things can be improved, I think we'd agree.
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So, I don't think we've had a successful "gateway game" thus far in RPG history. Now, having one isn't a necessity. I can't prove that one is possible, but I think that the principle is sound. There are games of this sort for board and card games -- which can be handed to someone and they can try it out to see if they like it.
As to what an ideal gateway game would be like, I'm not sure. I noted that Basic D&D was simplistic -- not to mention some problems with the gameplay itself. On the other hand, I also disagree with chgriffen, who suggested that Primetime Adventures (PtA) is close to a good gateway game. To me, PtA relies heavily on social and imaginative skills of the gaming group which might not be present. Now, I'm not going to present an answer, but I'll suggest some possible models: my own game "The Business of Murder" is something that many non-roleplayers have downloaded and played, though it is far from polished. In this vein though slightly more complicated are Shifting Forest's Parlor Larps. Alternatively there is the approach of the D&D Basic Set, which is closer to a boardgame in setup with roleplaying elements.
Malcolm Sheppard reported in this post an interesting note from Mike Mearls: "Mike Mearls emailed me about the Zero-to-Gamer post with specific reference to the redesign of the Basic D&D game. I think this is relevant to comments about railroading and such in the design of the game I demo'd.
Mike talked about how the design needed to stay on the "target" of showing somebody how they assumed the character's persona and interacted with the world, and I agree. This conceptual structure has to precede everything else. The rules that exist have to reinforce this basic idea." That is very vague, but I'd be curious to see what comes of it. At least, I bought the D&D3 Basic Game, for example.
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July 31st, 2006
12:54 am - The Death of GoO and the State of the Industry
So, following up on earlier industry comments, there have been a few more notable discussions and developments. mearls wrote a longish essay entitled "Freelancing Isn't Free" -- subtitled "Only An Idiot Doesn't Self-Publish". Essentially, he seems to be saying that the mainstream print RPG market has shrunk to the point that freelancing simply isn't viable anymore -- and newcomers are better off self-publishing, which is much higher share of the profits but a smaller audience. Also, the_tall_man has a brief comment on "The 'RPG Industry'". Also, Dennis Detwiller posted "On the Death and Rebirth of Gaming" -- where he talks about Greg Stolze's concept of "ransom" as a business model. Lastly, there was an RPGnet thread, The "Corebook + Stream of Supplements" Model.
There's some interesting stuff there. On the one hand, the basic news is that the overall tabletop RPG market is shrinking. There seems to be fairly wide agreement on this from industry folks I read -- though it is also agreed that the PDF market is growing (see RPGNow's "State of the Industry" Report (PDF) by William Corrie and James Mathe). As a sign of the times, it has come out that Guardians of Order has gone out of business. No official announcement has been made, but George R.R. Martin wrote: "When I finally reached GoO's owner and president Mark MacKinnon last week, he confirmed what many had come to suspect -- that he is shutting down operations. MacKinnon is presently attempting to place some of GoO's games with other companies." (from his News Page).
So, there have been a number of arguments over what to do about this. I'm not a businessman, and I'm not an RPG industry insider -- so take anything I say with a huge grain of salt. However, I've heard from industry people that I more-or-less respect.
1) From Ken Hite, it is good to shift more towards treating things as specialty books. That means having more expensive, somewhat higher quality books -- which seems to be where efforts like Monte Cook's Ptolus are going. The higher price point means that you're settling into a smaller market but making more per book. This hopefully produces products with a longer shelf life. I can see the business logic of this, though I can't judge it.
2) In the RPGnet thread, Mike Mearls essentially that game lines should be killed off more frequently -- namely, dropped when the core rulebook stops selling. He cites pushing a failing line through supplements as a main factor in the "supplement treadmill" effect. I'm a bit skeptical of this, since it seems like supplement companies like Steve Jackson Games and Hero Games are doing OK -- while Guardians of Order, which had fairly diverse lines (i.e. Tri-Stat, DX, D20), shut down. On the other hand, it's likely that there's stuff here I'm not seeing.
3) "Old Scratch" on RPGnet suggested that game companies sell too much too the geeky, hard-core players who are most vocal -- rather than selling to the larger market. I have some sympathy for this, and yet I'm not sure that this applies particularly to supplements. Now, generally speaking, I do think that games for beginners and more casual players can be different than games for dedicated role-players (though not always). But particularly once you have the core game and a set of players for that game, I would think you should listen to your dedicated fans, because hard-core players are the marketing engine of most RPGs, which have no advertising budget.
As I said, take my thoughts here with many grains of salt -- but at least they should raise some interesting questions.
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June 17th, 2006
05:23 pm - Links and Thoughts on the RPG Industry
So Simon Rogers had an article in the Dying Earth RPG column "See Page XX", entitled "Is the RPG Industry Screwed?". In it, he quotes from a number of people: Matthew Sprange (of Mongoose Publishing), Also Ghiozzi, Chris Pramas (CEO of Green Ronin), Chad Underkoffler (author of Truth & Justice), Ben Lehman (author of Polaris), Eric Gibson (of West End Games), Marcus King (of Titan Games), and more. Two responses include Joshua BishopRoby's post on "Screwing with 'The Industry'" -- and Mike Mearls comments on ENWorld thread in a thread on Rogers' article. Chris Chinn comments on Mike Mearl's observations in "Publish/Play Cycle". And Nathan Paoletta has a related post on "Indulging in Futurism".
Rogers' article is a bit of a smorgasbord of ideas quoted from various people. His main conclusions are fairly known issues: the D20 bubble has burst, the tabletop RPG market continues to shrink as a whole, and PDF publishing is growing. Mike Mearls' comments echo Ken Hite's criticism of RPG publishing when interviewed by Paul Tevis in "Have Games Will Travel GTS Special #9" in March. The problem cited is the periodical model of RPG publishing -- i.e. treating an RPG book like a new comic issue or a collectible card game, and thus trying to move the complete run off the shelf in 2-3 months or abandoning it as a failure. This is similar to Mearls' complaint that RPG publishers overproduce. However, both are somewhat vague on what to do differently.
Hite suggests that a more sustainable model would be similar to specialty book publishing. Prices would be higher, and books published less often -- but they would be higher quality and sell for longer. Mearls suggests moving to more like miniatures where what is sold are gaming props like dungeon tiles. I'm leery of both. Higher prices seem like at best marginal -- I think some people may buy into the "deluxe" approach, but surely it will decrease general sales. On the other hand, reliance props seem to reduce tabletop RPGs to miniatures games. The periodical model is in part a publisher/distributor problem, but also one with RPG players. Too often, I feel, there is an ever-shifting focus to what the "hot new thing" is -- whether that's a new splat book, a new D20 setting, or a new small game. The latest thing is always so cool, and a must have to get out and play.
I think we still have a long way to go to correct this in RPGs broadly. When I look at prominent RPG lines, these remain things like D&D3 which have hundreds of books for them. I guess I should make my bias clear here: while I think D&D3 is a clear improvement over AD&D2, I still consider it a clunky and over-complex system. It was and is aimed at established D&D players, and is a terrible gateway for new players into the hobby.
Is the RPG publishing industry even relevant for the hobby? I think so. I'm a fan of independently published RPGs, but ideally they should be a testing ground and complement to tiered publishing. Among traditional novels and comics and movies, I still generally buy from publishers (albeit often small ones) rather than buying print-on-demand directly from the authors over the Internet. Internet publications are important, but I love a nicely-produced book or even better boxed set.
In Rogers' article, Ben Lehman suggests that over the last five years we've seen "an across the board increase in actual, enjoyable play". I'm skeptical of this. Personally, I'm having fun and lots of people I know are too -- but then, I've always had fun playing RPGs. Once you move outside of the small niche of indie games into more typical play of D&D3 and Exalted, it seems to me more of a style difference from the nineties. Things are different than in nineties newsgroup discussion, but I see an equivalent mix of enthusiasm and complaint. Within publishing, hobby stores are closing and tabletop RPG book sales continually sink. If the new games were improving play so much, I'd think this wouldn't happen.
Meanwhile, Joshua BishopRoby's response is that RPGs can and should move out of their current "geek status". On the one hand, I'd love to see more non-speculative RPGs (mysteries, drama, etc.) as part of generally liking more variety in RPGs. However, the comments seem to idealize non-geek life. Personally, I'm happier with my geeky RPG social life than most non-geeks I know. I see a lot of moms and dads trapped with no consistent social outlet outside their spouse and kids except perhaps sports -- certainly nothing both creative and social. I'd be more interested in seeing games invade other niches, rather than pursuing a mythical "mainstream".
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