Archive for the ‘Caught My Attention’ Category

I pre-ordered The Bones from Gameplaywright Press this week. They have a hardcover special edition that I’m very, very eager to get my hands on. I have a few friends in this book, but even if not, I would have to buy it.

See, every book I’ve seen with Will Hindmarch as editor or developer has impressed the hell out of me. His name is one of those that, when seen, will cause me to buy a book without hesitation. (Jeff Tidball, the other half of Gameplaywright, is like that with me for board games. The two together are a fierce combination against my wallet, yo.)

Enough of my verbal fellating.[1] What I want to do is tell you a story. But first, I’ll do a little copy-paste from GPW to tell you what this book is about:

about the book

This isn’t about math. It’s about unlucky breaks and victory against all odds.

This isn’t about percentiles and probabilities. It’s about late-night game-ending rolls where everything hinges on that climactic moment when one single die skitters across the table and determines the fate of a hero, a city, an empire…

The Bones gathers writing about fandom and family—about gamers, camaraderie, and memories— and ties them together where they meet: our dice. These are essays and anecdotes about the ways dice make us crazy, about the stakes we play for and the thrill we get from not knowing what the next roll will bring.

Step back and look at how we play with dice.

When they announced the hardcover[2] on Monday, I ordered it.[3] I got the PDF Tuesday morning. I was in quite a bit of pain from a gout flare-up that started the day prior, so I was in a pretty piss-poor mood. I decided to take a slow that morning at the kitchen table, and downloaded the PDF. Sipping my coffee (which I walked down the damn block to get, because I really wanted that coffee), I opened it and started flipping through.

(Note: if you don’t have a Mac, you don’t know the joy of trackpad gestures. I can honestly feel like I’m thumbing through a book with how swiping up and down scrolls the page. That sort of natural motion is what’ll drive me to buying an iPad. And I’ve been a Windows monkey since 3.1 — you know, back when they used civilized version numbers. Get off my lawn.)

I started with John Kovalic’s Foreword, forgoing the “random essay/article” roll that you can do on the table of contents. (Which, by the way, I think is keen. I may never roll on it, but I love the personality there.) I grinned. Here I am, the big toe on my left foot in a crapton of pain, my left calf aching from having to walk weird, my back complaining about having to use a cane again…and I’m grinning.

And then I read Will’s introduction. That’s when The Bones clicked for me. It’s distilled Gamer Joy. From the history of dice as told by Ken Hite, to Fred Hicks talking about how diceless gaming made him love dice, to Paul Tevis sharing a story about dice and his gaming group[4], to Jared Sorensen sharing with you the random places he’s found his dice by describing it as a random table, to…well, you get the idea. All these people love this thing we do. And it reminded me how much I love this thing we do, why I keep doing it, making games for other people, things like that.

I kept reading. I kept smiling. I’m not saying The Bones made the pain in my leg go away. That’s crazy talk. But it did cut into the foul mood I had that morning, and made the rest of the day just a little easier. And I know I’m not the only one on the planet who has foul moods. I’m looking at you, Internet. You’re a moody bastard.

So, if you’re looking at The Bones and wondering to yourself “well, that’s neat, but it’s not a game or an advice book, so why would I want it?”, I’m here to tell you: because, if you’re a gamer, if you love this thing we do, it’ll put a smile on your face. It’ll teach you something. (I don’t know about you, but as a nerd, that puts a fucking smile on my face.) It’s about our tribe and being connected to it.

And when you’re having a piss-poor day, there’s that random essay table…

- Ryan

[1] Or is it?

[2] I typed and deleted “hardcore.” Thought you should know.

[3] Yes, I still don’t know where I’m living at the end of June. But I hope to know that by the 15th.

[4] Which I have heard at least three times before, in person over drinks. Still, the man can spin a fun yarn.

Man alive, I and 87 other people got a hell of a gift this morning. Daniel Solis released a preview PDF of his upcoming childrens’ game, Happy Birthday, Robot!

If you haven’t checked out this game, you owe it to yourself to watch this short movie (2m 6s):

(Holy damn, that Solis kid has himself some amazing design wizardry. I’ve seen this video a few times, and it never ceases to impress me.)

The PDF is gorgeous. I’m looking forward to sending this book to my sister in Colorado. She’s got three kids and another on the way, and I think they would just absolutely love HBR.

Good news for you is that you can still get the PDF now if you join the Kickstarter. Daniel’s doing a good job of building up buzz and getting people interested while its available. If this sort of thing is your bag, help him out! You can find out more at danielsolis.com/happybirthdayrobot.

(As an aside: I’m totally envious that Adam Dray landed this project.)

- Ryan

P.S. I’m not exactly unbiased here. I think the world of Daniel and his awesome talents. And he decided one of the stories we made playing HBR was good for the book, so my name’s on it (even if it a very minor capacity). You can see the story Justin Smith and I made over a lunch break by going go Daniel’s HBR site and looking at the third story.

[EDIT: Scott Mathis pointed out in the comments that my intent for this post, to talk about how a particular marketing method doesn't work and use my experience as a case study, was only discussed well in the comments. Sorry about that, folks! I forgot about my own rule regarding using the specific alongside the abstract.]

…but I can’t. And that makes me a sad panda.

Specifically, I would like to spend money on the new superhero RPG by Steve Kenson, ICONS. I hear people already geeking about it now that they have their pre-order PDF copies, and that’s got me excited. Leonard Balsera was IMing me today about the characters he was making. That taunting bastard!

And if I could right now buy it, I would. But since I didn’t pre-order, it’s not available to me. From one of the posts on Adamant’s site:

The commercial PDF of ICONS will be available beginning June 1st, and the print edition of the game should be available to stores (and shipped to pre-order customers) by mid-June.

Well, fuck. I didn’t pre-order it even though I was genuinely interested, because I didn’t know where I was going to be living in mid-June. (And I still don’t, but hopefully I will in a couple weeks.) And I don’t have a lot of shelf space these days, so I don’t order as many books as I used to. Thus, I’m waiting on the PDF.

The PDF won’t be available for another 13 days.

That is a year in Internet time. That is a long time for me to lose interest in this “SQUEE WANNA BUY” state, enough time for something else to take up my impulse dollars, enough time to hear things about the game that would turn me off — not necessarily something that would make me not want to play the game, but something enough to cause me to stop being excited about it.

I like Kenson and his work, and if I had a PDF today, I might be able to get a pick-up game together at the Memorial Day con in L.A. — my vacation con that’s before June 1st. But since I didn’t pre-order, no dice. (Pun intended, baby. That’s how I roll.)

So while my friends are geeking on it, they’re doing so when that geeking can’t generate sales. And such excitement doesn’t last long. Hell, this blog post might even generate sales, since people click on shit (and I buy that “There’s no such thing as truly bad PR” philosophy). But by the time you can buy the PDF, this post will be old news. The only thing it’ll be good for is collecting spam.

(Now, maybe the PDF isn’t finished. But it’s not like the power to send purchasers an updated PDF doesn’t exist. That’s what Fred did with Dresden. And it worked pretty well, I think.)

But, yeah. Guys, on today, May 18th 2010, in response to the geekfest on my Twitter feed, I want to give you money. Might not have that interest on June 1st. And ICONS probably deserves better marketing treatment than this.

- Ryan

John Stavropoulos is one of the sharpest people I know, and a man I’m proud to call a friend. Some weeks ago, he wrote a fascinating post about marketing on a Story-Games thread:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you are not reading Jeff Tidball & Will Hindmarch’s fantastic blog, Gameplaywright, there is a small hole in your life that needs filling.

Will and Jeff routinely offer, as they say in the old country, thought-provoking shit. Today’s post by Jeff inspired by The Hurt Locker is no exception. He muses about the power of drama and tension to be had when we take the safety off of our characters’ lives.[1]

I’ve been working here and there on this Terminator resistance war-inspired story game (riffing off of a Grey Ranks hack) for a bit now, and now I feel like I understand what’s been missing. The characters weren’t enough enough immediate peril, so there was less tension. And I was pulling back from the “characters can easily, and quickly, die” punch because, well, I don’t know. Maybe because I felt like that would make for a shit story? (Though I don’t entirely buy that now, just trying to guess my past reasoning.)

In any case, “safety” and “tension” cannot co-exist. Sometimes it’s worth being reminded of this simple but often overlooked idea. Of course, that doesn’t mean that every moment has to be about characters living or dying. There are smaller stakes, and there are fates worse than death. But if our characters surely aren’t going to die, aren’t going to fail, aren’t going to pay a heavy price so that others may live, then any tension we describe is false. Heroism exists precisely when there is action in spite of no safety.

And it’s totally okay for my game to have sudden player-character death, since that sells the tension of a world inhabited by roaming killer robots. Of course, now I have to think about the design implications of this decision.[2]

- Ryan

[1] “Take the safety off of…” has, over the last few months, grown into a favorite phrase of mine.

[2] No, it’s not something that’s pre-empting Mythender or anything like that. I just like to tinker with ideas. I can’t not.

Last year, Daniel Perez has this fantastic idea to get some group podcaster ads in Kobold Quarterly.  I was among those involved, and while I couldn’t tell you if I got any listeners from that ad, I can say that I was happy to be a part of that experiment and to have RPGPodcasts.com also in the mag. This year, Daniel’s looking to repeat the experiment, which I’m happy to partake in again.

Donald Dennis of On Board Games publicly responded to this, and in a way that I completely disagree with.  You can read is full text on his blog, but the part of want to respond to is this:

By charging podcasts for ad space the good folks producing the magazine are asserting they have greater value to us than we have for them, and that’s not a valuation I agree with. Why? It’s easy to skip advertisements in magazines without absorbing any content; it’s tougher to skip them in podcasts. Heck, if a podcast crew talks about a product, like a magazine, that’s about the same impact as a printed editorial or endorsement.

Donald, I think you’ve completely missed the point here. KQ hasn’t approached any of us looking for an ad-exchange or anything like that. KQ isn’t attempting to leverage us as a marketing tool in the way you mention. Sure, they could, and if they approached us as podcasters asking us to advertise, this argument would apply. But they didn’t — Daniel is looking for a few interested podcasters to take up a service KQ provides, that of advertising.  KQ is an entity looking to (I assume) be profitable, which includes meeting its target ad revenue, and we’re a group of entities looking to take advantage of that.

But the assertion that because less than a dozen of us are thinking “hey, let’s advertise on KQ” and that KQ is willing to take our money that somehow KQ is of “greater value” is assinine. That’s like saying that KQ has a greater value than the game companies that advertise with them — because that’s exactly what’s going on here. Just because it’s a different type of media outlet doesn’t change the advertiser-advertisee dynamic.

Let’s not stop there. Donald is saying that it’s wrong to claim that a professional magazine with an editorial staff is something “of greater value” than a group of amateur pseudo-radio nerds doing their own production and having an unverifiable listenership. That’s what 95% of us podcasters are — amateurs (perhaps with aspirations of professionalism, including myself) who do not answer to creditors if we miss an episode or come out late, and who cannot accurately verify listenership (as measuring downloads is a poor way to measure who is actually listening and who has just not bothered to stop subscribing, and have no reason to “catch up” since it’s a free show, removing that “I should get my money’s worth and check it out” sense).

But, is it wrong to assert that? I’m not so sure — it’s also easy to ignore ads on a podcast. Or after the podcast is over, on your commute, forget that the ad even played. Many podcast listeners aren’t in front of their computers when listening, so it’s potentially lost. And it’s rare that a podcast is listened to more than once by a person, so you don’t get repeat business potential in re-reading a magazine article. On the other hand, a print ad, while one can scan over it, exists in a way that’s referencable — people do re-read articles because print media makes referencing past data more convienent. So our ad is more likely to be seen again and again, even at a glance, by readers. And each impression comes with a more likelihood of follow-up. People are curious creatures (which is why my logo for Master Plan is meant to draw attention and make you wonder what I’m on about).

If you think you deserve some sort of free ad exchange because you’re a podcast, Donald, then why don’t you offer it rather than complain about a situation whose origins you’re not taking into consideration? And if you do, be prepared to justify that your show will bring an equivalent value to KQ that they believe they’re giving to you. Be prepared if someone tells you that “2000+ downloads isn’t 2000+ listeners.”

- Ryan