Archive for the ‘Caught My Attention’ Category

It’s time for another installment of Folks I Admire! Today, I talk about the dynamic duo of Bully Pulpit Games, Jason Morningstar and Steve Segedy. They’re the minds & talent behind games like The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, Grey Ranks, and of course Fiasco.

But I want to set aside their games for a moment, because they really do speak for themselves. It’s the two behind them that are worthy of praise.

Jason is a kind and generous guy. One of my first interactions in indieland was talking on my LiveJournal (yeah, back then) about getting to finally play The Roach. Jason responded with a comment that made me feel like he was excited to hear about folks playing the game. It’s that interaction, where Google Alerts is used or whatever to see people talking about your game, and coming in to say “thanks”, that I still think about to this day. He’s been kind even when people he’s dealt with online have been assholes to him and his work.

Jason is the high water mark for being magnanimous.

Steve is much like Jason, generous and awesome. He’s taking up the mantle of Games on Demand this year for Gen Con, and naturally as a skilled editor I find in him a kindred spirit. When you talk with him, you feel like you’re important, that he thinks you’re worth the time for conversation. He’s engaging and friendly. And you way away from a conversation feeling somehow more awesome than you did before, either because of just pure niceness or because he dropped a bomb of wisdom in your mind.

Ka-boom.

I guess I’m using many words to say “They’re two of the most decent, generous folks you’ll meet.” So…they’re two of the most decent, generous folks you’ll meet. Seriously.

And as craftsmen of games, I seriously admire the work they put into development. I got a peek at their process when I gave them some notes on Durance, and I’ve had post-play test conversations with them about Fiasco and Nine Roosevelts Against the Impossible. The questions they ask, the way they mine feedback, and how they process it is one of the most mature processes I’ve seen to date, and I’m including all I’ve been involved with.

Steve & Jason are wonderful people, they make great games and they’re serious about the work.

I raise a glass to you two fine gentlemen.

- Ryan

The totally kick-ass Elizabeth Sampat has a new project that I’m (a) totally excited about and (b) totally not involve in! :) She’s making a game called THEY BECAME FLESH[1], which is about the fall of a third of the Host and their exile to the mortal realm. I was privvy to an early rules draft, and was really intrigued by what I saw.

Check out the Kickstarter video:

If this sort of thing sounds up your alley, a PDF is as low as $5. $12 for a print as well, and from there.

Rock on, Elizabeth. You may have just made the angel game I’ve been waiting years for. Here are some highlights, for those just tuning in:

• Play during the game, and the decisions you make, will drive your fallen angel toward an endgame, much like in Polaris, or if you’re not familiar with that like Fiasco’s aftermath (though, it doesn’t feel like Fiasco at all, just there’s an endgame you’re going toward).
• There are two GMs, one playing God/the forces of Heaven/cosmos/etc. and one playing Humanity/people who need & want stuff & have feelings and junk. (And may or may not be as emo as I just suggested, your play will vary.)
• It has the same sort of vibe as, say, My Life With Master, where the things that you are…well, not so much “good at” but “are inclined to do” is based on descriptive phrases. Each one is tied to their connection to God, to Humanity, and to their Fallen brethren. What sort of connection you use is important, because that informs your direction. It’s, of course, the job of the GMs to challenge that.
• It uses far fewer dice than Mythender. :)

So, yeah, I’m all over it.

- Ryan

[1] Yup, all caps. Like God is saying it, in the way that God is depicted as speaking in media. If I were a thoroughly heretical person, I would recommend that someone tell God where his caps lock key is. (Pro tip: I totally am that person. :)

Once every other week or so, I am going to do these Caught My Attention posts. These are where I talk about some stuff I’ve seen or read, and I’ll talk about why after this round-up. (Unlike link round-ups on some blogs, I’ll talk about my thoughts on these things.)

Rob Donoghue on Experience Rewards

Given my thoughts on Dungeon World lately, Rob’s post is up my alley. He talks about creating a game log to track the creation & interaction of fictional elements as a way to trigger character growth, rather than the typical focus on destruction or defeat of fictional elements.

While I think the idea is rough and I’m unsure about the level element (though, if it were more framed through the lens & construct of Primetime Adventures’ Screen Presence, which rotates around from session to session, there could be fruit), it’s a blog post. Those are for rough, unfinished ideas. Yet again, Rob hands us a football and says “hey, run with this.”

Bajjutsu Masters, a game by Daniel Solis & Josh Mannon

This new game looks a bit like a cross between Sagefight (in the physical activity & structured play sense) and Hit a Dude (in the physical artifact at conventions sense). It isn’t really, but that’s a way to look at what it’s doing. Daniel & Josh are doing some live development, which is always a neat process to watch.

And yes, I did a quick developmental editing pass on the text. Because even a small game needs those sorts of eyes. Perhaps especially such a small game, because you’re going to take in 100% of the game in one gaze.

Paul Tevis talks about making smaller chunks of work

Paul talks about this idea from a software development perspective, about how the methodology he uses at work, Agile, causes people to commit code more often and in smaller slices or chunks than other methods. While I have software experience here, I’m also thinking about it from a creative standpoint.

Committing code to a repository is analogous to sending documents to peers for review. I could write a whole comic script before handing it to my artist, or I could slice it into chunks: an outline for review, and then a couple pages for review, then ten, etc. Rapid cycling is one way we could get things done, because it helps keep honesty and transparency up.

It’s one thing if I’m not expecting to hear back from you in two months, and then find out you’re going to be too weeks late on your draft. It’s another if I expect to see little slices every week or two. And that translates back — if I’m having to evaluate 35000 words, that’s different from evaluating 5000 words. Obvious, but it means the time slices to deal with this are smaller. And smaller means more, well, agile. I’ve been eyeing the parallels more and more here, about how “eating an elephant one bite at a time” is something we need to keep in mind.

There are ways of doing that wrong. We at Evil Hat did for a bit, as we were learning how to do processes. But that’s a future post I need to write: on transferring responsibility on creative projects.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

I am a Mac user, and an iPhone user, though for most of my life I’ve been a PC user and looked down at Mac users.

Many people talk shit about Apple & Jobs, for various reasons. And I’ve been thinking about that sort of things for a couple years now, but it hit home thinking about Jobs yesterday. I’ve seen people talk shit about me and people I’ve worked with & for. I’ve talked shit about other people. It happens. But here’s the thing: when you talk shit about someone you don’t know except in a famous or nerd-famous or business context, they’re still touching your life. You’re talking shit because somehow there’s an impact on your life, however small or otherwise irrelevant.

When you talk shit about Wizards or Hasbro, you’re also saying “they’re big enough to have my attention” even if you wish that weren’t the case. When you talk shit about D&D players, you’re saying “that part of my hobby is too big or loud for me to ignore.” When you talk shit about folks like Vincent Baker or Ron Edwards[1], you’re saying “They did a thing that cannot be ignored.” When you talk shit about Fantasy Flight’s rulebooks, you’re saying “I cannot ignore these games.”

To talk shit is to claim something is unignorable. And the impact Steve Jobs had is the ultimate expression of that. Sure, you’re also saying whatever frustration you’re saying, about stupid-ass business decisions you see or microcultural differences or whatever. But the undercurrent is that you can’t ignore that impact. And that’s something worth thinking about.

Why I’m doing Caught My Attention

Did you ever do current events reports in school? The exercise there being part-stay in touch with your world and part-writing instruction. Lately, I’ve felt like I’m not staying in touch with my world enough, and so I’m doing this to keep me a bit honest about that. A link round-up wouldn’t be enough for that. By writing about my reactions and thoughts on something, I’m engaging. So this is me taking that exercise from school and applying it to my life today.

Which I find amusing, because I so fucking hated those assignments in school. :)

Maybe they’ll interest you. Maybe not. But this blog is one of my tools for making me a better writer and, I guess, person overall.

- Ryan

[1] Which is to say, “when I did”. I’ll cop to that.

Amanda Valentine has been my editor since I started working on the Dresden Files RPG. I have met a number of fantastic editors in my life as a writer, editor & production manager, but my don’t often get to watch an editor work both on what I’ve written (thus dealing with me as a writer), work with me to coordinate editing (thus working with me as a co-editor), and work with me on scheduling (thus dealing with me as her project manager). The last three years being in Amanda’s orbit has left me, honestly, having very high standards for any future editor I work with.

That includes me. Jennifer Brozek got me starting in this life of being an editor, and it’s Amanda who has helped forge who I am today.

I wrote this for Amanda’s blog bio:

Athena. Freya. Hera. The goddesses of old inspire devotion and grant power. Today they’re myth, but we have a new goddess to revere: Amanda Valentine, goddess of editing.

Many writers, including everyone at Evil Hat Productions, would march with her to the ends of the earth if it meant she’d work over our manuscript. Her eye for prose, for flow, for content, for context, and for rules understanding are top notch.

I’ve seen her work on the Dresden Files RPG, Smallville RPG, and other projects here and there, and she’s amazing; she truly grants power to these works. And I have high expectations for the upcoming Marvel RPG, expectations I know she’ll meet and exceed.

Oh, and Amanda, don’t you dare edit this for content. I want you to feel ridiculous when you post this on your site. :D

And while I had fun writing that, I meant every word.

Amanda taught me how to better interact with writers that I didn’t already have a strong rapport with. She’s made me & Leonard Balsera get out of our own heads when writing rules in Dresden, with some techniques that I’ve since used on other projects as an editor. Things like Socratic questioning, asking for explanations in different ways, various ways she’s learned on how to get a writer to break internal patterns that can lock us up in how we explain rules.

She’ll be editing Mythender, when it’s done[1]. She’s working with Evil Hat on Fate products, and with Margaret Weis on Marvel. I’m pretty jazzed that she got to edit the Fiasco Companion, even if I’m a bit jealous of that specific job. (One of the rare times that I am envious of a fellow editor.) All in all, she’s a “take no prisoners” editor, while still maintaining a personable nature with her writers. That isn’t easy, and some editors don’t even bother[2], but she pulls it off well, making a partnership where there could be friction.

Amanda is starting to post more to her blog. Like me, she has thoughts on editing and how it’s viewed in the community. If that sort of thing interests you, I recommend following her.

- Ryan

[1] If it’s ever done. I keep pondering letting it go and just accepting it to move onto other projects, but that’s a different post.

[2] Not that that’s a bad thing, especially if you’re a submissions editor. Dear god, especially then.

If you’re going to Gen Con, there’s a game I’d like to to check out. It’s called Dungeon World, by indie publisher Sage Kobold Productions — Sage LaTorra & Adam Koebel.

After a year of PDFs and incremental releases, Sage Kobold Productions will proudly have the Dungeon World Basic Game on sale at GenCon through Indie Press Revolution (IPR, booth 413) for $15. It’s a striking red book featuring four classes playable to level 5, all the rules, equipment, and an included adventure. The cover is by Edwin Huang, artist of the wonderful Skullkickers comic.

The included adventure is really something special. It’s the first time we’ve tried to write a module for DW and it’s pretty great. It features a wonderful new map by Tony Dowler and an awesome contribution from none other than Jason Morningstar, designer of Fiasco and many other great games.

(Click for the rest of the press release.)

If you’ve been following me over the years, you know that normally I would never tell you to check out a pay-for “preview edition” (or playtest edition, or ashcan) of a game. They’re usually unplaytested, unfinished crap that someone’s trying to get out early so they can claim some indie cred.[1] But I’ve been watching the game & the twitter streams about it for the last year, and it’s clear to me that Sage & Adam have actually Done The Work. So I’m likening it more to incremental products like the Dragon Age RPG box sets from Green Ronin, which I think is a pretty neat model.

I’m showing some love to Dungeon World because they’ve take ideas from the old school revival and from Apocalypse World, and have made it their own. It’s like a sweet little idea baby from an odd but loving marriage. I hear they’re doing interesting stuff with layout, which excites the fuck out of me because I’m looking at doing similar with Mythender. And they ended up inspiring a fix for a problem I had in Mythender — Bonds came directly from Dungeon World (though they do things differently in terms of mechanics, the language around the idea solved a lot of stuff). And Sage tweeted about having an editor, so yay!

Granted, that doesn’t say shit about the game play. And I haven’t had a chance to play it myself — every time I’m at a con where a game’s happening, the fucker fills up fast. But I got to hear an entire group be Excited As All Hell at the May #BarCon[2] in LA. Colin Jessup ran the hell out of Dungeon World down there, and all of his players came back with that sort of high you get from an exciting, phenomenal play experience. Them raving about it makes me want to play Dungeon World. Maybe at Gen con.

It’s a sweet, sweet idea baby. Go check it out. Flip through it. Play it at Games on Demand. And if it look like it’s up your alley, like it’s worth your $15, buy it & take it home for your group to play.

- Ryan

[1] Which I did when I participated in the Ashcan Front, and which is what the ashcan model in 2007-2008 felt like. It was a place where several people wanted spotlight without Doing The Work, which was a shame.

[2] Which mortals call Gamex.