A mind map is basically just a hierarchical outline that has been painted graphically, so all your leaves are pretty bubbles and the hierarchy is described by arcs connecting these nodes. It’s pretty. But it’s fundamentally flawed because it’s not a way to map your data. It’s a way to organize data in a very specific way (hierarchical) and this very specific way is not always all that useful. Forcing it into that map can be destructive, even. The only way, for example, to imply a connection between two nodes that are not strict parent/children is with an artificial “link” that exists outside the core model of the data.

Why does this bug me? It bugs me because the hierarchy should be an emergent property of the data and not a starting constraint. We should start mapping the data and find out that it’s hierarchical rather than force it into this structure. That is, the mind map severely limits your ability to explore your data set. Instead it becomes just a way to write it down which is, frankly, not interesting.

So anyway I grabbed this app and started playing with it. It’s pretty nifty. It’s very pretty. After a couple of hours enthralled by it I had a huge beautiful map of what this evening’s Soft Horizon game will contain and how they relate. Hierarchically, to be sure, but relate nonetheless. Wow, it is useful. I just had it upside down.

What the mind map does is not organize your data. It discovers your data. What you are exploring is not the data but your brain. You are being invited to invent, decompose, and otherwise investigate the raw stuff of creativity and consequently create something that has structure.

The hierarchical form invite elaboration, for example. I have a node called “Ragged Mere”. It’s a place. I want to know more about it so I start adding nodes (hey are these Aspects?!) like “Peaceful” and “Full of sorcerors” and “Gunpowder”. Cool. I add a couple of NPC nodes — just names, mind you — for people that are somehow attached to these places. Hmm, each also seems to demand elaboration. They get some attached sub-nodes, which also smell suspiciously like Aspects. Pretty soon I have this huge tree of hierarchical data that went all over places I had no idea I was going to investigate. Amazing!

So, okay, I get it. I mean, it’s still a crappy way to represent pre-existing data for all the reasons I ever thought of. But as a creative tool for trying to figure out how to turn a nebulous concept into a structure you can actually use for something, it does indeed work. Because of the way my mind is wired, I have to wonder how much of its power derives from simply being fun and pretty, of course, and that will shake out over time. If it’s useful, I’ll keep using it. If it’s nifty it will gather dust and eventually wind up on my “dead app page”. That’s one step before the trash on my iPad.

The fact that its structure is trivially represented by (and indeed, for many of these apps this is the actual storage format) an outline structure, it’s easy to see how to move from this to a nice linear document, if that’s a path you intend to tread. That’s looking pretty handy too, now.

Damn, I love being wrong almost as much as being right.

–BMurray

We hooked our cart to FATE. There’s no way to deny that the opportunity to grab the same brand as Spirit of the Century presented to us by the OGL was a big deal. I don’t think we realized what a big deal it was (or more correctly, what a big deal it would become) but there’s no question that we instantly penetrated an existing and forgiving crowd of buyers while at the same time staying on the periphery of it — we changed enough and on our own terms that it was an outsider’s FATE game. In real terms that meant that we actually attracted interest from both folks that knew they already liked FATE and from folks who loved the sort of ideas we had but were leery of FATE for some reason. This was discovered, not intentional. But the bottom line here is that being part of an existing success is an opportunity, and the OGL is an invitation. That boom may already be subsiding, but that’s for history to declare. I know we still have at least one FATE-like game in the pipe.

The more important thing, though, is risk. I read a lot of game design forums. I don’t participate much because frankly I feel like an outsider. They are all really interested in aspects of game design that I’m not all that interested in — for me, design emerges from frank discussion between a small number of smart people who are iterating their ideas over constant play. All those adjectives are important. Some forums try to do this and for people that feel “inside” them, I am certain they work. Anyway, the only reason I brought it up is because inside these forums folks talk about how they intend to publish and, despite their cutting edge ideas in game design, I see constant conservatism regarding methods. And the article above hints at why this conservatism is a kind of doom.

The conservative method I am thinking of is the traditional print publishing method: make a book, print a bunch up, and sell them. The costs involved in this are many: making it includes art, editing, writing, software, yadda yadda yadda. Printing it means short run print jobs (which have very high costs), warehousing, shipping, and, inevitably, third parties (IPR). Selling it means being visible, and a lot of folks take that to mean going to cons. This last works well if you are already going to a con, which is cool for those folks that do that. It feels, however, mandatory when you talk to people that do this. That is, “I go to cons” is sort of an assumption rather than a method. In some ways indie games mostly finance going to cons. At least that’s how my math on it worked out. We bought scotch instead. I am not going to claim that was a better choice.

Here’s the thing, though: working in very small numbers (by publishing standards — say 1000 units in a year as a goal) means that you are necessarily going to operate with high costs. That thins your margin and means you pretty much have to do all your marketing yourself. Now you have a bunch of choices to make this work, but they seem to boil down to: cut your costs or cut your risk.

The vast majority seem keen to select either the former or no choice at all.

There is a popular notion that risk-takers are the big successes in a capitalist system. Actually what happens is that risk-takers succeed big when they succeed and fail big when they fail. Long term success is created by carefully managing and deferring risk in such a way as to still capitalize on it (Nassim Tales tries to tell us about this in The Black Swan but the message is buried under some dreadful writing — he’s still right, though). You want to be attached to that risk taker, but with a good knife for cutting loose if he plummets. That means you won’t see as much profit when he succeeds, but you might get away with small losses along the way. Anyway, we don’t here a lot of talk about risk in the indie design community, which strikes me as bizarre.

Cutting costs, see (sorry, channeling Edward G. there), is the reflex choice. Holy crap, this costs too much, what can I do? I know! Cut costs! Duh! But we rarely think about the choice of cutting costs to zero (or close to it) with the expectation of lower maximum profits. This is risk-cutting, a conservative course that has much higher expected (in the mathematical sense) rewards but much lower maximum rewards. I guess sometimes one can be too focused on the prize and loose track of ones footing in the process.

Again I will stress, what we did was fortuitous, not planned. We didn’t plan to sell 1,500 books in a year. If we were clairvoyant, we’d have done a 1,000 book print run and fronted the cash for it. But (and here’s the kicker) we’re not clairvoyant. We (and you) have zero magical powers. Thinking wistfully about what might have been is bullshit. It’s a waste of energy that could be spent yelling on the interweb.

What we did was adopt no risk. The Lulu model encapsulates all of the bits of publishing that entail risk, from store-front web presence to printing to customer payment, through shipping. They handle it all. And they take a fat chunk of cash for it — they take a very fat printing fee and then they take a kind of commission off your final sale price. And they deserve it! Whatever failings they have, they are eating all the risk on your product. And you still wind up with a pretty good profit margin at the end of the day.

In fact, if you decide to go all trad on the publishing end and print and warehouse and sell everything yourself, you can make twice as much money per unit. But your accessibility is weak — your units sold is low and you are doing all the dumbwork (I’m thinking of fulfillment here mostly). If you’re not doing a lot of it then you aren’t selling a lot of books. If you are doing a lot of it, you suddenly realize why it’s worth paying someone else. And so, pretty fast, you are looking for a third party like IPR to handle that. As soon as you do that you have cut your profit per unit down to about where it would have been with Lulu. Lower, as it turns out. But you’ll get more copy out!

Maybe. Your vendor sales will go up, but the unit profit on them will be very bleak indeed at your printing volumes. Your direct sales will go up over your home shop, but no one will tell you by how much (though they will tell you how much of your profit they will take — this is not a bad thing but it better be part of your decision calculus). No one will promise you anything particular about promotion (where will you be on the web site front page? for how long? will your game be in the IPR boot at Origins? will someone try to sell it? what are you buying here? It’s mostly a secret). But it’s pretty much the only game in town if you’re tired of handling payment and shipping yourself.

So when vendors are seeing the IPR move as a potential problem for indie titles, this better strike you to your heart, because IPR was already something of a problem for indie titles. I think somewhere people got it in their heads that this was a huge opportunity, but it was almost instantly eclipsed (in fact though not in mindshare) by what Lulu did: print + storefront + shipping. All your costs folded into a per-unit cost rather than an up-front risk or a workload. As soon as that happened it becomes tenuous indeed to pay a third party to do part of that work while you continue to sustain the bulk of the risk. It’s disproportionate. It’s a bad deal.

Now PDF sales are another ball of wax because they are intrinsically risk-free. So here’s where you can really make up some slack because there is a real (though small, by my count, but probably growing) market for them. Sadly, Lulu won’t let you bundle products or anything interesting like that, so your hands are tied there, but you have tons of other options for selling PDFs. Scattering them around is kind of crap, and the fees taken are pretty thick, but it’s all gravy, right? Yeah. In the end it’s a no-brainer though I’m glad we held on to it for as long as we did — it let the physical book get traction and seeing the hardcover was a big deal for a lot of people, judging by my mail. Anyway, I’ve said before that if DriveThruRPG gets their POD act together they have a serious winner in the bag for indie games: zero risk + great publisher account/sales tools will be the Golden Egg for a little guy with a game in his head. If we can wrap our head around dodging the trad publishing risk bullet. Big publishers amortize this risk with diverse titles and tons of market penetration. You won’t do that, but will take the same proportional risk per title (greater actually). That is a crappy deal.

So for the first year we sold directly, using POD exactly as it was intended (print on the demand of the customer, not the publisher — the way it’s often used is as a cheap printer, which misses the whole point). We had good buzz, thanks in no small part to an outrageous review by Fred Hicks which basically told the whole FATE community that it had his stamp of approval and they should go buy it right now. And that was the “hitch your wagon” part. We didn’t intend to be on a bandwagon (as I said before, we’re kind of outsiders — we didn’t know there was a bandwagon) but we wound up there. That’s lucky. We had an existing voice at RPG.Net and we sent reviewer copies to folks like C.W. Richeson, where we were confident the result would be respected, read, and (net) positive. That’s deliberate.

Now, a year on, we’re publishing in a more traditional model in partnership with Evil Hat. But we’re still operating a risk-averse shop, letting Fred and the gang take a chunk of the profits in exchange for taking on the risk. And he’s smart — he knows the risk is low and the profit margin high, and our end of the risk is that if it goes south we don’t get paid. But zero return on zero down is mighty low risk in my books. Most importantly, taking that kind of risk is his business. He’s got a stable of titles, a smart business advisor, connections in the industry…oh my goodness, he’s a publisher.

So, in response to that post from a vendor about IPR, I offer this to the so-called indie community. Ask yourself first if you’re a publisher. If you’re not, watch the POD space closely for opportunities, because they are there. But if you’re not, think hard about printing, warehousing, and shipping books. Because that’s publisher stuff — so why are you doing it?

–BMurray

One joy of studying safety (and I’ll stress that it’s not my expertise — we have a department that only analyzes for safety, but we all have to know something about it or we’d never release anything) is that you can apply it to science-fiction stuff and get cool results, like when I did a (flawed, it turns out) simple safety case for Traveller-style anti-gravity systems on starships. This made some unexpected subsystems necessary and several of them would make cool hooks for a game.

This is not about that. This got stuck in my head while walking to work. I have gone on (and on) about it in person to some of you, so please forgive me. Here I go again.

Adversarial activity benefits from unpredictability. When we behave unpredictably, it is more difficult for an adversary to find us, to reach us, and to harm us. Unless one or the other is vastly superior in some essential category, behaving unpredictably (within the margins that protect your strengths, so not just random but random and still taking advantage of being really fast and wanting to get further away) is good.

Cooperative activity benefits from predictability. There are edge-cases, like brainstorming, where you want some creative randomness in order to open new avenues for investigation, but generally when acting cooperatively things are best served when predictability is increased. In creative endeavours this is a weak statement, partially because there are adversarial elements to the process but also because it’s exploratory. In safety-related contexts, though, it is an absolutely hard rule. Safety requires conservatism and part of that is a demand for the best predictability you can get.

Traffic is a cooperative, safety-critical system.

There are funny-but-true ways to say it’s adversarial. These are bullshit. Take it from me, a pedestrian. Adversarial driving is bullshit. It will kill me or some other pedestrian. This is not on.

So, obviously, as traffic (and in traffic I include everyone in the system — pedestrians, workers, emergecny crews, commuters, cyclists, transit, whatever) is necessarily cooperative, it benefits from predictability. So how do we get predictability? Easy, with a process that everyone follows!

Yes, traffic law. Here’s where I wanted to go: no matter how stupid or inconvenient a traffic law seems to you, obeying it increases predictability and therefore safety. Disobeying it — again, no matter what it is! — decreases predictability and therefore safety. There is zero mileage in saying you disobey a traffic law because it’s stupid. It might be. It might cost you minutes a day. I do not fucking care, because when you behave unpredictably by disobeying traffic law, the odds are much higher that you will get a pedestrian killed than pretty much anyone else.

And this means you, too, cyclists. And you also, pedestrian. Buzzing stop signs or walking on a red-hand signal create unpredictability and increase the likelihood that someone will get hurt. And the worst offenders are the highest on the list of likely victims: pedestrians, cyclists, and then motorists.

So while it may feel uncool to obey the law, and it may save you seconds or even minutes, and it may seem like a dumb law, please embrace it. Decide to be proud of following this one set of procedures, no matter how iconoclastic you want to be. In fact, obeying traffic laws is kind of against-the-grain now anyway, a kind of punk straight-edge fuck you to the slackers. Make it yours, be proud of it, and then do it. It’s important.

–BMurray

This is only a half joke, but it’s self-satire, so that’s okay.

Yesterday at lunch I got to talking with JB about the game he’s thinking really hard about and scribbling notes about, Chimaera. This is a very interesting project to me because I am pretty sure I don’t get it. I get what we have built so far, but we have browbeaten JB into making something that’s not quite what he intended. So I get the shared vision but I sense that we missed his personal target. Partly that’s because I can be an obtuse son of a bitch, but also it’s because it’s a hard vision to share without artwork and fictional touchstones, and those are all in his head and unable to escape intact.

We talked about non-violence and about how it would be nice if the game modeled non-violent solutions. Now, in the past we had talked about what non-violent solutions really are and whether that is even fun in a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Do we really want to try to understand our Demon Overlords in order to forge a better relationship with them in which they are no longer interested in sucking us dry and discarding our husks? And if so, how to we make that more attractive than (or attractive at all beside) violent conflict, which we need to model?

The daemons, you see, are defined by the fact that they are unable to use anything but violence to solve problems. You may smell an allegory. So obviously we want humans to behave differently. But why should they?

There are two answers and both are awesome.

The first answer is “mutants”. Mutants in this world are changed flora and fauna that now have powerful capabilities and incomprehensible motives. Flying jellyfish with hallucinogenic stingers that worship play. Amazingly smart bee colonies. That kind of thing. So how does that build on non-violent solutions?

Mutants are the only ally that humanity has in this world against the daemons. But mutants are extremely hard to understand and this uncomprehension often results in violent conflict. Neither humans nor mutants, though, can really afford this with daemons running around starting shit. So, in order to preserve communities, player characters will need to forge alliances with mutants. To do this they will need to understand them. In understanding them (we will see) we acquire ways to influence them non-violently.

The other answer is in the mechanical resolution of non-violence. Here’s the central gag: violence and non-violence are resolved the same way, except that violence gets bonus dice from a central pool (violence is easier) while non-violence adds a die to the central pool (non-violence is harder, but supports the efforts of others). The fact that non-violence indirectly makes violence more effective might be more self-satire or it might be a flash of genius.

The actual resolution is simple: the actor chooses the skill she will be applying to the target. She then also selects the “need” that will be operated on. If the actor is attempting to subvert the need, that’s violence. If the actor is attempting to support the need, that’s non-violence. Dice are rolled, results checked (details uninteresting here) and on success, the target is affected based on the need and the type of operation. So, applying SHOTGUN to HEALTH with VIOLENCE is pretty straightforward, resulting in injury and death. Applying SHOTGUN to HEALTH with SUPPORT might not be a thing at all. Skills might be binary in this regard or might vary, with some being binary and others unary. Special powers or stunts might modify this. But the important thing is that applying RESOURCES to HEALTH with SUPPORT has a story — offering to bring medical aid in to make things better for the target and perhaps her community. And this might be very persuasive indeed. Supporting checks, then, are not the same kinds of things as violence checks. Violence inflicts things (injury, slavery, insanity) but support discovers things — yes, she is indeed very concerned about the health of her friends and this offer would be very welcome indeed.

So how does this help? Glad you asked. Mutants have non-needs either instead of or as well as human needs. And you don’t know what they are. So while humans all have a need for MEANING, a certain species of mutant (say those jellyfish) might have a need for ENTROPY. This looks easy, right? Just support their need for entropy and all is well! Except that you don’t know that. It’s a secret. A key that the referee hides. And so when entering a conflict with an unknown species, you will need to take a turn or two to use your knowledge talents (whether lore or science or communing-with-the-weird or psychic-horseshit) to discover their needs.

However, SHOTGUN to the HEALTH pretty much always works. You can always kill your opponent because it is alive, treating it as an object in the most extreme fashion. The temptation, therefore, is to use violence to solve local (me, now) problems, which inhibits the solution of larger scale (community and long-term) problems. You can act reflexively and effectively at the cost of longer reaching effectiveness. But if all you do is touchy-feely stuff, you’ll also have a whack of dice for when the daemons show up, and they like violence. But you are prepared, because you have been building good-will and alliances and have a crapton of dice in the KICK ASS pool now.

Does it work? I have no idea. Needs play.

–BMurray

SpaceX is in the business of (or wants to be in the business of) lifting stuff off the planet into space. Their technology is directed towards exactly this: getting kilograms out of the gravity well. This is a non-trivial problem and one of the most effective short term solutions is giant chemical rockets. There are better long term solutions, like space elevators, but they mostly involve material science that doesn’t exists yet, so while we want to be thinking and experimenting about these, we don’t want to bet on them just yet.

Regardless, we can call the problem of ground-to-orbit basically solved. We’ll be refining it and SpaceX will have a heavy hand in the commercialization of it (fingers crossed) but we basically know how to do it.

The problem is that a lot of what we want to do next is not about getting off the ground. And the SpaceX dudes have correctly spotted the fact that getting from Earth to Mars, say, is only feasible if you treat it as a totally different problem from getting off the ground. So SpaceX is basically saying that there are really good designs for long-duration space-flight that are not good for getting off the ground, but that for a small fee they will totally launch the pieces of your smart Mars ark into orbit for assembly and launch.

Obviously this is a pretty shrewd business position: NASA, quit worrying about the lift and start building huge long-term projects that assume orbit and rely heavily on some contractor to supply that while you (NASA) work hard on how to travel through huge open regions of space.

And so, atomic rockets. SpaceX specifically recommends a NERVA design (not to be confused with the Roman Emperor) which basically uses a nuclear reactor to superheat hydrogen and shoot it out the back at enormous velocities, giving you thrust. This was first proposed back in the sixties though I think the idea then was to launch the bugger straight from the ground, which we all agreed was a bad idea at some point. High velocity radioactive hydrogen is just not “green”. It also had some serious issues to surmount (material science ones, interestingly) but it looks like we can get around most of these with judicious application of iridium, which is cool because tanks and ray guns are made from iridium in David Drake novels, which I secretly read all the time.

Anyway, you don’t want this thing going off on the only planet you own, so you lift the parts into space, put it together, and set it off there. If that works really well, you might want to think about setting up a factory on the moon or something and make a bunch of them. Or at least re-use the first one a lot, because it won’t be intrinsically disposable (like many chemical rocket designs) and just needs a new load of r-mass every now and then to set on fire and shoot out the back.

This would all mean a huge need for a lot of heavy lifting from ground to space. Which is a lot of SpaceX business, I expect. Smart smart smart.

Something that strikes me as amusing is that we may have inverted our previous space strategy with this, and that’s not unusual when people are learning honest lessons from practical experience. That is, it may be the case that getting to orbit is the bit that should be disposable (contrary to the shuttle concept) and then we should not do it a whole lot. Instead, build space-craft with great re-usability in space and shoot people up into them rather than whole spacecraft. This provides an incremental method of space exploration and further feeds into a progression of leisurization of the processes: as lifting transitions from government to commercial domain, deep space travel opens up to the government (this is the SpaceX proposal). Then we expect a similar transition over a great deal of time: as the government establishes science and infrastructure, commerce can take over the travel, transporting science missions for a fee and maybe even exploiting resources in space. Governments can get on with other things (like funding the science I hope). And within all that, there must come an opportunity for leisure and an increase in opportunities for simple labour.

The SpaceX proposal is exactly on the path to real blue collar space, where folks do what they do, it just happens to be in space. Or on the moon. Or Mars. Or Europa.

–BMurray

The second thing pouring in is Toph’s great actual plays from Hollowpoint with kids. Kids really dig playing the bad guys, and that shines through these crisp little reports. Anyway, what is doing the feeding here is the difficulty with the teamwork pool. And the difficulty is such that I’m thinking of throwing it away altogether. And so I sketched up an alternative.

Okay back to the first. During that Soft Horizon playtest someone produced an awesome little bit of narration and, in total violation of the rules, Bob (who shall not otherwise be named lest his true identity be revealed, which embarrasses him despite the fact that he plays games with AWARD WINNING AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS) reached into the pool and handed the awesome guy a fate point.

That’s now a rule.

You could do this in Hollowpoint.

I re-invented fan mail. Prime Time Adventures is the most famous for this sort of mechanism and I’ve known about it for ages. But I had to see it happen spontaneously to really get it: players like rewarding each other. I think that as I prefer games with a referee there is a lot of residual baggage I have about who gets to do what, and rewards are traditionally bound to the ref. But there is really no good reason to avoid letting the players do this for each other (assuming you manage this mechanically somehow, and I’ll go there, but you could rely on trust, too, and that is a big deal for us — the Table is Trust).

So in Soft Horizon you can do what Bob did. If someone is awesome, anyone can pay them from the pool. This is self-regulating on a couple of points: there are only so many chips in the pool, and no one wants to look foolish at the table by offering rewards for stupid shit. There is too much trust and respect and naked fear of humiliation.

So maybe in Hollowpoint, teamwork isn’t nearly as important as being awesome. So instead of a convoluted system of ask and accept or reject and stuff, a fixed pool of dice goes in the middle of the table, and whenever someone narrates something awesome, any player can give that awesome player a die. You could get a die from everyone if you are truly amazing. And you can hoard those or spend them as you like (save your awesome for the final scene). Because of the way the dice stats in Hollowpoint work, this even has a nice richochet effect — if you roll a lot of dice, you increase the chance that you will get badly burned by your cockiness (hubris if you are using a serious tone): you will likely get a big fate set and go first, and then have nothing left to follow up with. This is the mechanism behind leaping out from behind cover, guns blazing, only to discover you are out of ammunition and standing alone by the pool, looking at a dozen bad guys with Uzis.

This all wanders around the fact that players get lazy and stop narrating their dice and their use of resources. Or the actual narration slacks a little. The ref can prod for it, but that gets old too, and often the dice game is still fun so it’s not really an issue. But those moments of great narration are the stories we tell about the game after, and the stories we tell after are how we generate enthusiasm in others and keep wanting to play. And get more players. So this fan mail, in two new forms, should serve to encourage sustained narrative input. When you burn a trait (shot in the Thin Black Jeans), if it’s awesome you get paid. And so, in theory, you have a little more motivation to be awesome, a motivation that balances against the inherent laziness we all bring to the table to some extent or another.

Some people say you shouldn’t bribe people to do what they already want to do. I disagree. A lot. Just because someone wants to do something doesn’t mean that they have sufficient motivation to actually do it. Adding further incentive can push them over the edge and turn “okay” to “awesome”. If all that costs is a nifty little player-managed resource juggling, fuck yes, count me in.

–BMurray

Now, however, one deal is in the bag and so I can talk about it. RetroPunk Game Design out of Brazil has acquired the license to translate Diaspora into Portuguese and publish that translation in PDF and hardcopy. These guys are great to deal with and just recently snagged some Evil Hat titles as well, and so we’re very excited about this development. I heard someone else got a deal for a Hebrew translation and now my inner typography geek is … aroused … over that possibility but I’m not actually pursuing it. What could be cooler than a Diaspora for the Diaspora though?

Anyway, I know we have at least a couple of Brazilian fans who are cheering, though I have to warn you that the finished work is a long ways away. Translation is not easy or cheap, friends.

I have a playtest session coming up tomorrow so I’ll have something more amusing then I expect. Until then, as one Brazilian fan shouted at me, sinistro! Which I think means, “you evil fuck.” Not sure.

Over the past year, with the increasing success of Diaspora (such as that success is — I don’t want anyone, especially the Canadian government, to get the idea that we bought yachts with our proceeds or anything), I have been thinking more and more about game design. We’ve had at least five ideas cross the table for new games and perhaps three of them are getting serious attention in alternation. New stuff is getting written every week. Some weeks, every day.

Amidst all this activity is a sense of confidence. Because we did it once, we (by which I mean I) have the strange idea that we know what we’re doing. With this notion comes a desire to cleverly mechanise everything — if there’s something I want the game to do, then there ought to be a mechanism that does that. Not a hand-wavy “hey if this happens then think about it and maybe do this” but a concrete “if you have seven points then this thing happens which changes your character this way”.

My revelation was this: not every important thing needs a mechanism.

See, I told you it was pedestrian in the light of day. Everyone knows this. But I had been following a path that pointed my head away from this fact, and so when I looked around it was startling.

Oddly, as I apply this new wisdom, I find new mechanism asserts itself. Good mechanism, too, but of a different kind. In particular, we re-discover the stress track. I agree this begs for concrete discussion.

So here’s the issue I was working on when I woke up. In Soft Horizon, there are Duties. Among the Duties a character might have are several that require the player character to change a specific basic statistic of a plane. For example, the Mystic duty requires that the character decrease the Arcana stat of a plane, making magic more occult, mystical, and inaccessible. The problem is that in play there is no mechanism for doing it and, worse, it’s really hard. My hope was that the player with that Duty would exercise a significant effort in driving the narrative towards his interest, but what I discovered is that this is an unfair burden to place on a player in a game with a referee.

There are several reasons for this. First is that there is a referee and so there is an implicit structure to the game that suggests that players ought to follow the ref’s lead if he presents one. That is, when I create a huge visual event with lots of howling and hair-pulling, the players expect me to expect them to investigate it further. And not only is this understandable, it’s also desirable. That’s exactly what you want!

Second, players don’t want to compete against each other in this sort of game. They want to act as a team in a concerted effort to solve problems and make stories about the team. Sure, each wants spotlight time and glory and success, but it’s just plain embarrassing as a player to wind up leading the narration into your guy’s success. When that’s also away from the ref’s preparation, that’s even less comfortable. And so it generally doesn’t happen and when it does it’s less than satisfying.

So I attacked this problem by imaging different mechanisms that would support the Duties without infringing on anyones’ interests. And then the light went on.

This conflict in interests is actually the tool.

Instead of mechanism, I wrote some concrete referee’s advice. It’s basically this: here are a bunch of ways to set up a session so that a specific Duty can be resolved eventually. This has the advantage of being a shortcut for preparing a session (having a simple list of things to prepare beforehand) as well as facilitating the resolution of Duties (the preparation feeds directly into creating scenes that will be about what the Duty-bound character needs). And it’s unmechanized and so it remains free and loose and role-play-ey. And that’s what I want because the game has been stilted so far — the burden of mechanism has created unnatural moments in narration and frustration over meeting goals.

Now that there is a way to resolve a Duty every session, we do need to think about how to keep that from making the plane stats juggle willy-nilly all the time, which feels like it would make players disinvest in them. And so here, as millions have discovered before me, is where the mechanism actually goes: it is inserted to change the pace, to mitigate the results of role-play rather than supplant it. The solution is at least as obvious as my revelation: give each stat a track, and reward the player for changing the track rather than the stat. When the track is exceeded, the stat changes.

And now we know what to do with leftover fate points to (amplify an effect on a track).

Changing a track value (a Trend — Divine Trend, Arcane Trend, Civil Trend) happens by table agreement. When a Trial ends and everyone says “oh yeah, this is a less Arcane place” that’s when the track is altered. It’s tempting to put a mechanism in there — roll some dice — but it is counter-productive. We already know. We don’t need no stinking dice here. Better, because the referee has followed the soft advice, he already knows whether this Trial is a candidate because it’s part of the plan to allow change. Better still, failure may indicate the opposite motion on the Trend and that’s hair-pulling time.

So the key to fixing this whole mechanical issue seems to be stripping out some gears, putting in a gauge, and adding a few thousand words of advice. And even better, this advice is basically to add in the bit that’s been missing in play: cool NPCs that are fun to talk to.

–BMurray

We did it because it was fun to do. We loved the things that Spirit of the Century taught us even though we revised our SotC experience during play very heavily indeed. I like — even require — this part about role-playing games.  It’s part of the fun I have. I get the whole rules-as-written thing, especially as I get deeper into game design and find — paradoxically — that I have to play closer to rules as written than ever before. I sympathise. But I don’t think it’s as fun as hacking on the rules to make them fit the evening and I don’t think it’s a realistic expectation from role-playing game designers in most contexts (I would certainly exclude GM-less games from this, for example, for reasons I haven’t thought through yet but that I suspect are interesting).

Anyway, we hacked SotC and loved Traveller and so we birthed Spirit of the Far Future which was a lark and good fun and got played by us. Business as usual.

Then we learned about Lulu and the whole print-on-demand concept. And this meant we could go from hack to product with close to zero risk. We could hold a printed hardcover of our rules in our own hands! A real book!

And that was really it — it was a vanity product in the strictest sense. We’d make ourselves some books because that would be really cool and, because it was zero extra work, we’d let other people buy one if they wanted one. There is no interesting way in which this is a business here. It’s just a lark with a trophy at the end and an invitation for like-minded people to get themselves a copy.

As we got started on preparing the text for this, we realized that in making the product available, we actually were assuming some new ethical responsibilities as well as opening up new opportunities. There’s not really any such thing as casually offering something for sale at a profit. Profit being the key word there, and we were certainly thinking very early on that it would be nice to get a bottle of scotch out of the deal. So now we had to raise the bar on what we would sell customers — it had to be worth the money, and it was going to cost some money even if we made zero profit.

There also came the opportunity of being an author on a “real” book. By making it available for re-sale, having a genuine customer base, and registering the book with Library and Archives Canada with a real-live ISBN, we changed what we are to the world. We are authors in a legally binding sense (though what we are bound to is not much). If you go to the archives in Ottawa, you can see our book. You can borrow the loaner copy. We are part of the international acknowledgment of participation in the sum total of recorded human knowledge and art.

So are a few hundred million other people you never heard of. But still, it’s a kind of club and I’m happy to be a member.

Today we publish in hardcover and softcover. We have an electronic version. There are fan hacks all over the place that turn it into exactly what they want. Other people talk about its virtues and deficiencies in public places — they actually care enough about it to say something one way or the other. There are attackers and defenders — it’s a big enough deal to choose sides. That all makes me very proud.

As I write this we’ve sold over 1,500 copies. I don’t know exactly how many, but it’s close to and more than that. You can buy it in real stores or have it printed for you through Lulu or delivered to your computer by RPGNow. And we’ve obviously been working on some new projects now that we know we can do this if we want to. And we do.

I’ve talked before about the surprise at the initial success. I won’t tell that story again. We’re up for an ENnie for best rules, which the math suggests we can’t win (> 7000 voters and only 1500 copies sold suggest there just aren’t enough owners to compete) but I am blown away that the four of us were  nominated and want to thank all the little people. We’re all little people, just folks, doing stuff they want to do. My pals at the table, my grandfather for making me think creativity was intrinsically valuable, my father for making me feel duty in my guts, my mother, my sister, my enemies, my workmates…it all went into the machine that makes stuff.

Anyway, enough of the maudlin bullshit. We’ve brought in enough money to have to pay taxes and we’ve bought a lot more scotch than we expected to. We split the money four ways, so no one is quitting day jobs (or even night jobs for that matter), but we had huge fun making the book and even more talking with more and more people about playing the game with the book. It’s been a really swell year that’s made me feel better about gaming and about myself than many prior years. If it’s always like this then I will always publish games.

It’s got a great beat and I can dance to it. I give it a 9. Would go again.

–BMurray

Anyway this all gelled in my head (what a mess) on the way to work this morning as I surfed Story Games and my own notes trying to dream up ways to really ignite my playtest session on Thursday night. It has to do with the way people don’t “get” compels, the resistance to paying players to do what they said they wanted to do, and the way the fate point economy stalls unless everyone is in the same headspace as the designer. And sometimes even that’s no solution.

First, playing with people you know are awesome only demonstrates your game will work with awesome people.¹ So will just chatting up a good story over whiskey. A good game needs to deliver that, not just make it possible. It’s always possible with any game, given the perfect people. We need to at least facilitate it and at best generate it. Which is interesting, because in the last session of Soft Horizon we learned that there is “a machine that makes kings” and that’s what I want in my game.

My instinct is that the solution can’t be complicated. Or at least it can’t be revealed by complication. Once we get its head above ground, we may have to construct a more elaborate trap, but here’s my plan to flush it out.

Eliminate the refresh. You heard me, and thanks Paul Beakley for the revelation (though now I can’t find his post). Characters all start with zero fate points. There are no compels in the game.

The refresh at the beginning of a session starts with the referee putting a big stack of fate points in the middle of the table. All players should be looking at this stack and licking their chops.

Whenever a player makes a decision to act based on one of her Scopes (not Aspects directly!) she mentions or points to or otherwise indicates the Scope (I’m kind of partial to a little ritual here, say starting the decision narration with the Scope text) and takes a fate point from the stack. If anyone thinks it’s dumb we expect them to speak up, just like any time narration generates mechanical effect.

That’s it.

Part of what led me to this is the stuff I already pointed at, but also while I was looking over character sheets for cool stuff to compel, I realized first that I didn’t really want to do the compelling and second that the Scopes are really great decision drivers. And loading up Scopes with more power seems like a good idea to make the number of them a relevant trade-off against the number of Aspects (keeping the zero-sum construction we use now). I mean look at these Scopes:

The Hag (the crazy oracle that allows the party to hop planes)
My Faith
The Lost One (the crazy oracle that allows the party to hop planes)
Asandalos (the god of Death)
Form of a Machine
The Madwoman (the crazy oracle that allows the party to hop planes)
Death Shaman
The Broken Blade
My Reputation
My Ceremonies

As a player, if you were faced with a hard decision and looked down at your character sheet for inspiration, these all pretty much sing to you. And they are containers for Aspects that have a different mechanical use, but also elaborate the context of the Scope. The character sheet becomes a rich place for narrative inspiration for the player and less of a cheat sheet for the referee. And it should be — we spent time and energy and laughter and good liquor in writing those. They should pay us back in play.

So with the compel gone, Aspects are polished to an elegant and glimmering razor’s edge: tag one and get a bonus. That’s it. No whiffling about what you can or can’t demand/request/suggest and no implication that you need to play at a certain minimum correspondence to the authors’ style. Whatever you narrate (though you will want to check out the Hollowpoint section on “Adult Diapers” for a discussion that transcends this) it nets the same benefit, which is the “Can I have a bazooka” effect I talked about earlier. Yes you can.

The only remaining question regarding tagging Aspects (and now there’s only one word for using an Aspect, too, which makes so much more sense to me and will facilitate teaching the game) is who gets paid? So try this on for size: tag yourself and pay the pool; tag any non-agent and pay the pool; tag an agent and pay them.

Tagging an enemy’s Consequence? Pay him.

Tagging a friend’s Aspect? Pay him.

Tagging your own? Pay the pool.

Tagging the zone? Pay the pool.

Now we have a mechanism by which fate points should organically zoom around the table. When you’re low you know how to get more. When you see your friend is low, you know how to recharge him (make him awesome!). When you are rich with them, you spend easily.

I think that this isn’t really Fate any more. We should probably rename Aspects, though I expect we will still say “Aspects” around the table. So I don’t know what to do about that, though our culture will have more momentum than the culture of a table new to the game and playing from scratch. So maybe that’s a non-issue.

Fate sure polishes up nice, don’t it?

–BMurray