I’ve talked (ad nauseuam¹, I’m sure) about what we did to get Diaspora out there. I’ve talked about why we did that and how it worked out. In light of this piece from an actual vendor about “indie” games and IPR, I’ll talk now about what the effects were in retrospect and why small scale game developers should consider our model when producing their work-of-love-for-small-but-real-profit.

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

I have skipped a few days here because the Ennies have spurred some interesting business for me to deal with and it’s pretty much all I can talk about and, since I can’t talk about it all, it’s just best for everyone if I don’t even sit near a computer.

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.

I had a bit of a revelation on the weekend. It was one of those sustained flash-bulb moments that you’re sure are profound — even prophetic — but that immediately afterwards you realize that almost everyone already knows about this “new” insight. In fact, when done correctly, you realize that you already knew it too. Maybe you forgot it along the way or something.

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

August 7th will be the first anniversary of the sale of Diaspora. In point of fact, I put it on sale sometime around midnight on August 6th, but our first confirmed sale to someone who was not an author or an author’s mom was very early in the morning on August 7th. So we are coming up on a full year of Diaspora and that makes me feel pretty damned good. Here’s why.

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

I’ve talked — okay really I’ve gone on and on — about  the way that publishing is changing and also about how gaming is in a position to take the vanguard in these changes, at least in part because we have limited ties to traditional methods in the first place. Sure there are still the “big boys” out there who do things the usual way, and sure there are still a lot of very small publishers still entrenched in the print-run-investment model, but gamers seem to be fast to explore new media. Now that has implicit risk, too, because sometimes experiments result in answers like, “no”, which means that while the bleeding edge explorers tend to have an open mind about trying new things, they (we) also go through new things like toilet paper, leaving a lot of guesses swirling down the can.

The VSCA has adopted a very low-risk model for its business, which happens to align nicely with new technology. Now, just this morning I was reading about another new technology and then remembering an old conversation, and I ot a little synergistic flash in my head that thrilled me because it implied that I might be able to dick around with fun stuff even more than I already do. This is a good sign, because I am more likely to do something if it’s fun.

So here’s what I’m thinking. What if the VSCA made available on a reasonably fast schedule (monthly say) its current design state for all projects, as well as a few blue collar space articles, and some other stuff, hopefully containing a complete (small) game every time? By small game I mean like a subsystem for something in development, but repackaged as a small stand-alone idea. And what if it was in colour and available digitally or print on demand? I’m thinking somewhere between 24 and 96 pages, delivered regularly, purcased either per-unit or by subscription.

I’m not really approaching this idea as something I think anyone wants, yet (which is why I phrase all this as a giant question) but rather as something that sounds fun to do and has been enabled by recent changes in technology and position — I’m thinking specifically here about Magcloud‘s recent announcement that they have an iPad app pending and that they will be giving stuff away for a while.

So we’re talking here about leveraging (actually I see our methods at VSCA as more parasitical, but “leverage” leverages Leverage, which is hot right now, even though I haven’t seen it yet) someone elses work (Magcloud making an iPad app to deliver colourful content with option to print, with them managing all the customer interaction and just sending us a cheque) so that I can do only the fun parts. And this, as I’ve said before, is how technology and capitalism work together to empower pocket socialists like me, turning my leisure into Scotch.

This would enable us to produce Diaspora supplements, for example, by putting them in a concise format that still has a profitable delivery mechanism, and that is super appealing to me. I’ve avoided supplements so far mostly because the document needs to be above a certain size to make sense turning into product, but if it’s part of (even the largest part of) a magazine format, then that’s solved. It can be as large or as small as the idea is. And I’m keen on Diaspora supplements.

What do you think? Could this be a new way to make games? See, I could see Diaspora broken up into distinct stand-alone pieces that together make an awesome game. If you got those pieces one at a time, would you be happy? If you came to the complete game having played the platoon-scale game for a few weeks and a couple of social fights already, would your experience be better or worse? Now naturally this doesn’t preclude more traditional (if you can call our parasitic method traditional) publication, but rather would augment it. Maybe customers on the subscription list get a discount. Or maybe I figure if you spent $50 on magazines then you already bought a game and I mail it to you. I dunno yet and I’m not promising anything.

But I am thinking real hard, and grinning.

–BMurray

For a commie, I sure am a bourgeois pig. And really, the whole VSCA authorial pool is packed with this. There’s no question that it influences us and that we make mistakes because of it.

Here’s a mistake we made. In the uncorrected (which means wrong) version of Diaspora, in the platoon combat section, we have an example unit with a mind-blowingly racist Aspect — the unit is “Primitives” and the Aspect was something like “Crush the white devil”. The racist bit here is the automatic association between primitive and not-white. Now, there’s a mitigating explanation here for how it got past us that has to do with the origins and revisions of the platoon combat system (hint — it wasn’t always for Diaspora or even sf or even a role-playing game) but that’s not an adequate response. The adequate response was to acknowledge it and fix it.

So we did that. I’m proud that we did that. Because that means that we have certain kinds of blindness induced by our culture (and I’ll talk about what I mean by that in a second because it’s very specific and not vague at all in this context) but that we are capable of seeing. When the error was pointed out to us we saw and it was embarrassing and we fixed it. I’m proud of fixing that mistake. Not proud of making it, though.

Who’s we? Well the Diaspora team is four middle-aged white guys with comfortable economic situations. Okay, Byron can get downright Mediterranean when the sun hits him, but he’s still white. The other three are fish-belly white. Two are somewhere between balding and bald. This is the culture I was talking about — the four of us. And the people we deal with regularly, professionally and casually, also mostly belong to the same demographic (though with a lot more women in it, for sure). But age range and colouration and even salary are all pretty close. We belong to the privileged class of our continent, without question, and so we are bound to make decisions that reflect this unless we think really hard about every little thing.

No one has the patience for that kind of detail in a hobby (well, certainly some crazy people do, but let’s omit that large but scary category) and so we make mistakes, and sometimes they are serious boners like the one I just described. Not just “oops that’s not how you spell it” but more like “holy shit do we really think in a way that makes that not obvious?” Well, it’s at least certain that we don’t now, at least not that specific way that made that specific error not obvious, but I am certain we will make new errors in a similar vein.

We’ve added another author and playtester to the team, and he’s a middle-aged white male and balding professional. Oops.

We’ve got another guy coming to join our game in July (the guy I first played D&D with in the Old Days, with his mom as dungeon master) and he’s a middle-aged white male and balding professional.

Now, being part of this privileged class obviously has a lot of advantages as well as a set of blinders that we can’t predict very well. I mean, it wouldn’t be a privileged class if it didn’t have advantages, right? And so while there is a distinct leftist leaning through the team (some leaning much harder than others) we sure like nice things. For example, we enjoy some pretty wonderful scotches during our sessions and we’re not very shy about it. We all can afford the time to play and to experiment. We can find the tools and the expertise to help figure out how to do things that we couldn’t otherwise do. We are near the pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, meaning that significant portions of our energy are spent on (or at least available for) self-actualization rather than finding food or avoiding wild dogs. I expect that an awful lot of indie game designers are here.

This is the 99th percentile of humanity. In fact it’s rarer than that. The kind of person that can afford the energy to, as a hobby, design and develop and publish and market a role-playing game with a potential audience measured in hundreds, is a rare and super-privileged beast. We are a bizarre anomaly in the set of all humanity. And so I have to wonder, having made the particular error we did, what sorts of blinders the whole community of designers (and probably players for that matter) have. I mean, we’re not all balding white male professionals, obviously, but we all do certainly have a startling amount of leisure time and the desire (and training) to devote it intellectually and creatively. We are certainly a subset (rich enough to have leisure) of a subset (interest in games) of a subset (interested in role-playing games) of a subset (interest in game design) of a subset (motivated to actually design games). I think there are more subsets in there actually.

So we count on those outside our tiny filtered niche to let us know when we blow it. As we design games to be played, we at least have players up above our little leaf on the tree. And we even have would-be gamers closer to the trunk still. But even all the way back to “people who have even heard of role-playing games” we have a really miniscule fraction of humanity in our potential pool of observers. As the whole idea of role-playing games is to essentially pretend that you’re someone you’re not, this seems like an especially glaring problem. Are all our characters also middle-aged balding white professional males? I mean, certainly we paint them different colours (black, female, poor, angry, and so on) but are they more deeply different?

This question bugs me in part because I’m not sure I want to play a character that is genuinely all that divergent from myself in these sorts of deep ways, and that’s obviously a cultural bias. Now there are some divergences that I know I can get a handle on because they are part of the fantasy space of middle-aged balding white males — Hollowpoint, for example, lets me play a character who is all I am but also amoral and a little stupid. Someone for whom violence is a functional early resort to practically anything. One could argue that D&D also goes to this same place, but the contrast I wanted in Hollowpoint is that these guys are not justified in it in anyway. Their opposition can be the good guys in all respects, whereas in D&D you can at least point to the goblin alignment and justify any action as purging evil. Evil! When we strip the idea of absolute and (therefore?) supernatural evil out, we get into some more interesting space. Anyway, this divergence is easy and familiar — I like watching movies like Heat or Reservoir Dogs or The Bad Lieutenant. This is not new territory for me, it’s just not exactly who I am.

I dread our next staggering error. But I also welcome it. I really have no idea exactly what I can’t see. I know roughly where it is, but looking there is such a deliberate act that it can only happen in little places. There have to be huge swaths of space that I can only see if someone points it out to me. And thanks to bankuei (though I wish the author made his or her real identity easier to discover — it would lend the criticism more weight, I think, to others) for shouting about this particular error.

You should shout too, so I know where to look to see things I haven’t before.

–BMurray

So we are getting close to closing out another quarter (our financial year at the VSCA is a little wacky and one day I may clean that up, but also maybe not) and the last three months will probably our best yet. No one is close to quitting any day jobs — we’re still looking at maybe a week’s worth of regular work pay in three month’s time, but not bad for not doing any new work at all. Anyway, that’s slowing down a lot now: I expect the upcoming quarter will be our weakest though I hope to see some rebound after Evil Hat’s spotlight time moves on (Dresden Files is doing amazingly well — kudos to Fred and the team!)

Anyway, thanks to everyone who lobbied for us to produce a PDF. That turned out to be profitable as well as a useful education, and I’ll say it clearly to anyone who’s still holding their breath: you were right.

I was right too, which makes that easier to say of course.

The past is fun, but the future (especially for someone with a reputation for science-fictional interests) is more fun. And so, here’s what’s coming. I can’t announce dates yet.

Diaspora. Yes we are still doing stuff with Diaspora, though not creating new content. Sometime in the next few months we’ll be getting Diaspora printed through a cheaper printing service so that we can supply it in bulk to IPR and consequently get in more physical stores. This has never been a huge priority for us, but the cash flow is sufficient now that it doesn’t actually burden us much to do it — and keeping this thing fun and riskless has always been a priority. We are doing this for a good time and cheap whiskey and not much else. It’s also a low priority because I don’t want to get stepped on by the giant releases in the FATE and FATE-ish world around now — Dresden Files from the aforementioned Evil Hat and ICONS from Adamant Entertainment. I don’t want to step on their toes either, but it would be a little egotistical of me to claim that was likely — these guys are selling the hell out of great products.

Hollowpoint. This is a strange beast that burst into my head just about whole after spending a weekend re-reading 100 Bullets and then chatting with JB about dice systems for Chimaera. Basically we worked out a cool system for his game and then while he was thinking about it I went away and wrote Hollowpoint to use it. I stole his toys. I am a bad man.

This is okay, because Hollowpoint is about bad men. It’s about a crew (and this is essential — this is not a game about a group of individual heroes) or maybe even more about a mission (the crew can be secondary as you’ll discover). The crew is super-competent, very cool, not necessarily all that smart, and they love their violent, dirty, underhanded, evil work. They love the noise and the smell of a gunfight. They do not argue but rather they act.

So this game is very much crafted around the idea of a mission and will include tools to build that at least as carefully (okay probably more carefully) as the characters are crafted. This game is not an opportunity to create a deep understanding of a single character (though that could happen) and in that sense it owes a debt to 3:16 (Gregor Hutton’s game over at Box Ninja) I suppose. Certainly it arrived in my head after playing a bunch of 3:16. It is an opportunity to sit down with a minimum of preliminary fuss and run an exciting and twisty heist or investigation-turned-sour or extended chase or double-cross. Or really anything with guns and shouting.

It will contain swearing and you will probably want to swear while playing it. In tests it runs about 2-3 hours a session, so it’s fast. You will be encouraged to let your character die in order to get two cool scenes all to yourself — one where you die, and one where you play the replacement berating the team for getting a valuable member killed. ¹ It’s fast, unusual, and a lot of fun. You can run a campaign, but in doing so the running constant is really the organization that employs the characters — that’s what you’ll come to love and elaborate, because the characters will come and go.

Hollowpoint is basically done as far as design and development goes. This week I’ll box it all up and start writing it as a flat document (which means no one else can directly modify it) and we’ll start editing and playtesting from this document. So you will stop seeing the current rev at the skunkworks and we’ll start making a real artifact. It’s a short game (Toph says around 20K words) so I bet we can have this laid out and read for sale in the fall. But I am not committing to that.

Soft Horizon. This game is suddenly interesting me a lot after a bunch of time on the shelf. It’s getting a lot of fairly deep revision now in the skunkworks and so it’s not coming out any time soon. It needs a lot of playtesting too.

This is a game about fantastic heroes like Elric or Conan or Den. It’s Heavy Metal and it’s stream-of-consciousness (a la Mobius). If you read The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius or Arzach and loved it, you’ll hit your stride playing Soft Horizon. Heroes in this game are individual wonders that you will want to explore over the course of a campaign and hopefully the environment is too. The setting is, like Diaspora, loosely defined through the game mechanisms and largely developed during a first session of cluster generation. This cluster, however, is a group of planes that are of interest to some pantheon of deities and the characters are people who can act across planes and have an interest in opposing or siding with these gods. These are big characters. We don’t care about their farm-boy period. They have already had adventures and already bear scars. Now they are icons of their specific competences — a Soft Horizon character whose best skill is Sorcery is the sorceror in the cluster and not a sorceror. An advancement system will not be necessary, but some system for change will be.

The actual mechanisms under the covers in this game are actually still in flux. It was originally intended as a FATE game but we are still thinking (as anyone following this blog has already seen). New dice are implying new resources and, well, everything is moving. So I don’t see this getting out of the skunkworks soon but if the enthusiasm remains high it could. A lot of new text has gone in over the past few days and it’s feasible this could see print by the end of the year.

The other two games, Chimaera and Soulscape, do not show signs of being released this year so I won’t talk about them in detail. They both remain interesting and are both getting work, but the former needs some time alone with itself and the latter needs a champion to drag it out and wonder what it is out loud at the table.

Oh Jack just told me the Lulu cheque came in. It’s a little lower than last quarter but this time around we get to add two deposits from RPGNow. The total is about 35% over last quarter’s profits per author. So we will look back, I think, on this as a peak period for Diaspora and the start of some great new things. I hope you all are open to new ideas, heartless violence, some cussing, poetic tales of strange people in strange places, the motives of gods, and a little risk.

I’m in, at any rate.

–BMurray

I know I started something yesterday and it’s frustrating to interrupt it, but I’m reading Herman Melville at the moment, so I’m in the mood for ten thousand word parentheticals.

I got an email the other day and I wanted to react to it in depth and publicly because it probably voices the sentiment of a lot of Diaspora players and so the default audience for anything new that VSCA will produce. I won’t reproduce the email (it was sent as private communication after all) but here’s the gist: Hollowpoint seems like a cool place to play (modern action) but the system is alien and not to my taste — please please do it differently.

From the general, abstract place in my head: Hollowpoint is an experiment and experiments need the freedom to fail. One of the things it experiments with is a kind of objective that is common in action scenes and badly modeled (sometimes impossible to model) in what I will call “guy versus guy” systems. So I’m going to try something very different (though not unrecognizable: leaf through your copy of Reign) to get at what I want to get it. I am certain that this divergence will be unappealing to a lot of people. That’s cool — that’s data. It’s also really appealing to at least one person so I hope there will be others. If you’re on the fence (and as the game does not yet exist, that might be a good place to be), hear me out. If you’re committed to disliking the very idea, move on — there will be other VSCA games and if you love Diaspora, you can already get that.

So I was watching Heat the other night — a Michael Mann movie with some very smart action scenes — and noticed how well Hollowpoint maps into it, and that’s exciting, because that film is very much in the target zone for the game. By way of example is the famous bank robbery scene: the crew has executed a bank robbery without violence and in the course of exiting they are bounced by the police. The crew has automatic weapons, great training, and willingness to cause harm and hurt but they are also professionals: their objective is to escape with the money.

No in guy vs. guy gaming, this is really, really hard most of the time. Because the system will focus on which cop your character is trying to kill each time-slice, you the player are focused on the wrong thing with distinctly uncomfortable (to me, and in this genre) effects.

First, I (the player) have to plan how to most effectively kill police officers because what the system primarily lets me do with my assault rifle is kill people. I am not enjoying that in this context.

Second I (the character) am not explicitly interested in killing police officers. I am interested in escaping with the money and don’t care if I kill police officers. But the system models me defeating police officers with my rifle.

Finally I (both player and character) have sophisticated, staged objectives that involve violence against a large opposing force with full knowledge that I cannot just kill all of them (and here’s a place where some guy vs. guy games really drop the ball for me — I can kill all of them. Seriously, I can kill the entire LAPD to solve a problem, just by looting corpses for ammunition.)

The scenario is a classic “breakout”. The police are technically a defensive surrounding force and the robbers objective is to create a weak point in their line, penetrate it, defend their egress, and escape. People are going to get killed, but the solution is not about killing people. You don’t create a weak point in a defensive line by killing everyone — you create it by making a zone where no defender is willing to oppose you effectively. If they are all dead, that’s certainly one solution, but you, with the objective of breaking, don’t actually care. And if you’re a pro you also know it’s not a feasible step in your plan anyway.

A breakout is achieved by aggression. The unit under siege identifies a point of egress and advances on it, concentrating fire. Flanks are protected to avoid being enveloped but the focus of fire is the point of egress. And you advance constantly and aggressively. Go watch Heat and come back.

Okay see that? That’s what you want. And when the line folds, you exit, secure transportation, and depart. The criminals are using several important tools in this process: they are making people feel too afraid to be effective by shooting the shit out of them. Terror is the tool there. They are identifying and neutralizing core sources of resistance (vehicles, commanders). Killing is the tool there. They are leveraging the fact that they do not care about innocent bystanders and the police do, giving them vastly more free mobility and fields of fire. Again, this is mostly about Terror.

But the bulk of it is not about a series of guy vs. guy incidents. It’s about effective use of ammunition, mobility, aggression, planning, knowledge of the space, sustaining fire (rapid reload!), and effective fire (shooting at the target — a notoriously hard thing for non-sociopaths to do). So a system that gives you a tool for defeating one other person by intimidating or killing her is not giving you enough to work with. The richness of this scene — and all of its energy — would be missed by focusing on who shot who. Watch that scene again and listen to it. This is one of a very few films that use accurate sounds of gunfire. Turn the volume up. Listen to the difference between the light assault rifles of the crew and the boom of Pacino’s heavier rifle. Listen to the echoes off the buildings. The chief issue resolving this scene is how afraid everyone and how willing they are to do harm. The ability to accurately hit a target is a tertiary factor at best.

So Hollowpoint, being interested in this sort of scene, does not do guy vs. guy action except as an exception. Instead it’s about the individuals in the crew and their contribution to an action against an opposing force with a common objective. An assassination, for example, is not “killing a guy”. An assassination is a sophisticated preparation of a space in which an effective killing blow can be struck while allowing the assassin to escape. An ambush is not “killing six guys”. It’s again a preparation of space in order to destroy a unit of men (as a unit, not each man) and then exit the location safely (or otherwise manage the objective: you ambushed them for a reason).

Now I am not slagging guy vs. guy gaming. Diaspora is very much a guy vs. guy design and I love it. But the model doesn’t do everything well and it doesn’t do what I want here. So far, in play, Hollowpoint certainly does meet my needs. I know every roll that Val Kilmer’s character made in every scene. I know what choices he made with the dice he got.

Interestingly, the most disappointing part of that movie for me is the last half hour or so. I think it’s obvious why, in light of this discussion. It forgets what it’s really about. Or it doesn’t detect what I think it’s about.

It’s cool to dislike some or all of my games. Vive la différence.

–BMurray

The FATE system is a highly successful one in a relatively wide range of genres (basically anything where the characters are expected to be very competent — not necessarily superheroes or even heroes, but competent). It seems unwise to dick with something that works, but part of its success is its malleability — it’s not just resistant to dickery, but rather it thrives on it. When you get your teeth into it the temptation to bend it to your will is substantial.

Partly you bend it to your will in play. That is, it can be played extremely well by using the rules as written to produce unexpected effects. Weak players will succeed less often than strong players. A group with one strong player can dominate, tactically, a group with no such person. It’s a tactical system and it rewards mastery.

But that’s not what this is about because when we play we’re usually also designing and so we are bending it to a different will: the will to make a new game that uses (in the dirtiest senses) FATE to accomplish our own ends. I think that one of the deepest savageries performed on the system was our own game, Diaspora, in which our objective was to play the desperate, broke, beleaguered competence heroes of the Traveller universe using a game intended to deliver pulp superheroes.

Now with our new games we’re pushing even harder — hard enough that it’s probably not reasonable to call them FATE games. Certainly they owe some debt to FATE (some more than others) and certainly at least one will use FUDGE dice, but they aren’t really reasonably FATE games any more. But let’s look at FATE because the game that uses the most of FATE, Soft Horizon, is on my radar at the moment.

Much as we are often loathe to admit it, role-playing game systems are basically fluff surrounding a resolution system. You invariably make characters who are described by the elements that interact with the mechanisms of the game to say yes or no to, “Can I do …” questions. One or more mechanisms exist to answer the question. They bring character description metrics to bear on a randomizer (or not — the randomizer is part of the gears not part of the definition) to find an answer. Here’s FATE’s central machine:

My character is this awesome (SKILL) + this consistent (FUDGE dice) + because of these things (ASPECTS).

Yes I am ignoring Stunts. Stunts are interesting because they aren’t here. I may talk about them later. I may not. I have a love-hate relationship with Stunts. They are a kludge that works really well, and so I despise them aesthetically but I need them. I am convinced there is a better way but currently they are inadequately defined and so it’s hard to get a grip on improving them. I think I have a path. But later. Patience.

So the SKILL rank is how awesome you are. As a designer ¹ this informs us about the skill structure. Armed with this knowledge, we can make sense of skill pyramids versus skill columns versus unstructured point buy versus whatever other variation is out there.

The skill pyramid, for example, is several declarations. In the 5-cap we use in Diaspora (and I will maintain it is optimal and am talking here about why) it represents 15 skills which is almost half of the total set of skills. So, the bottom five are things you can do. You know about them. They aren’t your focus. Because there is a disparity of four points between top and bottom which is a BIG DEAL in FATE, you are going to try to avoid using them. This creates an interesting dynamic at the table — with Computer 1 I am not awesome at computers. Consequently, even though I can make sense of them, I am going to find a way to solve problems that doesn’t involve computers. If I have Stealth 5, I am going to break in myself rather than hack. That’s a no-brainer. So we discover that the lower ranks of skills are not so much opportunities for different kinds of action but rather reinforcement of the awesomeness of the pinnacle skills.

The mid-range is where a lot of incidental action occurs where we are not super interested in success. This is where we go when we are partially invested in success and think failure might even be cool. Or sometimes it’s where we have to go when we can’t find a story in the apex. Ranks two and three are interesting spaces. They often represent desperate, fish-out-of-water scenes. These are the places where the character has to act even though she is not competent.

The peak is where the play mostly resides. This is where a good player is always going to steer the action. A choice of Stealth as an apex for the pyramid is shouting at the referee, “I am a spy! I sneak! I will solve un-sneaky problems with sneaking whenever I can! Make me sneak.” It is a character class. These three skills (the rank 4 and rank 5 ones) are the core competencies of the character and therefore the key definition of the character. ²

These things are not core features of FATE. They are core features of the pyramid. If you don’t want this to happen, then you choose a different shape. If you do want these things to happen, this is the shape. So that’s SKILL. That’s what the character is good at and what she is going to use as tools when in trouble.

Now the dice. The choice of FUDGE dice, a range from -4 to +4 with a strong peak at the zero, is a declaration of consistency: characters usually get the results they expect. Sometimes there are crazy outliers, but for the most part you are going to get a level of success roughly commensurate with the skill you choose. Those of you out there who are still awake will note how this feeds into the behavioural stuff I just talked about with respect to skills.

So here’s another place to dick around that has profound effects: by changing the probability curve you change the reasonable expectations of the player and you therefore change the tactical value of skill selection. With a wider range of randomness it will be less relevant which skill you choose (if you have a range of +/- 100, to be absurd, it doesn’t matter what skill you use at all really unless there’s a crazy powerful peak at zero). With a narrower range (or no dice at all — try that some time if you’re the exploratory type) skill selection is critical. The FUDGE range creates some very desirable effects that are thrown out of whack with even minor changes. We experimented with all kinds of d6 variations but ultimately none of them rewarded good skill selection as well as the FUDGE dice while retaining enough uncertainty to be exciting ³. So FATE system gives us a certain quality of consistency with the FUDGE dice that has certain effects. In some games they are desirable. In some games not. This is a place to tweak carefully.

Finally, the most interesting narrative component of the resolution, which answers the question, “How come I am so awesome?” Aspects are tiny little stories about the character that the player can leverage for advantage (at a price) during conflict. Varying how many and how much they cost is a knob you can turn pretty eagerly without breaking the game and the effects are not all that powerful. You can yank this knob (LOL) all over the place and maintain a high quality game without even affecting the capacity of the system to deliver its intent. This is the least interesting place to dick around, in my opinion. But there are undesirable behaviours that you can add mechanism to avoid.

First, it kind of sucks when a player leans on  all of her aspects at once because she has the fate points to do it and the narrative is strained, but she did do the tactical work to flex the economy so that she had the power to leverage. It’s a tough balance, honestly, and it’s one that we chose to handle mechanically rather than leave in the hands of the referee: we introduced the concept of “scope”. Basically, any Aspect has a scope — a context in which it exists. So characters have ten Aspects and they are all in the same scope: the character. A scene might have an Aspect. An enemy might have one. A zone might have one. Each of these are scopes. Now you can say things like, “you may only tag one Aspect from each scope.” Now the player must search the environment for advantage. This in turn rewards the group for placing aspects on the environment. This rewards teamwork with success. In some games this is highly desirable.

In some games it is not. This is really important. Diaspora is not all games. It’s not the only game anyone should ever play. It’s a game in which it is rarely the case that each character has the opportunity to deliver a “killing blow” ⁴ absent the assistance of others. This undermines the “I hit with my sword” litany that some combat systems devolve into because the chance of success is actually very low if everyone acts alone hitting with their sword. Instead, characters play supporting roles, planting aspects in new scopes, so that one person can grab the spotlight (and not just the “I am narrating” spotlight that we usually mean, but rather the “I am the center of attention, the source of awesome, the leading role” spotlight) and deliver an awesome success to resolve the conflict.

That’s not always the story you want to tell.

So the way you handle aspects changes the tone of the game substantially.

Okay so there is a lot more to FATE, right? I mean there must be. Most FATE games run hundreds of pages. Well here’s the thing — we have no idea what FATE actually is. Right now, FATE is a series of divergent examples. So up there is what FATE is to me. It doesn’t need anything else to be FATE. How awesome + how consistent + how come so awesome. Now, it’s fair to say that practically every game everywhere uses some clear variation on the first two thirds of that. So aspects are what make FATE novel. That’s it. There are fiddly coolnesses out there like the Time Track and stress and consequences and all that, but they are mostly derivative ideas (derivative of aspects I mean) and decorations on the core. You want a FATE v3 SRD? Skill + Dice + Aspects.

Now I know I’m leaving out the fate point economy. A year ago I wouldn’t have but since we started doing the dice for AP promo I’ve read a lot of actual play and here’s a dirty secret that doesn’t get spoken a lot: the fate point economy is far more dependent on style of play than on mechanism. The same rules generate vastly different fate point behaviour at different tables. That suggests that it isn’t as important as we sometimes think, because it seems to be subservient to play rather than driving play. That’s cool — even awesome — but not what we thought was true at one time. And so I’m not going to draw out compels and fate point bidding and refresh and all that. It’s important, but it doesn’t drive play as much as we hope. It gets reliable results at a table you know, but at a new table under a new referee, different things happen. With this five guys, ten fate points never get used up. With this other five guys using identical rules, players are begging compels by the second hour. With another five guys (who shall not be named) there’s a subtle player vs. player action happening with players trying to manipulate each other using fate points as a social currency. The fate point economy is important, even essential, but its effects have too much variation to talk about with any authority. This is the knob you hand to the consumer of the game: twist this wherever suits you.

Okay, so Soft Horizon. Soft Horizon is the only game in the upcoming list that is certainly a FATE derivative, but I don’t think it’s FATE in the sense expected by the OGL for FATE. It will still use the OGL, but I don’t think we owe it to FATE. It’s still Skill + FUDGE dice + Aspects, though, so it’s that much FATE. Essential FATE.

More later: this is plenty long.

–BMurray

Designing games is fun, but having several game designs on the burner has the uncomfortable side-effect of making every game session also a design session. And I kind of miss just gaming.

When you’re working through a design by play, which is basically how we roll, the flow is constantly interrupted with discussion — theory, effects, probability, and so on. It’s very hard to get at the emergent story that we play for in the first place, because we are so immersed in the mechanism. If a scene goes into unfun territory for mechanical reasons, it behooves us to figure out why, re-jigger the mechanism, and re-run the scene to make it work. The end result is that these sessions are very technical — they are sequences of mechanical application with only the thinnest material joining them, because we already know that that thin material can get spun out to story in a real game. When you’re “just gaming”.

While building Diaspora we did get to the “just gaming” point, where we had the system smoothed out enough that we could really play and build stories and have a great time gaming, so maybe I’m just frustrated at having a bunch of games in the mechanical stage. On the other hand, when I tried to get 4e working, or even 3:16 for that matter, I had that same jointed mechanism feeling — hopping from one mechanically guided scene to the next with interstitial role-playing that was perfunctory or absent. So there is also a risk that we’re making games that aren’t what I like playing, because if that’s all we can do then I’d rather play something that’s about the mechanism. Something that doesn’t even pretend to have a more creative context. Settlers of Cataan, say, or Wings of War.

So I think my objective for the next few weeks of gaming is to find the story and I think I know where it’s hidden. And if we can’t find the story then we need to seriously re-think the new designs. My suspicion is that what’s missing is compelling non-player characters — there’s not enough conversation with people I care about on topics I care about. Or rather there is but it’s with the people and not the characters. Those conversations turn the interstitial hinges joining mechanical play into the memorable part of the evening. This relegates the mechanism to the space it should be. In playing “properly” it may serve to highlight mechanical issues from a more interesting angle, too.

I think this is born out by our two Burning Wheel sessions from last month. The highlights of play, for me, where a couple of conversations with unstatted NPCs. They utterly lacked any mechanism (though the entrance points and exit points were mechanical — it’s certain that mechanism let the NPCs be awesome by setting the stage and supported the exit) but they are the images I have now of “what was fun”. The ghost of an ancient orc king, from back when orcs were artisans in their hate and not just monsters. His speech let me create a whole culture right there for the players, and that kind of thing is why I game.

So maybe it’s just time to start thinking about gaming as a hobby again. Maybe the business of it is too close; too looming. I’m not really interested in business. Or maybe I was but now I’m bored of it. We need to play.

–BMurray