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

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

So I’ve talked about POD before and how it’s been a great choice for us, and yet the current implementations leave a lot to be desired if you happen to get popular. In particular, the role-playing game world suffers and as it’s a tiny niche, it’s not likely to get serviced by the big guys.

Here’s the problem. I want to sell you books. I don’t want to warehouse books and I don’t want to do fulfillment and all that. I just want to create a book as an electronic entity and sell it to you as a real, physical, and ideally beautiful, book. What’s cool is that for the most part you want to buy this book. So it seems like we’re all good here. Enter the niche.

My best choice for this sort of riskless sale is Lulu. I just send them the data and sit back. They sell you books and send me a cheque. Problem is, Lulu customers are not mostly about role-playing games or even games in general. They are mostly about fiction. So it doesn’t seem to be the case that there is a lot of browsing going on at Lulu that ends up in a sale of my book, and that’s a problem — if I can only sell to people who already know they want my book, then I’m missing what I expect is a crapton of “opportunity sales”. That is, sales to people who know they want to buy something but don’t know exactly what. In a perfect world they stumble around in a place rich with possibilities and spot my book and buy it. Lulu is not this place.

A partial solution here is to supply to vendors. The downside of this is that now I have to get involved in pre-printing and fulfillment. First in small quantities to the small number of vendors who are willing to buy in volumes that make it worth my while (my margins are tight). Then maybe large volumes to a third party (like IPR, say) who can supply to vendors in a more appealing fashion (it still pays for them to buy in volume but they don’t have to absorb the risk of buying ten of my book — they can buy two of mine and two of another and two of yet another, and so on). Anyway, that’s all part of the business I am not interested in.

Enter RPG Now (Drivethru RPG, One Bookshelf, etc.) and their POD service. This is finally a real POD service. Real for me, anyway. The fact that it doesn’t quite exist yet does not bother me. Here’s what they are promising to do that no one else does, and that makes me very happy indeed.

They are promising high quality. As they will be printing through Lightning Source (a self-proclaimed POD service, but very much a first-generation one that has no storefront for authors and a clear preference for dealing with “real” publishers), a company that has very high quality standards, I am confident they can achieve this. We’ll be getting draft copies to verify this quality so we’ll know for sure soon enough. But I have high confidence. So far this is ground already covered by Lulu.

They are promising that the product will be a first-class product at RPG Now. That means that it will be part of the same publisher’s infrastructure there and that’s cool because it is super powerful — not only is the reporting to the author good, but also the capacity to bundle is there (and isn’t at Lulu, and that’s a big deal). So I can offer book + PDF at a bargain. I can offer all my books. I can offer all my books by a certain author. I can bundle with other vendors (one day there could be an “all FATE hardcover” bundle, say). Awesome.

They are promising that they will be able to offer vendor pricing to vendor accounts. This puts them in direct competition with IPR for this sort of item — if a vendor can browse and pick and choose in a way that might include my book, I am ecstatic. This will satisfy a very large number of vendors that I cannot satisfy right now. This is a new market.

RPG Now already has a reputation amongst gamers — it’s already a place that gamers go to browse. So this opens up my hardcopy to opportunity sales in two ways (site browsing as well as increased brick and mortar presence).

All of this smells too good to be true, but the fact is that most of this is just a user interface improvement over what Lulu does and so RPG Now seems to be aiming at taking the same (or less) out of the margin between print cost and sale that Lulu does. So for me, the publisher, the margin remains roughly the same. Selling to vendors can be similarly no different than, say, IPR as far as margin goes, assuming I pre-printed stock through Lightning Source or somewhere similarly inexpensive.

Okay so RPG Now wants to do all the work that I don’t want to do and they want to get paid such that I make the same margin I ever did. At the same time they want to vastly improve my options for bundling and make everything I publish available to an existing browsing audience. They have basically taken my IPR and Lulu defect list and made it their feature list.

Sign me up.

–BMurray

It’s time for me to think out loud about the game document as an application. All this talk about electronic books and manufacturing buckets and so forth has me thinking that practically every instance of the electronic book is at least as flawed as the paper book in some way or another. See, what the book does right is convey the content via efficient and effective use of the medium. What the electronic book does so far is attempt to mimic the book or extend it incrementally.

Seriously, an electronic device with gigabytes of space a millions of cycles per second and the best we can do is pretend to be a four dollar book? Fuck that.

Exploiting the new medium — a handy computer that does stuff besides display “Hello world” — is going to take some serious innovation. This is not a matter of making new standards or writing books using them or any of that. Real, serious changes to use the machine to do what we really want to do.

See, the game text is a compromise between what the author wants to do for the end user and what the medium is capable of doing. So when we make the machine pretend to be a book, we adopt the same compromise that the author has made for almost 700 years. I think maybe we can do better. Moore’s law, applied since 1450 or so, suggests we can do astronomically better.

What the author wants to do would, in my industry, be encapsulated in a requirements document. We don’t generally do this for books because the compromise we accept cuts so very deep — there’s just not all that much we can do. By contrast, when developing content for a computer, you want to start with the assumption that we can do anything. So now we have to constrain to what we want to do.

So what kinds of requirements would a role-playing-game-delivery-application (usually a book but now released from these bonds) have? Well, a place to start is a little use-case analysis. Here are our users (assuming a traditional RPG structure):

• all players
• non-GM players
• GM players
• readers
• reviewers

Yeah, see, even at this early stage in the analysis we already see that we have vast possibilities open to us just be acknowledging that we can be different things to different people. So let’s look at the most function-rich (I’m guessing!) user — the GM. What does he need this document to do?

• Display rules that are in the context of the current action at the table
• Search for a rule by keyword
• Display action-relevant information for each character
• Display action-relevant information for NPCs and monsters
• Adjust resource elements (fate points, gold pieces) for all players and maybe the environment
• Roll dice
• Display and modify campaign notes relevant to the action at the table and upcoming action
• Record table audio and video
• Convey private information to players (and observers?!)

I could go on. But starting with the assumption that we have a general purpose computer with audio-visual capabilities, a network, and some storage, we find the doors blown open on “what is an RPG if not a book?” As a GM I should be able to award fate points (in secret and in private), get updates based on player activity (“I am tagging ‘Zany funster’ for +2 because I’m just so awesome to be around.” click and fate point tallies on all machines are updated), see what aspects are begging for compels (maybe literally — a player might flag an aspect as a fun thing to tweak and the GM can respond to that red flag). It’s packed with back-channels that are both in and out of story.

So this is what I’m working on right now — what are the use cases for a Next Generation RPG Delivery System? Then after that will come the requirements proper. Then a design. And then I start developing iPad applications? Maybe.

I better go buy some books on that.

–BMurray

Here’s the VSCA sales as of Q1 2010.

Lulu revenue sales

Deluge (digital): 44

Diaspora (digital): 11

Diaspora (hardcover): 541

Diaspora (softcover): 29

RPG Now revenue sales

Deluge (digital): 21 23

Diaspora (digital): 93 98 101

Vendor sales

Diaspora (both bindings): 230

Totals

Deluge (digital): 65 67

Diaspora (digital): 104 109 112

Diaspora (physical): 800

Diaspora (all formats): 904 909 912

Deluge was an experiment and not really marketed at all, so its sales are mostly hardcore fans of VSCA and people picking it up because it’s cheap and near Diaspora I expect. Score one for the browsing audiences at RPG Now! Its sales are much higher than I anticipated.

For Diaspora, after the initial surge in August of 2009 at release, we had hoped to see 1000 sales during its first year. That’s a magic number of no particular significance, but it looked like a challenging goal. We figured if we hit that then we could say nice things about ourselves to ourselves. With over 900 revenue sales of Diaspora after only 8 months, this goal looks like it will be handily achieved. When we hit that mark I’ll think about the next goal.

Up next for us I think will be a concerted effort to get Diaspora into IPR affordably (for us), which means printing somewhere else. Along with that will be work on Hollowpoint, Soft Horizon, Chimaera, and Soulscape – and part of that will be prioritizing these to make sure effort goes where there’s the best chance of success. Right now Hollowpoint is closest to done and it’s a little thing, so it will probably get some focus right away and maybe release before summer. The rest I can’t speak to.

Thanks to everyone who has helped us out, and even the criticism from non-fans has been helpful. This industry-cum-hobby has been great fun for me so far as a neophyte.

-BMurray

So it’s been four days since launching the PDF and we here at VSCA are interested in what this actually does for us because we spent a long time speculating about it. So here’s what I know (as opposed to what I imagine).

We’ve sold around 90 units of the PDF through our two storefronts. That’s awesome — that’s a much bigger surge than I was expecting. It’s too soon to talk about average sales, but the bulk of that was on day one and two (roughly evenly distributed which seems weird to me) but we’re still seeing 5/day or so now.

Book sales are up, so that’s cool and something I didn’t expect. Not huge, but significant. It’s hard to know if that’s because of the PDF or because of something else (surges happen because of word-of-mouth bursts like popular forum posts).

The PDF was pirated pretty fast. I don’t know if I care to do anything about that (I could do a DMCA take-down order, for example) as I believe that people pirating the document are not generally part of my customer base anyway, but it kind of pisses me off that a fan would do it to us. I knew one (at least) would, but it bugs me anyway. An expected betrayal is still a betrayal.

This significantly elevates our total unit sales above my projections. I’ll post details at the end of the month, but it looks like we’ll be breaking 900 sales very soon and so our objective of 1000 sales over a year in publication is likely to be achieved and beat.

And hopefully I’ll have a cool announcement this week that the PDF has enabled. One thing digital sales do well is simplify interaction that would otherwise be very complex. That is also unexpected and cool.

–BMurray

So I’m not super happy with the Diaspora softcover and now understand why I was resisting it for a long time. Part of it is Lulu’s quality control on softcovers is not great — I just did a bunch of back and forth tweaking my source data only to discover that the variation at the printer’s side is greater than the variations I was submitting. This is very frustrating. So the cutting is inconsistent and because the cover is also cut, the cover positioning is also inconsistent. It’s not ghastly but it’s not up to the standards of the hardcover.

On the upside, the blacks are generally better because the cream paper colour is very forgiving. The reduced contrast is easier on the eyes and so it’s actually more pleasant to read. That’s nice to know, because softcover is the preferred format for our future work, so now I have an idea of its strengths and weaknesses at Lulu.

This opens up a lot of opportunities for us for various reasons — the margin we make on a softcover is about the same in absolute terms as the hardcover, but as a percentage of the cover price it’s quite a bit higher, which lets us make more attractive deals to vendors. That also lets us place in IPR and still hope to make a dollar or two  (though not much more than two in many cases) which is probably a win, though I still haven’t heard a really convincing argument for it. The numbers look like less overall profit for an elevated risk and I’m just not hearing anyone shout the upside. Please, shout the upside. I guess it’s supposed to be obvious. It’s not.

The big actual advantage to getting this thing out the door, though, is that I can get on with the next priority item, which is the PDF. That at least is not controversial in terms of profit as it has no production costs after it’s released, so it’s intrinsically risk-free. I’d still like to make good on my promise that it will be useful, though, and so there is some layout work to get done to make it what I need it to be. Once that’s done there is another possibility which opens up that I can’t really talk about.

So that’s where we’re at. I’m probably still a little depressed from being sick and so I’m not as enthusiastic as I could be about the softcover, but honestly it feels like whoring. It just makes me want to get on with the next product where I can again pursue an artistic vision instead of fill an order. That probably means, as it will be softcover, it won’t be through Lulu.

–BMurray

I’m still battling internally over the value of the PDF-target document. Not whether or not it’s worthwhile, but rather just how valuable it is. Like, in dollars. This is important because there is some desire from fans for a Diaspora PDF but there is some imperfectly qualified resistance to the idea from within the VSCA. I think this stems from the fact that the value of a PDF is unbelievably plastic. Here’s some data that illustrates this.

I have dozens of PDFs of role-playing games. I’ve paid between nothing and about ten bucks for them. I’ve read maybe half and played basically none.

The PDF of our book represents the entire source data to produce the book-as-artifact. I’m really proud of that thing, that book, and so I value ownership of that PDF very highly. How high? The VSCA needs to put a price tag on that I guess. It will vary over time — if Diaspora doesn’t sell a single hardcopy for a month, obviously the value of its production material goes down.

PDFs of games sell for between two bucks and twenty bucks at cool places like RPGNow. Yet recently, for charity, a package that sent twenty bucks to Haiti got the consumer some fourteen-hundred bucks “worth” of PDF data. I think I worked out the mean value of those PDFs to about eighty cents. That’s an amazing disparity. That could never ever happen with physical books, for example — you’re never going to get Barnes & Noble giving you fourteen-hundred bucks in hardcover books for twenty bucks, which they then ship to Haiti. There are excellent reasons for this, bearing mostly on the delivery bottlenecks, and there is a whole other discussion about the actual cost of the sum finally raised (the efficiency as a process for fundraising and who paid for the inefficiency and how much) and most of it will have to use fictional numbers (estimated lost sales, sales delayed or lost from server outage, and so on).

And then there’s Deluge which I released for seven bucks under a share-alike license. This had an effect that I hoped for — lots of people were happy to pay for something they were allowed to share. It’s what people tell me happens with PDFs, so I wanted to use a licensing scheme that expected it to happen — rather than say “here’s the PDF, it’s not for free, please don’t share it with anyone but there’s no DRM” I chose to say “here’s the PDF, it’s not for free, but we acknowledge you’re going to do what you want with your thing, so go nuts”. That seems to work — my expectation is that when people pay for something they have a sense of ownership and resist distributing it widely.

So anyway, with this enormous plasticity, obviously a Diaspora PDF would need to deal with our range adequately. We have people who own the book and reasonably would want the PDF for free. We have people who would be delighted to pay anywhere from two to twenty bucks for it. And we have the authors who have a large but unquantified interest in not letting it from our bosoms.

It seems like the solution (and this is not a policy as I haven’t put it before the VSCA itself) is to ransom it.

Basically, we need to set our value on it and say it clearly. Then collect pledges through some reputable pledgerizer (I’m sure Greg Stolze knows of one) until that value is met. Then release the PDF for free. This involves us not wishy-washying around that valuation — we need to decide what it really is and then be loud and clear. And if we can’t get what we value it at, we don’t release it. Maybe we ransom again later when the value goes down. But most importantly, it would only be ethical for use to release it for free when we meet that value, otherwise we were lying about the value.

–BMurray

So I put up Deluge last night for sale, as I already noted. I thought, though, that I had better talk about what’s in it because, well, it costs seven bucks.

Deluge is 37 pages of material, about 30 of which are strictly game-related stuff. It’s in PDF format using a version that lets me add bookmarks and hyperlinks, so it’s not fully functional on some kinds of software and devices, but you should be able to read it just fine. I have an ePub and MOBI version kicking around on my drive at home (and on my Kindle) that also works and if you want a copy of that just give me a shout.

It costs seven bucks but you can share it for free with anyone you want. Yeah that means that you can re-host it and give it away to the world. That’s cool by me — that’s part of the experiment. It’s only available through Lulu at the moment but I’m looking into getting its stuffed into more popular locales in the next short while. Probably in the complete “package” with all formats. Well, all the formats I have, I mean.

It contains, aside from some original artwork and thankfully terse fiction:

A discussion of the premise of the setting.

Concrete ways to organize and design characters so that they have cool things to do in the setting and with each other.

Ideas for developing communities so that they are interesting to discover and interact with.

Random tables for finding out what communities have, need, hate, and love.

A method for building a session around your home town, plus fourteen meters of water and a hundred and fifty years without modern technology.

Details for angels, bears, and giant squid.

A discussion of the kinds of secrets the GM will want to invent, keep, and reveal in the process of participating in a Deluge story.

Factoids about rain.

In the spirit of Diaspora and my own preferences, even though Deluge is a setting, it’s also still a toolkit. Yeah I know, settings have been traditionally anti-toolkit, but rather reference material for a campaign. Honestly, I hate that. Remember Thieve’s World, the game aid? What was cool about Thieve’s World for me was not the characters or the stats or the story lines already unfolding in the city. Honestly I barely read any of that because it wasn’t mine, I didn’t want to memorize it, and I knew my players would not read it or listen to me read it. What was cool about that was the map and the tone.

So Deluge is all about this kind of thing too — the core assumption is that you, the potential consumer, want to tinker. You want to take something and make it yours. You want to be as unhindered by canon as possible, so all you need is a premise and a methodology and you will be off and running making your own awesome game. Because that’s what GMs do, at least where I come from. So that’s what it delivers — premise, methodology, atmosphere, and some examples to spark your own imagination. In a sense I’m selling you a good idea rather than a game or even a setting. A good idea and a way to use it.

I am certain that my idea of what play is (as a GM) is not universal. There are people who want encounter details in a setting document. They will hate this document but, hopefully, they already know that because Diaspora is full of clues regarding my preferences and they already hate that game (or know they will hate it). However, if your idea of a good time is drawing over a map of your home town, documenting its destruction and its treasures, and then slowly revealing this to your friends during a rousing game with your favourite system, this is certainly built for you. It’s built for me, after all.

–BMurray