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.

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

Okay that was fun. All the fiddling with my Terrible Grant, I mean. I’m jazzed about layout and typography and stuff relevant to this Highport idea. But is there anything to it? What would go in one of these? Who would get paid and how? What would it cost an end user?

Maybe those should be looked at one at a time. Is there anything to it? Sure. I could be persuaded to generate or acquire and edit content on a relatively frequent basis and fiddle with amusing software to get it done. I’m cool with that. So it’s certainly feasible.

What would go in one of these? That’s the kind of thing that makes lists in my head! So here’s one:

• A Diaspora cluster in some detail. Not everyone feels creative all the time. Detail might include common equipment and maybe military structure ready for use in platoon combat. Ships? Sure! This is already looking like something that could easily span multiple issues actually.
• A new game. I remember photocopying Dragon magazines and chopping that up to build my Snit Smashing boardgame. Making something like that happen regularly would thrill me.
• Preview upcoming VSCA titles. Things like our space combat free PDF release could be stuck in a VSCA magazine.

Obviously I’m thinking mostly about concrete, playable content and not editorial material. Some of this is stuff fans have already been asking for, so it would be cool to be able to fork it over. I can’t see it as being very art-heavy, frankly, but rather more of a nuts and bolts periodical manual for actual play. Tables, charts, diagrams, rules, and enough fluff to get you thinking about how to use it in your game. Very little more. It would look sharp but austere on your iPad.

Who would get paid and how? See now that’s a good question because it’s not sustainable as a single-person effort. As Bob implied earlier, the clone army is not yet ready. But there are some kick-ass game designers and other creative folks withing a few dozen blocks of me and many more within reach of the interwebs. So I’m thinking of some kind of flat fee for a usage license with VSCA not owning the content. So basically I would pay a contributor (of art or writing or whatever) for the right to publish, but they would retain all rights to their content. I thought about doing a royalty thing but honestly I’m just not interested in the accounting.

What would it cost the end user? Well this is interesting. I’m exploring Magcloud because they already do the full-colour magazine thing using a model I like, but also because they have an iPad app and that’s really what I want to get in on: delivery by iPad. Also paper — I love paper — but PDFs can look so damned good on this thing that I am compelled to show you. With product. Currently Magcloud offers content through the app for free with a click-option to purchase the hardcopy. Things looks os bloody good on the device, though, that I’m afraid that’s ass-backwards — it almost makes more sense to sell some kind of ownership and charge a minor printing and shipping fee for hardcopies. Anyway, they will sort that out and if I’m working with them on this I’ll be providing vocal input. They’ll work something out. So there are a few models that would intersect with the Magcloud method:

• Charge the base rate + profit on the Magcloud hardcopy. When they let me charge for the app delivery, charge a base rate + profit. This is least interesting to me, partially because in soliciting art and writing I incur risk and hope to get paid from the Magcloud revenues. This smells old-school.
• Kickstart each issue and use a fraction of that money as budget for the issue and a fraction as profit. Release the PDF for free, selling through Magcloud at the minimum possible (just the Magcloud costs basically) for hardcopy and iPadd app release. This is pretty appealing (zero risk, leveraging technology) obviously.
• Some combination of the above.

Anyway that’s what I’m thinking. I like the visual austerity of Diaspora ¹ and would be aiming at that + colour to really take advantage of the iPad as delivery system. This would not be a magazine you buy for the cool artwork. Lots of folks do that already. I want to produce game-stuff. Shitloads of it.

–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

I have some great news but I can’t tell you about it yet.

There comes a time — usually several times — during the design of each game I’m involved in at which I hate the game. Sometimes just a piece of it, sometimes huge swaths of it, and sometimes the whole bloody thing. I only have one published significant work (and it works) — Diaspora — and so I can’t yet say that I know everything will be alright, but I do know that I hated Diaspora several times during its construction, so I suspect all is cool.

In Hollowpoint right now I hate the teamwork pool but I also love it. It creates an essential tension — a resource that depletes over the course of play and that becomes essential in the endgame, so managing it between all players is a necessary part of succeeding at a mission. I don’t want to drop it because that bit gets hammered all the time in play. But a lot of the play that surrounds the teamwork pool smells a little funky and I don’t have a good solution yet to the imperfectly understood problem it represents. Because I tend to feel either neutral or extremes and nothing in between (the Fudge dice curve is no good for pegging my emotions), this imperfection means I hate the game.

Now, understand, this is an awesome game. It delivers very cool action scenes with a lot of player participation in the details. It creates a high-pressure story arc that makes the endgame tense and uncertain. It establishes a a context in which bad play means someone usually has to die in order to succeed in the mission — by three-quarters through play, it becomes clear that the only way to get enough dice to beat the enemy is to replenish the teamwork pool, and that means someone has to die. In our last playtest we had one player tactically trying to get killed so that we could beat the mission, and that’s pretty cool.

But something still itches and I don’t feel I have the perspective to address it. Fortunately, I have collaborators. Specifically, on this project, C.W. Marshall (sometimes Toph) is energetically proposing changes and fixes and generally sees the same faults that I do but from a different angle. This happened on Diaspora as well (though there I had three gung-ho collaborators with competing interests, so something different happened there) and was the reason the game went where it did. If I’d followed my original ideas through it would have been just another fan hack to do Traveller a slightly different way. My collaborators had different ideas about what made Fate fun and even what Traveller is, and so something exciting happened that I didn’t expect or intend.

So right now I’m trying not to think too hard about Hollowpoint (which is why I am writing a thousand words or so about it, right?) until there’s more external action on it. I don’t want to throw my darlings away (like the teamwork pool) but I also need to step back and let my partner do what he needs to do rather than defend something while I don’t like the game. That usually makes for a bad defense and, worse, reinforces the idea that I don’t like the game and I do. I do like it. I love it in fact, but loving something is more complex than just a shouted hurrah. It’s a dynamic thing that jerks you around all over the place. That’s just how that works.

So I’m not going to second-guess myself right now on that game.

Soft Horizon, on the other hand, I don’t hate. Reviewing the design notes, which I’ve been away from for quite a while, is funny because my ideas about how games can work have developed a great deal over the last year  and so a lot of the game seems dated — quaint even — now. It looks like something I wrote when I was a kid. A kid of 43. That’s part of why I started playing around with a different probability curve for it, really — it’s an attempt to re-energize the game and bring in a new idea that might force us to re-think other parts and consequently differentiate the game well from other games. And it did that and now it needs a lot of play and I don’t hate it. I just need to play it a lot. Not write it.

All this probably means I should play around with layout ideas for Hollowpoint, because that almost always jazzes me on the game again. Whenever a piece of the project seems intractable I go to a totally different part of the project and tinker with that, even if it’s too early (or late) to be productive. This lets me channel the game through different parts of my brain, and that tends to jog loose good ideas. It also does something essential to collaboration — it gives me time and space to detach a little from my little obsessions. There are things in each design that I will cling to because … well for no good reason other than that I invented them. Stepping back and looking at something slightly different, or from a new angle, sometimes allows me to let these go and it’s only then that I really hear my collaborators’ voices on the subject.

So there I am. A little depressed about some things, elated about others, and looking for a path through all that which leads to the release of a great game. So I’ll sit down and have a drink and let Toph blaze the trail a bit.

–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

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

What is the FATE system?

This is getting asked all over the place, though most vocally over at RPG.net and on the FATE mailing list. It’s interesting because the current incarnation of FATE is basically a list of exemplar works that declare themselves to be FATE. This is not actually all that helpful because each tries to bring some new ideas to bear (it’s not fun just applying paint to an old game and calling it new — you want to improve it) and file off stuff from other exemplars that doesn’t work for you. And so the resulting definition of FATE is the intersection of all these exemplars and the intersection is both small and shrinking.

So my declaration is this (and it’s typical B.Murray vaguery): until there’s an official document declaring what FATE v3 is, no one knows what FATE v3 is.

Okay, so now I can tell you what I think it is.

First, FATE v3 is a core resolution mechanism that is not unique to it: fixed measure of competence + fortune + narrative benefit versus target value or opposed roll. The common expression of this, or rather the canonical one as in Spirit of the Century, is Skill + Fudge dice + Aspect invoke/tag. I think it’s fair to say that a game that doesn’t do some variation of this is probably not FATE v3. But lots of games do pretty much this and are certainly not FATE games.

So FATE v3 is also characters with Aspects. And so we need to define Aspects. Characters have Aspects if they have one or more descriptive phrases that can confer mechanical benefit (see “narrative benefit” above) at the cost of a narrative currency: the fate point. And so here I will say that the fate point and therefore the existence of a fate point economy (which at a minimum is used for mechanical benefit) is a FATE v3 requirement. I think that we also need to include the Compel as essential: there has to be a way to get as well as spend fate points.

I think that’s it. Everything else can come and go. Consequences are special Aspects. Stress tracks are completely detachable. Stunts are wildly malleable (as we’ve seen) and don’t need to exist at all. But a game where you roll dice and add skills, then narrate in your features and pay for the result is FATE. A game where you are shilling around for more of these points is also FATE.

Well that means that a good canonical statement of what is necessary to be FATE v3 shouldn’t take more than a half-dozen pages or so. And then six hundred pages of stuff you can glue onto it.

The end result of this is that I don’t know if any of the upcoming VSCA games are going to be FATE games now. Let’s look.

Hollowpoint. Dice pools that owe more to ORE than anything else and no points economy at all. Aspects are their own economy, burned when used. Certainly not FATE.

Soft Horizon. Tricky one because we’re just now thinking hard about changes. Certainly it’s FATE-like — the resolution is skill + dice + aspects, but the dice are in flux (could be |d6 – d6| — see the skunkworks). So far it retains a fate point economy as well, so I’ll call this one FATE on my own terms, but it could be debated.

Soulscape. I don’t know. We need to revisit this design before we know what it is. It is imagined as a pretty straightforward FATE v3 game but that was a long time ago and I think it could benefit from something more deliberately addressing its premises.

Chimaera. This game is, unsurprisingly, the most chimaeric. It uses a cool dice pool mechanism that’s distinctly unFATElike, and uses an Aspects-as-economy system not unlike Hollowpoint rather than a strict fate point economy. It also has some very cool dice-as-record-keeping tools that are fun to manipulate and also very much not FATE. I think we’ll call this “partially inspired by” but to be honest it’s more inspired by the play we got from FATE games than by the games themselves.

I guess that as players and designers we are continuously evolving our games and we don’t feel any particular attachment to whatever the core of FATE is, partially because it hasn’t been clearly stated. And I think that, even if it was, now we’d be as happy to say “it’s not FATE really” as “it’s another FATE game!” I mean, I get that there is a kind of built-in audience for FATE games just as with any other generic identity because there’s a community associated with it even though the definition is nebulous.

Maybe that’s at the heart of it — I would like for FATE to remain poorly defined exactly so that the community remains diverse and open to experiments and hacks. Hacking on it is what got me into design in the first place. It made the VSCA exist. I’d hate to lose that spirit in that community and a rich and rigid definition would risk killing it.

So here’s to FATE: skill + dice + aspects to resolve, and a fate point economy in action all through play. Hah, six pages indeed.

–BMurray