A multi-way conversation between roleplaying game authors and developers. Occasionally useful.

 
Building vs. Razing
posted by Chad at 11:25 AM

(First off, thanks to Bruce for the invite.)

On another discussion board, I started discussing a business-themed RPG. I said something like, "What's the difference between seeing in-game a successful rollout of a new sneaker and the effects on the kingdom of eliminating the dragon who'd been terrorizing them?"

That's started a bit of controversy. Most folks seem highly resistant that there could be any fun in playing a character in an Romantic/Heroic Business Adventure Game (like Preston Tucker, the three women in 9-to-5, Tommy in TOMMY BOY, or any Horatio Alger rags-to-riches hero). Whatever.

This sparked an insight, which I'd like to share with you for evaluation:

Most mainstream games are about building/creating/improving, and most RPGs are about razing/destroying/eliminating.

A large proportion (maybe 1 in 5) of popular mainstream games -- like Monopoly or Life (or electronically, Sid Meier's Civilization or the Sims) -- include a substantial amount of resource-building in the course of the game in order to win.

In RPGs, for every "create a kingdom" type game, there are 10 "kill the dragon" ones. (The exception seems to be in the science fiction end of the genre, where playing a start-up adventure merchant crew seems to be okay... but working for a big corporation in the same capacity doesn't seem to be. And, by definition, it would seem few cyberpunk games really allow one to play a corporate functionary -- I guess that would eliminate the "punk" aspect of the genre.)

The most successful RPG of all time reflects "building" in its leveling mechanic, combined with the "razing" of numerous generic critters in numerous generic caves. The most popular second wave RPG, while having little building of the PC after chargen, has a tremendous amount of building potential designed into the social network that PCs operate in. Probably the most popular boardgame in the world involves creating a financial structure of money, deeds, and edifices, while destroying the structure of your rivals. Many popular computer games, while mostly about killing the enemy sprites, involve building your side up (from Bard's Tale to Warcraft, etc.) in order to kill them there sprites better. While "pure razing" games have their charms, the lion's share of mainstream appeal goes towards the games with a "building element." And this is why a "pure building" game like SimCity is fascinating, but ultimately a letdown as a game -- no real eliminating or competition. (I believe the creator calls it a "toy" rather than a "game.")

I think the focus of the RPG industry has shifted from mostly "building" to mostly "eliminating." The mainstream appeal of increasing in power and ability (and/or changing the game environment through building actions and processes) could be a factor in the huge boom in D&D3/d20 products (not disregarding familiarity, marketing, and branding, of course).

To go back to the Romantic Business Adventure Game, how about this one: "Mr. Spacely calls you into his office and says, 'Here's a 15 million space-credit budget and a staff of four. Sell Sprocket X. You have to make at least 30 million space-credits in profit in three years. Go forth.' What do you do?"

Am I the only person who does not find that a boring basis for an RPG campaign?

Let me know what you think.

CU

 
Can You Play It Stupid?
posted by Bruce Baugh at 7:09 PM

Folks in da biz spend a fair amount of time groping for metrics by which to gauge the probable success of a new game. This is particularly true for those of us out trying innovative, artistic, and otherwise not-surefire things. Certainly I've been mulling it a lot lately, and it seems to me that a crucial question is this:

Can you play it stupid?

There are two components to the extent to which a game lends itself to success by this standard:

• Does the game have an easily accessible summary, and does it connect to things gamers already know?


• Can it support straight-up play in some variety of "see the monster, hit the monster" low-characterization, high-action campaigning?

Vampire: The Masquerade is a good example here. "You play vampires, there are different lineages with different powers, there's a secret society dominated by a couple of big sects; it's angst and moral struggle on the individual level, and Machiavelli and Le Carre on the social level." And the potential for thoughtless let's-whack-stuff is well enough known in gaming to have bred its own slang ("Vampions") and cliches (two silver katanas, one leather duster, a side order of mirrorshades, please). Exalted has this, too: it's a fantasy world where the PCs are the heirs to demigod power and must now deal with the world at large and with the empire whose leaders killed the Solar Exalted first time around and would love to do it again, and thanks to the charm system, everything characters might want to do can be vivid and cinematic as we use that term in gaming. Enduring successes like D&D and the Hero system likewise work if you know and like the cliches of their inspiration, and the tactical-wargame approach to organizing play time is demonstrably of interest to a lot of gamers.

Compare some of the fascinating failures in gaming, both setting ones like Tekumel and Jorune and mechanical ones like Space Opera. They lack that simple solid core on which you can hang embellishments. A world which doesn't remind most gamers of something they already know is, or at least can be, great to read about but is not one for which they can comfortably to the make-up-your-own-bits customization which is crucial to an engaging campaign. And while there's widespread gaming interest in more detailed tactical resolution than I care for myself, this isn't license for unbounded compexity - if players can't keep the gist of it in their heads, they won't keep messing with it.

There's a counsel in some portions of the game design community which says that you should therefore not try anything very interesting or exotic. I, on the other hand, note that it's possible to be very successful in a lot of media with quite detailed and innovative subjects - while the public at large will go see really dumb screwbll comedies and mindless amoral action films, they'll also go see Civil War epics, multiple long films about Middle Earth, foul-mouthed comedies of heterodox Roman Catholic theological speculation, and stories that combine action with thoughtful extrapolation and world-building. Likewise in comics: DC still sells a hundred thousand trade paperbacks of Sandman each year, a decade after the series ended, and that's as dense and mannered a work as you can reasonably ask for. It's just that each of these works also has something to offer the customer looking for a cool good time.

If it can play stupid, then your audience will sit still for art, philosophy, and a great deal else.

 
Martial Arts (possibly for d20?)
posted by Sean at 4:40 AM

[JackSlack, AKA Sean] Random RPG system thinking: Critical success means instant extra turn. Makes for quick, simple combat and multiple actions are done easily.
[Blue, AKA David Wendt] Very interesting. Though I think I would make 'critical successes' more common (or give ways to make them more common) than has been historically true for such a system.
[JackSlack] I just thought of it as a way to handle the problems. Among other things, you'd be able to come up with some neat martial arts characters. Give yourself a million bonus points in dodge, and you can counterattack like crazy.
[Blue] That would be very cool.
[JackSlack] By contrast, give yourself gazillion in attack, and you can keep attacking until they fall down and die. It could actually end up being that most fights resolve themselves in a 'single' action between true masters.
[Blue] Right. Or you can give yourself average attack and max out your damage. A "one hit wonder" so to speak. ;) That actually makes a lot of sense.
[JackSlack] A hard master vs. a hard master would be entirely about who strikes first, consistent with hard martial arts. A soft master vs. soft master would take forever to resolve. :) Again, makes sense more or less. And a hard vs. soft would be a matter of who makes the first mistep.
[Blue] It actually works very well for a martial-centered game. I like this idea ALOT. Kudos.
[JackSlack] When blogger comes back up, I'll throw that one to Rock Scissors Blog.
[Blue] Cool!

 
Reflections on Playtesting
posted by Bruce Baugh at 2:49 AM

Like just about everything in gaming, playtesting is the subject of a lot of conventional wisdom I regard as doubtfully grounded, and a great deal of confusion. Since I'll be running another playtest in a few weeks, I thought I'd lay out my own principles. I should note that, yes, it's true that I'm fortunate to write for the #2 rpg company, since this gives me a larger probable audience than many of my colleagues get to enjoy. But it's also true that there is no White Wolf hive-mind at work, and that a lot of promising experiments end up tanking. I am not exempt, as writer or developer, from the need to juggle the competing interests of existing fans and potential new ones.

So.

Who is a new game for? The answer obviously depends in large measure on who you want it to be. John Nephew comes to mind as someone who's managed to carve out a viable and eminently successful place for himself with a steady-state approach. Apart from the Penumbra line, Atlas Games makes essentially no effort to attract new customers to its existing lines. Steve Jackson Games works similarly: while some projects (like the Hellboy RPG) aim at new customers, by and large, the audience for GURPS books is the population that's already buying them. Unfortunately, since folks at these two companies are most vocal in discussing playtest philosophy, the steady-state assumption dominates playtest discussion in ways I regard as undesirable.

I aim my games at people with an interest in the subject and a willingness to look at my treatment whether or not they like anything else that might be associated with it. This is something I think White Wolf has done right nearly all along, and which contributes significantly to its success. The first duty of a game is to be a good game for what it is, and compatibility with others is at best a secondary interest. WW got into creative trouble only when it had a collective bout of trying to put everything in the World of Darkness into too tight a creative framework; since returning to the philosophy that different games are at liberty to have wildly different perspectives, we've had a run of very interesting creative experiments, many of which have worked for the market as well.

Trinity was a learning experience. I think it's a darned good game, but those added few pages of "the story so far" in the softcover made a big difference, as does the freeform psi system. The game didn't initially get quite the creative distance from the WoD it needed. By the time we got to Adventure, it was clear that we had nothing to lose by being exuberantly this-thing-now and quite a bit to gain from it. Adventure sold very well by nearly anyone's standards, and emphatically wasn't a failure in economic terms, and obviously it enjoys a very high degree of player satisfaction and good word of mouth.

And we got that partly by our willingness in the creative process to tell some staunch advocates that they wouldn't be getting what they wanted.

To begin with, reading is not playtesting. Assertions by people I otherwise respect notwithstanding, reading a manuscript does not allow you to fully anticipate the experience of play. There are always surprises. The only - only - way to assess player and GM experience is to have people play and report. This is not to say that reader critiques have no value. They do. I rely on the comments of trusted friends in and out of the business a whole lot, and I think they improve the quality of my work significantly. But there is a qualitative gap between reading and playing, and I think it's a critical mistake to think of or describe reading-based critiques as playtesting.

Next, playtesting must include a mix of people already steeped in the lore of the game and publisher and people new to it, and when push comes to shove, the comments of the latter are more important. At least this is true whenever the game comes from a publisher with a known style and history. At a bare minimum, one can always default to doing more of the same and count on whatever constitutes a modest success for the company. Maybe better than that. But to reach a new audience, you need to find out what those folks actually like and don't.

Likewise, if the design goals include doing something new, then you have to be prepared to tell some existing customers that they won't necessarily be interested in this new thing. This is a very tricky matter in gaming, where a small fraction of the audience is very loud, and of that fraction a significant number of people are willing to carry on with obsessions that border on (if they do not cross into) the realm of the genuinely clinically disfunctional as well as socially disruptive. When you put out a new game and run into someone who lies about its contents in an effort to strike back at the company for something done fifteen years ago by someone who isn't at the company and may not be in the field at all anymore, you are not dealing with an essentially healthy audience. And I know that every developer and most authors reading this are nodding along, thinking of multiple examples of the sort of person I just described.

If you the reader have never encountered that sort of obsession, count yourself lucky. It is in any event part of the social context of presenting new games. A vocal portion of our audience wants nothing but more of the same, whether their preferred "same" is 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS as of 1990, White Wolf as of 1994, or whatever. And if they are allowed significant input into the playtest process, they will bully down anyone who wants anything else, and if they don't get what they want, they will go off and malign the developer and publisher. It is better to act as gatekeeper and deny them entrance at the beginning, and let the preferences of existing customers be represented by people who are prepared to be more temperate about it.

Legacy is particularly tricky when it comes to something like Gamma World, which has a publishing history older than a fair chunk of the audience. There are people who've already taken the time to write to me and let me know that because it's D20 (D20 Modern, specfically, but who's counting?), our work must suck and they'll make sure to tell everyone so. Some of them haven't waited for anything so mundane as publication to provide evidence, either. Others think that we don't have to necessarily suck, but will if we make any changes to their pet subjects. Well, a lot of these people are in for disappointments, and I don't feel at all badly about it. My assignment is to make a Gamma World that works for active customers in 2003, and I'm doing it by incorporating the benefits of twenty years' more insights into science, adventure narrative, and game design. We're actually keeping more than I expected of the legacy, and that makes me happy, but I know at the outset that we can't satisfy some people and still have a commercially viable product of a sort to satisfy my artistic and artisan ambitions.

Nostalgia comes so easily to gamers - as it does to related sorts of fans, like sf fans busy being so nostalgia for the dreams of the future from half a century ago that they find nothing to regard with wonder or delight about the actual future they're living in. I like the past myself, but I also like to look at it with contemporary eyes, recognizing weaknesses and looking for improvements even in what I love. In this particular case, we've rather substantially reenvisioned the apocalypse in light of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and the notion of the Singularity, so that even when it leads back to some of the same end results, things take on different meaning because of their context. I am, in some ways, like Jorge Luis Borges' Pierre Menard, who in writing Don Quixote again created a work that means something unlike Cervantes' work of the same name and all the same words. My desired audience necessarily excludes those for whom this cannot be a licit aim.

Then there's the matter of who's accountable for what. My stance is simple and absolute: the authors must satisfy one (1) person, and that's the developer. It is not an author's job to cater to the preferences even of co-writers on the book - cooperation is good, but in the end, it's the developer's call what goes in the book and what doesn't. As developer, I deal with management concerns and other external factors, and act as gatekeeper. The writer gets the outline and any supplemental comments I have, and that's it. When playtest comes, the writer has absolutely no obligation whatsoever to pay attention to what players are saying; it should be the kind of experience that the writer wants to follow and take part in, but it's not part of the job description as I write it.

The writer's contracted for so many words at such a rate on this and that subject, nothing more. Playtesting is a part of development. Sometimes a writer may run a playtest, and even oversee the whole playtest for a book, and that's cool, but that's a matter of asking and accepting. Playtester comments should be addressed to the developer.

The format for playtester feedback matters, too. I've several times found myself in the position of having no good way in GURPS "playtests" to comment on the overall effect of a passage or chapter because their format calls for precise citations, fixed subject tags, and other measures which allow for lasering in on specific data...at the expense, I think, of an awareness of the work as an overall thing. The format is, to me, uncomfortably reminiscent of reading Mozilla bug reports, which ties in with Adam's jeremiad of a few days ago. I get better results, I think, by asking for playtesters to gather up all their initial read-through comments into a few long posts, to do likewise with all the weekly comments and questions during play, and so on. These long posts often lead, in my experience, to unexpected insights about the interplay between separate elements of the work, and seem to feed the sense of the book as a unified thing with constituent pieces rather than fundamentally distinct and discrete pieces assembled like a mosaic.

The looser approach to commenting also seems to encourage more attention to matters of prose, both connotation and denotation, and since I regard myself as an artist as well as a craftsman, that pleases me. I like getting discussion that includes literary as well as mathematical analysis, because both are important. In addition, I find that I get better results when I ask playtesters to report their experiences and suggest revisions. This opens up room for discussion. When playtesters start demanding things, then it's going to go downhill, because I don't much like to be dictated to by anyone who isn't signing my paychecks. (And even then, I really prefer bosses who engage in discussion as well as the emission of directives.) Identifying areas of concern is not the same either as asserting an objective state of brokenness or being entitled to require some specific alternative, and the more narrative approach to reporting seems to feed the kind of discussion I prefer.

I've never had all the time I would like with playtesting. I won't with Gamma World, either. But I believe that doing playtests the way I do them will give me back a work which better accomplishes the aims that my bosses and I have for it. It will, I hope, be fun for customers and players, and the more so because folks will have played it and worked with me to strengthen the fun and turn the not-fun into something better.

 
An Addendum
posted by Adam at 2:28 AM

I found this quote from Warren Ellis which I think makes an excellent postscript to my screed below. It's wrong, deeply, truly, badly wrong and, as an editor myself, I despise it.

It still made me laugh, though.

"Treat your editor like an appendix. If it starts giving you shit, have it removed with knives." - Warren Ellis

 
Biting The Hand That Feeds Me: Develop, don't debug, dammit
posted by Adam at 4:43 AM

It’s been a little quite around of here of late, so I’m going to take the opportunity to get a few things off my chest, in what I hope will be the first of a series of linked posts. Why “Biting the Hand The Hand That Feeds Me”? Well, because I’m directly attacking some of the sacred values of the industry that has consumed much of my free writing time in the last few years

Have you ever noticed just how many roleplayers, and roleplay writers, have day jobs in the IT industry? In many of the recent games I’ve run, virtually all my players have worked in that once-lauded and now struggling discipline. I’ve been on projects where a writer has moaned about suggested rewrites because she was too busy coding. It is my contention that this link has an adverse affect on game design and is one of the factors limiting the roleplay industry to its painfully tiny niche. I’ll be exploring the idea in a number of posts, but first of all I’d look at some of the ways that the IT mindset influences the way RPGs are written.

This relationship is particularly evident in the online gaming forums, to my mind. Posters on places like rpg.netand even the forums of the gaming companies like White Wolf and Steve Jackson Games. A large number of posters on those sites appear to be limited to binary thought processes: they talk in absolutes and can only dual positions of right and wrong. They struggle with the idea that two people can hold completely different opinions of a product or idea and both be correct, within their own frame of reference. This has been reflected in my discussions with friends in the IT industry as well, where heated discussions have devolved into debates about the context of the debate. What emerged was the revelation that I, an English Literature graduate and incorrigible Devil’s Advocate, make statements that I consider to be opinion and a starting point for debate, whereas they take it as a statement of an absolute fact, to be either accepted or destroyed. It’s an interesting distinction and one that can lead to headed debates, particularly after three pints and a whisky chaser.

To return to the industry itself, this link manifests itself in some interesting ways in the RPG industry. I’m sure most of the writers here have come across developers or editors who treat redlining drafts like they are debugging code. They focus on details, spelling errors and grammar, rather than looking at the general issues of the piece. Their work is essentially micro-managed rather than looking at the big picture. I’ve had to deal with nit-picking redlines which took longer to deal with than complete conceptual rewrites and yet created no substantive change to the content of the writing.

The application of grammatical rules in a particularly interesting manifestation of this computer industry mindset. Grammar is treated as an inflexible set of rules that must be applied to every sentence, paragraph and sub clause. This ignore two rather crucial points. First, most writers of any skill and talent break the “rules” of grammar repeatedly, for effect, pacing and tone. That’s natural and normal. Hell, I was encouraged to do it both at school and university and it’s an essential part of my day job as a section editor of a magazine. Not so in the RPG industry, though. Prepare for mocking and derision in your redlines and howls of protest from the fans should you choose to try something a little different. This leads directly into the second point, which is that the rules of English grammar are entirely arbitrary things which were created a few centuries ago to allow the teaching of English in schools in the same manner as Latin. This works for Latin, which is both a dead tongue and a language where precise grammar is necessary to construe meaning. It is far less necessary in English where meaning is derived from context and word order.

This is important, because by focusing on the nit-picking and not looking at the big picture you risk destroying what makes this RPG publishing business a worthwhile enterprise in the first place: the act of creation. This is an industry about the creation of stories, settings and fun. Sometimes people seem to forget that. Sure, we need good writing which is both enjoyable and easy to understand. The rules of grammar are one tool to help achieve this, but they are far from the only one.

I’m going to name check Mike Lee, who develops Demon: the Fallen for White Wolf, here. Mike is an absolute pleasure to work with because he does look at the big picture. He is a developer with more than one critical tool in his editing toolbox. He recently asked for substantial rewrites of a project because he wanted to change the narrative thrust of the piece. He also gave me general guidelines for rewriting the storyteller advice section. Sure, there was a significant amount of work to do between first and second drafts, but I enjoyed it. Really enjoyed it, in fact. Why? Well, because Mike had taken the time to discuss the changes he wanted and the reasons for them with me, and then take on board my suggestions. We had a discussion, in which I threw in extra ideas on top of his. I enjoyed the rewrite because I knew we were creating something substantially better on the original skeleton of my first draft, and because he trusted me to find my own grammatical errors and put them right in the second draft.

There are other developers in Mike’s mould, but not enough. Like I said, to many writers and developers treat RPG writing with exactly the same mindset that they would treat coding and the two are completely different disciplines. In any piece of writing the ideas and concepts within are the most important part of the endeavor, with the way they are expressed a very close second. Yet, precious few developers give guidance on writing style or concepts and very, very few reviewers comment of the quality of expression in a book, while they busy themselves nitpicking over every literal in the book. We have a team of half a dozen subeditors on the magazine, who are devoted to nothing but spotting errors, inaccuracies and passages which need clarification, and still errors slip through. How can a RPG company with a fraction of the resources expect to put out a literal-free book?

To the reviewers and players I say: “There will always be errors. Surely it’s better to see if that book inspires you rather than meets some mathematical standard of editorial accuracy”. To the designers of games I say: “Remember that language is a tool for conveying ideas. Its principal measure of success would be how well it does that task. The “rules” of grammar are only relevant where they work in service of that goal.”

Simply put, if you have to give a writer specific guidance on every single little error in a manuscript to get a clean second draft, why the hell are you employing that writer in the first place?

 
A Tribute?
posted by Doc Blue at 8:04 AM

As many of you likely know, the death of Fred Rogers was announced today.

If you are like me, you grew up visiting Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and the Neighborhood of Makebelieve. Similarly, if you are like me, you owe your interest in role-playing games in some small part to the freedom and encouragement Mr. Rogers and his puppeteers gave us to imagine other places.

Thus this small post is a tribute to the man and the gift he gave us. I wish I had more to give, or had thought to send him a note of thanks while he was still with us.

Then again, perhaps I do have more to give. Surely, in some small way, the man can be immortalized in role-playing. It seems unlikely or unreasonable to be able to get a license to write the Neighborhood of Makebelieve RPG (and perhaps some would claim it unprofitable), but perhaps some similar homage could be written.

Do the assembled masses have any thoughts?

As always,
Doc Blue

 
A Manifesto Of Sorts
posted by Bruce Baugh at 1:52 PM

There's a convoluted history behind this post, which appeared in the forums at RPG Net. Very briefly, last year the gaming industry's award for best new game of the year went to HackMaster, a game born in the comic strip Knights of the Dinner Table and constructed both as a joke and as a deliberate effort to turn the clock back to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition, which came out in 1977. Those of us who try to do new things are disgusted by this, and by what it says about the awards and their voting process. There's been, um, discussion of the matter recently. In the course of it, I decided that since I was quite deliberately insulting the taste of those who picked HackMaster as best game, I should also lay out a positive vision as an alternative.

The funny part of this for me is that between bouts of reading the net, I've been working on the outline for the first Gamma World supplement and discussing the first drafts of the core book. In both cases we're giving substantial attention to making the game mechanics and advice better support really obvious genre inspirations - Geoff Skellams is testing the community map system to make sure that it can do Mad Max, for instance. This "let's give the folks more opportunity game what they - and we! - like watching and reading" concern goes hand-in-hand with better evocation of motifs out of classical mythology, folklore, and literature...because I chose to, my bosses support me in it, and my writers are all keen on it. We fully accept the pop culture interests of our probable audience, and indeed we share them; you should see my video shelves, where the Russian art films and Chinese epics jostle for space with the horror films and the action/adventure blockbusters and the Muppet Show discs. It happens that the very innovations that let us make the game better resemble its inspirations in this regard also let it do so with regard to inspiration out of history, culture, and science.

As it says in my notes to writers, if the bear can't fire laser beams from its eyes, the game ain't done yet. The really fun part is making the game also not be done until you can re-fight Thermopylae, complete with Spartan badass attitude. Part of the challenge for my art and craft - and the art and craft of my creative crew - is to make it more fun, to take what might seem distant or uninteresting and make it immediate and exciting. We do not wish to settle for rehashing old ground; it is our aim to please ourselves and to please our customers with more gaming fun. In some ways the thing that most pisses me off about HackMaster and other completely derivative games is that they implicitly tell gamers that they ought to settle for no more fun than they're having now, or at least to wish and expecting nothing but incremental tweaks to the same stuff. Folks like Geoff Grabowski and Greg Stolze and Jeff Mackintosh and Justin Achilli and Deirdre Brooks and I are saying that you can and should want more, expect more, feel that you deserve to keep the fun you're having now but also to get more. More and more of what delights you in other media should become viable in your gaming. You are entitled to more than any of us has yet given you.

If any particular "you" happens not to want this particular new venture, that's cool. But for crying out loud, just because dogs will go for a second meal out of what they cough up because of a hairball, don't feel like you have to do the same. Don't toss away every single possibility for something keen and new to just one thing. There's a whole alphabet, not just one letter; a whole world full of languages, not just one. Learn new words and sentences and ways of expressing yourself - not to become someone else, but to more fully become what you already would like to be, and to discover how things you don't yet know about or haven't yet understood fit together with what you have now to enrich and strengthen the whole.

Yes, I craft entertainment. But entertainment is important. The demands of living a decent and humane existence are tough: it takes work to be a good child and parent, spouse and friend, employer and employee, neighbor and citizen. Life is seldom altogether delightful. Our entertainment time is our chance to renew our sense of enjoyment, and in gaming to do so with friends in a really pretty unique kind of way. Having as much fun as possible in gaming is, or can be, part of living life responsibly, recharging energy and enthusiasm ground down by duty and happenstance. Gaming seldom gives anyone new ideas, and indeed anyone who gets their ideas about life from gaming has some other problems. But good gaming can build us up in a bunch of ways, including the sense of rising to a challenge: "I wanted to do this, and I prepared for it, and I made it work. We did something cool together, and it happened because I made it." Those of us who create games are the collaborators-at-a-distance with all the folks reading and playing the games in their various and sundry ways. If I fail to pursue options for adventure, intrigue, drama, tragedy, and mystery just because they weren't done right or at all 20-odd years ago, I'm being an irresponsible steward of the money and time I'm asking you to invest in my products. You deserve more than rehash. Don't settle for it.

 
Iron Developer and a New Games Competition
posted by Doc Blue at 9:49 AM

Folks, http://www.irondeveloper.net is active.

What is Iron Developer, you ask? Check the site for details, but it is a special event which I started at Origins last year in which would be RPG designers crank out their best efforts in one hour.

Why do I mention it here? Because I am seriously considering hosting an on-line competition, ala the New Style Games suggestion posted early in the history of this Blog. IMHO, Iron Developer is the perfect place to host such a contest and I am more than happy to work with my team to make it happen.

Though I am asking for your thoughts, this is mostly an announcement for you notification....

"Chairman Blue"