On Why the One-Person Startup is an Awful Idea

I don’t mean to sound uncouth or ungrateful, but it drives me crazy when people come to me for advice on how to start their game business. It’s not because I don’t like giving advice; I really do, and I love the dynamic process of developing a general plan for a business together. It’s something I love to involve myself in, so long as the idea has merit.

That’s the problem, though. Very few of the ideas have merit, because no one is making games that other people want. All of these small press publishers are pushing out games that they like, that they want, that they think are brilliant, playable, and fun. People aren’t looking at the market and trying to find a hole to be filled. They aren’t looking for a niche to fill. They just want to publish their game, and they think self-publishing is the best way to do that.

The truth, unfortunately, comes down to this:

The successful one-man startup is rare enough that the except proves the rule.

Let’s look an a roleplaying game. One guy who wants to write good games and make money doing it will need a pretty expansive skillset. He’ll need to be:

1. A proficient and prolific technical writer.
2. An experienced games designer.
3. A talented visual artist (and probably also prolific).
4. Reasonably proficient with page design and book layout.
5. Knowledgeable of proper marketing and advertising practices.
6. Able to run a business, balance a ledger, and negotiate costs.

That’s one pretty talented motherfucker, right there. Also, even if you are that polymath, you only have 24 hours a day to do it all in. How quickly do you think you could churn out a book? Hint: it takes a lot longer than you think.

This is why partnerships see so much success; one partner fills the artist, designer, and editor roles, while the other is a writer, salesman, and accountant. Of course, they’re going to share some of these responsibilities, but you get the idea.

One’s ability to produce a quality product is related to one’s willingness to pay for those skills you can’t muster. Nothing is free. Even when you are working for “free,” you should be “paying” yourself and expensing out the cost of the product (so the company owes you money).

Also, it takes a lot more than the ability to “balance a checkbook” to do market and profit projections and proper costing. These are skills, you can learn them, and you need them to reach a proper level of success. Hell, a proper business plan is a writing endeavor in and of itself, and if you’re not planning on doing one of those, then, well, I don’t know what to tell you.

It’s terribly unrealistic to expect success through vanity publishing, and that is essentially what a one-man press is. What’s more, the expectation that it’s going to build into something great and grand is absolutely far-fetched.

It’s like saying that you want to open a restaurant, but you want to start out as a hot dog stand first, and then expand that brand (and perhaps a few others you have) into a real restaurant (and maybe add a bar!). That’s a ridiculous business plan. If you want to start  a restaurant, start a restaurant. If you have to think twice about it, you’re probably in the wrong area.

Okay, that’s enough naysaying. Guess what? Monday’s post begins my series called So You Want to Start a Game Business! I’m excited! You should be excited too! Numbers shall be thrown, dreams shall be crushed!

Until then, I hope 2011 has been good to you, and may 2012 be even better!

How Not to Design a Game System, Part 2: Consider Three Mile Island

Today, I’m going to write a bit about what I see as the biggest obstacle a game has to adoption, after it overcomes the hurdle of getting into a player’s hands in the first place. In a nutshell, the problem is that of expectations not matching results. Consider the following:

This is a control panel for a nuclear power plant. It is very large, very complicated, and allows a user to execute literally thousands of potential actions and millions of action chains.

Nuclear reactor design is instructive because the designers of very complex industrial systems (known in other circles as User Experience, Usability, User Interface Design, or Human Factors) have understood for a long time that unexpected emergent behavior can be a critical problem. If I flip three switches, expecting the result to be a green light that indicates everything is swell, and then the building explodes, the result did not match my expectations. So let’s consider Three Mile Island.

The cause of the Three Mile Island disaster was a little light on a control panel that indicated whether an emergency relief valve was open or closed. That’s what the operators had been trained to think, anyway. In the event of a pressure emergency, the valve was supposed to open briefly, then close automatically, and that’s exactly what the control panel showed had happened.

Unfortunately, the light was not hooked up to a sensor that was actually measuring whether the valve was open or closed- instead, it was measuring whether the solenoid that operated the valve was receiving electricity or not. Because of a mechanical fault, the valve became stuck open even when the solenoid was shut down and the light on the control panel was dark. So the operators saw that a problem had happened, saw the light come on and then go dark again, and continued on under the impression that everything had worked correctly.

The problem was not the design of the reactor, or the design of the control panel, or the sum complexity of the system, it was simply this: the designers did not account for a mode where the valve was open (due to mechanical fault) even when the operating solenoid was turned off (or alternatively) the operations training did not communicate to the operators that the control panel light was ambiguous in that mode.

Now consider this:

Where am I going with this? Well, Dungeons and Dragons is in roughly the same class, complexity-wise, as a nuclear reactor. There are thousands of possible actions and millions of action chains that a user can perform on the system, and the system produces a result. If the results of some action or actions fail to match the player’s expectations about the outcome, they will simply go do something else that isn’t so frustrating.  The underlying issue is that the player does something with the belief that they will get a specific result, and when it doesn’t happen they will re-evaluate whether the thing they are trying to achieve is worth the cognitive effort required for further analysis and another attempt. When the reward is supposed to be a fun gaming experience (as opposed to a salary, or a school grade, or some other tangible), the frustration threshold is staggeringly low. If you’ve ever heard a non-gamer friend describe something as “stupid” or ” a waste of time” or “boring,” chances are that they’ve simply run out of desire to understand the machine you are trying to get them to play with.

And it’s hard to blame them. Who would want to play a game after making a character who is a “Fighter” with “Power Attack” only to find out that they are less capable of killing enemies than the healer? Or, for the GURPS fan, after discovering that their “Weapon Master” is substantially less skilled with a weapon than someone who didn’t pick up the advantage, and that they only get a minor damage increase in exchange? Obviously, a more complex system is more susceptible to this problem than a less complex system. But even relatively simple board games can trap people by dashing their entirely reasonable expectations with seemingly nonsense results. Consider Settlers of Catan, where one player making a non-optimal decision at the set-up phase can turn the entire game into a drawn-out slog because of resource starvation.

One of the worst offenses a game can commit in this vein is example characters, strategies, or army lists that do not work well real play. Some poor sucker reading Shadowrun 4th Edition’s examples might not even realize that the most critical trait a character can possess to increase their combat capability is extra initiative passes (getting to go more times in a combat round). Someone reading GURPS might not realize just how critical it is to have the advantage High Pain Threshold if you want to take a hit in combat and live. Someone playing Warmachine back in First Edition might have been misled into thinking that all those giant steam powered robots on the cover would be useful in a tournament.

Good job spending 30 bucks on that miniature, idiot

Privateer Press had the wherewithal to tear it all down and build again. Few companies do.

These things happen because the designers didn’t really understand their own creations. It’s not that they’re bad designers, necessarily. It’s that emergent behavior is something that is emergent. You can’t fully predict every consequence of every rule or mechanic without a staggering amount of simulation. Some of the most intellectually taxing games, like Chess or Go, are such because they are just simple enough that a raw computational solution is just barely viable (for human beings) as a way to predict the course of the game. Consider the difficulty of doing that with an RPG or tabletop wargame. It shouldn’t be surprising that games have emergent behavior that isn’t predicted by the designers. Just like that misleading indicator light at Three Mile Island, the game has modes that aren’t fully understood before they start causing people grief.

The challenge for a game designer is that, unlike a nuclear reactor control panel, the common (and appropriate) reaction from a new player to a game where results do not match expectations is to drop that game in the trash and find another one. Or watch TV. Next time I’ll talk about the the only practical way to avoid this sad state of affairs: testing.

Why Are There No Numbers?

One of the most aggravating things about the gaming industry is that there are so few numbers and statistics to go on. The only vaguely reliable thing I have found are the ICV2 surveys, but those have a host of issues related to accuracy and sampling. As a measure of trends, they are reasonably accurate, but they are practically useless for any sort of in-depth industry analysis.

When I started writing articles for this blog, a friend shared this with me. It’s a collection of all of the statistics we have from fifteen years of TSR operations, including an anonymous confession and some inferential stats. I have attempted to wrap my head around how I could use this to produce something relevant, but sadly, it’s pretty much impossible. Not only are TSR’s catalogs highly prized collector’s items, but the prices and products offered are so highly variable that nothing useful can be gleaned.

What really gets to me is how many questions I have to answer with “we don’t know.” Just how popular is Magic: The Gathering*? What sort of numbers are RPGs producing? Do sales of games fluctuate seasonally? What sort of profit margins do game publishers operate with? What sort of game markets are growing, and which sort are shrinking? ICV2 can’t tell us the answers; it’s a voluntary survey of game stores, and hence leaves out major distribution outlets (like Amazon) and PDF sales entirely. They can tell us that Pathfinder is generally outselling Fourth Edition, but without specific numbers, we can’t determine the reasons.

Part of me understands why companies don’t release this information. An clever person can deduce a LOT of information about a company from sales figures alone. If you include things like distribution avenues and restocking figures, you can pretty much diagnose the health of that company at a glance. Corporations aren’t interested in these sorts of secrets getting out. However, it does make my writing difficult.

I want to dive in, dissect the industry, and come up for air with a wealth of viable, interesting, useful information. What I’m left to do is make some educated guesses and try to read the tea leaves of the industry.

 

*Hasbro called Magic a “mega-brand” in their 2010 financial report, on the level with Transformers or GI Joe. An anonymous source claims that Magic grossed $250,000,000 in 2010. If that’s true, Magic: The Gathering probably eclipses the entire tabletop gaming market as a whole. We’ll talk more about this later.

A Most Depressing Conversation

A few days ago, I spoke with John Waite, owner of  Merlyn’s, one of three active game stores in town. His business is everything you’d expect from a middle-of-the-road game store. The guy who owns it, John, is a decent guy, but shrewd as hell. He sits on at least a hundred grand worth of inventory (from walls of comic books to aisles of miniatures) and has a huge backstock of old, vintage games. John also runs a lot of events, and offers a huge area to play games in the back of the store. The whole place looks like what you’d expect from a largish nerd store: a swap meet full of nerd schtuff.

I can’t come down too hard on John; he obviously knows what the hell he is doing. For that reason, I found myself wondering: what does John thinks of the industry? What is he excited about? What does rubs him the wrong way?

Well, let’s start with the other nerd store in town. We both share a loathing for it. It only sells TCGs, doing the greatest of its trade in Magic. I won’t link you to their website, because it literally crashes my browser, but the name is T&M Cards. It is awful. It reeks. It is located in a small strip mall in an iffy part of town. The owner is a big, fat, obnoxious racist. You have to flag down his wife or kid to get any sort of customer service. Mostly, it’s just a place for him to hang out and play card games with a bunch of other nerds who have nowhere else to go.

I’ll invite you to postulate which one is struggling to make rent and expenses and might close soon.

John’s biggest beef, however, is really the industry itself. What John wants is products that sell, that move of the shelves. He’s in this for the same reasons everyone else should be; not for art, not for the hobby, but to make a god-damned living. This isn’t to say that John doesn’t play or love games; he does! But he has also been running a game store for thirty years, and he knows how it works.

John likes Magic, and he likes that the new set is selling well (so well that they can’t keep boxes in the store, which I’m sure annoys him a bit). John loved the WoW TCG until it got ruined and the player base in his store abandoned it. He wants more things to sell like that; products that fit into one of two categories.

The first category is the best: pre-sold products, like D&D, Pathfinder, Dark Heresy, Magic, Arkham Horror. Games that people come in wanting to buy. John has a real appreciation for people who continue to shop locally, so much that he offers ten percent off his entire store! No joke. The entire damned store is 10% off.

The second category is easily presented products. These are products that an employee can pick up off the shelf and sell based on their own merits as a product – not as a niche game, or a supplement, or a new universal system, but a fun experience in and of itself. Stick around in Merlyn’s for long enough, and you’ll watch an employee haltingly explain what an RPG is, or a TCG, and how to get into one. What a game store owner wants is a game that sells itself based on its own merits: fun, enjoyable, potentially challenging games.

I’ll let you guess how many of RPGs on John’s shelf fall into this category. How many truly introductory products are there in the store?

Wait for it.

Two.

Two RPG starters.

Now, I might seem to be contradicting myself here. I said in a most inflammatory post that there were over a hundred. Where’s the difference here? Well, allow me to illustrate by example.

The first is the Doctor Who Adventure Game, which comes in a box and lets you play as The Doctor and his Companions! Wait. What if I’m not into Doctor Who, because it’s British and what the hell, why is this show so goofy? Why are the aliens farting?

The second choice is the aforementioned Pathfinder Beginner Box. Let me tell you, John is excited about this. He has one box opened up for display behind the counter. I’ve seen his employees suggest it to people as Christmas gifts. It’s the Red Box for the twenty-first century; probably not in sales, but certainly in marketability.

It’s a simple pitch: Want to play a D&D? Get this.

It’s sad to watch someone like John feel abandoned by the industry. Everyone puts it on his shoulders. I’ve heard the refrain a dozen times in the last two weeks: “Game stores should take an active part! Offer our products! Explain how they work! That’s their job!” Oh wait, game stores are dying, in no small part to the way that John feels.

He feels abandoned by Wizards, who jerks him around with shipping, creates false shortages, and just plain refused to ship him the Red Box to sell (and when it arrived, it sucked). He feels abandoned by most of the other game companies, too, as they continue to push their niche products on a shrinking customer base who increasing buys directly from them, or from Amazon. He feels abandoned by customers, who no longer frequent his store, instead going to T&M or buying their books and boxes online.

So, there’s John, alone, with his game store. John wants you to make new games. He wants new things to sell, so long as they will sell. He wants fewer entries in his Alliance catalog, and he wants to have greater confidence in those products. He wants companies to produce products that will make him money, because it’s good for everyone on down the line.

So, why aren’t we? Why aren’t we making better products? Well, most companies are full of excuses. They run their businesses poorly:

We got the first shipment of 2500-series miniatures, but still don’t have any rulebooks and got word that fleet boxes won’t happen until next year. (We have had to cancel dozens of orders for them as the credit card company will not hold orders that long.)

They complain about sales and that the industry is shrinking:

There is a school of thought that says that when a recession comes along, sales of RPGs go up. In the main, that is probably true, and we certainly saw an upsurge in 2009 (indeed, we had some of our best sales months for some time in that period). However, it could not last, and the RPG market overall…has been rather depressing. The word we would use is ‘challenging.’ Things always go in cycles in the hobby games market, and RPGs are on the low swing at the moment.

Or, you know, blame Wizards of the Coast:

 It would be nice to blame the market leader for this situation – as does the market leader, so goes the market after all but, in truth, RPGs would still be in a downturn right now, even if the latest edition of the favourite game was selling hand over fist. And it isn’t. Sorry, but it just plain isn’t.

That’s right, the Wizards of the Coast that is singlehandedly keeping the lights on in John’s store. The Wizards of the Coast that is exploring new publishing models in order to get out of the diminishing returns business. The Wizards of the Coast that wrote the entire game industry darling Paizo is selling.

All the while, they produce the same games that John doesn’t stock, the once that won’t sell in his store. More miniatures, because miniatures sell (online). More ridiculous sourcebooks that they’re confused about not selling any of. More reprinted games. More of the same.

John sits alone, just watching. waiting, pinching pennies and hoping that a big seller will find its way to his shelves soon. He’s optimistic; he thinks that things will turn around.

I sure hope so.

A Christmas Surprise!

It turns out “Brain Full of Games” contest co-winner Ewen, aka nekoewen, aka yarukizero, is a legitimate indie game designer! Also, incidentally, word on the street is that he is a good-game broseph who has fought the good fight with many of my e-friends on RPG.net and reddit. He likes good games and makes good games. That’s not strictly relevant, but it makes me happy.

What is interesting is that he has written a longer, more involved blog post about his idea for an app-based tabletop RPG. I like some of his ideas, but I’d like to see it slant more toward multiplayer with each player having a device. After all, smartphones are pretty ubiquitous in his target market.

He also likes anime. A lot. A very, very lot.

From Poland!

I just want to drop a link to this post by Polish blogger Sethariel (it’s in Polish, of course, mostly translated here). He said some very nice things about my post that The Players Make The Game, and I wanted everyone to see it! This guy has the right idea about RPGs, games, and why we should be playing them.

Thanks from across the world, Sethariel!

“Brain Full of Games” Contest Winners!

Without further ado, except for my apologies for the delay, here are the five six best ideas I received!

Game I Most Want to See On the Shelves

Some starships have mood lighting, spotless matching leotards for an elite crew, and AI targeted terawatt lasers. Then there’s your kind of starship, which looks like somebody lashed a bunch of boxes together (you did). Sure, your antiship lasers are really just scruffy dudes with laser rifles, but you’re a scrappy bunch of survivors!

Boarding Party is what happens when two of those ships run into each other. Each boxed set is enough for a complete two player game, and contains a rulebook, foldout grid, 182 laminated cards, unit tokens, and a dry-erase marker for drawing little explosions on destroyed cards. Ships are represented by cards placed on the grid, and players move units to explore each other’s ships and destroy the power core.

The catch is, the enemy ship is unknown until explored! Cards are two-sided, with a picture of corridors on the back and a ship module on the front. Once you’ve designed your ship (and written down what goes where), place your cards onto the gameboard face down, with the exception of the face-up power core. Units, and some cards, are moved or used on a turn by turn basis, but you may activate your modules by flipping them face up at any time. These range from upgrades (Really Big Armory, Jetpacks!) to deathtraps (Solid Steel Wall, Corridor of Acid Covered Spikes), to situational tricks like the Monster Closet, Teleporter Room, and Energy Sink.

Don’t forget the Alien Assault expansion, with new cards and Infested Ship rules!

Let’s start with the bad: this idea has mostly been done (in different genres). It’s kinda ZOMBIES!!! meets Space Trucker. It’s well-trod territory, and that bumps you to the bottom of the list.

That said, I would buy the fuck out of this game. It’s my kind of genre: space, ruffians, piracy, and hilarity. I dig games that don’t take themselves seriously, and I love the idea of each ship being randomized. I think my friends and I could have a really fun time.

As with many of the other ideas, you’re going to have issues with costs and production, like all other game companies. What’s more, you’re going to be diving into a saturated board game market. Good hunting.

Most Interesting RPG Supplement/Setting

Title: Aztlan

Outline:
The land is dying. The caves of Chicomoztoc, where the Seven Tribes arose, are falling to the forces of death. Mictlan’s forces claim more each night. The people must find a new home. Some look to the mountain jungles, or would follow the eagles to a new land. Some would cross the waters or even want to go back to reclaim the caves in battle. The arguing wastes time and lives.

But there are heroes. You, who resist Mictlan’s power, can save them. Jaguar Warriors, who trade their souls to the night for the power to resist death by being beasts. The Birdmen, who take mystic herbs for the strength to escape Mictlan on wings of light. The Smoke Mirrors, who seize Mictlan’s power and use death to conquer death. There are these methods and more. You are immortals, who have fought free of death, and it’s your job to lead the people home.

Each PC in Aztlan is immortal. However, that doesn’t mean they’re invincible – defeating death has a that price must always be paid. Aztlan is a game of heroes leading their people to safety or destruction, with each PC wielding great power and the responsibility that comes with it. Characters succeed far more often than they fail, except when opposed by others of power. Their followers, though, are less capable. What will you do to ensure that your people survive and find a new homeland? What price is too high when your enemy is death itself?

Well, I mentioned for Anthropological Fantasy, and I got it. This is an awesomely themed idea in line with Maztica, except better (of course, Maztica sucked ass). I can see this being a very attractive setting book, with maybe a few subsequent books and adventures to flesh out the setting and characters.

The biggest draw away from it would be the general unfamiliarity of, well, most people with early Mesoamerican history/prehistory. Most people pretty much see it as blood sacrifices and calendars. Maybe this could be an opportunity for education!

Most Challenging to the Notion of “Tabletop Game”

Vessel of Pure Conception
An RPG by Sulecrist!

—–

The players are Searchers pursing Primal Truth. The Primal Truth is held in a Vessel of Pure Conception (VPC), which all can see but no one wants to experience.

Anyone may use Reason (which is ice). Each Searcher brings Weaknesses (in bottles) and his own cup-sized Vessel.

There is Iblis, the GM. He chooses the VPC (coffee-cup-to-soup-bowl-sized) and describes the Searchers’ obstructions. Iblis also has Insights (in bottles). Insights should mix nicely with Weaknesses but not brace terribly by themselves.

At any time, a Searcher may add Reason to his Vessel, or Insights or Weaknesses to any Vessel on the table. If he’s caught adding anything to any Vessel but his own or the VPC, he must add its contents to his own. If his Vessel overflows, his character dies.

Turns, starting with Iblis, circle the table. Iblis recites a ten-syllable Cryptic, but otherwise acts like a Searcher. A Searcher’s turn is one of the following actions, with in-character description:

-Drain his Vessel AND order someone with a Vessel to drain it, or
-Drain his Vessel AND claim an Insight (if he has one, he trades one Insight for another), or
-Drain the VPC. His Vessel then becomes Iblis’s.

He then repeats the Cryptic. If he fails, his character dies, unless he’s Iblis, in which case he drains the VPC.

If a Searcher has no Vessel, he must, on his turn, drain the VPC.

Only one Searcher–the last to correctly recite the Cryptic–survives.

Sulecrist, congratulations; The structural integrity of my mind is certainly suffering! This is like a storygame drinking competition with Telephone mixed in (no pun intended). Holy fuck; this could be fun for the right group of people.

Obviously, your explanation suffers from the word limit, but a full game would probably do a much better job. I love the idea of making these sorts of in-game choices with very real (and potentially dire) metagame consequences. The philosophical decisions echo in the physical world.

On a marketing standpoint, this game is…difficult. I mean, who are you marketing to? RPG Party nerds? That’s a market, for sure, but I don’t know if it’s an especially lucrative one. I can see some cross-genre appeal with LARP kids.

Most Ambitious Idea

Earth’s Eternal Night

In the future eternal night is falling, and the world’s monsters are at war. The demons of humanity’s soul – the Dragons, Vampires, Werewolves and other monsters – now do battle with the remnants of once advanced civilizations. Humanity is not without its hopes, however. With the advent of monsters there also arise human powers. Ancient orders of knights, advanced special forces and long-hidden wizards hold the darkness at bay.

The player will take control of a character of one of the available factions, divided into the monstrous races and the human factions. Who will rule over Earth’s Eternal Night?

The core concept of this game is a card game playable on multiple levels. It can be played as a “pure game” or with roleplaying, ranging from solitaire play to two-player versus matches to cooperative or competitive group games. Each player generates their character using a small side deck of statistics cards and equipment, then creates their own unique action deck consisting of things their character can do in the game. There will be some faction mixing, allowing for a diverse array of strategies.

Most important is accessibility. The complete rules for the game should be contained within the basic decks plus at most a small booklet, allowing anyone to buy a deck and jump into a game as quickly as possible. The multiple levels of play will hopefully make finding people to play with as easy as possible.

This blurb is spectacularly written; I want everyone to look at the structure: lead-in with story, explain the player’s role, go into system and design aspects. I am sold just on the idea that it’s designed to be simple, accessible, and consistently interesting. Plus, the setting rules.

However, this game is ambitious as fuck. I’m reading a game involving design for thousands of cards, balancing “simple” rules for all of the mechanics included on these various cards, and integrating a real multiplayer into a genre that traditionally stumbles in that area. You’d need a really solid design team, and a lot of fucking money, to make this work.

That said, if it did work, you could have something that competes on the level of Game of Thrones or World of Warcraft (the LCG/TCGs, of course). The unoriginality of the genre is overshadowed by the fact that this game has very concrete design goals designed to make it stand out.

Okay, these next two entries require some explanation. Well, not a lot; it comes down to the idea that I decided I wanted two winners. The first is a winner because it’s the most absolutely original idea that I had, but is virtually unmarketable. The second is a winner because it’s really original and appeals to the real subject of this blog: how to make a good RPG business. What? How can this be?

FOR HE IS THE KWISATZ HADERACH!

Co-Winner Number One!

Trapped in a Dream (TriaD)
TriaD is a party game RPG inspired by Everyone is John and the like, but fixes the major problem with EiJ. In TriaD, everybody plays. Since seeing this picture http://i.imgur.com/DbEP9.jpg I wanted to play it.

One player is the dreamer and the others collaboratively make the environment, essentially one PC with several GMs. The protagonist is a person caught in a dream, trying to escape to consciousness. Before playing every player writes down events, thoughts, and people from their day, (at least one each) and puts them in a hat. The first ‘player’ is chosen and two others draw slips for the setting and antagonist of the scene. If the setting is Grandma, be allegorical and run with it! You’re dreaming! Other players are encouraged to draw a slip and add wrinkles, or portray things the first two introduced from theirs. The current protagonist narrates how they overcome or escape the situation, and anything straining the dream reality requires a coinflip of heads to succeed. Notable creativity is rewarded with the used slips balled up as counters that can buy re-flips. Players can give any counters they have to one another freely, eventually encouraging a cascade of reality-breaking. Play rotates until there are one or fewer slips remaining, at which point the current dreamer must overcome all undefeated antagonists. TriaD lets you play anything from Inception to David Lynch and beyond, and can be played anywhere. It’s exactly what you make it, just like your own dreams.

Once I get past my inherent, reactionary hatred for storygame-type games, I am absolutely in love with this. The idea of four people collaboratively creating a surreal dreamscape for a single player is such a delicious inversion of the standard RPG dynamic, and it’s a concept that anyone, anywhere can immediately understand. What’s more, it allows people to legitimately flex their own creativity with virtually no rules.

It is, in fact, exactly what you make it, and you can make it anything. This is the heart and soul of RPGs, captured in a new and invigorating way. I want to play this, and I want to play it right now.

Co-Winner Number Two!

RPG in an App

You purchase this game as a mobile phone app. When you sit down to play it, you get some friends together in the same room and start up the app, and it proceeds to walk you through a series of prompts, often for role-playing short scenes, but sometimes asking you to read something aloud, sometimes telling you to pass the phone to someone else, sometimes asking for input such as a character’s name, and possibly using the phone’s camera or other features. Behind the scenes it is walking you through the procedures of play, and where appropriate generating random numbers, pulling random story elements from tables, slotting in data you’ve input or that the app gets from the phone (time, weather, etc.), and so on. Only one person has to have a compatible smartphone to allow a whole group to play the game, and like most apps it’s at an impulse buy price. The game is designed to have a decent amount of replay value, but there would be other apps adapting the basic structure to other kinds of subject matter and gameplay.

This idea preserves the “social” aspect of gaming, all while integrating technology in a manner that every single game publisher has pretty well refused to. This could be a real killer app, no pun intended: take all of the potentially arduous parts out of gaming, and make it a purely automated, social experience, sort of like a multiplayer, customizable choose-your-own-adventure. Who wouldn’t be sold by that?

What’s more, it’s infinitely expandable; you aren’t tied to any one setting or system. Your branding is based on the methodology, not anything specific, so you can sell a Fantasy and SciFi and Crime Scene and anything you like.

Additionally, this is the sort of endeavor that a small group could accomplish. A good mobile coder, a good writer, and a good artist are all you’d need. It would be a significant investment in time and money, though; but I can see that investment paying off. Good job!

Congratulations to our winners, “General Ironicus” and Ewen! Both of you have earned a TEN DOLLAR BOUNTY for your idea. I will email you shortly with details. Thank you to everyone who participated!

What is the Model Train Ghetto?

Today guest poster LogicalPhallacy joins us to explain exactly what is meant by the “Model Train Ghetto,” and share the most hilarious image of John Lithgow I have ever seen.

So if you’ve been reading this site, you’ve most certainly seen the term “Model Train Ghetto” tossed around, or references to model trains. I think it’s high time that we discussed that. You see model trains are a definitive example of an insular hobby. To get into model trains requires an investment. A real model railway can easily total in the hundreds of dollars, and of course there are multiple competing standards of rail gauge, train size, props etc.. All this together means that model trains are a bitch to get into.

This is a shame because what was once a hobby that would bring joy to a child’s eyes on Christmas morning, is now an industry that caters to a rather select few.  Even the Wikipedia article is a mountain of technical terms and details about the different competing standards. Where the model train community might describe itself as refined, exclusive, and well known, most would describe it as expensive, lonely, and the butt of many jokes.

RPGs are running a risk of becoming model trains. How so?

Historically there was a time when model trains were a popular gift, the sort of thing that you give a child to occupy their time, or to play with with their friends. Then over time the trains got more complex, and the hobby got more and more focused. The kids grew up and kept their model trains, but not too many new kids came in.  Now we see an interesting situation: it is hard to find a model train set for a kid to just get into, and you don’t go looking in a toy store for one, you go to a hobby shop.

Likewise, there was a time when an RPG (“Red Box” Dungeons and Dragons) was a popular gift, the sort of thing that you give a child to occupy the time, or to play with friends. Then over time the games got more varied, and the hobby got more and more focused. The kids grew up and kept their games, but not as many new kids came in. I’ll stop there to avoid belaboring the point, but the parallels are pretty clear.

So what are RPGs to do? Well that is where this blog comes in. There are some people who actively want RPGs to be like model trains. They frequent forums to talk about the good old days, and how to relive them best and most accurately. They actively shun newcomers and argue for a more “exclusive” game. In this hobby we tend to call them grognards, but we might as well call them conductors.

Ideas Aren’t Everything

A couple of readers have asked me about why I chose the Creative Commons license. Most of these people are concerned with someone “stealing” their idea.

To be honest, I picked a CC license out of thin air. When it comes down to it, the idea of someone “stealing your idea” is ridiculous; it often comes up in a lot of circles and results in much argument. The end distillation is this: from a marketing perspective, an idea is worth virtually nothing. In almost all cases, it’s the implementation of the idea that makes sales. The idea of a user-friendly touchscreen mobile device is nothing; the conglomeration of ideas and implementation that are the iPhone that sells. (Well, that, and the Apple brand, but that is another matter.) One needs only to look at the multitudes of also-rans (such as the nightmarish Blackberry Storm) to see that the idea is not what is important.

On a similar note, parallel development is a lot more common than people think. I was having a conversation in about an entirely card-based RPG, and it turns out that at least three of us have had this idea. Are we stealing it? Does it matter? No, to both. Even if my friend and I were to both release functionally the same game, it wouldn’t matter one bit, so long as you couldn’t prove derivation. (I haven’t even mentioned that my friend lives in a country with radically different copyright laws!)

I would recommend reading this link in regards to copyright. It’s a good example of exactly how backwards the thinking can be in this industry. You can’t copyright anything butcreative work. Mechanics and methods are not creative work. People need to be informed if they want to publish.

However, I am more excited about something else right now!

I have 28 submissions! I am impressed, really. I had expected a glut of them, or none at all; this tells me that people actually spent some time thinking about what they were doing, and more importantly, whether or not they should submit. Well, at least I hope it does. I have purposefully kept my eyes off of the submissions until the end, in order to be able to review them at once and not give preferential treatment to the first submissions. I’ll consider the submissions over the next two days, and post the winners on Friday! Good luck to all!

The Players Make the Game

If you’ve ever read a description of one of Arneson’s original proto-D&D games, you understand just how far we’ve come in this industry. Six to twelve people, all huddled around a table with a hacked-together character sheet each, laughing and carrying on as the “caller” and “dungeon master” conversed about the realities of exploration and combat. No one at the table except Arneson knew the rules, and that was okay. It was a raucous, frantic, hilariously chaotic good time.

Somewhere between here and now, we lost that idea. Somewhere along the way (I suspect in the mid-eighties), we came up with this idea that RPGs should be serious endeavors. If you weren’t constantly concerned with your dwindling HP total, if you didn’t carefully manage the bookkeeping of your character’s encumbrance, if you didn’t know the rules for brawling, magic item creation, and individual initiative, you were PLAYING IT WRONG.

At some point, a lot of gamers tend to forget what got us into this hobby: the prospect of having fun with friends. This happens across the board; the roleplayer who is more obsessed with creating his own world than engaging his players in it is in the same bucket as the TCG player who is overly competitive and can’t seem to have fun any more.

For me, the part of this hobby I love most is bringing new players in. I’m not saying I don’t have fun with experienced players; on the contrary, I’ve had some grand times playing with a well-informed group. However, the times that are burned into my brain are, more often than not, those experiences with new players, a fresh dynamic, a raucous time more akin to Arneson’s early games than to what I hear described as “roleplaying” these days.

A friend of mine asserted the other day that roleplaying is, at its heart, an inherently “goofy” activity. I think he’s right, and that’s something that we need to come to terms with. I mean, think about it. Try to describe hardcore roleplaying to someone who has no idea what an RPG is. It’s going to come out something like this:

I’m going to get together with some friends of mine. We’re going to pretend to be murderous, sociopathic treasure-hunters [Editor's Note: replace with angsty sociopathic vampires/Jedi/people of no consequence as required] in a fantasy world. In order to do this, we need the assistance of one or more technical manuals, some strange-looking dice, and a lot of mind-altering beverages. We will be rewarded for arbitrary behavior, liking killing sentient creatures, doing as we’re told by one player (who is the Master), or playing pretend particularly well, with increased power and influence in this fantasy world. We will do this for several hours. It’s fun! Really! Why are you giving me that look? This is a legitimate hobby!

Yeah. Let me know how that goes for you.

Obviously, there are better pitches for getting newbies in. However, the best games are those you don’t have to pitch outside of the basic concept. Star Wars is amazing for this: “Come play a Jedi with us!” Once you get them okay with the idea that we’re going to be pretending to be Jedi, everything else is pretty much downhill.

However, this is a real problem with our hobby, and it’s an issue that is getting worse, not better. It’s not society getting further and further away from the idea of gaming; on the contrary, gaming is more exposed in the public consciousness than ever. It’s that gamers are getting further away from the idea that this should be an inclusive community. Instead of an inclusive community of players, with people stepping up to run games as needed, we seem to be moving toward an exclusive community of experts.

Gamers think they are smarter, more educated, more informed, more prone to risk-taking, or any number of things that make them superior to the average prole. When it comes down to it, that’s false. There are people just as smart (and smarter!) in Starcraft, stocks, and soccer. We aren’t special.

Given that mindset, though, it’s easy to understand why just about every gamer on Earth thinks he can design his own game.

This is the inherent danger of the “community” model, where everyone makes games, as opposed to an “industry” model, where actual game designers make games: it’s exclusive. It makes us out to be some sort of elite cadre of dual-classed warrior-kings, which we aren’t. It changes the playing field from the open vista of players playing games, to one of games masters. It turns a friendly, open hobby inward, into something competitive, antisocial, and obsessive.

Do you know what the worst part is? It doesn’t matter. If you want to devote your life’s work to making the forty-fifth Fantasy Heartbreaker retread of house-ruled AD&D, you’re only harming yourself. Being part of a community that endlessly orbits itself, churning out the same, repetitive schlock over and over, just means that you’re turning into a model train enthusiast. The industry, and the hobby as a greater whole, isn’t going to notice.

That’s because the good designers, the forward-thinking businessmen, and the creative writers are making new games that encourage fresh blood to dive into the hobby. They’re making games that bring people in, not drive them out for “playing the wrong way.” They are focusing on constant improvement and consistent innovation.

There are precious few of these heroes in the industry. If you want to be one of the good guys, be one of them.