Lions of the North is a roleplaying game that takes place in the future after the destruction of our current civilization. New nations and states have appeared in Northern Europe, struggling for their place in the sun. The new nations have abandoned the dead past and have embraced equality in a way our society hasn’t. Racism and sexism are things of the past.

The nobles of Peimar, the traders of Kirkoslet and the despots of Hanö are all seeking fortune and power. The pirates of Bornholm seek to gain wealth by raiding merchant vessels and the Gotlanders try to keep control of their island when the great powers of the age start encroaching on their territory. It’s The Age of Lions, and it means means that anyone is free to carve out their own destiny on land or at sea. It’s an age of free women and men, an age where your birth and gender don’t mean anything, having a strong swordarm or a cunning mind means a lot more.

Beyond this struggle, mythical creatures and strange magic appears on the new frontier. What are the dark forests hiding and are you brave enough to find out?

I really like the idea, and Kemper’s blog puts out some more fantastic details about his setting and system. Please support this awesome project by pledging!

I like her. I wanted to help her. I want her to be successful. If she’d asked me a month or two before that, I might have been able to help her. If I’d had a hand in catalyzing the business concept before it was all set in stone, maybe, just maybe, I might have had some miracle to increase her sales. However, the sad, cold reality is that her ship was scuttled as soon as she launched it.

Self-publishing in any industry (including tabletop games) is just a thin green line from vanity publishing. If you publish, they will not come. The real mistake here, however, is not the type of publishing venture she entered; it’s that she dived into it with very little research or consulting. She had it all set up before she even called me.

She’s not alone; actual, real companies do this all the time. Mongoose Games spent tens of thousands of dollars on a POD setup, only to realize it didn’t work. In the process of trying to fix it themselves, the managed to break it so that an actual expert couldn’t fix it without spending a lot more money*. Wizards of the Coast pushed hundreds of thousands of dollars into a virtual tabletop for Fourth Edition that never materialized (I still love the ad in the back of my original printing PHB).   As I write this, Paizo is sinking time and energy into a Pathfinder MMO that reeks of vaporware.

It’s one of the largest mistakes you can make in business, and even the wisest aren’t immune; if Lisa Fucking Stevens can be convinced, anyone can.

So let’s be clear: don’t doom yourself. Don’t dive in. Do the research, do the work, and do it right. Stop writing your game; start planning your business.

*I would link a source, but they have apparently taken down that State of the Mongoose. So much for their whole “transparency” bit.

What I am here to talk about, after my long absence, are the effects of piracy on the gaming industry. It’s no joke to smalls publishers; there is a distinct feeling that the proliferation of digital ‘scans’ has been a major factor in the ruining of the market. As Matthew Grau, creator of the game CthulhuTech, notes:

That doesn’t even address the issue of piracy. I remember a day when a mediocre release of a game book sold 3000-5000 copies, with healthy restock orders. Now, a successful release might sell 1000, if you are lucky, selling through the rest of your 3000 unit print run in three years – many companies print far less. Not only is the industry shrinking, but people don’t have to pay for their gaming books anymore if they don’t want to. Unfortunately, unlike the music industry, we are not made of money. It costs a surprisingly large amount of money to develop a well-written and attractive gaming book and the return is not so hot. Without those extra sales, the traditional model of core plus regular supplementation isn’t really viable.

Oh, really?

A follower of mine, Old School GM, posted an interesting article about the sales of Eclipse Phase, taken straight from the horses’ mouths: their company report. This got me thinking, much as my article and blog got him thinking. We don’t have any concrete idea just how big the industry is, but the numbers behind those links show some fantastic progress for the folks at Posthuman Studios.

What is most interesting is that Eclipse Phase is FREE. Free as in beer. You can download it, legally from torrent sites, sanctioned by the publisher. What’s more, you have free reign to remix or redo the game and publish it yourself. In the spirit of the posthuman information age, ownership is nothing. Want to pay? Sure! Thanks! Don’t want to pay? Here, you can have it, from us, for free.

Under this model, Posthuman Studios sold a tremendous 8,422 units in 2010. That’s big numbers for a small press publisher. One could crunch the numbers and reveal their probably gross, but I won’t do that to them. It’s not important. They’re moving units of a product that they’re also giving away for free. Meanwhile, the Cthulhutech guys are spending a lot of time whining about how piracy is ruining their business. A not-insignificant amount of time and effort is wasted by them (and many other small press companies) “chasing down pirates.”

So, we have two games of comparable scale. Why is one selling, when it’s available for free, and another is struggling? Well, friends and grognards, I think you already know the answer. It’s Quality.

You see, Eclipse Phase is a magnificent game. The setting is a genius take on the idea of a Posthuman world; the background and adventure work is top-notch. Players love it, because it’s an empowering, vast solar system of intrigue and information. There are nearly infinite possibilities for adventure, and new sourcebooks are being released all the time. And, despite the fact that you can have them for free, many customers are willing to pay for the books and PDFs.

Cthulhutech, on the other hand, is a mess. The system sucks, the setting is full of stereotypical, mustache-twirling demons that betray the basic principles of Lovecraft’s mythos, and the developers are fond of telling the players that they are playing the game wrong. New supplements aren’t coming out (mostly because of the aforementioned whining about sales).

It’s worse than that, though. The books and adventures are chock full of fetishistic descriptions of murder, rape, and misogynistic and/or racist portrayals of, well, just about anyone the authors can think of. If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to read Ettin’s reviews of Cthulhutech and its supplements. One of the adventures ends in a narrated rape scene. (One of the writers once claimed the game was only around 2% rape.)

Yeah, I’m really wondering why one of these games is selling, and another isn’t. If you’re not convinced, though, I encourage you to look at a big player: Paizo, who literally gives their core rules away for free. Do people pirate their PDFs? Sure, almost certainly they do. However, they’ve chosen a winning business practice out of making people desire their actual products.

We see the same themes repeated throughout the industry: if a release is good, if the art is beautiful, if the rules are laid out well, if there are useful game aids and accessories, customers will want to purchase the product.

It’s almost like I’ve said this before.

However, there are several myths that are thrown around on the internet about D&D and its history that I would like to address. We covered one myth on Monday, here are two more!

Myth #2: The New Edition is Too Soon/a Money Grab

Well, let’s do some math:

First Edition (1978) to Second Edition (1989): 11 years

Second Edition (1989) to Revised Second Edition (1995)*: 6 years

Revised Second Edition (1995) to Third Edition (2000): 5 years

Third Edition (2000) to “Three Point Five” (2003): 3 years

Three Point Five (2003) to Fourth Edition (2008): 5 years

Fourth Edition (2008) to Fifth Edition (2013?): 5 years

The mean time between the release of a new Player’s Handbook is 5.8 years, and the median and mode are five years. What this tells us is that we are, based on prior performance, DUE for a new edition of D&D. There is nothing anomalous about their announcement. In fact, the anomaly here is the delay between the release of First and Second editions!

*”Wait!” you’re saying, “Revised wasn’t a new edition!” The problem with this is that there are quite a few indicators pointing the the fact that TSR wantedto release a new edition in 1995, and that they did, in a way. There were rumors of its development, so much that “This is not AD&D Third Edition” was printed in big, red letters on the first page. What’s more, the release of the Player’s Option rules really pointed to the development of a new, improved game (those books didn’t come out of nowhere). Player’s Option is, truly, a different game than core AD&D.

Myth #3: Gygax Would Hate All These New Editions

Well, this one is technically true. However, it is often rolled out in defense of Third Edition play, as if the style of play encouraged by that game is “what Gary wanted.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In his own words:

As a matter of fact, Gygax disliked Second Edition.

However, there are several myths that are thrown around on the internet about D&D and its history that I would like to address. Quite simply, I believe D&D 5 could be an amazing move for Wizards, and gaming as a whole.

Myth #1: Rebooting D&D is Killing It

This sentiment is often followed by “X Edition is just fine!” Often, people point to the fracturing effect of edition wars as evidence to the idea that no new editions should be released. The idea that the shitty, toxic parts of the fanbase should rule the industry just baffles me.

Truth be told, this is a perfect opportunity for Wizards to do something awesome with D&D. Why? The answer is simple: DDI.

Dungeons & Dragons Interactive, a subscription-based set of web-based tools for creating characters, monsters, and scenarios, is one truly new thing in the industry. It’s a consistent, participation-based source of revenue for Wizards: basically, it allows them to monetize the fact that people are playing D&D! You don’t have to sell books, you just have to keep the players playing!

Every marker show us that DDI has been remarkably successful. A subscriber count from the WotC forums shows us that Wizards is raking in revenues of at least $400,000 a month from DDI, or $4.8 million a year. To put that in perspective, they would have to sell 342,000 more books (34.95 a book) a year – more than any edition of D&D has sold in decades, if not ever – to equal the revenues from DDI.

(Incidentally, this is the source of the “X game outselling D&D” claims. It’s true, they are being outsold on the book market; however, Wizards likely doesn’t care about anything but the bad press.)

What’s more, DDI is great for players. A new player can spend less than $40 and have access to every bit of rules content out there, fully errata’ed and revised. An existing player doesn’t have to purchase new books to keep up with everything. All you have to do is subscribe.

If DDI is so successful, though, then why a new edition? Well, Wizards isn’t perfect. Fourth Edition has succumbed to the same heat death that killed Third:bloat. There are thousands of powers, over five thousand feats, dozens of classes and builds. Quite a bit of those are useless from a player standpoint, and just clog up the character builder. Monsters are wildly variable in power and staying ability. Skill challenges still suck as written.

They tried the halfway-reboot strategy with Essentials. The best option is to tear down the system, and build a new one out of what worked in previous editions. They have the opportunity to build Fifth Edition around the DDI platform, instead of adding DDI as an afterthought. This is a real opportunity for success.

We’ll see how they handle it.

Game rules are not words from your heart.

For some reason, many game writers have this idea that when you write up some game rules, they are above criticism, without flaw, and inviolate. To some extent, that is true. True, in the same way it is true for trash novels that will never be published. The instant you decide that you want money for your game, you are simultaneously deciding that your game is a consumer product. Not art.

Secondly, people vastly overestimate the value of innovation and novelty in comparison to less sexy but much more important qualities like learning curve and consistency. People use words like “gimmicky” to describe games that have an interesting idea and nothing else. They use words like “fun” to describe games that are easy to pick up, easy to play, and deliver a consistent experience, regardless of how innovative they are from a rules standpoint. If you can’t make an innovative mechanic play as well as the less exciting alternatives, broom it and move on.

On to the practical matters. There are a lot of ways to test a game out, but there are some tried-and-true stages you’ll probably want to go through.

Do your homework first.

You can do a lot of testing just by gaming out various scenarios under the rules and seeing what happens. If you’re writing an RPG, get four guys (or however many are the recommended) and start coming up with some scenarios and acceptance criteria. For example, you might have some test encounters where the expectation is that for all of them, the players win after at least four but no more than seven combat turns and at least thirty but no more than sixty minutes. Then, come up with some “test parties” of benchmark characters and start running encounters. Run the same encounter two or three times, then switch the characters and go again. If you’re writing a wargame, come up with some sample army lists and start playing scenarios. One trick is to have the players switch sides (for a wargame), player positions (for a card or board game), or characters (for an RPG) after each turn and see what they think of the situation from the other side of the table. Make sure to include the GM in any switching procedure… they’re a player too, despite how infrequently people remember that.

Another key point is that, for this or any other kind of formal testing, you need a third party (not the GM) to referee the test, take notes, and switch the test scenarios when things get bogged down. His  job is also to make sure the participants remember that this is a test, not a regular play session. Part of that means not getting attached to what is happening on the table, and part of it means being willing to rip holes in your own work and that of the other people sitting there with you. Internal testing should be the most critical of the material, out of any of the phases, because external testers will often be reluctant to point out flaws in your work while you’re standing over their shoulders.

The purpose of this kind of testing is two fold: first, to iron out the basic mechanics, find inconsistencies, and surface submerged defects. Is the game taking too long to play? Is one type of character or unit totally ineffective? Is a rule too hard to follow, or does it allow for multiple interpretations? Are people having trouble keeping track of all the options that are available to them? And second, to start generating the test scripts and scenarios you’ll use when you test with people from the outside.

I strongly recommend omitting any kind of “discretionary” mechanics or conflict resolution systems (for rules disputes) that you are intending to include in the final product. Mechanics like action points and stunt dice can be great, but they’re basically just a lever players or GMs can pull when the game isn’t doing what they want it to do on its own. You should test these out later, but they’re just going to obscure underlying problems at this stage.

Also, make sure you thoroughly test the set-up tasks, character advancement, any kind of tournament scenarios or game-to-game continuity rules, and other grab-bag mechanics in the same way. It’s pretty easy to lose sight of those rules that aren’t used as much when you get into the meat of making sure the core mechanics are functional, but they need the same kind of attention.

Get fresh eyes on the material.

After you’re fairly confident that the bulk of the rules make sense, play at the speed you want, and don’t contain any glaring flaws, it’s time to get people outside the core team to test the game. You can do this at a con, your local store, whatever. You might be surprised how easy it is to get people to sit down and test for a while… it’s actually harder to make people understand that you are testing and not just demonstrating. Again, have someone present to moderate the test just like in the first step.

This is the stage where you want to find out if the rules are accessible,  not just internally consistent and coherent. This is the best time to find issues in character generation, army list building, board-game set-up phases, and so on. It is critically important that you get actual beginners to do blind testing of this stuff, because you and anyone else directly involved in the game will fly right through it without seeing the problems.

Similarly, your in-house group will develop a common understanding of how the rules work very quickly. You may find, however, that another group of people will read the same instructions and get a very different idea of how the game is played. If the testers start arguing with each other, that is a pretty solid sign that your rules haven’t been written clearly enough. This is just as true for Dungeons and Dragons as it is for Apples to Apples or Scattergories.

For adversarial games, thoroughly test the end-game. Set up a game in progress scenario and have some inexperienced people play it out to completion. One of the most frustrating things about adversarial games is when the outcome has basically been decided but the game shows no signs of ending. Make sure that even first time players can seal the deal in a reasonable amount of time.

If you’re not familiar with usability testing protocols, an easy way to get more information out of players at this stage is to tell them to think out loud. When they are going through character generation or army listing (which absolutely should be tested independently of the table-play itself), have them just say whatever they’re thinking. Prompt them if they stop talking. If they get completely stuck (more than one minute without progress), move them to the next stage on the script. And, by the way, have a script. You don’t need to follow it exactly, but you need to be able to skip forward if the testers can’t advance on their own. If you’re testing character creation and there are three steps (say, attributes, skills, and powers), have sheets on hand that have attributes finished, attributes and skills finished, and are completely finished with attributes, skills, and powers written up. If something breaks down and the testers can’t advance, move on to the next check point and hand them the pre-generated sheets.

And finally, a piece of advice: you’re testing the game, not soliciting suggestions. Don’t ask people what they think is wrong with the game. They don’t know, any more than you do. Have them play it, watch, and you’ll find out where the problems are. Incidentally, this is the bright line between a test session and a focus group. You can and should do both if you can manage it, but make sure you have the proper compartmentalization so that focus grouping doesn’t bleed into your test session.

Side note: Keep track of defects

Any time a tester has a problem, immediately write it down with a brief summary. Later, put it in a centralized spreadsheet and keep track of whether it’s been fixed or if you have decided not to address it. You don’t need to change something to respond to every complaint, but it is a good idea to at least know what’s been discovered and have a single location to track it all. Some issues are easy to fix, and you need to address them. Spelling errors, rules phrasing that people interpret differently, and other “broken” content should be your highest priority. If players seem to having trouble selecting their characters’ skills, or deploying their army, or showing some other common area of frustration, make sure you have a plan to address it.

This is important no matter how small your operation is, but it’s a make or break issue if someone besides the original test moderator is going to be responsible for fixing the problems reported.

Get lots more eyes on the material.

This is the part where you would want to distribute play-test materials to external testers who won’t be directly supervised. The reason you want to do this is pretty simple: once people get experienced with the game, they are going to start finding tricks and end-runs in the rules, some of which might ruin the game.  If you want words like “replay value” or “competitive scene” to apply to your game, you need to squash these problems with extreme prejudice.

However, you will probably find very quickly that this type of external play-testing is less than completely successful at finding the sort of problems I’m talking about. Unless you have a massive play-test program, you’re just not going to be able to get enough people to try out the material to find everything.

At this point you might say, “Hey asshole, wasn’t the entire purpose of this post to tell me how to find that stuff?”

The fact is, your game is going to go out with problems in it. The first edition of anything does. Eventually, people are going to find stuff in the rules that you never did. The only question is whether that will happen before they get deeply invested in it, or after. If it’s the former, your game wasn’t tested properly and will end up in the customers’ trash cans and on the tomb-shelves of distributors, where shitty games go to die. If it’s the latter, you’re on the right track.

Next time I’m going to talk about how to design with revision in mind, and some of the techniques and technologies you might consider exploiting so that you can fix your game after it’s gone out the door.

I’ve been asked by a lot of people to write a guide to show how to start out as a game business, instead of focusing on how not to do it. In light of these concerns, I think it’s time to clarify some things about how startups should (and shouldn’t) work, so that people understand what is proper and what is ridiculous. I’ll let you guess which of these things are more commonly suggested.

First of all, if you are thinking of starting a business, any business, I want you to stop right there. Stop thinking of your awesome game idea, stop developing amazing setting details, stop considering how your production model is going to change the industry. Stop!

Have you stopped? Good. If you haven’t, or you don’t want to, then you’ve already failed the first test. You probably want to write games, not publish them, and you should pursue that. It’s a difficult field, but you (and your games) will be better off.

We’re going to go over some things that everyone needs to consider well before we start talking about actually producing a game. The first one, of course, is money.

I mentioned this before, but I want to emphasize it: undercapitalization is one of the biggest killers of small businesses. You need money to start a business. There is no way around this. Any business needs capital sunk into it. But how much?

The quick and dirty method is all of your costs for the first year, plus twenty percent. Let’s take a hypothetical situation: new startup Badwrongfun LLC is interested in calculating how much capital it needs.

1. We’re planning on producing three games in the first year, which we have done our project cost calculations for (more on that later). These games are small-cost, small-run projects that will get us on the map as a game company and open up room for expansion into bigger, more profitable products.

The total costs for these games are:

Game 1: 1,000 (writing), 500 (art), 500 (layout/editing), 3,000 (production), 1,000 (marketing)
Total: $6,000

Game 2: 500 (writing), 1,500 (art), 1,000 (layout/editing), 5,000 (production), 1,000 (marketing)
Total: $9,000

Game 3: 1,000 (writing), 1,000 (art), 500 (layout/editing), 4,000 (production), 1,000 (marketing)
Total: $7,500

Total Production: $22,500

2. We’re going to run these projects virtually as a home office, so our adjusted costs for that are (essentially) zero. Since this is obviously a part-time endeavor, we’ll assume that the principal in the business is getting his main income from another source. As such, there’s no need to include any payment above and beyond any of the credited payments above.

When we do an income statement, we’ll write off part of the rent as a business expense, but there’s no reason to take care of that now.

Other expenses include a proper website and hosting ($1,000), LLC/tax registration ($300), and proper desktop design software ($1,000), for a total of$2,300.

3. We add a twenty percent cash buffer, rounded up to an even $5,000.

Okay, so our grand total is $29,800. Let’s call it thirty grand.

“Wait!” you say. “This is supposed to be a part-time business! How can I need such a ridiculous sum to get a part-time business running? That’s unreasonable!”

You’re correct. In this sort of industry, and especially for this sort of endeavor, that’s a large sum for a part-time business. Some of these costs are mitigatable, or delayable, and a few  reducible or available in trade.

Notice that I said some. You cannot start a business, a real business, with no assets. I cannot emphasize this enough: The less capital, the more likely failure. It is an absolute truth. Do not ignore it.

Now, let’s say we’ve got writers willing to work on profit shares, an artist or three who will do our art on 20% advance, and we’re going to do our out editing and layout. In addition, we’ve cut back the costs of our marketing plans to half. How much money do we need now?

1. Our total production costs are reduced to just $14,100.

2. We happen upon a software license, and find a student to do our website ($100).

3. Here’s a key: your 20% buffer doesn’t change; this is why we did the original calculations. You’re going to need that cash, I guarantee it.

This brings our total to $19,500, 65% of the original figure. Yes, that’s still a very lot of money. It is, however, how much investment you’re going to need, in advance, to start this small, part-time company.  You’re going to need this money when something goes wrong, and it will.

If you’re wondering why I’m running numbers for a business of this magnitude, and not the traditional idea of a lone hobbyist publisher, I would like to point you to my previous article on why this is such a bad idea.

Does it seem foolish to sink twenty grand into a game company? Well, we can’t answer that properly yet. Next time, we’re going to go into Step One: Define and Research Your Market, and determine if there’s any money to be made.

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!

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.

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.