[How We Came to Live Here] Update

Quick update on HWCTLH:

I have a rough draft of the basic rules done, and I am doing some editing based on quick review feedback from Jason Morningstar. It's always great to get a second pair of eyes to look at your design. I had a number of things in the rules that were basically just a legacy from an earlier version. These were rules that solved a problem I had, but as the rules evolved the underlying problem disappeared, yet the solution lingered on. I should have an alpha playtest version ready in about a week or so.

I've also been talking with Jonathan Walton about doing a character sheet for the game, and he also expressed interest in doing a cover. I will be consulting with him on this over the next month or so and we'll see what we get.

I'm excited to have some motion on the project! This one has been a seriously long slog, thanks to increased pressure at my day job, and the fact that IPR has sucked up all of my out-of-work time.

Flawed Published Products

So, there has been some buzz around the webs this week about indie game design and publishing, specifically here at Story Games and here at the Forge. The gist of these conversations is that some games have been published in an unfinished or half-baked form, and many folks believe that this is harmful to indie games in general, and unfair to gamers who may have purchased these products.

This is a topic of some interest, of course, and I agree with (most of) what everyone here is saying. Some of the solutions being put forward are excellent, including the idea of printing ashcans, or beta versions of games, in cheap formats for low prices, and then incorporating all the live play feedback you can get into a final version of the game. Plenty of people have done this, and it works.

If you've followed the discussions above at all, you will know that the reason I'm bringing the subject up here is that Mortal Coil gets called out for some heavy critique on these threads. I wanted to say my piece about it in my own space, rather than jumping into these other threads with long discourses about my own game. The main reason for this is I'm not really interested in getting into a long argument about the game on those other threads, or dealing with the attacks and well-meaning defenses that would inevitably come up.

I know that Mortal Coil has some problems with how the rules are presented. Lots of feedback from players, with the same questions coming up again and again, are an excellent indication that some areas of the rules are not well explained. If I had done a better job communicating everything in the text, I wouldn't have as many questions coming up about it.

Some players are going to contact me and ask questions no matter what. There are players out there who like to gather all the info they can before starting a game, even one that is well layed-out and explained. These aren't the people I'm talking about. The ones I feel I've failed are those who bought the game and couldn't understand it well enough to give it a try. Some of these people have contacted me, or gone on the web and found some of the FAQs and examples I've posted. Many of these people, on the other hand, took the game and put it on their shelf, and they will never play it. Those are the ones I feel I have failed.

So, mea culpa aside, I want to talk a bit about the expectations that go into a design and second editions. I've been accused of picking gamers' pockets by publishing Mortal Coil the way I did. I don't really see it that way. Mortal Coil is playable, and many people have figured out how to play from the text alone (I know because I have heard from some of them).

I design and publish games and try to put the best product out there I can, and I spent a lot of time thinking about how to present the rules in Mortal Coil so they can be understood. After getting all of this feedback, I have a much better understanding of how I missed, and what I need to do next time to present the rules in a better way. My next product will be much better. I also plan on revising and releasing a new version of Mortal Coil at some point, to better explain the rules. Nothing about them is going to change, I am just going to adjust the areas where comprehension was difficult, and add in the extended examples of play I've written for the forum. This will be a better product than the first version.

All I can do is learn, and improve. That's my duty as a designer, and that's where I am going to go in the future.

[How We Came to Live Here] Results of Dreamation Playtest

The playtest I ran at Dreamation went extremely well. My rules are very rough, but the play that came out at the table (from an admittedly expert group of players) was pretty much exactly what I wanted out of the game. So, my task to continue to prepare these rules is to firm them up, and to deal with the problems that came out and the hacks I introduced in the playtest.

There are a couple of systems that need some serious work. I added player-character Ambitions as a sort of last minute tack-on, and they did not have sufficient influence in the game. These were basically goals the character had, and each time you attempted to move toward the goal and failed, it's value as a payoff would increase. I'm not sure they are entirely necessary. They did give some good role-playing hooks in the game, but I think the idea about player-imposed obstacles isn't really necessary, since everyone's passions about their character goals seemed to run so deep they weren't interested in purposefully failing.

The threat level of opponents is also something I want to really look at. Opposition outside of other player characters is formalized into three levels of threat, which basically translate into dice pools. The formal threat level needs to be balanced with the level of player resources available, but I think I may need to do fixed levels of resources in sample opponents, and indicate restrictions depending on stakes (simple, difficult, heroic). Some opponents may be too difficult for players to take on as heroic challenges until they have built up their resources over time. The playtest didn't get into the character-improvement mechanics at all. My main concern here is color: how to make these dice-pool enemies into something with some flavor that can be called on on the fly without a major demand on the GM's creativity.

I think that village building and relationships needs to be simplified a bit, too. The village relationship map was really complicated and confusing. I had four types of relationships for each PC, and I will probably reduce it to two types: friend/lover/ally and rival/enemy. That will result in fewer lines and some strong advice on how to build the village will help by introducing a "law of conservation of NPCs" sort of principle. I will also have specific rules about what types of social contests are required to change people's disposition, so you could have conflicts to turn someone's heart against someone else, or to win them over to your side.

Dice pools in conflicts are created by calling on one of four stats, related to a direction. How you choose direction in a conflict is pretty important and not yet sufficiently defined. The other problem I had with dice pools was that people were drawing on traits and rolling dice, and then failing to get the result they needed, and then drawing on another trait. This created a narrative dissonance, where players kept going, "And furthermore!" to call on trait after trait til they got what they needed. I think the solution here is to increase initial pool size, and let players call on traits to flip dice to the results they need. This keeps both a random and a strategic element to the conflict system.

Another thing to firm up is GM duties for conflicts and the like, and also what the GM does during interstitial scenes. Tension needs to be applied to the village on both the inside and the outside front each turn, which will help force the players to act and force them to make hard choices.

One last thought, it seems to be pretty important that you have both female and male characters in the game. I'm not sure how it would work without, but I can imagine some issues with player partisanship one side of the issue or the other. I may have to playtest with a single-gender character group and see what happens.

Another Interview

I was interviewed over at The Games the Thing by Ron and Veronica Blessing. I don't think I made a total ass of myself. I talk about Mortal Coil, design, my upcoming projects, and also IPR.

Check out the podcast here:
http://www.thegamesthething.com/

New Game Name

After the feedback I've gotten, combined with my own preferences, I've decided on the new working title for The Fifth World. Henceforth, the game shall be called How We Came to Live Here.

[Fifth World or Something] Quest Rules

Last week, thanks to a long business-related train ride, I got several hours to work on that game (not called Fifth World any more). I put together the basic die mechanic, and worked out how one of the types of scenes is going to work in the game. The section I'm working on is about quests, where characters leave their community in search of some item or just to gain renown.

I've ventured quite far from The Shadow of Yesterday at this point, even though that was the original inpiration. TSoY just wasn't supporting what I wanted out of the game, and shoehorning it was starting to really frustrate me.

Here's a basic summary of what the quest system is about:

Characters have traits, which they call on to overcome challenges. I'm using Fudge dice for this, since they have a nicely constrained set of results. The players gradually build a pool of dice to use in a challenge, where + counts as an attack opportunity, - a defense opportunity, and blanks serve to absorb attacks. If a player uses a + on his turn, the target of the attack can either discard two dice of his choice from the pool (the attack succeeds), use one of his - dice to block the attack (the attack fails), or use a + and discard one die to suffer the attack but return attack.

Renown and inside pools can be used to supplement traits in the challenge. Players can also do criminal or dishonorable things which raises their outside pool. I wanted this to be an attractive option, so if a player runs his outside total up by one, he gets two new dice and can choose what value he wants on them. Outside basically gives the GM a pool of points he can spend to mess with the character after the challenge.

I ran this little conflict system out with some friends last weekend and it works quite well. The players, thanks to some rolls that weren't as useful, ended up tapping into the outside option, so the temptation is definitely there. It's also quite predictable how effective a character can be (barring really crappy rolls), so it makes challenges easy to construct. This is good, because there will be some quest guidelines for GMs to build proper challenges for the players. The more difficult the quest the players choose, the more renown they can earn by completing.

[Fifth World?] Name Changes

It's been a very, very long time since I posted, my apologies.

Anyway, short version, it turns out that another group of game designers is releasing a game in December called "Fifth World," and they very politely contacted me and asked that I not release my game under the same name. Since they are beating me to the punch, I agreed to come up with a different name for this game. After some advice on various message boards, I've come up with a short list of names:

Twin Souls
How We Came to Live Here
Up from the Fourth World
So That This World Will Not Be Destroyed
Into The Light

Feel free to comment on these (and add other ideas if you have them). I've got time to ruminate, and the game's got the working title of The Fifth World until I settle on a new one.

Design Journal: Getting Going on The Fifth World

It's been a while since I've touched this project. Last year, I decided to finish Mortal Coil, the game closest to completion at the time. I did finish it, and now it's out and ready for sale. Ever since I got it off to the printer back in June, I've been meaning to pick up on The Fifth World again, my project for next year. All summer long, that hasn't happened.

Yesterday, I took a long look at the project and tried to see what was hanging me up. I had decided to use Clinton Nixon's The Shadow of Yesterday as the core rules for the game, and elaborate from there. Some of my issues stemmed from attempting to repurpose those rules, because copying and altering the existing rules turned out to be pretty boring for me.

I was looking at the introductory paragraph of The Fifth World when inspiration hit. The opening paragraph is a brief sketch of a story about how the First People came into the Fifth World. It struck me that since the inspiration for the game was Native American folklore, that is the form the final version of the game should take. I had just read The Dictionary of Mu by Judd Karlman, and his setting takes the form of encyclopedia-style entries that gradually flesh out a fantasy world. I decided to present The Fifth World as a series of stories, told around the fire in a kiva, that gradually introduce the setting elements and various other aspects of the game. The rules would be in the form of asides in the margins, and appendices in the back of the book.

This is probably going to be a difficult way to present the material, but the goal is to make the rules clear while at the same time evoking setting in the strongest possible way. To do this, I am going to need to pare down the rules considerably, and the final result may not resemble The Shadow of Yesterday hardly at all. Part of my problem was me limiting myself to the TSoY rules, so this is freeing my creative juices a lot. I think it will end up being "inspired by" TSoY, rather than a full TSoY mod.

"You" Means the GM

I got an interesting comment from Andrew Craig regarding my blurb for Mortal Coil on IPR:

"<...with magic powerful or subtle depending on your desires.>

'Aha, so it supports GM fiat', I thought."

This is interesting, because that is totally counter to the intent of that sentence in the blurb. As soon as Andrew pointed this out to me, it seems completely obvious how you could mistake the intent of that sentence. When I say "you" in this blurb, I mean all of the players, but when you read back cover copy on a game, "you" almost always means the GM, the assumed audience for a rulebook. Coming from that perspective, "depending on your desires" means the GM's desires, leading to, as Andrew says, fiat.

I do plan on editing the blurb a bit based on his feedback, but this was fascinating to realize.

Mortal Coil: From Concept to Product

This is quite long, but may be of some interest to anyone doing publishing. It's mostly about timing and process.

The story of Mortal Coil begins quite some time ago, back before I had published The Legend of Yore. In those days, we were playing a lot of Vampire, and my group had grown quite sick of the system, especially my friend Glenn. One day, he threw down his dice in frustration after a soaked damage roll and declared he would never play Vampire again (our group's very own 'System Does Matter' moment). I started work on a supernatural game based on The Legend of Yore percentile mechanic, and in a few months we converted our Vampire characters and were playing this new game. For the next ten years or so I worked on it off and on, and by about 2003 it was still a percentile system, very combat heavy with simple skill rolls and big, big lists of various types of creatures and powers. Then I discovered the Forge.

I was polishing off Bulldogs! at around that time, and once that was done I turned my attention to the various innovative mechanics I was reading in the indie games I found associated with the Forge. I decided to go a fairly radical direction with Mortal Coil, and jettisoned pretty much all of the work I had done on it to date and reimagined the system entirely. Creature lists, power lists, disad lists, and ultimately, skill lists all got the axe. When I was done and had started on the new framework, it was not the same game. The lesson I take from this is that you should never be afraid to throw something out, no matter how long you have been working on it.

I had a rough version done last year and ran a few sessions with some local friends. It was very clunky and had a lot of problems. Then, I drove out to Origins with Thor Olavsrud, and on the long drive we talked about the game a great deal. He gave me lots of excellent advice. After Origins, I started to think about what my next project should be now that I was pretty much done dealing with Bulldogs!. I had three or four game concepts on my plate, all in various stages of development. I always work this way, actually, because if I work to intensively on one project I start to get bored and burned out. I then turn my attention to a new game and refresh myself before delving back into the original project. When I looked at all of the projects I had cooking, I decided to finish Mortal Coil because it was the one that was closest to being done.

Once I had settled on that, I thought about the coming year. Given the state of the rules, I thought I could get it all done for the 2006 convention season, and launch it by Origins, or GenCon at the latest if there were problems. Once I had my final release date in place, I started planning backwards to set deadlines for myself. I figured in about a month for the printing, which meant submission of files by June 1 if I was to make Origins. Back from there, I factored two months for layout and proofing, and a month before that for editing. Using this schedule, I knew I had to have a final draft of the rules by the beginning of March.

At this point I also started planning for the layout. I had an idea of how I wanted the book to look, and I had decided to try to get Jennifer Rodgers to do the art. I wanted all of the art to come from a single artist, and having worked with her on Bulldogs!, I knew Jenn was fast and reliable, and I also knew her color work looked great. She was busy during the fall, but I didn't plan on being finished with the writing until the winter anyway, and she put this project on her schedule for February. After discussing what I wanted, she estimated that the project would take roughly a month for her to complete.

I started working hard on finishing the rules and getting them ready for publication. I wanted to start playtesting by November. I didn't make that deadline, but I had a playtest version finished by December, and ran it with my own group. During the playtest process I was continually editing the game. In January, I ran it again at NerdNYC's Recess game-day. I had two sessions and a full table both times. During these sessions, I identified some really problematic issues with the rules as written, and corrected these before I ran the game again at the Dreamation convention. The Dreamation playtest went very well, and included Nathan Paoletta, Alexander Newman, Thor Olavsrud, Keith Senkowski, and Mayuran Tiruchelvam, all of whom had extremely useful feedback after the game.

I began the final, hard edit of the game. I was pretty ruthless at this stage. There were a lot if things in the game that were not strictly necessary, and I threw them all out. If something seemed redundant or I felt it was an extension of the rules meant to deal with some minor exception or other, I axed it. I have never been so severe in an edit before. I cut whole pages out of the book. When I was done, I felt like I had stripped the rules right down to where they needed to be. It wasn't an entirely comfortable experience, but the rules came out much better because of it. I was also getting very close to my deadline, as it was now February.

At this point, I began to work with Jennifer for the artwork. I am a pretty light hand when it comes to art direction. I gave her the basic feel I wanted for the work, basically an Art Nouveau style, which Jennifer enthusiastically agreed to. I gave her a list of about a dozen ideas for art pieces, and she agreed to do six interior color plates, the cover, and several small black-and-white decorative pieces for the layout. We negotiated timing and fees, and I agreed to pay her in three installments over the next three months. She had originally estimated a month of work, but it ended up taking nearly three times that long. I also made some fairly major changes when doing the art direction, but Jennifer was always very good with the suggestions. In the past, I have not been entirely comfortable with something in the art but not said anything. It's definitely better to speak up, that way you get exactly what you want rather than ending up unsatisfied with the work you've just paid for.

While this was happening in February, Mayuran had taken the playtest draft and ran a game for his group. This outside playtest was invaluable. The issues they were unclear on were ones I obviously needed to explain better in the text, and I made changes based on this feedback. He also had several very excellent suggestions about theme creation that made the whole thing really click. He suggested adding in Situation and Villains to the theme document building section, which suddenly makes the theme extremely relevant, and moving from these steps directly into character passions ties the whole game together. It had been good before, but Mayuran's suggestions made the game move up to the next level.

Jenn had done one piece by the end of February, and I had a final draft ready to send to my editor, Charlie Hogan, by mid-March, a bit behind deadline. I sent him the file and he began to go through it. Like Ron, I pretty much take all edits at this stage. I rarely ignore one of Charlie's suggestions, and it has to be something that I feel quite strongly about saving. A couple of Mayuran's suggestions got added in after this stage, but all of the post-edit changes were pretty minor. Charlie is a very detail-oriented man, and he did a great job with Mortal Coil by pointing out where important details were buried in the middle of a paragraph. Many of his edits were to pull out and emphasize some important rule. Charlie had never played the game, nor has he ever played any new school indie game. He was pretty amazed at some of the rules, and was constantly telling me he had never seen an RPG do some of the things the Mortal Coil rules did (I knew better, of course, since I had used just about every indie game idea I ever liked). Actually, the fact that he was completely new not just to the game, but to this type of game, helped a lot. His edits made the rules far more clear and readable than they would have been otherwise.

While Charlie was editing, more art was rolling in. I began to play around with my preliminary layout in InDesign, using the intro chapter to set the page parameters and play with margins and the like. As I did this, I gave Jenn direction on the layout art, since I had a pretty good idea at this point what I was going to need. Jenn put the finishing touches on the art in mid-May, and the final edit came in and I made all the changes in the Word file of the game book. I loaded the game up in InDesign, and began to lay it out. I had all but two images now, and I had Jennifer do the token movement diagrams for me at this time. I built all of those images myself in Photoshop using Jennifer's character sheet, a token graphic, and an arrow graphic that she had prepared for me.

I gave myself a whole weekend to do the final layout of the book, and I was done in about three days with all the final art in. Luckily, Mortal Coil isn't very long, and it was pretty easy to do. The last two steps were the table of contents and the index. I indexed the book by hand on paper at first, going through the book page by page and noting terms and page numbers. I then typed in and sorted the terms in Excel. I then imported the list into InDesign and layed out the index. The book was ready for printing, and I wrote a back cover blurb and loaded it in over Jennifer's image in Photoshop. Time was short, it was the last week of May, and I had arranged to get the files over to RPI that week.

Just before I sent them, I realized I had used the wrong page size in my layout. I changed the page size parameters (which included the margins), and then had to go through and re-lay out the book with the new settings. This only took a day, luckily (man, InDesign is so much easier to work with than PageMaker, which I used to lay out Bulldogs!), and I sent in the files, right on schedule, at the end of May.

The printer had some trouble with the cover image, and Jennifer had to resize it. After this change went in, RPI printed me a proof and sent it out. I got this in the first week of June. I noticed a couple of things I didn't like in the table of contents (things had gotten squished when I changed the page size at the last minute), and I decided I didn't like my original back cover blurb. I submitted these changes, and RPI ripped another proof. Rather than wait for it to be shipped to me, I went over the changes with my rep at RPI, and approved over the phone. This is a bit risky, but I have dealt with RPI enough that I trust them, and my old rep was very competent and detail-oriented. She is no longer with RPI, sadly, and I haven't worked with her replacement enough to know if he is the same sort of person.

Anyway, printing approved, they ran the job, with the completion taking place the Friday before Origins. Once the job was submitted, I started taking pre-orders on IPR. I knew that they weren't going to get the boxes to me in time for Origins, so I arranged for a fast shipment of 30 books to the hotel at Origins, to arrive Wednesday. These came in good order, and I sold out at the convention. The remaining books were supposed to be shipped that same Monday and arrive while I was away at the convention, but my new RPI rep messed up the shipping, and they went out on Friday instead. This did throw a little wrench in my plans, as I had scheduled a July 4 signing with Jennifer, and the books weren't there in time. We signed them at DexCon last weekend instead.

Convention Season

I haven't posted in quite some time, and I apologize for that. I have been working quite hard for both Galileo Games and Indie Press Revolution for the last month or so:

- Mortal Coil was released, and is now available to order.
- I attended both Origins and DexCon in the last three weeks.
- The quarter ended, and I had to do the books and pay all those crazy game designers on IPR.

Anyway, I will be posting a slew of Actual Play reports over the next week, and I will be putting up a tale of publishing success for Mortal Coil, to contrast my last publishing story about The Legend of Yore.

In the meantime, check out this excellent post over on The Well of Urd. Thor has some great advice that I strongly urge all game designers to think about.

Gone Writin'

Sorry for the long hiatus. I've been working hard on Mortal Coil, and it's mostly whipped into shape. I made a lot of edits based on independent playtesting, and I think it is just about there. The draft is being edited now as well, and I am planning on starting layout in the next few weeks.

Not So Bad

I wrote the "Play" section for Mortal Coil very quickly a week or two ago. It's all about tips and techniques for creating a good game. Anyway, while I was writing it, I felt it was very half-assed, and when I was done I was thinking it was basically an outline for what I wanted the final section to be.

I just reread it today for editing purposes, fully intending to add a lot of text and expand on things. It turns out that it is pretty good! If I expand it a lot, I'll just end up repeating myself. It's not a college paper! I don't have to pad it out!

Just goes to show that you should never judge your own output at the time you are writing it. Get a week or two of distance and reread it. It might surprise you!