This is my fourth and final retrospective on attending Dragonmeet as a trader for the first time. If you’ve missed the earlier posts you can find part one here, part two here and part three here. In this post I want to try and provide a summary of how it went. Really though I’m here to ask the question of would I do it again?
The answer to that is a strong, but not definite, yes. Running the stall was an experience that I greatly enjoyed and based on the small but noticeable sales bump I’ve experienced over the following couple of weeks it has boosted my profile. It definitely boosted my ego and energy levels significantly, something that is always helpful during these dark months.
You might be wondering why my answer to the question isn’t 100% yes. There are a number of reasons.
The first is money. I didn’t make a profit from this event, though I wasn’t too far from it. This year I could afford that and I think the cost was worth it. I’ve no idea what sort of situation I’ll be in when trader registration opens in 2023 and if inflation continues as it has done the past few months then the costs may simply be too high for me.
The second reason is location, and relates back to the first. There is a strong possibility that the event will move to the Excel next year. It’s a bigger venue and provides the space needed the convention to grow but change also means prices may rise. It’s also just that little bit more awkward to get to compared to Hammersmith.
The final factor is novelty. I had six products on offer and most of them had never been sold at a convention before (and those that had weren’t necessarily prominent items). I can’t bank on those games selling well again next year which means I need new products. Realistically I probably need 2-3 new products. Minimum. That’s not an unrealistic goal for the year given my past output and there’s always a second option – sharing the stall space. This is something I’ve discussed with a couple of people and would allow for a wider selection of games. Alongside the various one off setup costs I had this year sharing the stall would significantly reduce my costs and make it easier to break even.
The downside is, of course, that more games doesn’t automatically mean more sales. By sharing the stall I could end up losing money simply by dividing the same amount of income across more people. It’s something I’ll need to consider carefully before coming to any decision and thankfully it’s one that I’m ok with leaving to future me to deal with.
In terms of what would I do different the list is surprisingly short. The main one is more obvious this is who I am / contact details which will be especially important if I share a stand. Second is less stock as I could have taken half of what I did and gone home with a nearly empty, rather than half empty, case. Finally, adding a vertical stand or two would have made better use of the space and have brought more items up to eye level.
All in all though I think that for my first time it went really well. Part of that was planning and part of it was observation. In the months running up to the convention I was checking the hashtags for major events to get a feel for how others presented their stalls. Combined with my own experience as a visitor to conventions I had a clear idea of how I wanted the stall to look. I also looked into what others had written about running stalls. The Technical Grimoire blog has a great series of posts looking at how they have redesigned their stall over multiple conventions which was really useful in identifying the areas I wanted to focus my attention on. I was a little surprised by how few of these posts there are, which is partially why I’ve written this little series.
So what’s next? Honestly, I don’t know. Dragonmeet is rather unique in the UK in terms of the audience it attracts and I will hopefully apply to be a trader there again next year. As for other conventions it would be nice to attend one in the summer but I’m not sure what the best fit would be for me right now. I would ideally like something focused on RPGs and with a good trade hall to make it worth attending. The exception would be anything local where I could just travel to it on the day. Now that I have built up some stock and without the cost of accomodation attending a smaller event as a trader becomes much more appealing and offers the opportunity to get my games in front of a different audience.
I hope that these posts have been useful to those of you that have read through them. They’ve been very off the cuff and a way to just record my thoughts about the convention. It’s been good to get back to regular blog posts, even if I have rambled on a little.
Tag: rambling
Signal to Noise retrospective 2: Post fulfilment
Back in March, I did an initial retrospective on my ZiMo campaign for Signal to Noise but now that I’ve completed the fulfilment of the game I wanted to revisit those thoughts and look at my options for the future. I’m also going to pull together final spending for a subsequent post as I like to be open about these sorts of things.
First up, the game – which is a delight to hold and looks beautiful thanks to Val’s fantastic art. It was such a pleasure to work with her and I hope I can do so again in the future. I can highly recommend commissioning her if you’re looking for detailed and realistic art.
Seriously, look at that art! If you somehow missed out on buying Signal to Noise before now then it’s available in digital from itch and drivethruRPG while physical copies are available via Etsy (with distribution via Peregrine Coast and IPR coming very soon).
Fulfilment itself was, I’m happy to say, a relatively straightforward process. That came down to a few factors – Mixam printing everything correctly the first time, the scale of the project (<50 shipments), most packages being a single zine and having help filling envelopes while I focused on the postage. At the moment I know the game has reached backers in the UK, US and even Australia but thanks to good old Brexit copies heading to the EU may still be in customs limbo.
So now that I have two successful campaigns under my belt how do I feel? Pretty good. I have no doubts that I’ll run another campaign next year and I’ve already started initial planning in terms of what to focus on. Starting planning six months out from Zine Quest might look a little premature but I need to ensure that I have a solid concept in place so I can advertise it at Dragonmeet (where I will be running a stall for the very first time).
The big question that hangs over any future crowdfunding I do is what platform I will use. I genuinely think that Game on Tabletop offers a robust ecosystem and the level of support I received from their team was outstanding. As you might suspect though there is a but hanging on to the end of that statement, in the form of “but I am certain Signal to Noise would have done far better on Kickstarter.”
And that is a frustrating situation to be in. I switched to Game on Tabletop because of Kickstarter screwing with Zine Quest and proposing that they enter the tech bro crypto market. While the community did try and support those of us that moved off of the platform many people stuck to Kickstarter and had wildly successful campaigns. I could say that I’m not into game design to make money (which is true) but on the other hand, making money allows me to make better games. I can’t afford to hire an editor or artist for games that don’t sell or fail to gather any attention, which is sadly true of much of my work.
On the selfish level, I also want people to play my games. It’s a fantastic feeling when someone says they’ve played something you wrote and that’s not going to happen if I only run campaigns that barely garner any attention. Signal to Noise is, I believe, a special game and I think it would have done significantly better on Kickstarter just by being tied into the ecosystem. Just comparing these two campaigns Project Cassandra was backed by 175 people, 107 more than Signal to Noise and every single one of them will receive an email if I launch a new campaign. Even if most of them ignore that email it’s such a big and effort-free marketing boost that I would be foolish to ignore it. That was true going into the Signal to Noise campaign but I had hoped the anti-Kickstarter feelings at the time would compensate for it and the truth is it didn’t. Or at least not as much as I’d have liked. I’ve always been upfront about the fact that Project Cassandra only did as well as it did because of the Zine Quest force multiplier effect and much of that is, frustratingly, baked into the Kickstarter site.
All of the above is really avoiding the big question – what am I going to do going forward? Honestly, probably go back to Kickstarter. I would like to pretend otherwise but the disparity in terms of the English-speaking market share between them and Game on Tabletop is so significant that I would be shooting myself in the foot if I didn’t. It sucks but as a tiny fish in the big pond of crowdfunding I just don’t have the influence to pull backers to a new platform when I’m struggling to even build an audience. I wish I was ending this post on a more upbeat note but, well I’m not, because like it or not Kickstarter remains the site to beat.
Rambling: Thoughts on crowdfunding and putting together your first campaign
Like it or not crowdfunding is now a central component of producing an RPG, especially if you are aiming to produce a physical product. When Matthew from the Effekt Podcast interviewed me at the start of 2022 to promote Signal to Noise we talked about sitting down after the game was out to discuss what goes into running a small crowdfunding campaign. While the game isn’t out just yet Kickstarter has decided to push on with an August Zine Quest so I thought it would be worth discussing some of those details now here on my blog.
You might be wondering why you should be listening to the advice of someone that has only run two small campaigns that raised less than £3k. To that, I would say because I’ve only run two relatively small campaigns. The vast majority of RPG crowdfunding is at the smaller end of the scale and unless you have an established presence or a lot of luck that is probably what you should be aiming at as a first-time crowdfunder. So my experience at the smallest end of the scale is reflective of the challenges new designers are likely to face.
So what do you need to think about going into your campaign? Obviously, there’s the game itself but I’m going to leave that to you and focus on logistics. The most important aspect to me is the budget, which I break down into 2 sections – fixed and dynamic. You should, ideally, be thinking about this well ahead of launch to ensure you have everything covered and that running your campaign won’t cost you in the long run. There are plenty of horror stories out there of disappearing products or people having to shell out from their personal finances because they failed to create a proper budget.
As I said I break my budget into 2 sections – fixed and dynamic – so lets take a closer look at each of them.
Fixed Costs
Your fixed costs are exactly that – one-off payments that will not change regardless of the success of your campaign. If an artist quotes you a price of £200 then that cost is fixed, regardless of whether you sell 10 or 1000 copies of the game. The majority of your fixed costs will usually be associated with contractors such as artists and writers but licences for software, fonts or stock art can also fall into this category. When it comes to hiring people get quotes early and make sure to pay them fairly. The standard rate across the industry for writing is often quoted as 5 cents but that is too low and we should be aiming significantly higher. Try to aim for 10 cents per word as a minimum and work from there. The cost of editing, another essential component, will vary more depending on whether it is copy-editing or proofing. Art is even harder to price as individual pieces may range from small embellishments at the corner of the page to complex full-page pieces so reach out to artists early, discuss rates and make sure to mention that you want to use it commercially as this will increase the price further. Then put it all in writing, make plans for when and how you will pay for the work and be prompt with payment.
You might be thinking but I can’t raise that much or how do I make any money off of this. If you’re thinking your campaign won’t raise that much then you need to scale back your plans (but well done on being realistic on how much you can raise). Look at your budget and scale it back. Do you really need 10 full-page spreads or could you use stock art and include stretch goals to upgrade each piece? Could you do any of the work yourself?
For Project Cassandra, I relied almost exclusively on stock art. My total spend on art? Less than $50 if you exclude the time I then spent tweaking it in photoshop. My art budget for Signal to Noise on the other hand was closer to £500 and was the single largest cost of the campaign. My original budget was for only a single piece but I designed the campaign (and budget!) in such a way that as we pushed past certain goals I would be able to afford additional pieces, a fact I’d already discussed with the artist.
Which brings us to the question of how do I make any money for myself? The short answer is you probably don’t, at least not nearly the amount you deserve relative to the amount of work that goes into producing a game. A small 5,000-word game has a writing cost alone of $500 if we use the 10 cents per word we’ve established as a minimal fair rate. That’s before we consider all of the other work you will have put into the game, from design and testing to promotion and running the campaign. A realistic budget that pays you fairly for the amount of time you have put in will come into the thousands. Some campaigns will raise that but you need to be realistic with what you think you can raise and be prepared to fail if you include those costs upfront.
Dynamic Costs
Simply put these are the costs that increase as you get more backers. The three main areas you will need to be aware of are production, shipping and fees.
Production is the cost of producing each copy of your game – most of the time this means printing by your chosen supplier. As with contractors you need to get quotes early and then add a margin. Paper costs have risen sharply due to the pandemic and continue to do so. So if you think each copy will cost you £1 to print then budget for £1.50 or even higher. This gives you a buffer if costs rise, the game ends up being larger than expected or you decide to switch from black and white to full colour. If it doesn’t then hey, it can go towards other costs.
Shipping – This is the cost of getting copies into the hands of your backers and just like printing costs postage rates have shot up, especially if you’re in the US. It’s fairly standard to charge for postage after the campaign but you should get an initial estimate early if only so you can let the backers know what to expect. You also need to think about how you are going to handle import fees such as VAT if you are shipping into the EU – for a small creator the reality is either finding a shipping partner or leaving backers to pay those fees when the product ships.
Talking of fees don’t forget to include them in your budget. Regardless of which site you run your campaign on each pledge will incur fees, so if a backer pledges £10 you might only receive £8. Sites such as Kickstarter typically take around a 5% cut of every pledge while payment processing will take another 3-5% so expect to lose around 10% of your total straight out of the door. After shipping, this is a common reason for campaigns costing their creators money.
Finally, we add a contingency, which I like to set at 10%. This is there as a just in case, if it’s not needed that’s great but if it is it can be the difference between a project making or losing money overall.
Stress testing the budget
So now that you’ve got all of those numbers what do you do with them?
Maths. Sorry, but it’s time to break out excel. You need to put all those numbers into a spreadsheet and work out a goal for your campaign that, at a minimum, ensures you break even. This is also the point at which you must start thinking about what each pledge tier will offer. Why? Because different products have different dynamic costs. PDFs might be as low as nothing while a physical tier will need to cover printing and shipping.
When running these calculations I start with the total fixed costs as my initial goal and use the cost of the print tier to work out how many backers I would need to reach that target. I then calculate whether that would break even once I add the dynamic costs for that number of backers. Then I incrementally increase the goal and rerun the numbers, repeating the process until I break even. Then I add a buffer, just in case. So lets break that down into an example. Say my fixed costs total £500, my print pledge tier costs £10 and my dynamic costs for that tier are £2 per backer. If I set my initial goal to £500 I will need 50 backers at that level to reach the goal. However, the dynamic costs for those backers come to a total of £100 so my final expenditure is £500 fixed plus £100 dynamic for a total of £600. I’ll therefore lose £100 if I hit that goal but don’t exceed it.
Incrementing the goal I find that to break even I need to set the goal to £630. This requires 63 backers to reach, and their total dynamic costs are £126. Added to my fixed cost of £500 I’d make a profit of £4. After finding that break-even point for my print tier I then check my numbers with other rewards. If a third of my backers choose the print tier and the rest go for PDF only (which will have a much lower dynamic cost per pledge) will I still break even? What if it’s 50/50? If all of those tests return a profit then I’ve found the minimum viable goal for the campaign.
So that’s the budget. Much of it may seem obvious but I’ve spent a lot of time on it because it’s important and because so many creators still seem to trip up at this point. Even big names in the hobby can screw up – just look at the mess that was the 7th Sea 2nd edition Kickstarter.
Before I move on to what else you need to consider I want to come back to paying yourself. This is an issue that gets a lot of discussion. Creating games, for many of us, is a hobby but we also need to ensure that people are paid fairly when they want to make money off of them. There are two things to consider here. The first is not to undersell your work, something I have been guilty of in the past and which is depressingly endemic across the hobby. For my campaigns, I have priced PDFs at £5 and print copies at £10 plus shipping, which I think is the bare minimum you should aim for when producing a zine-sized game. Many creators are starting to raise their prices but it’s a difficult market and the vast majority of small press games will never earn enough to pay their creator fairly. You need to be aware of that going in.
The second factor to consider is the time and effort you have already put into the game. If you have already written 5,000 words then you could be tempted to add £500 to the goal to pay yourself for that work. I would argue against doing that though. Why? Because it’s a sunk cost – you have already done the work regardless of whether the campaign succeeds or not. If you end up being able to pay yourself back £200 then you’re £300 in the red but if you had set the goal £500 higher you’d still be £500 in the red.
I’m aware that this approach requires a level of time, money and privilege that not everyone can afford – if you’re not in a position to afford those upfront costs then add them into your budget but make sure to avoid the temptation to spend on the campaign before it succeeds. For Signal to Noise I was fortunate that I could afford the time to have a complete version of the game before the campaign launched. I then set the initial campaign goal so that it would cover printing and a small amount of art. Stretch goals paid for additional art, maximising the chance of success. Have I paid myself for the work I put in? No, but it hasn’t personally cost me money either, only time and that is something I can afford. Any future sales of the game will slowly pay me back but I doubt it will ever earn me what could be considered a fair wage for the work that went into it.
Creating your campaign page
Right, enough about the budget. What about the campaign itself. My biggest piece of advice here is once again to plan ahead as much as possible, starting with which platform to use. As much as I hate to admit it Kickstarter still rules the crowdfunding space and projects there have a much higher chance of success than if you use one of the alternatives such as Game on Tabletop or Game Found. That may change over time but right now it’s an important factor to take into account. You also need to decide whether you have enough of an audience to go it alone or whether you should join an event such as Zine Quest. If you’re a new creator I would highly recommend this.
Why?
Because they are force multipliers that will bring more eyes to your project, especially if you put in the effort to be active in the community. I’m under no illusion about the fact that my own projects would have struggled or even failed if not for the fact that other creators drove cross-promotion from their own projects. It’s tempting to consider running a project outside of those events but for that, you’ll need to seriously consider your reach and whether you will succeed because building an audience is hard. You cannot just launch a Kickstarter and expect it to gain backers without spending time and effort on promotion. There’s a lot that goes into building an audience but the biggest piece of advice I can offer (which I regularly fail at myself) is to be active. You need to be part of the community, talking about your game but also engaging with others on a regular basis. It’s easy to spot someone that is only interested in talking about their own work and that tends to put people off. A podcast interview or actual play is a fantastic way to bring attention to your project (Thanks again Matthew and Dave from Effekt and Marx from Yes Indie’d!) but as with everything else give yourself time. Most podcasts will schedule interviews a month or more in advance so launching your campaign and then reaching out to people at the last moment is a big no.
Going back to the campaign page itself once you’ve decided on the site and launch window give yourself the time to put your campaign page together and make changes. Many of the sites have rather unintuitive campaign creation tools that can take a while to get used to so don’t expect to be able to throw together a perfect page in a weekend. You need time to work out how to create a page, write and edit the text, to create banners and promo images. At the same time check what the process is to get your campaign approved – it may take a week or two and I’ve heard of more than one project launching late because the creator assumed the process would be relatively quick. For Project Cassandra, I started this process in November ahead of a February launch. I know many fellow Zine Questers that only started mid-January but I wanted to avoid going into the campaign already stressed by creating the page at the last minute. For Signal to Noise I gave myself a month but as the game had already been released on itch I was able to reuse text and art assets, significantly cutting down the amount of work required.
Ultimately what you include on your page is up to you but you need to showcase your work in a clear and concise manner. The text of the campaign is arguably the most important section – it needs to hook the backers and tell them what the game is about. But that’s not enough. The best pages will also use graphics and preview material to support the text. Graphical section headers can help break up the text while art and layout previews give the backers an idea of what to expect from the final product. This upsell is why so many creators invest in the sunk cost that I mentioned earlier – a rules preview or example artwork grabs the attention of supporters in a way that plain text never will.
If you’re unsure of what to include on your page the best idea is to look at successful projects by both small and large creators (These are the links to the Project Cassandra and Signal to Noise pages). What did they write, how did they order the page, did they include any preview material etc. Section banners are an easy and effective way to improve the visual design of your campaign page. You can quickly and easily create eye-catching banners using a combination of stock art and photoshop (or one of the many cheap/free alternatives). My ability to draw is pretty close to zero but over the years I’ve learned the basics of image manipulation and can produce effective banners for my own campaigns that cost me nothing but time. Art previews are another great way to sell your game on the campaign page so if you’ve been able to commission material in advance of the campaign make sure to highlight it. A lot of the time that won’t be possible for the simple reason that the aim of the campaign is to raise funds for art (amongst other things). In that case, ask your artist if they have any existing portfolio pieces that you can share. It lets you show off their abilities and costs absolutely nothing.
Alongside the main page, you will obviously need to set up your reward tiers, which you should have already decided on when creating your budget. For your first campaign, keep these as simple as possible – PDF, Print+PDF and maybe one or two special high-value tiers such as an annotated print copy or private game session. It’s tempting to offer extras such as custom dice or limited edition art prints but these come with a lot of risks due to the added complexity of budgeting for them. That goes double if you were thinking of including them as stretch goals – it’s all too easy to promise extras that you can’t afford in the long run – just look at the disaster that was the 7th Sea 2nd Edition Kickstarter if you want an example of a campaign by a big name in the industry that promised too much and failed to budget properly.
So that’s my rambling thoughts on what you should be thinking about in advance of running a campaign. It’s by no means comprehensive despite its length and there are so many caveats that you shouldn’t take any of it as gospel. I just want people to be aware of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into just setting up a campaign and of the many things you should be thinking about when you do.
In the next post, I’m going to talk about what happens after your campaign has been funded and all the wonderful pitfalls such as customs forms and printing errors that you might run into.
Set phasers to boring: Starship combat and RPGs
During the most recent edition of the newsletter I ruminated on the issue of starship combat and why most systems fail. I’m currently preparing for a mini-campaign using the Tachyon Squadron system, one of the few which I think works but for this post, I want to take a deeper look at the most common approach to starship combat, which I’m going to call bridge combat.
The best example of bridge combat is on Star Trek. Each character has a specific and narrow role to play – Worf at tactical, Sulu at the helm or Janeway in the Captain’s chair. With the exception of those episodes when a character is forced to work at a different station for the sake of the narrative (such as Picard taking the helm), they have a single, clearly defined role.
In a TV show this makes sense but in a tabletop game it leads to boring combats. Why? Because each character is static.
Let’s take a hypothetical scene from TNG and break it down into the standard turns of an RPG. Worf, standing at tactical because Starfleet doesn’t believe in providing seatbelts, fires the phasers. Next turn he… fires the phasers. There may be some minor variation to the roll when he switches to photon torpedoes but ultimately his choice of actions are limited. This plays out for each and every character – they make the same type of roll turn after turn. In some situations they may not even be able to make a roll, for example if there isn’t a ship for Worf to shoot at.
And that’s boring.
It works for a TV show for a few reasons. The tension and dynamic nature of a scene is built into it as a whole and that’s where the audience’s attention is. It’s rarely focused solely on an individual character and all the time they spend standing around waiting.
The second reason is that it plays out in real-time – we don’t have to wait for Worf to remember which button to press or to pause as we calculate the damage. We can even have overlapping actions, with Worf taking his shot at the same time that Picard is giving orders or Geordi is falling in love with a hologram. That adds to the drama and the tension.
And all of that is absent from bridge combat in an RPG.
In a game, we focus on one character at a time and a second long action may take a number of minutes to resolve. The passage of time drags out so by the time it gets around to a player’s turn they want to be able to contribute and to have a choice in how they contribute.
To use a personal example a number of years ago I played in a high-level campaign of the Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader RPG from FFG. We had a group of six players and each of us had a specific role during bridge combat. As the Missionary, mine was to minimise the crew losses when the ship took damage. One action, rolling the same skill every turn of the combat… except on turns where we hadn’t taken damage and I did nothing. Because of how the system was designed that was almost the only way I could contribute to the combat. Many of the fights took multiple hours and I’d often leave a session having rolled only two or three times. Not the best of ways to maintain player engagement.
Yet mediocre (at best) bridge combat seems to be the default for sci-fi games and I don’t know why we’ve come to accept it as the norm. Tachyon Squadron gets around the issue by shifting the focus to starfighters and I’m going to do a deep dive of it once the upcoming campaign is underway.
But how to improve bridge combat?
Personally, I think the solution is to shift the focus back a little, away from individuals and onto the ship as a whole. A player should be able to take any action, regardless of which character it is technically associated with. Get round to the person playing the medic when the ship is on the tail of their target? Well, they might end up as the one to take the shot.
The trick though will be to design the system in a way that they are balancing resources/harm. Sure they could take the shot but should they be trying to repair the shields or perform first aid on the crew instead? They might be better at the first aid roll but is the shot a more urgent action? Are the shields at 20%, 10% or out entirely? It requires the sort of balancing act more often seen in board games than RPGs but I think it would make for more dynamic bridge combats that would keep players engaged. It’s certainly one I’ll be looking to explore when I get around to introducing bridge combat to the Dyson Eclipse.
RPGaDay 2021: 7th August
It’s time, once again for RPGaDay and as always I’ll be releasing a short post each day inspired by the prompt from the table below. For the most part these are going to be off the top of my head, zero edit posts so I have no idea how much sense they’ll make or where each prompt will take me.
7th August: Small
While I’ve been able to build a little momentum over the past year I am still operating on the small scale compared to a lot of people and other than the slow grind of releasing material I’m not sure what to do. Running my first ZineQuest kickstarter resulted in a significant boost to my sales but I need to translate that to a continued interest in my games, which so far has been difficult. I think the biggest part of the problem is me, I struggle to connect with people and put myself out there in the sort of way that is necessary to really make it. I don’t do hot takes, make giant sweeping statements or call out other games (ok, occasionally I call out 5E). It’s not uncommon for me to just avoid social media altogether for a few days which isn’t the way to draw attention to myself or my games. Of course adding the ongoing pandemic on top of all that hasn’t helped and I’ve struggled with engaging with online events for a host of reasons I won’t go into.
It’s also frustrating to not be getting eyes on my work when I see some people getting engagement from constant hot takes or just throwing half baked ideas out into the void but never actually finishing anything. If this sounds like I’m venting a little then it’s because I am. Maybe I need to do that a little more and just throw things up on the blog as they come to me. I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, I’m under no illusion about the fact that the market is flooded with creators right now and that you need the right combination of luck, connections and just being out there to really make it. It’s just frustrating to release stuff into the wild that I think is good and see little to no response. I think it’s also annoying that I’ve let me put myself into the position of being bothered by it all. While I’m treating designing and publishing games as a micro-business it is, ultimately, a hobby and I’m in the privileged position of not being reliant on earnings from this stuff.
Anyway rant over. It’s Saturday so rather than dwell on this I’m going to go and check out the #selfpromosaturday tag over on twitter and see what others have been up to this week.
RPGaDay 2021: 6th August
It’s time, once again for RPGaDay and as always I’ll be releasing a short post each day inspired by the prompt from the table below. For the most part these are going to be off the top of my head, zero edit posts so I have no idea how much sense they’ll make or where each prompt will take me.
6th August: Chase
I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a chase mechanic that really feels like it works in play and I think part of the problem is the way that mechanics typically take an overly literal approach of how far away from the target are you. Tracking how close you are is, on one hand, a fairly reasonable assumption. If you are chasing a person you either need to catch them or fall behind so much that they get away but in reality it never feels interesting during play as you end up rolling the same thing over and over. It’s also all too possible to get into an endless loop where you never catch up to them but they never get away, something that doesn’t make for much fun at the table.
Because it’s boring.
The games that do it best tend to be the ones that use a challenge based approach, so you need to overcome 3 out of 5 challenges to catch them. Why do I think that works best? Simple, it’s more cinematic. Think about how chases are presented on screen – it’s rarely about the actual distances involved but overcoming challenges such as dodging other traffic, finding shortcuts or knocking things into the path of the chasers. Ultimately though it all comes down to the final total where the chaser either catches up or loses their prey but only after all the hijinks involved in chasing them. A good GM using that sort of approach will think about 3-5 thematically interesting challenges that might get in your way and allow for a wider range of approaches than repeatedly rolling whatever skill you use for running.
RPGaDay 2021: 4th August
It’s time, once again for RPGaDay and as always I’ll be releasing a short post each day inspired by the prompt from the table below. For the most part these are going to be off the top of my head, zero edit posts so I have no idea how much sense they’ll make or where each prompt will take me.
4th August: Weapon
When I first got into RPGs one of the things I enjoyed was poring over Weapon books, such as the Kanawa Personal Weapons and Heavy Weapons books for Torg. The odd thing though is that I wasn’t doing it to mechanically optimise my character but to narratively inspire myself. In a combat orientated game weapon descriptions can tell you a lot about the wider world and how the authors are pitching the tone of the game. Is it full of pistols, each hand built by genius crafters and firing ammo with unique effects? Or are there a half dozen corporations specialising in a particular type of weaponry?
The pinnacle of these for me was probably Corporation, a game that is all about the gadgets and weapons that cybernetically enhanced agents are equipped with. As a GM I used to spend hours digging through the books looking for inspiration that was thematically appropriate to the NPC the players were about to encounter. Sniper and spotter? What would they need to infiltrate the city, set up in an abandoned tower block and ensure their target was positioned just right? Even if I did regularly find myself creating over the top experts it was rarely about the stats, my focus was always the concept.
These days I’ve drifted away from that sort of gaming, preferring to focus on the actual narrative rather than small details that the players rarely pick up on but every so often I do find myself tempted to sit down and just dig through a weapon book and think about the fine details.
RPGaDay 2021: 3rd August
It’s time, once again for RPGaDay and as always I’ll be releasing a short post each day inspired by the prompt from the table below. For the most part these are going to be off the top of my head, zero edit posts so I have no idea how much sense they’ll make or where each prompt will take me.
3rd August: Support
For today’s prompt I want to give my support to all of the amazing contributors to the ZineQuest Jam – As part of running my first Kickstarter this year I wanted to try and give something back to the community by organising the jam and using it as a place to bring together as many of the projects as possible once they’d been released to the wider public. We’re about halfway through the jam and already have loads of entries that you should check out. Right now the list (including links to each game) looks like this:
- The Sun’s Ransom
- Thursday
- In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe
- Aether Operations
- Microvania
- Project Cassandra
- A Complicated Profession
- Reliquary
- An Altogether Different River
- A Small Collection of Flowers & Entanglements
- Paranormal Inc.
- Weirdwood
- The Lord of Wolves – A Trophy Gold Incursion
- Two Summers
- Subtle Fluid – The blooder
- Cryptid (Mis)Communication
- Patchwork World 6E
- Trash Planet Epsilon 5
- The Collector
- Menagerie of the Void
- Hope Is Not a Plan
- Habits of the Common House Ghost
- Hinterlands: Peoples and Perils
- Gratitude: A horror game
- Two Summers: first holiday memories
- Network 23
- Rascals
- Vis-a-visage
- Peculiar Children
- Major Arcana
- Descending the stairs
- Lethal Fauna Bric-a-brac
- Most Wanted
- Contorta
- Coiled.Spaece
- This Night on the Rooftops
- Mage to Order
- GrimBlade
- Superstition
- Edinburgh Indie Gamers Zine
- Glitchspiel
- Infinite March
- Tomb of Immolation
- MechTek
- Grasping Nettles
- Monolith: Path of Transcendence
- The Soul Sword Forge
RPGaDay 2021: 2nd August
It’s time, once again for RPGaDay and as always I’ll be releasing a short post each day inspired by the prompt from the table below. For the most part these are going to be off the top of my head, zero edit posts so I have no idea how much sense they’ll make or where each prompt will take me.
2nd August: Map
I virtually never use combat maps during play. My preferred approach to GMing is to improvise each session on the fly, which makes producing anything more than a quick sketch fairly difficult. As a player I also prefer to avoid them as it drags me away from the RP and into a more wargaming focus. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, I enjoy wargames, I just prefer not to mix them with my RPGs. Whenever I see a fancy combat map and minis in use I do feel a little jealous, they look awesome but outside of a streamed game I do wonder how many people can really justify set pieces like that. It would be awesome to find a gaming space that allowed you to rent stuff like that and had a big enough stock that you could mix things up, even if only to use it as a centrepiece for the table.
All that said I do have a soft spot for hand drawn maps. I really like the styling that tends to be used for both world and dungeon maps. I’ve tried my hand at them a few times but never really gotten into the habit when it comes to just drawing them for the sake of it. Art isn’t my strong point so I tend to get frustrated when I can’t get things the way I want, even with relatively simple concepts. I really should try and get back to trying, it would be a nice way to take my eyes away from the computer and just focus on creating something.
RPGaDay 2021: 1st August
It’s time, once again for RPGaDay and as always I’ll be releasing a short post each day inspired by the prompt from the table below. For the most part these are going to be off the top of my head, zero edit posts so I have no idea how much sense they’ll make or where each prompt will take me. With that said lets get going.
1st August: Scenario
When it comes to writing scenarios I like to focus on what I call a ‘starter’ approach. This sets up the major locations, antagonists and goings on but isn’t constructed as a narrative adventure. I’ve run so many sessions where the players threw curveballs and did something unexpected that I’ve learned to instead think about goals and motivations than an a->b->c approach. The other thing that I focus on is the opening hook – why are the PCs involved and what’s their motivation to go along with the plot. Why should they care that somebody is Godzilla is robbing banks (you are the sole team of superheroes in the city) or that the local crime boss has a suspiciously generous job on offer (you’re broke and if you can’t pay your debts you’ll lose you ship). All of this is especially important when it comes to convention play – if you can’t get the players invested in the plot in the first scene then the next 3-4 hours are going to be a drag.
LunarShadow Designs 