bySwarm and Setting-Testing

As I write this, Mike Bohlman is at GenCon running playtests of what we've been working on bySwarm.  Since most of you doubtless don't know what I'm talking about, bySwarm is Mike Bohlman's really cool project that I'm part of - the idea behind it is essentially cloud-sourcing a rolelpaying game and setting.  During the first stage, various designers and writers proposed rpg settings and everyone rated them and then ultimately voted on them to see what we would go with.  The second stage was choosing a system, whether we would adapt an existing system or build our own, and we ended up voting for adapting Pathfinder.

Stage three is where we are now, fleshing out the setting, which is the Dark Golden Age.  We've been designing aspects of the setting, creating new races and feats, adapting the magic system for the special conditions in the Dark Golden Age, and other fun stuff.

The reason I bring all this up is that the playtests that Mike Bohlman has been running are essentially setting tests, and I haven't really thought about that distinction before.  We know that the system works - tens of thousands of people playtested Pathfinder, and I've played it, and there's no question that it works.  It's incredibly easy to come up with feats and races and so on to add to the system as well, so that's not a concern really.  They key is really testing the setting itself.

I'm thinking about what one would do in order to test a setting rather than a system, and I definitely want to talk to Mike about it after he's recovered from GenCon.  It's one thing to have an interesting setting, the way a novel might - it's another thing to be able to specifically highlight that setting as part of a game.  No one reads those DM handouts about setting, in my experience, so if you want something to stand out as part of the setting, you have to tie it into the scenario you are running.

This is of interest to me not only because I am a bySwarm contributor, but also because games like Heroes of Karia that I am working on are in a large part setting-driven.  It isn't enough to have a cool setting.  You have to find a way to have cool setting elements come up in every single session - most importantly in a convention demo that is supposed to be showcasing a new setting.

As a concluding note, if you want experience working on a collaborative rpg project; if you want to be a published rpg writer and designer someday, come over to bySwarm, read up on where we are right now with the Dark Golden Age rules and setting, and be a contributor!

Parsec and Lessons Learned

As I never tire of announcing all over the Internets, my science fiction RPG, Parsec, is out at last.  It is my first RPG credit, and was a long time coming in retrospect.  Like you'd expect with any first-time outing, there is a lot about the project that isn't perfect.  Also, since I was working for a publisher, there ended up being a lot that just wasn't under my control.  Being new to the hobbistry, this is something I've just had to get used to and accept.

Just like with any threshold crossed, I've been working out what I've learned from the whole process, what I can take with me as I move forward to other projects and future goals.  A few things come to mind.

There is no substitute for time
Writing this book took a LONG time.  I started playtesting it about 2 years ago.  Now, granted, during the time I was working on this book I was also going to graduate school and simultaneously working multiple jobs on the side.  I worked 80 hours a week at a hospital for a year.  Then at one point I technically had 6 jobs at once.  So it wasn't exactly a picnic time in my life either.  But still.  I have a much more realistic view of how long it takes to put together something with as many moving parts as a roleplaying game: approximately 6 times as long as I expect.

I cannot playtest too much
I actually only ran 3 or maybe 4 playtests of Parsec.  I had a few people read through it and give me feedback, and I went through it very carefully many times, but playtesting was kind of a challenge to put together.  Fortunately, Parsec is, underneath it all, a pretty simple game. It is a combination of things I know work from other kinds of games combined with a few things I tested in the playtests I did run to see how they turned out - things like the Initiative, zero-G combat, and Scars.  Otherwise, it's a dice-pool task-resolution system most of the time - it's just the system that I've always wanted for simulationist hard science fiction.  For other more innovative designs that aren't built on a dice-pool/task resolution skeleton, I know I'll have to find a way to playtest even more.

Do I want to publish, or be published?
This is a good question put forward in one of the Accidental Survivors' Collateral podcasts, and it was good food for thought in light of my recent experience with Parsec.  I guess my pipe dream is to be published, but to have creative control over the entire project.  Good luck with that, Doug.  Instead the question is creative control OR being published by someone else.  Do all the work myself, or give up some of the creative control to someone else.

That's a hard choice.  Are there companies that will just put something out, unchanged but under their imprint?   Maybe.  That still leaves me either learning layout or hiring someone to do it; either becoming an artist or finding, recruiting and paying them.

Self-publishing is probably something I can do - but can I do it well enough, on top of everything else I have to do well (as a solo pastor, that's everything), to justify not finding and hiring someone who can do it a lot better?

I heart collaborators
Yup, that's about it.  Parsec was 98% designed in a vacuum.  The feedback I got from playtesting helped, but as I noted above, I didn't playtest as much as I'd like to in the future.  Other feedback I got was on the writing itself, from people who are more familiar with other kinds of writing and not specifically writing gaming systems - really helpful, but not exact.

I feel like in an  hour with a couple people I can hash out more good ideas than in a month by myself - maybe it's just how I work.  The price paid for collaborating, though, is that things can also go a lot slower between bursts of inspiration and creativity.  And yeah, sometimes you hit a snag where you just don't agree, and it's hard to see how to move forward then.  Also, people can be unreliable, myself included.  But there's always the chance that I get left holding the bag for a big project when collaborators find they are no longer interested.  I find I have a hard time letting go, even 7 years later.

***

Well, regardless, Parsec is out, for sale at what I think is a good price-point for what it is.  I come away from it a little wiser and more experienced, a bit proud and also thinking of how I can do better next time.  There was nothing about the experience that makes me want to do it less, so here we go - I'm already waist-deep in the next few projects...

Writing Well and the Art of Forgetting

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan talks about, among other things, the importance of forgetting.  We don't usually think of it this way, but forgetting is almost as important as remembering for our psychology and survival.  Would you really want to remember, in detail, every single commute you ever make?  Every single meal you eat?  Every word you hear someone else say?  Every word you read?

Forgetting is adaptive.  It is the process of editing the overwhelming flood of sensory information that comes at us every moment of every day, so that it is refined down to something manageable, something that won't break our brains.

I've been editing a lot myself lately, and it made me think about how forgetting is like editing our writing.  We must slow the flood of everything I want to tell you about my fascinating characters, my wondrous setting.  Essentially 'forgetting' selectively until what you have left over is meaningful and beautiful and elegant - and by necessity, profoundly incomplete.

It's amazing to me that even a profoundly abbreviated expression - a snippet of poetry, a single photograph, a cartoon - can feel so complete.  Through selectively 'forgetting', editing, whittling down, we come up with something that is not merely a placeholder for a more full experience.  It is itself a better expression than the full experience might have been.  It is evocative rather than discursive.  It is beautiful rather than thorough.