An Update, in Lieu of Content

I'm not sure what to do with this blog right now, but I don't want it to die, and I thought I'd post a little update on what I'm doing. Parsec is done (at last!) after a very successful Kickstarter campaign, and I'm proud of the end result. I have heard from some groups that are playing it, and I'm glad to hear it, and I hope many more are that I'm not hearing about.

I still find time to listen to podcasts, mostly when I am relaxing and playing Oblivion (I finished Skyrim first and then went backwards to Oblivion). The ones that I'm most excited to find in my feed are:

Aldasaga (Tolkien and Old Norse) is a special kind of awesome, and started relatively recently. The focus of the podcast is the works of JRR Tolkien and how they draw from Norse myth. In short, they draw from Norse myth more than I'd thought, and so far the podcast is fascinating.

Freakanomics is the only way I can tolerate listening to things about economics. I know I should understand it to be a participant in society and so on, but it's just so...dismal. Freakanomics focuses on the surprising or counter-intuitive aspects of economics, including how the President of the US has almost no impact on the US economy. The topics are presented in a way that is likely to inform and entertain actual human beings.

This American Life is possibly the best podcast, period. It is Ira Glass going through amazing stories that follow a different them for each show. If you want to be moved and amazed, give them an hour and it's almost guaranteed.

WNYC's Radiolab is like This American Life's little brother. Jad and Robert, the hosts, take a theme, but their themes are often related to science, technology and a little bit of philosophy. They approach these topics through stories much the way that TAM does, and like TAM they are consistently excellent.

Writing Excuses is the best podcast on the art, craft and business of writing, period. Each episode is only 15 minutes and they are currently in season 7. If you are a writer, or are interested in writers, then this should be a number one listening priority.

On the other hand, I'm doing a lot of writing, which feels good. Well, I'm doing as much as I can, given that I'm also a stay-at-home dad most days. I have continued to work on Never Pray Again with my Two Friars and a Fool collaborators, though I have taken a break from that. I wrote a ton on it for a few months, and sort of burned myself out until I can see more from Aric and Nick that I can respond to and be inspired by.  I am also collaborating on a number of projects: some supplements for Parsec focusing on Mars and the Asteroid Belt, a Victorian Gothic horror game called Clockwork, and a more-than-an-ebook adventure for bySwarm's Dark Golden Age setting. Lastly, Reckoning, our horror rpg, is limping along, mostly neglected because of all of these other things going on.

In addition, I always have a few projects on my many back burners. I've been working on a poetry portfolio, theoretically as part of a possible Master's in Fine Arts program application, and I've been learning that I am terrible at territory. I also have a few games percolating, including Fivefold Qi and still poking around with Heroes of Karia. I am also trying my hand at some fiction: a long-form story called Dragonblade and two short stories, one about a person who hires assassins to kill himself and the other about a superhero sidekick who turns villain. These are for a thematic anthology on sidekicks, and I may not finish them in time but they still interest me to see through.

Is that a lot of writing? Hell yes. And it's awesome, and I want to keep writing as much as I can for as long as I can.

More Kickstarter Talk to Come

Our Parsec Kickstarter is kicking ass.  We have gone beyond 300% and there is chance we could see 400%! This is beyond crazy. What I would like to do, when I have a little time, is to look at and talk about the whole experience overall, as well as look at how our pledges worked out, using the information that Kickstarter gives us about where backers are coming from, the graph of the project's progress, and so on.

This is just a reminder, though, and/or foreshadowing, because currently I am beyond swamped with other things to do, not to mention the coming task of organizing rewards for well over 300 backers, many of whom are not in the US.  It'll be interesting!

If anyone reading this would like to talk Kickstarter, I am no expert, but our project did pretty well, and I think I have figured out some of the reasons why it did so.  Feel free to contact me through Google+ or my email, Facebook, whatever, and I'll be happy to talk and trade ideas.

Until I can dig myself out from under some of this work - if you haven't backed us yet, what are you waiting for?

Learning From Kickstarter

My RPG, Parsec, is currently up on Kickstarter.  So far things are going great - we've over 100% funded and still going strong.  I've found that I have preposterously generous friends and family, and that somehow my project got onto a French BBS which resulted in hundreds of dollars of support from people I'll probably never meet.

In this whole process, I have learned a few things, and I thought I'd share them here for anyone who might want to put up their own Kickstarter project.  I am by no means an expert on any of this - this is my first project, and I have just gotten lucky in a lot of ways thus far.  However, if you haven't put anything up on Kickstarter before, or maybe if you have but it wasn't successful, something here might be helpful.  If you want to add anything you have learned, please comment.

Kickstarter is awesome

I know this isn't really advice, but Kickstarter is truly awesome.  There is already a built-in community of generous people, it is only becoming more popular as time goes on, and the software you use to set your project up is easy to use and understand.

Enthusiasm is infectious

If you love your project, and you should if you want others to love it, don't hold back in talking about it.  Talk about how it came about, where the ideas came from, why you think it's awesome, and so on.  I have proven to be a terrible salesman previously in my life, but because I was excited about this project, I think I was able to communicate that enthusiasm.

Do your homework

Spend plenty of time looking at successful and unsuccessful projects in your own caregory, and look at what they do.  How often do they post updates?  What kinds of rewards are they using?  What does their video look like, and what other images are they using on their site?  Do they seem available to backers for conversation through comments?

In my case, I looked through many projects in the Games category - not just other tabletop RPGs, but also video games, board games and card games.  I looked carefully at what they did, and how, and what the result was.  I think that this homework prepared me to put together a pretty good project page at first, and that may have been part of how I got early momentum for Parsec.

Structure rewards carefully

One of the cool things the Kickstarter site gives you to track your progress is the Dashboard - basically, it is a breakdown of your backers.  How many do you have, what is the average contribution, how are they finding the project, and which rewards account for the largest percentage of your overall support.

I can already see some mistakes that I made.  My rewards should, ideally I think, fall into something like a nice bell-curve.  My curve is vaguely bell-like, but quite bumpy.  I have many times more $5 backers than I have $10 backers, and looking at the rewards I can see why.  I under-priced the PDF of the game at $5 and didn't make $10 distinctly cool enough.  (That being said, I also might have more PDFs total out there as a result of under-pricing them, which puts my game into more hands, which might be an advantage later on.)

My goal in building the rewards was to keep in mind what it would cost to produce each reward - if you spend all of your support on rewards, you won't have enough left over for the actual project.  One thing I didn't take into account was the cost of shipping internationally.  Honestly, I just didn't imagine that I would have a lot of international backers, but I later learned that on a Kickstarter project, often as much as a third of your support (as an American) comes from non-US sources.  I'd say this is the case for me as well, and I had to do some re-assessing of  how I would handle shipping costs.

Keeping an eye on cost, I did try to make each level as cool as possible.  I tried to cram them with rewards, including ones that cost us little or nothing, like thanking people by name in the final book when it is printed, or signing books before we send them out.

For each level, think "Would I read this and think it was cool?  That it was worth my money?"

Visual presentation is king

Even for a project like Parsec, which is a book, visual elements were key.  I got a friend who is skilled with video editing to put together a video using artwork from the book.  If you have art, put it all over your project page, even for a work that is not primarily visual at all.  Visuals are catchy, and can communicate a great deal very quickly, even at a glance.  If possible, team up with people for the project who are artists.  Split some of the proceeds with them in exchange for some artwork up front.  I can't over-state how important the visual elements seem to be.

It's a huge help to be known already

Whatever creative community you are part of, it is a huge advantage to be known already, to have a name and a reputation that people know and respect.  I didn't have this advantage, and had to weight other things in my favor as a result.  No one knows who I am, and I don't expect them to.

For those who are known in their given community, though, the sky is the limit.  Well-known writers and game designers continually leverage the recognition they have on Kickstarter to get new projects off the ground.  Most of the advice that I got was that the most powerful element of a successful Kickstarter project is to already have a community that supports you.  In my case, that community turned out to be my family and friends - but I know many of them are probably tapped out at this point, meaning I cannot depend on that next time.

Don't spam, but promote the crap out of it

Go on forums and boards, join groups, send emails and Twitter messages, post Facebook updates, contact friends and family, talk to people who are working in your creative field, and make sure people with an audience are aware of your project - bloggers, writers, social media types, podcasters and so on can be incredibly valuable, and a lot of them are awesome people who will help you out for nothing, or maybe just a promise to help them out sometime in the future.

That's one more thing I am continually learning - creativity and generosity often go hand-in-hand.

Parsec Again

I just got a copy of the full PDF of Parsec, complete with most of the layout and a lot of the artwork.  It's really cool to have it to go through - I find places where I'm proud of what I wrote, as well as places where I'm thinking "Oh crap, this is going to be published?"

The upside is seeing a project I worked so hard on develop further.  The downside is that I have 120 or so pages to go through and re-proofread and re-edit on top of everything else.

Still a labor of love, though.

Origins 2011

Last night I got back from Origins - this year, unfortunately, I was only able to be there for a single day.  I chose Saturday for obvious reasons - if you're just going to be there for one day, that's the one.  I didn't get a chance to do any actual gaming - I only really had the time to go through the exhibitor hall, talk to some people I needed to talk to (more on that later), go to the art room and a couple other things.  Still, I feel like I did a lot, and had a good time.  The convention seemed more subdued than last year, and it was also about 10 degrees cooler (though still warm).

At the very first booth we visited, my wife found something that I just had to buy: the original, out of print boxed set for the Lord of the Rings Adventure Game by Iron Crown Enterprises, circa 1991.  Here's a pic of the find:

I only had a chance to glance through the box, which is in decent condition for something 20 years old.  Inside are all of the books, character sheets, and un-punched cardboard cutouts of the characters and enemies that come up in the included adventure "Dawn Comes Early".  It is a rules-lite version of the Middle-Earth Roleplaying (MERP) system, but using d6s instead of percentile dice.

My wife promised she would play a one-shot with me, which is awesome.  That'll have to happen.

The rest of the dealer room felt very busy, but not packed or claustrophobic.  The room was dominated by a huge Mayfair Games area, including a dozen or so round tables, all of which were filled with players the whole time I was there. As usual, there was no Wizards of the Coast Presence, nor a White Wolf presence to speak of, and if Indie Press Revolution was there this  year, I did not see them, nor HERO Games, which is too bad.

Once again, business brought me to the Jolly Roger Games table.  I finally got to meet the artist for Parsec in person, which was cool, and the three of us got a chance to sit down and iron out the last details of what needs to happen before Parsec goes up on Kickstarter.  Overall, I'm very happy, and whatever happens with Kickstarter, I feel like I'm doing all I can.  I got to go through the contract I'll have with JRG, and speaking without a lot of experience, it seemed like a great contract to me, so that's a good thing as well.

It was cool to see the cover art out on the JRG table - one small step closer to A Real Thing.

I'll be posting about other things I saw at and around Origins this year, but one thing that somehow I hadn't heard about before is Cubicle 7's new LotR game, The One Ring.  (Is it the Chosen One at last, or do I need to keep designing Servants of the Secret Fire?)  I've looked around for more information on the game itself, and there isn't that much, from Cubicle 7 or otherwise.  Here is a site where they are promoting the game by posting characters who will be in it.

From what I've read, a few people are comparing The One Ring to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition - a big boxed set that contains all the things you need to run the game, like dice, character sheets, the rulebooks and that kind of stuff.  I personally am both excited and unhappy - excited because I think WFR is an awesome game design, but unhappy because I hope that The One Ring won't have a price point anywhere near $100 (there's a reason I really like WFR but don't own it - I can't afford to).

The model for the game is clearly it's own supplement treadmill, which is also unfortunate.  The first game will focus on Wilderland, Mirkwood and the Lonely Mountain in the wake of the destruction of Smaug.  Future releases will expand that focus to other parts of Middle-Earth.  One review that I found stated that the game's storyline assumes that the heroes of the Lord of the Rings do not exist, and explores the storyline in their absence (or, at the least, they are not brought together, etc.).  I think that idea is awesome, and is a game I would love to play, I just hope it isn't too expensive - and that it's, you know, a good game.

In August, almost certainly with a GenCon release, we'll find out.

That's enough for now - next time, some more from Origins, as well as other Columbus stuff.

The Theme is Burial

So much has been going on lately - a possible book deal with Chalice Press; three or four other book ideas with my collaborators over at Two Friars and a Fool; helping friends with a Vampire the Masquerade LARP for GenCon this year; a rough draft of the character sheet for Parsec; continuing work on a rough draft of Reckoning; and that on top of everything else.

Hence the longer-than-usual languishing of this blog.

There's a lot of writing inside me, and it is coming out like one of those old-school lawn sprinklers - in multiple streams and all over the freaking place.  That being said, if I didn't enjoy it, it would be the easiest thing in the world to just...stop.

But that won't happen.

I'll be at Origins this year for at least two days - Friday and Saturday.  I want to make sure I get a good look at the dealer floor, maybe try to awkwardly schmooze with people, and also check out the art room, since that was awesome last year.  Also, you know, Columbus is no slouch as cities go.  I wish I had more time to prep and run a game, but honestly we need a final character sheet for both Parsec and Reckoning before I want to do a full-on convention demo.  I feel like, especially for a convention game where people are paying to play, there should be a baseline of quality, and we're not quite there yet.  It's one thing to hand friends something you laid out yourself in Microsoft Word three years ago.  It's quite another thing to do that with strangers who you want to turn into fans, you know?

New Parsec RPG Sketches

Once again, I got to see some new sketches for the game.  Those of you who know where the art blog is for Parsec can check them out.  Otherwise - here are a few samples:

Yes, my friends, that's a cover mockup.  Not sure the buggy will stay in the final version.

That is a zero-gravity ju-jitsu knife fight.  Zero-gravity because people will fight there, and it will play out differently from fighting in gravity (yes, there are rules for that).  Ju-jitsu because when I imagined the fighting, it would quickly become close-quarters, and once you grab someone in zero-g, the two of you start spinning and jerking around with each push and pull, and something like full guard would help you keep control of an opponent, just like in gravity.  Knives because I don't imagine lots of discharging firearms in a spaceship, and because I really like an action sequence that results in globs of blood floating around the cabin.

This is an idea we talked out (the publisher, the artist and I did) about a flag-raising image, a take on Iwo Jima, but it is of Silva Energy raising their corporate standard over yet another fallen Latin American nation.  The new world order in the ruins of the old.  Impending privatized dystopia and all that.

There's more but you'll have to support the game when we go live on Kickstarter to see it. :)

Game Publication Snapshot: Parsec

I have a load of writing projects sitting around in various degrees of completion and neglect, and I'd like to take some opportunities to give snapshots of each project - partly to keep me enthusiastic, partly to tighten my focus for each, and partly to help me decide where to put my priorities.

The first project I need to cover is the Parsec RPG I wrote for Jolly Roger Games.  It was released as a PDF last year, and is currently moving toward a second incarnation as a hardbound book with full artwork.  We have an artist, and some of the art he's working on for the book can be seen on his blog here.

Right now, the goal is to put Parsec up on Kickstarter to raise the money for a full print-run.  I have no idea how this will go, but I promise that when it goes up on the site, you will hear about it from me constantly.

I'm still happy with Parsec as a setting, a system and a text.  "Industry" people who read it, the ones I've heard feedback from anyway, tend to get pretty excited about it.  Our artist is psyched, and there is already a writer who wants to put together a supplement for the setting focusing on Mars.

Right now, progress on Parsec depends on other people almost entirely.  Once it's up on Kickstarter, it'll be basically out of my hands (I've been helping the publisher figure out levels of support, rewards for various levels, and so on).  Because of that, I'm still excited about it, but there isn't much I need to do.  As the writer, the contributions I can make are narrowing towards zero...apart from running the game at conventions and talking about it periodically.

Parsec Artwork!

So, the artist we have for the Parsec RPG has set up a blog to show us the art he's working on and to get feedback.  He's said it's ok to post the link (as has the publisher), so I'm doing that.

Here it is.

I'm very excited that we're moving from the very small release in PDF form to putting the game on Kickstarter to go for a full print-run with art and the whole shebang.  More on that later, but seeing more artwork for the game definitely makes this stage more real to me.

I love to see these stages and even to be involved on some level.  I know this isn't always the case, and I'm enjoying it.

Honorable Mention

Got a mention on the All Games Considered podcast for Parsec and also this blog, so I thought I'd at least return the favor.  I've been a listener to AGC for about four years now, and it's a consistently excellent gaming podcast.  I've mentioned it more than once before, but again: go download and listen to All Games Considered.


And now, we return to your regularly-scheduled blather.

-The Management

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...

Parsec

Parsec, the hard sci-fi RPG I have been writing for Jolly Roger Games is nearing completion.  It'll be my first publishing credit in the gaming "industry", and even though the project has taken longer than I expected at first, it's still pretty exciting.

Project Juggling

Recently, the main challenge I have been trying to deal with in terms of writing and game design projects is that I have way too damn many.  My Google Docs account is brimming with dozens of ideas that started - that I often still care about and want to work on - but which languish for months or years.

What I really need is a publishing empire and a stable of freelancers who can take my brilliant ideas and run with them.

But that ain't going to happen.  (If my ideas were actually brilliant, it probably would, but alas...)

In the meantime I want to feel like I am making progress.  I am currently working on the last edit of the Parsec RPG for Jolly Roger Games, and it feels good to be actually finishing that project after all the work I've put into it.  There was a little hiccup there (I call it 2009) where I was working between 3 and 6 jobs at once, and Parsec fell by the wayside.  But I met with Jim Dietz at Jolly Roger Games when I was at Origins and I'm back at work and it feels good.

I know I like the beginning-feeling - I want that finishing-feeling more.

I was listening to an episode of The WritingCast on organization and the Stephen Covey rocks-pebbles-sand thing was mentioned again.  I thought I might be able to start there.  I'm not very good at organizing anything, so I thought maybe I should begin with humble aspirations.

Rocks
These are the big things that get worked on first.  Really, the big thing.  I want to keep this to one project at a time - I work long, irregular hours, and I've proven that I can't juggle more than one 'rock' effectively.

Right now my rock is Parsec, and for the last few days since Origins I've been pretty good at focusing on this project.  It is the closest to being done, and I think that for game designs that the closest project to being done should always be the rock.

Pebbles
One pebble is Horror!, which is currently being playtested by four different groups.  What this means is that there isn't much work I can do, or want to do, until results from those playtests are in.  I've made a few small tweaks to the playtest document, but I can't change much because part of what we're testing is the playtest document.  We know the game works and is fun - when we're there to run it.  But does our text actually work?  Only one way to find out.

Another pebble is Heroes of Karia.  We know that this game works incredibly well as a hack of Big Eyes Small Mouth.  That licence is untouchable and defunct as far as I know, however, so it has since become an original game system that in theory should work better than the extensive BESM hack we came up with by the end.  We know that the game is good enough to elicit well over 300 blog posts worth of original writing from the players.  It's the most generative game I've ever seen.  But does it translate to any other gaming group?  Remains to be seen.  I've run some alpha playtests that went well, but that's a long way from done.

The third pebble in the realm of game design is Servants of the Secret Fire, my Tolkienian heartbreaker.  (Yeah, yeah, I know)  The thing is, I'm passionate about Tolkien and about roleplaying games.  As far as actually creating anything like a Tolkienian roleplaying game, the only things that have ever come close are Burning Wheel and now Realm Guard.  Other games, like Decipher's Lord of the Rings RPG, are Dungeons & Dragons with a few tweaks.  ICE of course had MERP, and a lot of really well-developed adventures and scenarios and setting books, but the system itself was just Rolemaster.  Anyway, I care about this game, and I think it is turning out, if nothing else, as the game I will use to run stories in Middle-Earth.  When it's done, it will go up for free download, and we'll see what people think.

Sand
I cannot tell you how much sand I have.  Other RPG ideas, hacks and house rules that are stretching on into infinity, custom settings, races, locations, and meta-game mechanics for the various games I play - it goes on and on.  The real challenge here is keeping this stuff as sand, rather than letting it clump and swell and take up actual space that my other projects, ones that I have put the most work into and are the best-developed, genuinely need.

As I think about it, actually, that's really the challenge.  How do I keep sand...sand?  My intuitive answer is to just make the rocks and pebbles as big as I can so that I honestly won't have time to focus on the sand much. Knowing myself, though, I'll just neglect mundane tasks.

Anyone reading this face a similar problem?  How do you keep things straight?

The Home Stretch

I am grinding my way through the last manuscript for Parsec. I've decided to finish it before the end of this calendar year. I really hope I can pull that off while working 60-80 hours a week. Finishing this manuscript will be a big step in my mind - I started something almost a year and a half ago, and I'm close to completing my part of it. Its been a long process, one that I'd normally quit in the middle of and give up on. I've learned a lot of things through the process that I'll be talking about in the near future.

For now, I've really got to get back to writing.

Third Draft is Out

I just emailed out the third draft, what I'm calling the Gamma Draft, of the Parsec system to the publisher. I'm proud of where it is on the one hand, and on the other hand there is the feeling that I always get when I read what I've written - man, this is crap. I know that it probably isn't crap, but that's just the reaction I have to things I write most of the time.

Its been a long process, and it isn't over yet. Something like 14 months and counting.

I've run a couple playtests with the near-finished system a while ago, and they both went really well. Everyone had fun, they understood the system in a matter of minutes, and I got some solid new ideas to improve the whole thing (which have gone in already for the most part).

At the same time, there are always other ideas percolating. What tells me I'll be designing games for a long while is that when I get burned out thinking about one game, I just turn around to work on another. When time allows of course.

If only I was passionate about writing something lucritive, you know? Like writing self-help books, or writing how to get out of paying taxes if you're rich enough, or writing adolescent fantasy about vampires in high school. Of course, there are tens of thousands of people who are passionate about writing those things who never make a cent.

The average editor of a major fantasy or scifi magazine, for example, gets something like a thousand submissions a month, or 12k a year, of which they publish maybe 6-12; say 10 for the ease of math. That means if you've finished a story and sent it in to a magazine like that, you have a 1/1200 chance of being published. And that's just one publication - that's not paying the bills or anything wild like that.

Not writing crap is a good way to up those odds. Also submitting to lots of publications. Having a decent story moves you out of the outright slush-pile, maybe to the 1/120 range. So if you write 10 good, solid stories, and send them to every publication you can think of, you might get something in one of them.

Anyway, long tangent. The good news is - draft three is done and draft four, AKA the final draft, is coming.

Parsec Alpha Playtest 3

(I only say "Alpha" because I was present for it, and that's how I categorize them).

I just got done playtesting Parsec, with me present, for only the third time. This isn't a game that needs a lot of playtesting - I'm not doing anything revolutionary with the system, I'm just using existing tools in a few ways I've never seen before, and using them in usual ways that I think are better than I've seem some of them used before. There's also a lot of it that is just "Yeah, its a rules-lite science fiction game".

The playtest was designed to test the ship-to-ship combat system, and frankly, it went really well. The system came through about 90% unscathed - and in talking it out with the players afterward, I think I found all of the problems and also found fixes for them. I'll want to test those a little, but I really feel like it succeeded in multiple areas.

We had two walk-ins to the game who had no idea what they were sitting down for, and they both learned the system in about...maybe ten minutes. It is really simple, which is exactly what it should be. This is being handed pre-gen characters (I'm confident about character creation already, so didn't need to test that again) and having no backround whatsoever with the system (thought both were experienced gamers).

I also had two other game-designers from the area, one who created an Eberron version of Spirit of the Century and the other who is designing a game and is apparently talking to Palladium. The important thing is - they both seemed to be having fun, and they both quickly figured out exactly what they had to do.

I was very nervous (only my wife could tell) and it had some slow spots (of course) but it was fun and it worked. The wheels didn't fall off and nothing shorted out. It just sputtered a bit - basically, the system needs a tune-up, and I feel confident about what I have to do going forward.

So that's really good.

My God I might actually finish this thing (it's been a year of work in earnest).

One kid, one of the walk-ins, told me that he would keep an eye out for the game, and said flat out that when it comes out, he's buying it. And that's a walk-in. Just one kid? Yeah, I know. But when a playtester who walked in off the street says "I will buy this game", that's a fucking score in my book.

I feel really good about it. It helps balance out the infinite weight of the work I know I still have to do.

Parsec: Functionless Attributes

Now that I'm down to just three jobs, I remember that one of those jobs is writing Parsec, so I'm trying to buckle down and work on it in a more disciplined way.

As I go through the text once again, I have re-habilitated my rules on Status, which is basically a measurement of your social and economic standing in the setting. The thing about Status is that there are almost no actual rules attached to it. It is sort of a measurement, a note about your character like the place of their birth (but more important, I hope, for a game).

The reason I decided to bring Status back after I cut it out is that I want Parsec games to have a strong sense of economic realities of the setting injected into them. I don't want Star-Trekkish homogeneity because I think that's less plausible than faster-than-light travel. I think we're going to have phasers and warp drives before we have an economy without scarcity, without wealth on the one hand and the poverty on which wealth depends on the other.

But it does feel odd to put something forward as important when it won't be involved in spending points or rolling dice or doing the other things that attributes usually do in an RPG. Maybe its just that I don't want to tell players how Status must function, only that they have to take it into account in some way.

What do you think about something on your character sheet that doesn't really have rules attached? Should I give it leverage in the system or drop it, or is it not a problem?

New Try at an Intro for Parsec

In every RPG, there is always that starting page or so of "what is a roleplaying game" type stuff. I've been going through Parsec trying to come up with something that is actually interesting and helpful, which is a lot harder than it sounds (or, if you're a game designer, it is probably just as hard for me as it was for you).

Here is another try; feel free to comment. In section 1.0, I've said that Parsec is a "science-fiction roleplaying game", and a few other introductory things, before I go on to say this:

1.1 “Science-Fiction”

Science-fiction is a genre of fiction in which some of the assumptions about the world are changed. Often, a science-fiction story takes place in the future, as is the case with Parsec. It usually involves advanced technologies which are not available now, as well as other kinds of speculation around what society might look like or what people will do with themselves.
It is very common for science-fiction to be used to comment on our present lives. Sometimes an aspect of our everyday life is exaggerated to show what problems might come up, or sometimes a present trend is extrapolated into the future to show what the consequences of our actions might be. It is also common for science-fiction stories to ask the big questions – Why are we? Why are we here? What does it mean to be human? What are our social, technological, cognitive and spiritual limits?
Some science-fiction stories take science more seriously than others. In Parsec, we try to stick close to what we think is actually possible. We run a risk, of course, of embarrassing ourselves by saying that something happens 100 years from now when it is really around the corner. That’s why science-fiction like the Time Machine or Journey to the Center of the Earth is so interesting now, because we can see what people 100 years ago thought our world would be like. No doubt, we’re no more accurate. The only intentional scientific “cheat” is the Baeder Drive, which is a faster-than-light engine that can carry spaceships across vast distances very quickly. We intentionally don’t explain exactly how those work (yet). Otherwise, we think what we talk about is plausible.
In Parsec, because we try to stick to “hard science”, the world we depict intentionally exaggerates some of the things in our own world and time that we think are interesting. Human beings have journeyed into space and are building long-term homes outside of the Earth for the first time. The Baeder Drives are opening up exploration of the solar system and of distant stars and planets as well. Back on Earth, there is a great deal of conflict as human beings are basically split into two groups, the Insiders who have everything and the Outsiders who have almost nothing.

1.2 “Roleplaying”
As the description suggests, in Parsec the people playing the game take on roles – you portray characters that you imagine and create and then connect together in a story. Most of the players have one character that they focus on, like an actor in a play who only portrays one character, but one of the players needs to be the Director, who doesn’t portray any specific character. The Director guides the game and portrays the characters that you meet over the course of the story. The Director is also in charge of deciding how to implement the rules fairly, so she needs to be familiar with how Parsec works.
When you are a player in Parsec, you should have two things on your mind at the same time. The first is: “What would my character do?” Unlike in a play, there is no ‘script’ in Parsec. Your character can try to do anything you can think up. The way you decide what your character will try in any given situation is by imagining them as an independent person and imagining what they would do, how they would respond to a given situation. You also need to keep in mind what your character can do. Your character has particular skills and abilities and relationships that make up who she is, just like any person does – so she isn’t going to be good at everything, and some things will just be impossible. Your character is still basically human, after all.
The second thing for the player to keep in mind is: “What would be interesting or fun in this situation?” As we already said, your character can try anything, but remember that you are still working with the other players to come up with an interesting story that will be fun to play out through your characters with the help of the Director. Just because your character can try anything, however, doesn’t mean the she should try whatever comes to mind. Of all the options you have for your character in a given situation, choose the one that adds to the fun for the whole table whenever you can.
When you are the Director in Parsec, you can also boil your job down to two basic questions that you keep in mind. The first is “What happens next?” The players are responsible for making up their own minds, but you as the Director are in charge of how the world responds to the player-characters’ actions. Are they now in trouble with the law? Have they made an enemy or an ally who will help them in the future? What are their opponents thinking and doing while they plan their next move?
The second question to keep in mind as a Director is “How can I complicate this in an interesting way?” A story without conflict and adversity isn’t very interesting. You don’t want to crush the players and frustrate them all the time, but they will have more fun if their characters have to fight for what they want to accomplish.
If this seems like a lot to keep track of, don’t worry. Parsec has a lot of things that help you figure out what your character might do in a given situation, what kinds of choices would be most interesting, what happens next, and how to complicate your characters’ lives in interesting ways.

1.3 “Game”
Parsec isn’t just a way of playing the roles of characters in a story together, it is also a game. It has rules and systems and ways to resolve questions just like any other game. It is an interesting kind of game because either everyone wins or everyone loses. Everyone wins when the story moves forward, when everyone is having fun, and when your characters develop in interesting ways. Everyone loses when the action bogs down, when the story stops making sense, or when only a few of the people at the table are having fun.
One way that Parsec is a game is that it injects some randomness into what your describe your characters trying to accomplish. Otherwise, there would be a lot fewer surprises. Just like in real life, sometimes when you try something, you fail – it isn’t always your fault, but something happens to get in your way. Parsec uses dice to decide when this happens, so that there’s always a chance that someone will be surprised.
Parsec is also a game because it has specific rules, and there are better ways to use these rules to accomplish what you want. Part of Parsec is playing with the game itself, manipulating the rules that you find in this book to get the result that you want.
In Parsec, all of the rules boil down to rolling dice. You roll 6-sided dice and the numbers that come up on the dice tell you what happens. The way you decide how many dice to roll is a combination of factors – what your character is good at and what the situation that your character is in is like. The playres control what their characters are good at and the Director controls a lot of what the situation is like. An able character with a beneficial situation will mean that more dice are rolled. An unskilled character in unfavorable conditions will mean that very few dice are rolled.
What numbers you look for on the dice is also determined by what your character is good at. When you roll dice, you count “successes”, which are dice that show numbers that are equal to or higher than the “target number”. With a target number of 6, only 6’s rolled count as successes – and more successes mean that you’re more successful, so you want those. With a target number of 4, 4’s, 5’s and 6’s all count a successes. So you can already see that with 6 dice, for example, a target number of 4 is a lot better than a target number of 6 – it means the difference between averaging 1 success and averaging 3 successes! In Parsec, all target numbers are between 2 and 6, and target numbers are always determined by a character’s Skills, which we will discuss later.

A Little Parsec Update

So, things are looking good for the publication of Parsec. I'm being told that a fall release date is the goal for the game, and so I have re-commenced Operation Working My Ass Off to get what I would call a final rough copy ready for revision, art, layout and so on.

Every time I feel like I've got a handle on how much work this will involve, I realize that it will involve significantly more work than I'd expected. I definitely understand why so many indie games are so thin!

But I continue to really enjoy the work, and sometimes I have trouble stopping to do other things I need to do, like school assignments or other work. Which is a good thing.

Beta Playtest Before Alpha - Madness!

This is going to be really brief.

Friends of mine graciously ran a beta playtest (that is, a playtest at which I was not present) for new years. I got pages of responses back from them that will be extremely helpful. Its incredibly nerve-wracking to talk about how people are critiquing something I've been working on mostly in a vacuum for months now. Brief overview: character creation got rave reviews, and most of the rest of it was broken to some degree. But that's to be expected.

I also recently got to run a playtest at the local game store. This tested character creation and the basic dice-system, and also gave me a chance to test a system for players to create the setting together, as well as the situation for the game in particular, to varying degrees of detail. This is going to be added to the base system, before the character creation and system chapters, because I think it was very cool. And you can ignore it if you have a Director who wants to put a lot of time into the game. Brief overview: its nerve-wracking to playtest your own game, but I really loved it. I'm still worried about having far less time and far fewer playtests than even other small-scale games, but I'm also confident that I can pull it off. If I wasn't, I wouldn't be able to bring myself to work at all.

In other news, I might be delving back into Horror! soon. There's some interest, perhaps. I hope. More on that as things develop.