Why do Commercial RPGs Fail?

There’s a pretty short list, really.  Avoid those and you will avoid most of the pitfalls that can keep your game from being a success:

1. Lack of Promotion: Before getting into anything about the writing or content of the RPG itself, this is the single biggest reason why an RPG would fail. It doesn’t matter if you’ve written a masterpiece; if no one knows your RPG exists, then it will fail. Make sure everyone does, and even a mediocre RPG stands a chance of doing well.
Ironically, this is one of the areas where many would-be writers fail to pay proper attention; they discount the whole concept as though “if you build it, they will come” was the only guideline they needed. 

2. Unclear Writing: the game might be full of potential greatness, but if no one can actually make sense of what you’re saying, you’re fucked. Get an editor.

3. Too Much Front-end Commitment: if you have to memorize 10000 words of jargon, or remember that some stupid word with no vowels in it is what they use instead of “shield” in the game setting, or in some other way have to learn massive amounts of stuff UP FRONT, from the beginning, that relates only to your game, odds are most people won’t bother.

4. The System Sucks:  Of course, system is one of those things that falls on a spectrum: you say “GURPS” and one gamer might get wood at the thought of all that delicious point-buy and pseudo-realism, while another might cringe.  But there’s that, and then there’s systems that just suck.  If you have to do quadratic equations to play your game, or if you are missing a certain table vital to determining outcomes of most battles, or if there’s a low-level spell in your game that basically makes the entire party invulnerable forever, then you’ve got a system that just plain sucks ass.  Some people resolve this through playtesting; I think its important besides that to have a “mechanics editor”, someone apart from the regular editor (the guy who makes sure you don’t have the aforementioned crap writing), that specializes in understanding how games work.  Your regular editor need not be that (shit, it could be someone who’s never played a game in their life), but your “mechanics editor” should be a guy who can look at something you just wrote and explain “that means that in your game nobody could ever have a high enough skill to  successfully drive at speeds above 30km/hr”, or whatnot.

And finally:
5. Pretentiousness & “Too Weird to Live”: Both of these are categories of things that, one must admit, have had successful games.  Of course, they’ve had far more utter failures.  Generally speaking, the pretentious games that succeeded were ones that were not derivative of existing pretentious games.  The whole point of a game full of pretentiousness is to make its reader feel like they’re special just for “getting it”; if you are doing something that is an obvious cheap copy of an existing Pretentious work, you’ll never get there.  Consider how Vampire spawned an entire brood of copycat “dark”, “gothy”, "edgy", “storytelling”, “deep” games (i.e., 50 metric fucktons of bullshit), none of which anyone remembers today.

As for just-plain-weird games, their problem is that they’re weird.  That makes it hard for people to get the point of them, and odds are they’ll fail.  Bizarre settings that have no obvious sense of cultural connection to anything we know tend to be pretty hard to roleplay in.  Your best shot in these cases is to try to make your writing as clear as possible, do massive amounts of promotion in the hopes of finding someone who digs your endless cultural essays on “the tgunslanttrhru rituals of the Ksaltohyanu”, and pray that said 'someone' creates a small band of obsessive fanatics who’ll buy everything you write, guaranteeing a tiny but loyal customer-base. 

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(reposted April 26, 2013; from the old blog)

Continuing To Confront the Fake-Outrage Brigade; and Getting Just a Bit Sappy

So I don't have much time to be writing today; I'm about to rush off to a local gaming Con sponsored by the city government; yes, Uruguay has turned into one of those weird socialist countries that have state-sponsored Gaming events.  Since I was especially invited, I'd best not be more than fashionably late.

But I can't avoid addressing yet again the assholes who continue to try to slander me as a homophobe, making up that lie because it is much easier to get a (righteous) response from people at the suggestion that I'm a homophobe or transphobe than it would be to give anyone to give a shit that I hurt your feelings about elfgames.

It pisses me off immensely, these rpg.net and SA-goons spreading this meme about me being homo- or trans-phobic.  And you'd think that the fact that, as far as I know, I'm the FIRST fucking guy to ever put a transgender character on the cover of an RPG rulebook would be proof enough that they're full of shit.

Luckily, the tide seems to be somewhat turning. A significant number of people have spoken out in support of me, in exhaustion at the Outrage Brigade's antics, and in condemnatory suspicion of their utterly unsubstantiated claims.  Even in some of the places where these guys reign supreme, they've actually had to face people demanding that they offer up some kind of proof.

So apparently, these guys have scoured my blog with a fine-toothed comb in a desperate effort to come up with some kind of evidence that I'm in fact the raging LGBT-hater they want to make me out to be. You'd think if their claims was true that would be easy, but of course, that hasn't worked out for them.  Instead, they've managed to come up with only two frankly absurd exhibits that they want to try to make people believe is 'proof', one extremely old the other very recent.

The first is something from the archives of my old blog, a throwaway comedic line from a blog entry where I was bemoaning the shift in demographics in gamer's ages that happened in the 90s. There, I commented along the lines that before White Wolf's games came out, the average gamer was 13 and obsessed with barbarians, big guns, mecha, etc., and the hobby catered to that; after White Wolf, the gamer being catered to was a college kid "wearing all black, listening to the Cure and questioning their sexuality".  The point being that the shift in age-range from making games to draw in young teenagers to making games for pretentious college kids did not have a good effect on the hobby.

Now let's note something: this was from a blog entry that I wrote something like 8 or 9 YEARS ago.  Eight or nine years ago, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were against gay marriage; as were the majority of the population of the U.S. (I'll note that even 8 or 9 years ago, I was FOR gay marriage).

I could point out that right around that same time, I made a blog entry about a kid named Zach Stark who had been forced by his parents to be interned in a 'gay reparation' (read brainwashing) clinic against his will. Some of you might remember the case, you can read about it here. I wrote about that too, expressing my outrage and trying to draw attention to what had been done to him, linking to a campaign that tried (and failed) to get action to have him released (in the end, as you can see in wikipedia, the 'therapy' didn't work, surprise, surprise).

So right around the same time, you see me trying to defend the rights of a gay kid. 

But more importantly, in 8 years language and humor have changed, I probably wouldn't use that line about "questioning sexuality" now in that same exact way.  Back then, I sometimes still used "gay" as a synonym for "lame", which I wouldn't do now either.  The point is, even in the context of history, while I've continued to evolve, by the standards of 2005 you could say I was already ahead of the curve in terms of a straight guy supporting gay rights.


The only other quote they got to use against me? A line from a very recent DCC campaign update; where it's not even my own words, but a 10 year old who's a player in that group.  I reported how he's playing a wizard that changes gender when he spellcasts, something he's been not at all bothered by;  I was inspired by that (and trying to make sure that the kid saw his character's gender fluidity as something not unique in the setting) to introduce an order of wizards who are all in some form or another not 'cisgendered'.
Now, I called these guys the "Grand Inclusive & Non-Hierarchical Azure Order", which maybe some people interpreted as mockery; the thing is, anyone who's been reading my DCC updates knows that the entire campaign has been a little bit silly, and this order are just about the least silly thing in it.  As I've said in other DCC updates, the Azure Order are both powerful and the 'good guys', using their powers to help protect the helpless from the many horrors of the post-apocalyptic fantasy setting they're in.  But it would have stood out like a sore thumb if they weren't at least a tiny bit silly, because EVERYTHING in that campaign has been a little bit silly.
The part that has been used as proof against me, somehow, is that my young player, when invited to join the order, said "no thanks" because he felt completely comfortable and included in his current group (the PC party).  He later changed his mind and joined after all, I'll note, when he cannily realized that he could raid the Azure Order's library for spell research purposes.  That's a good gamer if ever I saw one!
Oh yes, he also referred to his character as "trigendered".  I don't know where he got the term from, but it was his term, not mine; so really, if you have to resort to using a term I quoted a fifth grader as using (and not one I see anything particularly wrong with!), you've pretty much got nothing.

Seriously, if this is the best they can do, it's pathetic.


But anyways, it always pisses me off when the anti-pundit crowd resort to making up lies about me to try to "get me"; but this particular bit of libel bugs me a lot more than most.

I have to admit bothers me in a particular way; maybe more now than it ever would have in the past.  I don't have kids of my own, but in the last two years, for the first time, I've had a couple of kids (one in his mid-teens, the other the aforementioned 10 years old) playing in my gaming group.  They're the sons of a very dear friend of mine; whose family we've spent a lot of time with. I'm very close to both of those kids and would be proud if I were ever to have a kid like either of them. 

The older one identifies as straight, the younger one has not said outright one way or the other but has been really happy playing a wizard who changes into a girl when he spellcasts.  And just the thought that, if either of them were in fact LGBT and should happen to end up finding something on the internet that would suggest to them that I would hate them for who they are, it absolutely fucking sickens me to think that for a second they might imagine (because of these what these assholes wrote) that I wouldn't accept and love them unconditionally.

Sorry for getting sappy there, but it's true. And I want it on record as much as possible, just in case.  For my awesome DCC player, for any theoretical future kid, nephew, niece, whatever.  Don't believe for a second I wouldn't be on your side, don't ever think you couldn't tell me anything.

RPGPundit

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Arrows of Indra Class Skills And Old-School "Character Powers"

Arrows of Indra has an awful lot of skills for an "old school" game.  These are, as I mentioned in my previous entry on the caste/background skills, not really set up in the same way as players of more modern games would think of as typical skills; rather, the background skills mostly tend to be things that, while conventional as skills, are not meant to be directly related to adventuring as such (though many will certainly be put to very good use by creative players), and the Class skills are really closer to "special abilities" than to anything we'd normally define as "skills" in the post-3e-D&D sense.

There are in fact a few skills in AoI that do fit the standard; "theology" for Priests or "disguise" for Thieves, for example.  But in AoI the more basic "spells" for Priests and Siddhis are found on the "skills" table, and not because they're in any way rolled as skills (they aren't; each occasion where you get one means you can use it once per day).  Likewise, fighters and rogues get proficiencies (bonuses to using particular weapons) from the skill tables, as well as other things like Leadership, or Urban Knowledge. 

Human characters get two initial rolls on the skill tables, non-humans get one; that's at first level, and after that any PC gets one skill roll per level.  Optionally, players can simply choose one of the skills from the basic table, but doing that they won't get a chance to choose any advanced skills until all the skill slots from the basic table have been filled. If they roll, there's a chance they can obtain an Advanced skill earlier.

All of this brings up what I think is an element of my own old-school perspective: there are some people who think that part of old-school play means "don't give the PCs too much stuff", that the idea of a PC getting some new power or bonus every single level is somehow anathema.  I don't think that's true. 

See, I think that this is a reaction against something that happens in some new-school gaming; two "somethings", actually.  The first, being that characters become quite overpowered outside the more traditional scale of old school D&D.  The second, that mechanics like 3.x's feats create a situation where people engage in a type of character-building that puts the focus on getting the right bonuses, on pre-planning how your character gains in power, and that often slows down the game as players have to choose between series of feats with pre-requisites for other feats, etc. etc., and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of any old-schooler who feels character progression should be an organic thing.
That sort of thing is certainly not within the aegis of "old school".

But I think there's nothing in old-school that is against the idea as such of player characters being able to regularly increase in power as they go along, including gaining something every level. Magic-users have always gained at least one spell each level, thieves always gained percentage skills each level. So the key in Arrows of Indra was to create a skill/power system that didn't fall into the aforementioned traps of 3.x-style "CharOp".  In AoI this was worked out by having gains generally be gained through random determination from a set and limited list; no picking and choosing from a huge variety of powers.

As far as power-level, being an "Epic India" RPG, Arrows of Indra is supposed to be more powerful than your average D&D game.  Even at mid-levels, fighter characters can be frighteningly competent; and while there's a chance a Siddhi may not cast as many spells in total as a D&D 1e magic-user of his equivalent level, he can theoretically (between class skills and Enlightenment Powers) gain some very powerful spells at a very early point in his career. But again, all of this tries to stay within the old-school affinity; what you don't see are feats that involve tricks that operate at the level of mechanics, a wide variety of "conditions" and condition-affecting feats, or character stuff in general that has more to do with gaming-the-system than with roleplaying a character in the world.

So in all that, I suggest, Arrows of Indra provides one way that you might "do it right" when it comes to innovative design that still falls entirely under the style of old-school play.

All that said, I think now that if I were to do something along similar lines to AoI's system but intended for some other setting, I might simplify the mechanics of character advancement even further, while at the same time using the "random advancement" method to encompass even more of what a character does. I won't have a chance to work out this idea with Dark Albion, as it won't be having its own rules-system; but possibly we'll be seeing the product of these thoughts in my next project after Albion.

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If You're Going to Hate Me, At Least Do It For Stuff I Actually Believe

Well, I can't say I didn't expect it.  The Swine are up in arms, the big (I should say HUGE) initial success and popularity of the new D&D release has them furious, and especially furious at the fact that people they hate, namely yours truly and Zak S., were credited as Consultants (some of them acting as though it was a huge surprise, as if it hadn't been something I'd been open about all along, and as if they hadn't all previously expressed outrage back when it was announced two years ago).

For the most part, my attitude toward them is this:

What I think is especially funny is when people who despise D&D and would never have bought it anyways in a million years say "because this guy was working on it, that's why I would never buy it!" as if otherwise they'd have stacked their shelves full of WoTC products.  They really think they're fooling someone.

And some of the comments are just hilarious;  one person suggested that the best way to counteract the effect of our evil would be to give to some kind of charity.  I would like to know just what charity would need to be donated to in order to offset the evil that Zak and I represent... I mean seriously, what is the cause that both of us will be deeply opposed to?  Some kind of pro-censorship organization, I suppose...

On the other hand, there was at least one comment  I didn't find funny at all. More than a few people have spoken with praise to Wizards of the Coast for the inclusion of this statement in the section on Gender in the D&D rules:

"You don't need to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender. The elf god Correllon Larethian is often seen as androgynous or hermaphroditic, for example...You could also play a female character who presents herself as a man, or a man who feels trapped in a female body, or a bearded female dwarf who hates being mistaken for a male. Likewise, your character's sexual orientation is for you to decide."

Now, Bruce Baugh made a post on his G+ stream where he stated his problem with me and Zak being hired being that we would 'be opposed to the very options of inclusion that are being praised'.  He invited people to comment, even supposedly in defense of myself and Zak, so I wrote this on his thread:

---
Your statement about "options for inclusion" was pretty vague, so maybe you'll want to clarify what you meant by that.  However, at the moment as much as I wrack my brain I can't think of what you could possibly have meant other than the comment on gender found in the new D&D rules.

If that's the case, I think you're engaging in a serious injustice, be it accidental or intentional.

I was completely and explicitly in favor of Wizards including that, just as they did.  Contrary to what you have implied I have never  and would never be opposed to inclusion on the basis of gender or sexual orientation.  I have always been firmly in support of gay rights; I have had gay and bisexual players in my gaming groups, my wife (The Wench) and I lived for many years with a gay couple renting our spare bedroom, I have been a supporter of LGBT rights in Uruguay (which is one of the most progressive countries in South America on that note, where not only has gay marriage and adoption been legalized but anyone from the age of 12 onwards has a right to choose the gender stated on their identity card), and to my knowledge (maybe someone can point me to a pre-existing work that proves otherwise, but if so I did not hear of it) my Arrows of Indra is the first RPG to feature a transgendered character on the cover.

It's true that in some areas I would be seen as "conservative" by the broken dualistic concepts the U.S. paradigm is stuck with; but this is not one of those areas.

And again, many people  reading this might have legitimate reasons for hating me, because of my position on RPGs being radically different than theirs or even for other political stances I might have, but if anyone hates me because they think I'm a homophobe, they're dead wrong. If you or others want to cry angry tears over the fact that the new edition of D&D is closer to my vision of gaming than yours, that it represents a return to old-school thinking instead of pseudo-intellectual 'theory' bullshit or pseudo-artistic pretentiousness, then by all means continue, but I'm sure you can all find more than enough things to hate about me that are actually true, rather than misinformed.
---



I guess he didn't like that, though, and I guess his claims to fair debate were just bullshit, because he went on to block me and (I presume, I can't say for sure since he blocked me) to delete my post.  So I'm reposting it here.

It's very telling that the people who hate me (and Zak) can't just be honest about the reasons why; it seems silly and petty to say "this person should never be hounded out of his job because he has a different idea about RPGs than I do!" or even "This well-known RPG writer, blogger, and rpg forum owner said mean things about me! How dare they listen to him or take him seriously as a writer on RPGs!"
No, instead, they feel like they have to make up LIES about me being homophobic (or racist, or other such inventions).  I'm sure in their pseudo-activist minds they justify it by thinking "well, he doesn't agree with me on rpgs so he MUST deep down really be a neo-nazi or something, because anyone who disagrees with me is clearly evil in every way!"

And that's the sort of bullshit I just won't abide by.

Finally, I should note that while I did get paid some seriously fat cash, I do not actually gain royalties from D&D.
So haters: no matter how much you hate the fact that I mattered to the design process of D&D, and that in spite of your wishing it weren't so I continue to be successful, your buying or not buying D&D products does not enrich or impoverish me in any way.  You can go forth and safely purchase D&D.  Go on... I mean, surely, you were actually planning to buy D&D, right? It couldn't possibly be that you're mostly from the crowd of perennial D&D-despisers who would never have bought the thing no matter what, right?

RPGPundit

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The D&D BASIC PDF is out! Well... Sort of. Plus: RPGPundit's Revenge. Plus: A First Easter-Egg!

First, the big news, which if you're a gamer you've probably heard everywhere already.  The fifth edition of D&D is now officially here.

Actually, it's here. You can download the basic PDF.

Only I want to make something very clear: this is not really the basic PDF.  Not the one I'll put my final seal of approval on, anyways.  Note that this is the "0.1" edition.  This is intentional; we have between now and sometime around the end of the year to make sure everything is really right, and then the 1.0 version will be coming along, which will be much more complete and final.

Do keep that in mind when you're looking at these rules.

Also, take a look at the credits.

No, not because I'm in them. Well, yes, because of that of course! Because Fuck-You to all the morons (and we all remember who they were, even if they will now try to pretend it wasn't them) who actually thought I wasn't  involved in the D&D project.

But actually, what I really wanted you to take a look at is the little blurb that comes right AFTER my name in the credits.  The little disclaimer there right below it.

Because you might just have skipped right over that little blurb otherwise, and I thought you should see the message for old-schoolers that's there.

RPGPundit

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Famous Pipe Smokers

Today's famous pipe smoker was famous for smoking a pipe, somewhat less famous for his interest in the occult, and more than a little famous for having written a few amazing stories:

Yes, W. Somerset Maugham was a magician of the Golden Dawn, he pissed off Aleister Crowley by basing his "Oliver Haddo" on him, he wrote some impressive short stories, and he was a pipe smoker.


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Early LoO Day: The Promethean Road

I usually try to post about Lords of Olympus on Friday; but I’m about to enter a very busy period of work which might keep me away from my regular computer stuff. 

As such, I thought I’d post a day early, talking about one of my favorite powers: the Promethean road.

This is a power mainly for mortals, but also for those scions of olympus (or titans) who are really on the margins, someone who can’t dare to get the boon of World-walking from a legitimate source. In the Lords of Olympus setting, fire wasn’t the only gift Prometheus gave to mankind.  To the initiates of the most secret mysteries, he uncovered (in his egalitarian zeal) the secrets of crossing between the worlds.  In most worlds where magic is known of at all, it would be seen as one of the greatest powers any mortal can attain to.

Its hugely difficult to do, it takes 12 hours of intense ritual, with trance work and mind-altering drugs. In its basic form, it doesn’t allow you to even sense where portals can be found, meaning that you have to discover these by other means (research, or more often known locations passed down through mortal secret-societies as fiercely guarded mysteries).  There is an advanced form, which lets you operate on all three roads, and allows you to use a scrying device to seek out openings.
And once you’re on the road, its as though the divine power of the road itself knows you shouldn’t be there.  So its hugely difficult to obtain, requires that you find an opening, and then you enter onto this interdimensional pathway stoned out of your mind and with everything around you trying to kill you.  Clearly, its a means for the desperate.  It would be something that would be open (among heroic mortals) only to the highest initiates, people who have trained and disciplined themselves to be able to survive in these conditions, and have the means to protect themselves as they travel along the pathways to other worlds.

As a power, its clearly what you might call a “sub-optimal” choice; but in terms of roleplaying potential, its awesome.

RPGPundit

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(originally posted April 25, 2013; on the old blog)