The Greed Factor

School is over (I now have a Bachelor of Science in Christian Ministry) and I've been looking at some of my various writing projects to decide where to pick things back up.

There's The Gramarye 2.0, of course. It's a magic system design guide, using the original Gramarye rules as a worked example and base to start from. I've got a lot of it written, but I've got quite a bit more to go. It's going to stay on the back burner for awhile longer, though, because I want to work on some setting material first.

The first setting is an unusual superhero setting, inspired in part by Strikeforce Morituri, but with a rather different twist on the "fatal flaw" bits. If I make it a mini-setting magazine article, it'll get about 8,000 words. (The length of "[[http://www.fudgefactor.org/2004/04/department-13.html|Department 13]]". But like D13, it could be expanded quite a bit, either with supplementary articles, or by making the core article longer.

The other is a much bigger setting… can't really do it justice in just 8,000 words. If I wrote it for Fudge Factor, it'd definitely be a multi-part article. This one is inspired by many things… it's a space opera born out of my love of Star Wars, Babylon 5, and lots and lots of fiction. For years my wife and I have toyed off and on with developing a sci-fi setting, but we couldn't figure out what the "hook" would be… what would make this setting interesting enough to stand out? I think I've got something, and it's rather simple, but I think it will work.

Now here's where I hit my real dilemma. Fudge Factor needs more articles. And I could certainly write up any of this stuff into several articles for FF, from stand-alone mini-settings to serialized maxi-settings. But what's frustrating me is that I believe I could write this stuff for money. If D13 had been a Pyramid Online article, I could have made over $250 in cash, or $500 in SJ Games product. (And I could finally get Munchkin and all those card games I keep saying are too expensive. It's kind of hard to give away something that you realize you could have made more than pizza money on.)

Since the beginning of the idea for expanding The Gramarye, my intent has always been to publish it as a PDF for money. And now that selling PDF's is easier than ever with RPGNow and the like, the barrier to entry is almost non-existent. And now I've got some other ideas that I think will sell at least moderately well… enough to make it worth the trouble, at least. I don't expect to get rich or support anybody with an RPG writing income, but it'd be nice to get some extra money and the recognition of having my work purchased by the discerning public.

So here I am, begging members of [[http://fudge.phoenyx.net/|Fudge List]] to write something for Fudge Factor because we're low on articles, and at the same time thinking that my ideas are "too good" for FF and that I ought to be selling them. I wish FF could pay its authors… then I could write for FF and get paid at the same time.

I may work it both ways. I published 8,000 words of D13 in FF. But I could easily write another 8,000 words and more. So maybe I'd write about 20,000 to 40,000 words total… around 30 to 60 pages, and publish it as a PDF with art and a professional look. I could do the same with the other stuff… write a "teaser" article, complete but sketchy like D13, and then write an expanded treatment to sell. The article could serve as advertising… but it could also serve to satisfy readers' appetites and cut into sales of the PDF.

What do you think? Would you pay $3 to $12 for a 30-60 page PDF book based on a ten page article that you liked? As a specific example, would you pay $7 for a 40-page Department 13 with art, which is four times longer than the article? How much would you pay?

Betraying your favorite game

Jay on Shining Dodecahedron talks about [[http://bigd12.blogspot.com/2005/05/doth-not-appetite-alter.html|disillusionment with the Hero System]]. In short, his preference has grown away from "crunchy" rules and toward rules that are simple and support the kind of fast-moving style he's grown to prefer. But the interesting thing is, he feels like he is "betraying" his long-time favorite system.

I can sympathize… I've gone through the same thing. I played the Hero System exclusively for seven years. I picked it up right as I left high school and, having played primarily D&D up until then, I was enchanted by the point-build system and the detailed combat system. After seven years, two years of running a fanzine, and 27 pages of carefully-crafted house rules, I suddenly realized that I didn't like The Hero System any more. Combats took hours, creating a character took hours (and a spreadsheet), and the system had fundamental flaws that couldn't be overcome without substantially changing some core features. I wanted more story and simpler rules. But I was part of a community. I didn't feel loyalty to the system itself, but I was connected to a lot of people who were devoted to the system. Leaving the Hero System behind meant disconnecting myself from the community.

In the past couple years, I've been facing a similar situation. I'm the owner of the Fudge List, I am the Editor-in-Chief of Fudge Factor, and I've been a player in the Fudge community for over ten years. And I don't play Fudge the way most people do. I've become very frustrated with the dice method not doing what I want and not being fixable without substantially changing the system. I don't feel a strong connection to the community, even though I hold a prominent position in it. And the idea of abandoning Fudge and its community entirely is difficult to swallow. It's been a big part of my life for about half of my adult years.

See, I'm not the type to play lots of game systems. I pick one system, and I use it for everything I play. The benefits of not having to learn new systems outweighs the rules not addressing the nuances of genre. So when I get dissatisfied with a system, I usually start looking for a new do-everything system to replace it entirely.

Which is odd, since I'm playing Dogs now, which isn't a "universal" system. Dogs is a lot more "rule laden" than the way I play Fudge right now. Or not so odd… I'm in a state of trying to figure out just what it is I want from the rules and from my roleplay in general. Maybe Fudge, in some variation, will satisfy me in the long run. I'm not convinced that rules with a Narrativist bent are really what I want. (Do I want the outcome of a scene to really be disconnected from my character's abilities? In Dogs, sometimes the difference between success and failure isn't what my character can do, but how much importance I, as the player, have put on an aspect of my character.)

I'll have to see how I feel about it when I've got a few sessions of Dogs under my belt.

The Raise/See mechanic of Dogs

The other day, my wife asked me something that had been in the back of my mind, but I hadn't really examined in depth yet… essentially, "Is the whole Dogs Raise/See exchange unnecessary, because you can compare the two dice totals and see who is going to win?"

Normally, I'd look at a game like this and think the mechanics were wonky… on the face of things, I agree with her. But I'd heard so much about Dogs and how great it was, I was just ignoring that bit until I'd seen how the game plays out.

Of course, I did do a little fiddling with some imaginary dice to see if the guy on the bottom could finagle the outcome by careful maneuvering of the dice… something like Take the Blow now, even though I don't have to, so I can save my big die to Reverse the Blow, or force you into "overkill"… using twelve or thirteen pips to See an eleven-pip raise, for instance.

I think it's possible, but I have a feeling it doesn't come up very often. In my few random pools of dice, I could never get the guy with the lower total to come out on top.

Of course, that initial roll isn't the end… the characters can activate Traits, Things or Stats, and all those things can bring in more dice to shift the direction of the conflict.

But this brings me round to something I read on The Forge the other day. Essentially, the idea is that the Dogs can win just about any conflict they want… the point of the game isn't winning conflicts. It's about the authority and responsibility the Dogs possess and how they use that power. Yes, they can win the conflict… but should they, and what will be the end result when they do?

To put aside the issues of the Dogs power, I think the mechanics still have something more to offer. I touched on this yesterday… even if the outcome is clear, the rules force you to play through the events. They create story elements that may have never occurred if you'd just said, "Roleplay how you beat him." While you may know you'll ultimately lose, having to roleplay your See to his Raise may reveal something about your character or the ongoing story that wouldn't have occurred to you. It adds spice, and my scant experience tells me I want to try this a lot more before I discard it as being a overly complex for "roll your dice, the highest total wins."

Dogs: Session 1

Finally got started with [[http://www.lumpley.com/dogs.html|Dogs in the Vineyard]] today. We only got through character creation, which we don't normally do "in person"… my groups tend to create characters with a lot of time to think them over and discuss them with the GM in email and in person. But folks on The Forge insist that folks should try playing Dogs exactly as the rules are written, because it's not always clear why the rules work the way they do. So I'm following them to the letter to see what effect it has.

(Recall that in Dogs, the characters play "watchdogs" of their religion in the Old West, riding among the towns of the Faithful, making sure everyone is on the straight and narrow. This is more than rigid control… demons are real, and sinning allows the demons to attack the town. So one man's "little sin" can escalate to hate and murder if it's not nipped in the bud. And being God's right hand on Earth, the Dogs dispense mercy and justice… sometimes with a bullet.)

Character creation isn't quite so straight-forward as with most other systems. At the end, each character goes through an "initiatory conflict"…. The characters have just finished their training and initiation at the Dogs Temple when they start the game. These hoped-for accomplishments are flash-backs to some defining moment in their training, to determine how the moment went. They are presented in the form of, "I hope I (did something important)."

The first one was pretty straight-forward. The hope was, "I hope I exorcized a demon." The character is pretty spiritual (which contrasts nicely with the city-trained doctor who doesn't really believe in demons or faith healing, even though he's of the Faithful), and fighting demons is what he expects to do in the field.

So we, mostly me and the player, but everyone else can through in their thoughts, devise a scene in which we get to find out whether his hope is fulfilled. This was easy… I just stole the example out of the book. The teachers have encountered a man possessed by a demon, and the PC enters the scene when he's led to a room and locked in with the possessed man. Experienced exorcists are standing outside in case it all goes wrong, of course. And we play out the conflict using Dogs conflict rules (slightly altered, because the GM never gets to escalate). And the conflict went pretty smoothly… Brother Silas whips out some Ceremony, calling on his "I'm very spiritual 2d8" Trait to handily banish the demon. Now he gets to put the Trait, "I exorcized a demon 1d6" on his character sheet.

At this point, we've been debating about how to frame the conflicts for their accomplishments. Their desires are not quite so concrete, but the conflict has to be a concrete representation of their desired accomplishment.

The city doctor wants to prove that he's not like all the city folk back East (where he's from), because the Faithful believe those back East are all decadence and sin. Problem is, if he's been accepted into the Dogs Temple, he's been called by God and his call has been confirmed by the Elders… he's already been proven that he's not like those other folk. So here we punted, and fell back onto something more concrete… "I hope I save someone's life." That's an easy one… while they're out doing target practice outside the town, someone from a near-by farm comes running up. His little sister has been mauled by a dog and is dying. I was kind of mean… Brother Benjamin's "excellent doctor's bag 2d6" was back in his room and there was no time to go get it. He had to save the girl's life without his tools.

This is where Dogs' conflict is fun. This isn't just "roll against your First Aid skill, -3 for how badly she's hurt." It plays out like any other conflict… the GM gets a handful of dice to challenge your attempt with, and you do the whole bidding war thing.

Brother Benjamin doesn't have a lot of dice against the default I get to roll for these initiatory conflicts. And I rolled mighty fine… and I make the first Raise with a pair of 6's, and blood sprays from the wound in her neck as she thrashes and the man trying to stop the blood slips. He can't match that without Taking the Blow, and he's going to take minor some psychological Fallout after it's all over. We're looking at our dice, and I'm seeing that I've got the upper hand… she's going to die if he doesn't have any tricks up his sleeve. And he's got one. At the moment he sees her wounds, he yelled for boiling water, clean bandages, and needle and thread. Just as the girl's pulse is fading (my last Raise), he gets his needle and thread… which gives him another 1d6 to throw for bringing an Item into play. It's a close one… but he rolls just high enough to See my last Raise (he's sewing up the wound), and he's got one die left over to Raise with, a 1… but I'm out of dice and have to Give. He wins the conflict by a hair, and her life is saved. Whew. That was fun, and it was nothing like "roll against your First Aid skill at -3." New trait, "I saved a girl from dying 1d6."

Back to the last player. She's got this older brother who is a Dog, and he's got a great reputation at the Dogs Temple. While she idolizes her brother, she also lives in his shadow… everyone in the temple is comparing her to him, and she feels she's coming up short. Her desire is, "I hope I live up to my brother's reputation." This was really hard to find some conflict to represent, because we first had to put her brother's reputation into concrete terms… just what was it he was so admired for? "Being a really great guy" is nice, but why, exactly, do people think he's great? We finally decided on shooting… her brother taught her to shoot, and she's a great shot, better than her brother. So they're out on the practice range, and one of her teachers says, "See that tree way out yonder? Your brother shot a limb off of it when he was out here." And there it became very concrete… can she shoot a limb off that tree? Sure she can… she's got a lot of dice she can throw into this one. The neat thing is, we do the whole bidding thing, Raising and Seeing, over one pull of the trigger. I go first, with a pair of 8's… "There's a mighty strong breeze today, and those limbs are swaying in the wind." She couldn't beat sixteen with just two dice, so she had to Take the Blow. (Two dice is Block or Dodge, three dice is Take the Blow, and you get Fallout.) We had some trouble deciding just what "taking the blow" meant here… it's easy when the Raise is, "I punch you." Sister Maggie says out loud, "I bet it wasn't this windy when Daniel did this," and accepts that she's going to have to live with the wind. "But I bet I could hit that farther tree if it weren't so windy." I have to Take the Blow because I don't have high enough dice… and the wind dies down for a moment. Sister Maggie shifts her aim to the far tree, and I Give… I don't have enough dice left to even pretend to put up a fight, and she handily lops off a branch.

Any different than "roll under your Sharpshooting skill?" Mechanically, not terribly different. But the mechanics force us to play things out with at least a little roleplaying, and made it feel like something was happening beyond some dice being rolled. It added flavor, and I think that flavor is what my games are usually lacking the most.

That's where we ended. Didn't even start in on my lovingly-crafted town of Creekside. That'll have to wait a couple weeks.

Getting ready for Dogs

My first session of [[http://www.lumpley.com/dogs.html|Dogs in the Vineyard]] is Sunday afternoon, and I've spent the last couple weeks letting my brain stew over town ideas, hoping something would pop up. I figured I could afford to wait… there are plenty of towns already written up and I could just grab one of them if I had to.

Unfortunately, nothing just floated to the surface in the pool of my random thoughts, so I sat down this afternoon with pen in hand to force myself to start working on something. It was kind of a rough start, but I think I've got something that I can use on Sunday. Going to let it stew overnight and look at it again tomorrow… that usually works out for me, when my stewing is over something already half-cooked. I need a few more characters with specific agendas, instead of just saying, "the town is resentful of X's good fortune." Need to put some faces on that resentment.

In accordance with the rules, I haven't given much thought to how the Dogs will deal with this town. I can see that they can go a few different ways with it… and I have no idea what they'll do. And no intended outcome. It's really the least amount of prep I've had to do for a game, and I feel that I'm going to be fairly well-prepared. Whew.

Just need to practice on my voices and mannerisms, so the players can tell the townsfolk apart. And I need to buy some of the right country music. Been watching westerns to get in the right mood. Unforgiven tomorrow night. Seen that one before, but it's worth watching again. (Gosh, it's over ten years old. I'm getting old or something.)

Networking the gamer community

I've mentioned Meetup.com here before, and I think I've mentioned how they sprung sudden and excessive fees on the Organizers for using the service. They seem to be sticking to their guns, so we're jumping ship, over to the Wichita_Roleplayers Yahoo Group. It's free, it actually has a more flexible calendar and scheduling system than Meetup does, and it's mailing-list based, which I think makes it a lot easier to manage the group.

The point of the Wichita Roleplayers Meet-up Group is to encourage face-to-face get-togethers among the roleplaying community, specifically to get gamers who don't play games with each other to start networking. It's working so far, though the build-up has been a little slow. Once we start offering one-shot adventures to demo games and the like, we ought to be able to attract more folks.

One of the things I've found useful in promoting www.WichitaGamers.com has been the old, reliable business card. The cool thing was, I got a box of 250 of them for the cost of shipping from VistaPrint. The only catch is that they have a small, tasteful ad for the service on the back of the card.

Once I got the free cards, I signed up for their "future offers" mailing list and they keep sending me discounts on products, including the Premium Business cards… I don't care about the ad on the back, but the Premium service gives me access to their entire graphics and template library. This week, they were offering 250 Premium cards for $3.55, and the glossy stock for just a nickel more… $3.60 for 250 full-color, glossy business cards, which I designed myself using their online tool. (It's very nifty, but you have to use Internet Explorer to get access to it.)

If you decide to get some cards, don't bother to mention I sent you. I'm not signed up for their "refer a friend" program. :)

What my games are missing

I recently read a article by the author of Dogs in the Vineyard, Vincent Baker, entitled [[http://www.lumpley.com/creatingtheme.html|Creating Theme]].

I really wish I'd been following [[http://www.indie-rpgs.com/|The Forge]] the past couple years. I used to read rec.games.frp.advocacy, which used to be mostly talk about roleplaying theory. The Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist (GNS) model has its roots there (in the [[http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/threefold/|Threefold Model]]), and when I saw that The Forge has a forum dedicated to discussing it, I thought "all theory, just like rgfa" and took a pass on it. (Besides, I have a lot of trouble keeping up with web forums… I really prefer email lists or Usenet news.)

Unfortunately, I was wrong. Vincent (Remember Vincent? This is a post about Vincent.), among others, has a strong emphasis on "actual play." In fact, he recently commented that he'd been theorizing far too much for the amount of play time he was getting, and it was time to stop theorizing until he got some more play time under his belt.

The folks over at the Forge have been doing a lot of hard thinking about issues that I've struggled with, and about issues that I'd never even considered. I've been too much out of the loop on something I wish I'd paid more attention to. But I still get to benefit from all of their hard work… games like Dogs, in addition to all of the articles they've written on roleplaying.

I need to reread Vincent's "Creating Theme" again, and see how I can apply it to my superhero game, which I'm postponing the restarting of because I can't figure out where to take it. This really gives me some stuff to think about.

I'm free!

Well, that's that. I just finished my last obligation for school. No papers due, no final to take. Later this month, Tabor College of Hillsboro, KS will confer on me a Bachelor of Science in Christian Ministries. I'm even going to walk and everything. ("Everything" is stand, sit, walk, shake, and sing on command. Sounds like I just finished dog training school.)

So I am free to game. And build my son a swing/slide playset (appropriately equipped to act as a pirate ship, castle or spaceship, as the circumstances dictate). And paint the house. And landscape the backyard. And put in a privacy fence. And clean the garage. Sigh… did I think I had time to game? :)

I had planned to game this Sunday, until someone reminded me that Sunday is Mothers' Day. Oops. And circumstances dicatate that we can't get the group together until two weeks after. I'm anxious to play [[http://www.septemberquestion.org/lumpley/dogs.html|Dogs in the Vineyard]] , and this delay is frustrating. Two more weeks, after more than two years of very little gaming, shouldn't be a big deal, but it's surprisingly frustrating. Probably because I was beyond having "hopes up" and into "certain I was gaming this weekend."

Oh, well. Maybe I can start character creation online instead of in person, if Chris can stay on top of his email. (He's not Internet-addicted like the rest of us.) Karen wants me to start a Dogs play-by-email game in addition to the live game, but I'm not sure I have time for that. We'll see.

Bury your character in an RPG Coffin?

Well, not exactly bury, but the RPG Coffin from Cheese Weasel Logistics is an interesting way to carry your character sheet, miniatures and dice around.

http://www.cheeseweasel.net/images/products/RPGCoffinHS.gif" width=284 height=220 align=left>

The RPG Coffin is an adaptation of Cheese Weasel's Card Coffin, which is a tin box about four by five by three inches deep with a special insert for holding your card games and accessories. In this incarnation, the plastic insert is replaced by a foam insert that will hold two miniatures, and some fun stuff… a character record booklet, a multi-purpose adventure note pad, a little calendar for tracking what days you'll be playing, and an official Cheeze Weasel Logistics pencil with eraser. There's also an adhesive-backed sheet of felt which you can put in the bottom or lid to roll dice in.

Unfortunately, the box is just barely too small to hold 3x5" index cards. It'd be great if I could just throw a few of those in there (seeing as how much I [[http://raven.phoenyx.net/mutterings/20041125.html|like them]]), but they don't quite fit.

While the boxes come in only two pre-printed styles, they also have magnets with various pictures on them that fit the top of plain black tins. And thin sheet magnets that will work in inkjet printers are not terribly expensive… buy a package and print your own custom labels, perhaps with your character portrait. (This is what I'm planning to do. Alternately, you could put local restaurant magnets on it. I seem to have no shortage of those.) Whether you go for a pre-printed tin or the plain black one, watch out… the coating scratches very easily. Mine is already showing wear just sitting on my desk and being taken out of the house only once.

I think the neatest part of the RPG Coffin is the miniature storage area. For those who play with minis, it's always a little awkward finding a safe place to store that one mini you need to bring to the game every week.

There are currently only two character record booklets available, D&D 3.5 and XCrawl, neither of which I'm interested in. I got the D&D booklet with mine. My primary purpose in buying the whole kit was to figure out if I could develop a useful Fudge-related booklet for it. I'm still working on that.

The big question I have is, will people use a character sheet that comes in a 3.25x4.5" booklet form? I think it'd be easier with rules-light forms of Fudge, where there's less technical game information, whereas the D&D booklet spreads important combat info across many pages. I think trying to play D&D with this character booklet would drive most players nuts.

One could just fold up a standard character sheet to fit, but that makes for a wrinkly, unattractive sheet. And you'll run into the same problem with any handouts from the GM, etc. Not to mention that your rulebooks won't fit in there. :) (Though I could probably write all of my freeform Fudge "rules" on a booklet that would fit.) If the character sheet doesn't work out, the RPG Coffin is a pretty box for a couple miniatures, dice and any tokens or small gizmos you might want to carry to the game. Especially handy if you use tokens to represent "hero points" and want to keep them between sessions.

Or if you play [[http://www.septemberquestion.org/lumpley/dogs.html|Dogs in the Vineyard]], your character will easily fit in a little booklet, and you can use all the rest of the space for all the dice you need to play the game.