May

02

Monsterhearts Shipping Update

Housekeeping

Dear Monsterhearts backers,

Good news! I got most of your orders shipped out over the past few days!

There are a couple wrenches to pull out of the machine, though. First wrench: the postcards never arrived at their intended destination, and I’m unsure if they’ll ever be found. It’s looking like I need to order another batch. Frownie! Second wrench: I’m not finished the zines yet. Frownie! Final wrench: I’ve still got a couple Overlord packages to ship out, that I need to first find appropriate boxes for.

I’ve gone ahead and shipped out all packages that would have zines & postcards in them (like Beloveds and Long-Distance Lovers). I’ll ship the remaining components when they’re assembled. I’m pretty sure that they’ll get to count as regular letters (as opposed to packages), so it’ll be inexpensive and easy. Fingers crossed.

Below are some pictures of the first 160 packages, which got dropped off at the post office earlier today. Enjoy!

Teenage Monsters, ready to ship

Keepers of Secrets, in need of labels

My Awesome Stencil

 

Posted by | 0 comments
Jan

03

Perfecting It

Design Diary / Promotion

Perfect, Unrevised is for sale. This is one of the most exciting announcements of my life. Folks can pick up the PDF for $10, and preorder the book for $22 + s&h.

This moment has been a long time coming. I’d like to share with you how I got here, and link you to some reviews and AP along the way.

In late 2005, I started reading The Forge. I participated in one or two little design contests, before stumbling upon my big RPG idea in early 2006. Imagine a game where your character sheet only told you about the things you can’t do? Imagine if play was about finding out how to work around that?

That idea in and of itself didn’t prove to be very exciting, but it did lead to Perfect. Impatient and seventeen, I rushed to design and release the game as soon as was humanly possible. I was at Gencon with the game in hand that very same year – about 6 months after my initial idea.

That’s, uh, a stupid way to design a game. In May of this year, I blogged about some of the lessons I learned in that experience.

I published the game, and was initially really excited about it. I heard some really lovely compliments from Paul Czege, who was my game design idol. Ron Edwards played it,  and then played it some more. He encountered some glaring hiccups, but generally liked it. Malcolm Craig played it too. He encountered some glaring hiccups, but generally liked it.

Over time, the glaring hiccups came to occupy more and more of my mental real estate, and reports of people having “generally liked it” were less exciting. Some time in 2007, I pulled the game off the market. I was determined to refine it and re-release it once it had been, well, perfected.

I assume this process will take about three months. It takes over three years. The game receives about 100 playtests over this period, some led by me and some blind. I posted about one session here.

I almost abandoned the game several times, because the work of editing and refining turned out to be hard. Gasp! What a surprise!

It’s then that fans and supporters came out of the woodwork, to help push me to keep going. Gary Breinholt is one of those people. He playtested every iteration of the game I put out, for years, and always came back with critique and encouragement. I shared some of that process here, in 2008.

Finally, in the early Summer of 2010, I had something that felt complete, that told the kinds of stories I wanted it to, that was easy and compelling. Playtests started to soar. Feeling immensely confident – cocky even, I put the game up as a Kickstarter project, asking for $7,000 in funds to publish the game. I managed to raise an exciting $2,660… and am ultimately glad that I failed to raise more. The game design was done, but the physical product was still far from complete.

I worked with editor Josh Roby, who was fantastic. And then I spent months slaving away in inDesign. I learned a lot about graphic design in the process, predominantly that it is a much slower craft than you would think it is.

Come to think of it, I’ve learned something about all crafts: they take much longer than you’d think. Artistry isn’t something you can just vomit onto a page. It takes years of training, honing, doing, refining, re-examining, doubting, and trusting.

It’s been exciting to actually go through that process, and give every step its due attention. At the height of my wit, I named this second edition Perfect, Unrevised – a nod at the dystopian, history-erasing setting it exists within. But truth be told, this is the project that’s taught me the value of revising – the value of hard work.

I talk about some of the important mechanical changes here. The folks at the tremendously good Ninja Vs Pirates podcast explore the mechanics and the structure of the game, with me, here.

And now, finally, it’s ready. You can buy it if you want to. Wilper did, and he reviewed it the very next day. The review is really good and comprehensive, albeit short.

Posted by | 0 comments
May

21

[Design Diary] Perfect v1: The Need for Patience and Flexibility

Design Diary

Ah! So, before I begin this post proper: I’ve moved to Nelson, a small artsy city built up the side of a heavily-wooded mountain. It overlooks a pristine lake, is populated by lots of amazing coffee shops & restaurants & galleries (a selfish amount for its size, really), and is wonderful. I feel so at peace, re-collected, grounded.

And, thus, it’s time to start blogging again. With a fresh perspective & vitality. And to kick that off, I’m going to start a little series called Design Diary. Expect one every Friday. I’m going to move through all of my design & publishing efforts, and explore some lessons learned and successes achieved. I’m going to try to focus on the social elements of play & design, but might drift the conversation elsewhere if it feels right.

Although I designed some other stuff (and released some PDFs of it) prior to it, I still think of Perfect as my first game. I started working on Perfect shortly after I started participating at The Forge, in early 2006. The Forge was really lively back then – an active design community and lots of people sharing thoughtful reports of actual play. The theory forums had recently shut down, forcing people out of their heads and back to the drawing boards.  There were lots of designers, and I could feel the energy in the “room”. There was an excitement about the fact that anyone could be a designer, that it didn’t have to cost a million dollars, that indie design was growing and thriving.

Excitement is infectious. It’s also really hard to build structures around. The result (I feel) is that 2006 was a year of really exciting but incomplete products. Shock: Social Science Fiction is an amazing game and a novel take on how worldbuilding and roleplaying can interact, but the original text is extremely opaque and spotted with errors. After a couple years and two revisions, its definitely doing itself more justice. But it came out of a year of premature releases and a culture of enthusiasm > follow-through.

I’m not meaning to harsh on Joshua AC Newman. He’s a bombin’ cool designer, and Shock: is a bombin’ cool game. Other games saw premature releases that year too, Perfect being a prime example. Perfect was released without adequate playtesting, without adequate revision and design tweaking, while early fans were cautioning me to develop it further and continue considering it. It lacked polish. It was far from perfect, ironically enough.

There were several lessons that I learned from that experience, that I subsequently forgot about. I’m trying really hard to ingrain them into my design process, to re-learn them and to take them seriously.

Heed the Advice of Those Lending a Hand. This doesn’t mean that you should let your friends design your games. You shouldn’t. But designs florish when they exist within a social process. If you are lucky enough to have interested and thoughtful people that want to support you, as I did when first designing Perfect, you need to hear and engage with what they say. To do less is a disservice to yourself, to them, to your game, and to the community that is rallying around your work. It’s quite simple: when good-natured and thoughtful people support your vision and offer wisdom, take it seriously. This is one of the most meaningful and hard to come by things in the world.

The reason that I take the time to spell that one out is that design is an art form, and there is a notion of artist as monolithic and brilliant and untouchable. When you step into that artist role, especially when you pour lots of your creativity and hard work into it, it’s easy to forget that you aren’t monolithic and brilliant and untouchable. In fact, you’re hard-worked and blind to your own weaknesses and you’re only one person. It can become easy to reject the good support of those who’ve put less sweat into something. The first lesson is: don’t. Don’t reject support, and encouragement, and love. It’s find to consider it and decide it isn’t for you. It’s fine to take it with a grain of salt, or a cup of salt. It’s fine to debate and hesitate. But treat all support and perspective like it’s super important, because it is.

Slow Down. I was very concerned with getting Perfect ready for Gencon. This was a grave mistake. The game and the product suffered as a result, and I burnt out some of my support network by pushing unrealistic deadlines upon them. That damage to my support network was made even worse by the fact that the person editing and doing layout for me (David Artman) was doing it absolutely free.

My design process used to be: Create, Release. That’s a terrible design process. A more sustainable and thoughtful design process might be: Consider, Create, Reconsider, Share, Revise, Invite Critique, Edit, Release. I used to see editing (especially entrusting my work to external editors and critiquers) as unnecessary in my design process. Even worse, I saw it as an affront to my process.
Everything suffered as a result of rushing, of not taking time to let things simmer, of not engaging in a dialogue of improvement. Creating, especially the initial burst of creativity it takes to produce a first draft, is actually a tiny fraction of the process of designing and publishing a game.

It’s Not Done Until You’re Proud Of It. The world has a ton of artists, of art, of games, of bands, of professionals. The amount of stuff we produce and participate in is astounding. And, as a result, the world has no need of things which are good enough. And I reproach myself for going to press with something that I told myself was “good enough.” If it isn’t something that you’re unwaveringly proud of, there’s zero need for it.

The first version of Perfect is the last thing I have ever published before I was totally proud of it.
In conclusion… Heed the Advice of Those Lending a Hand, Slow Down, and It’s Not Done Until You’re Proud Of It.
Those are the lessons learned in publishing the first edition of Perfect. As I get closer and closer to being finished Perfect, Unrevised (my cleverly named second edition), I’m having to remind myself of these lessons constantly.

Posted by | 2 comments
Aug

10

How to yell a poem & tell a game.

Telling Stories Together

I like poetry. I especially like performance poetry.
But sometimes it feels like we’re playing to format (*) and not to content.

I’ve often gone to poetry slams and seen good poems put down by bad poems that are delivered as per the form’s standard: exactly three minutes, build-and-then-invert-your-message-and-then-crescendo, get jittery as you lead up to your climax, address it to “you” (that never-a-stranger, always-a-stranger audience member that sits inside the spotlight.) When you have 12 poets going up in a row, you have the following happening: an overdose of imagery and impact, leaving the audience desensitized to a soft voice or a subtle line; a culture of confessional one-upmanship, in order to keep the audience’s attention and to distinguish yourself as somehow more than the other poets who’ve come and gone; a shift over the course of the evening from poetic appreciation to frenetic, untargeted energy. And sometimes you lose track of what you’re actually looking for. The result is that you feel cheated by the moment.

Poetry Slams are not an anomaly in this regard. They just seem to have a bit more self-awareness of this condition than do other social art forms. Another place where I’ve seen this rear its head is in story games, in two specific ways. The first is a “push to conflict” mentality. Many games necessitate each and every scene to build up to and resolve a conflict mechanically (popular examples: Primetime Adventures, Shock: Social Science Fiction). The second is a “bring the awesome” mentality, where rocket-mecha jesus is a better addition to the story than a soft-spoken preacher, because it’s MORE AWESOME!!!!!

Sometimes, we deny ourselves the moving experiences we’re looking for, while simultaneously paying lip service to them. I’ve talked to people about their experiences with Dogs in the Vineyard, and many have told me about game sessions where people rushed into conflict with each other, escalated to guns and decimated the first town they walked into, because other people’s excited play reports had informed them that the game was about destroying innocent people. Dogs in the Vineyard is actually about trying to resolve difficult situations, and watching ideologies come face to face with real life. Which sometimes results in the destruction of innocent people. We’ve (for any values of “we” you find useful) established a culture of play that revels in the dramatic reveal over the dramatic tension, the breaking point over the establishing point. We push to conflict, we make it awesome, we bring the pain, we play close to home, we… miss the point. We put characters we don’t know into conflicts that don’t mean anything to us as people. We get lost in the fever of it all.

How do you facilitate better play over bigger play? How do you remove the one-upmanship of poetry/story games/social interactions? How do you keep your focus on the elements you’re actually looking for? Christian talks about games that focus on non-competitive/escalative elements. Jonathan talks about a culture of play that puts fiction first.

I’m going to suggest something: that the issue is a focus on format over content. In the example of slam poetry, people write the 3-minute angry poem that builds-drops-builds-twists-explodes, even if the content doesn’t demand it. In the example of story games, people push to conflict and race to face-stabby play, even if the content doesn’t demand it.

The tricky thing is that I’m not talking about transitioning away from any school of game design (from focused-structure to open design, for example). “Format” doesn’t simply mean “rules”. To suggest that freeform, story jamming or “rules lite systems” will avoid the pitfall of format-over-content is to miss part of the point. Format includes: rules, expected structure, expected pay-off, assumed roles and genre stand-bys. We are eager to affirm that what we’re experiencing conforms to and exceeds our expectations. The trap in this is that we begin to live in our expectations rather than our experiences. And then we begin to create affirmations of our expectations, rather than just focusing on creating our art.

We get excited about the promise of good content. We create formats to deliver the best content possible. And then we get lost in the format, to the point where some of our best content gets washed over and disregarded. The questions: How do we keep our expected outcomes from dictating our actual play? How do we appreciate elegance in the face of something easier? How do we keep fiction first, and stay rooted in what we’re actually creating? How do we put content before format?

Posted by | 2 comments
© Copyright Buried Without Ceremony - Theme by Pexeto