Played the sixth session of the Agora v2.8 rules this evening. We managed three scenes in three hours, which is better (we’ve been managing two scenes in three hours) but not where I want the game to be. For all of its complexity in play, I am trying to make it relatively quick — I want scenes to range from 20-40 minutes, not an hour.

And so this is the place, right, in game design where you have a relatively functional set of mechanics, but it’s not firing on all the cylinders. You playtest and playtest and playtest, making rules tweaks and adjustments, and you keep plugging away at the playtests, and eventually you start to lose sight of the target. The game generates play, sure, and you become very familiar with the type of play that the game is (presently) producing… but that’s not it, and you’re not really sure what “it” is supposed to feel like any more.

And then you wonder if there really is an “it” that you were aiming for when you wrote the original version of the rules three years ago, because at this point you can’t remember what the impetus was, except that part of the rules started out as a little mental exercise, a joke really, and kind of grew from that, and maybe that’s all the game really is: a joke grown out of proportion. Was there ever a game? Was there even an idea of what the game would look like?

And you look at your sales record, and you look at all the avalanche of games that are now being produced, and you wonder if the effort you’re putting into this is worth any expected payoff — not just in terms of sales, but in play and players and fellow-gamers and sharing something that you think is cool. Because, if you can’t remember what that thing was that you want to share, what are you even working towards, here?

…

And then you notice that it’s two in the morning, and you should probably be in bed already, and you should take it on faith that you’re not a moron and there is an experience that your game is pointing at, and you’re probably missing the forest for the trees at this point. The playtesters keep coming back, right, so the game is entertaining enough — just with rough spots that need smoothing out. And after the playtest, you had some really thought-provoking discussion and you took good notes and really, you should come back to this in the morning with fresh eyes.

And you tell yourself that, but you don’t get up and go to bed. You sit and you stare at your notes and the character sheets, and you keep wondering: what is this game supposed to do?

Yesterday I came home to find the proofs for Sons of Liberty, and they looked pretty good! To share the excitement (and gloat a little), here’s a couple little pics:

Yes, that big block of text on the bottom of the credits page is all the playtesters!

They asked for a diagram of play; they got one. Ph3ar my Illustrator skizillz!

Unfortunately, they didn’t send me a bound proof, which would have been nice, but I did review for those last remaining typos, checked the trim and bleeds, and saw what the paper stock looked like.

We start printing tomorrow!

Have you ever had Alexander Hamilton wind up your clockwork power armor, jump out of Thomas Paine’s ornithopter, and land in the middle of the Battle of Yorktown to punch General Cornwallis in the face?

No?

Well… would you like to?

The Sons of Liberty Preorder is now open. Take on the role of the Founding Fathers to kick ass and take names for truth, justice, and the American way in the only Roleplaying Game of Freedom and Badassery.

The game’s fast-paced card mechanics ensure high-action madness and revolutionary heroics. If you are playing Benjamin Franklin and you aren’t swinging an electrified kite over your head to clear the streets of redcoats, then you are playing it wrong.

View the game’s Patriot Sheet, Tory Play Aid, and Objectives Sheet.

Play Sons of Liberty in three different modes: Battle Mode, Campaign Mode, and Versus Mode.

In Battle Mode, you and three or more friends play
through one secret “battle” of the Sons of Liberty. One player takes on the role of the Tories, while everyone else picks a Patriot figure to portray. A single battle takes between two and three hours to play.

In Campaign Mode, you and your friends string together a series of battles to tell the whole, secret story of the American Revolution. Each battle features different Patriot figures, and the role of Tory player is traded to a new player each time. Scheduling is simple since the group of players need not be the same for each battle – if Jim can’t make it one evening, there’s just one less Patriot and more badassery for everybody else.

In Versus Mode, you and one other player can each take on the role of one of the Sons of Liberty after the Revolution has been won. Once comrades in arms who founded a nation, the task of actually building that nation often set these men and women at odds. It was their impassioned struggles with each other that formed the nation we know today.

Read the Sons of Liberty Design Blog at Ludanta Retero.

Sons of Liberty will be released on President’s Day, February 15th, Election Year 2008 at OrcCon. Preorder and receive the Full PDF Preview in January in addition to the softcover in February!

The Sons of Liberty preorder is $25 and is available through Kallisti Press website.

I realized a couple days ago that I had hit the point in developing Sons of Liberty that I needed to see it in layout to keep developing the manuscript effectively. So last night I sat down and put together a ’starter’ layout, and flowed a little over 80 pages of the book. Since all of the art in the book is square (for eventual potential as art on a custom deck of cards), I just dropped 4×4, 2×2, and 1×1 frames into the pages to adjust flow.

Then I placed actual art into the frames, cause, hey, why not? They were on my hard drive anyway.

I was surprised by how quickly and easily all the disparate pieces came together to make a very good design draft. It’s always encouraging to find out you’re farther along than you thought you were.

I’m going to fiddle a bit, and then I may have some sample spreads to show off.

The following is a souped-up version of a comment I made on Story Games which a lot of folks have said a lot of nice things about. I’m reproducing it here (and embellishing it a bit) in the hopes that other folks can get some use out of it.

The following will sound like 9th grade English advice on constructing an essay; it’s only marginally related. This is planning and constructing a book, which is way the hell more complicated. This isn’t about designing a roleplaying game. This assumes that you’ve already designed the game. This is about writing the game, taking the design and presenting it in a way that’s comprehensible to people who are not inside your head like you are.

You probably have your setting and rules written down somewhere. That is not your manuscript. Those are notes. Now that you have completed notes, you need to write the manuscript. Before you write the manuscript, you need to plan the manuscript.

(Doing the following on index cards is really helpful; you can also do it on a word processor, or even in a plain old notebook — but you’ll use a lot, a lot of pages and get hand cramps.)

Write down a list of all the things that you’d need to explain to your intended audience*. This is not a list of rules, although the different rules will probably be items on the list. Then start shifting around the items on the list so they’re in the order that you’d present them in. After you think you’re done, go down the list and for each item think about what other things need to be explained before that item. Make sure they’re already on the list, above that item. When you’re done, you’ve got a procedure to teach the game.

Now chunk the list into sections. Some of the items will look like they sort of ‘belong’ to a previous item: make the belonger a subitem of the belongee. Some of the items will look like they sort of belong together as a group. Create a new item for the group, give it a temporary name, and make all the others subitems of the group name. You’ll need to go through the list a few times. You’ll get groups of groups, and subitems of subitems, and at some point, they’ll all clump up into a reasonable number of supergroups. Eventually, these groupings will become chapters, but don’t think of them as such yet, because you’ll end up making assumptions. You have a rough sketch of what the book will look like.

Now go through the list and use indents to indicate main topics and supporting topics. Any good word processor can do this. If you can use ‘Harvard’ outlining, with roman numerals and then a/b/c and then 1/2/3, you’ll be golden. Eventually, those become part/chapter/section/segment distinctions (with roman numerals being chapters, lowercase alpha being sections, arabic numbers being segments, and so on). Right now, just sort of get them organized. Now you have an outline.

Extra bonus: go through the whole list and write down, in one short paragraph, what gets explained in that section. This may very well make you realize that you need to add an item or two somewhere.

Payoff: You have a nice, fleshed out outline. Now you can write any section, in any order, whichever section appeals to you when you sit down at your desk. Tick them off as you go. Write all the sections separately and in different word processing files. You’ll thread them together later. Do that only after you’ve written the vast majority of the sections (at least 90%). Then read it through yourself; you’ll notice a couple bits that you left out. Write those as sections and insert them somewhere appropriate in the outline and the compiled manuscript. Then you will have a first draft, which you can hand to somebody else who can read it and tell you which bits don’t make sense.

Super Awesome Payoff: Using a word processor or layout program that actually uses styles, you can define styles for different levels of headers. There are chapter headers, section headers, segment headers, and so on. How do you know what level header you should use? Refer to your outline and what level of indent that bit is at. You should be able to do this uniformly down the whole outline. Not only do you have regular styling, you also have a table of contents!

For an example of this in action, see John Wick’s Livejournal, where he is posting the sections of Houses of the Blooded as he writes them. Each of those sections, and what is covered in each section, is coming off of an outline like the one I described above.

This is a lot of work, but the trick is to plan it and chunk it out so that it never feels like a lot of work. Whenever you sit down, you should be sitting down to write just one section — a page or three. You will be astounded at how quickly you tick off the items on your outline.

Then it’s time for somebody else to look at it and tell you where it doesn’t make sense, and then you can start playtesting!

* You have an intented audience, even if you haven’t identified it yet. What kind of person do you want to get your game to? Who do you want to play it? That’s your intended audience. Write for them.

Okay, so look. This is how publishing works:

1. You spend a lot of time, effort, and occasionally money on a project. You work your ass off getting it done, and then you work your ass off again polishing it and getting it really done.
2. Then you release it into the wilds of the world. You make it available as best you can, and offer it up for consumption.
3. Maybe some people will be impressed with it, buy it, use it. Maybe they’ll say nice things about it. Maybe they won’t.

As a publisher, you have control over steps 1 and 2. You have no control whatsoever over step 3. Ever.
Hopefully, by the time you’re done with step 1, you’ve got a project that you’re proud of. By the time you’re done with step 2, you’ve presented it in such a way that you’re proud of that. But because you have no control over step 3, you cannot take pride in the reception of your product. You didn’t do that. Your pride in your work comes from making a good product and presenting it well. The feel-good that you get from the good reception isn’t pride; it’s fame. Fame is never earned; it is not something to be proud of.
“But!” you might say, “surely the quality of the product has something to do with its reception! Surely a good book sells well!” To which the answer is, in all seriousness, “No.”
There is no correlation between any standard of quality and actual sales. Let me repeat that: there is no correlation between quality and sales. Sales are not derived from quality, they’re derived from utility. Utility is, roughly, how useful a given product is for a given customer. It comprises how well it fulfills that need, and at what cost — not only in terms of its price tag but also the time and energy it takes to find out about the product and purchase the product. As a publisher, you have feeble control over a lot of these factors, and seeing to them falls under step 2. You have absolutely no control over the needs of the consumer. You cannot control how well your product is received.
You can attempt to predict what the consumer wants. This is called market research. It’s very difficult; there are few reliable tools for this process, and the market can shift and slide much, much faster than your development and production schedules can compensate for. To put it another way, even if you figure out what a lot of customers want right now, it still takes you a couple months to make a product to fit that need, and by that time they may all want something else, or somebody else may have come out with a product to fill their needs before you got done. And just to clarify, talking to your friends on an internet forum is not market research. That’s talking to your friends on an internet forum.

So what is a publisher to do?

Isn’t the entire affair built around the idea that, at step 3, people will give you money and compliments for a job well done? If you can’t control that, what’s the point, anyway? Here’s how to cope:

• Take pride in the steps you have control over. Make a fantastic product. Present it magnificently. Don’t hitch your wagon to customer response.
• Don’t invest anything into the project that you’re not okay losing to the project. That goes for money, certainly — find ways to develop and produce your product without a lot of capital — but it also goes for time, effort, and emotional involvement. Consider any investment in the project the same way you’d think about investing into a vacation: is the investment worth the enjoyment you’ll get from it? If no, don’t do it. (The solution of the corporate world is a neat solution, here: use other people’s money to finance your project; use employees’ time and effort to develop and produce; pay the employees with the other people’s money; repeat.)
• Stop publishing like a consumer. If everybody’s ga-ga over new product X and you want to join in, get a copy of product X. Don’t publish a clone of product X. Publish what you can’t get elsewhere (and make it good). What you publish should not be the same thing as what you get elsewhere.
• Implement step 4, and don’t confuse it with step 3. This, with a smattering of the first three, is my preferred solution. What’s step 4, you might ask. It is:

4. Interact with the consumers who do use your product. Get to understand their needs and fulfill them: either with immediate, ‘free’ materials or in a supplement or the next edition.

The beauty of step 4 is that it is again under your control, and it is something that you can take pride in. Getting to know your customers as people, and not as wallets with human beings attached, means you get to make a real connection with people who share your interests. That’s awesome.
Now, one might be tempted to add in, “also, good customer service leads to more sales” but this is a trap. This is mistaking step 4 for step 3. Providing customer service is not making sales. If you think of it in terms of making more sales, or building a market, or whatever else, you’re going to kill it dead. Step 4 is about interacting with people, not drawing more wallets-with-people-attached closer to your bank account. Step 4 is only worthwhile as long as it’s genuine, and once it’s not, it’s just another chore — for both you and your consumers.
Step 4 is just as important as Steps 1, 2, and 3. For my money, if you’re not doing step 4, you’re not really publishing. If you can’t bring yourself to do step 4, you might reconsider publishing. These are the people that you’re publishing the product for — if you didn’t have any interest in these people, you can just develop the product and let it sit on your hard drive, or publish your very own copy through Lulu.
And that is, really, my end goal here in this article: publishing may not be a good idea for you. Publishing is a pretense for applying yourself to something you think is worthwhile and a means for allowing others to share in that thing. If you want to make and share what you like, publish. If you want people to tell you you’re clever, go somewhere else. Publishing is a terrible way to get people to notice you.

Alrighty. After surprisingly little headache, I have proofs coming from Lulu for Full Light, Full Steam in hardcover and in softcover. Hardcovers will be going for $30 and come with the Full PDF Preview. Softcovers will be going for $20 — a steal, I tell you!

With copies in stock in a couple weeks, I’ve set up preorders and all that jazz:

Preorder Full Light, Full Steam!

I love getting art for games in development. Nothing makes me want to write more than seeing awesome illustrations by talented people with fun spins on “my” material. Sons of Liberty is going to have a whole ton of art, and it’s streaming into my inbox every week, now. It’s to the point where I can’t help but share:

Anna Krieder is doing the Connected (Diamonds) illustrations, involving networking, connections, and social-fu:

Jake Richmond is doing the Patriotic (Hearts) illustrations, involving courage, martial prowess, and sacrifices:

I am so looking forward to laying this book out, since I am going to be drowning in art assets to throw into pages!

I’m starting to solicit artists for Sons of Liberty. This is one of my favorite parts of publishing; seeing your work reflected through others’ interpretations is simply awesome. I’m getting a LOT of art. This project needs a strong visual reference, and no matter how crazy my prose gets, it can’t convey the same things as an drawing of Ben Franklin leaping out of an exploding building and Thomas Paine swooping in on an ornithopter to catch him.

But anyway, did I mention a LOT of art? If you know any artists that can do three-cornered hats, sailing ships, and laser beams, by all means shoot me an email or leave a comment here.

Hi, remember me? I used to post a lot. Now I don’t; I have a job that actually requires my brain and a computer at home that’s less than reliable. But do not mistake my lack of posting for lack of work. Here’s a quick overview of what’s on my plate:

Story Games Names Project - Jason Morningstar asked me to do up the layout of this project. Like so many projects of its kind, this started as a simple idea and has mushroomed to stupid proportions. At last count, the book is going to weigh in at a little under 300 pages and have like 800 lists.

Sons of Liberty - The rules chassis turned out to be surprisingly functional the first time out; I’m tweaking the situation creation ruleset, and then the system will be done. Then I just have lots and lots of writing to flesh out the figures and world that the game takes place in. Sure would be nice to have a functional computer for that (come on, tax return!). It will be released in early 2008, just in time for election year madness.

Agora: how shall we live? - This game is on the back burner, due out in 2009. It is not being quiet over there on the back burner, however. I have a little flurry of notes scribbled on Post-Its regarding improvements for the game. When it rolls around into active development and then to publication, I expect this to be a very strong design. Very much looking forward to it.

Secret Project Keystone - This project, which started out as a flicker of an idea at GenCon SoCal, keeps leaping up to the forefront of my mind. It wants me to design it now. It will probably get its wish soon, although I have no idea where it will fit into Kallisti Press’ publication schedule. I’m going to be tight-lipped about details, but at this point it’s an unholy mashup of Dogs, Capes, Shadow of Yesterday and Primetime Adventures. I plan on spooning in more sources later; cause really, what’s the use of the shoulders of giants if we don’t scramble up on them every once in a while?

Dynasty - Play a dynasty of a pseudo-European noble house in a pseudo-Holy Roman Empire. Acquire lands and titles, backstab the other nobles in play, and so on, but never lose sight of your primary goal: ensure a robust line of succession. This card game is already finished and sitting on my hard drive. It just requires 155 full color cards, counters, a d20, and a box. It’s waiting for an infusion of capital.

Full Light, Full Steam: Tactical Card Game - This is just shaky notes at the moment. The current plan is back-burnered design on a lazy-slow schedule. When FLFS 2nd edition rolls out in 2010, I’ll be getting more art for the book. From the pile of art in the book I can derive art for the cards. At least, that’s the plan.

Playing! - I presently have FOUR regular gaming engagements: Tuesday Playtesting Circle, Wednesday Nobilis, Thursday Primetime Adventures: Conservancy of Gears, and Saturday Full Light, Full Steam. I’m also dumping geek-time into NerdSoCal.com and Nerdly Beach Party.

So in conclusion, I’m not quiet cause I’m not doing anything; I’m quiet because I’m too busy with other stuff. I am buried in projects, and I am loving every minute of it. At some point soon I’ll have Sons of Liberty in a more “public” phase where there will at least be stuff to share. I miss sharing stuff with all you guys, and I’m looking forward to doing more of it soon!