About a year and a half ago, I published two role-playing PDFs, an adventure (War in the Deep) and a sandbox setting (The City of Talon). I’ve posted my earnings-to-date one year ago and six months ago. Here’s what I’ve earned since then:

Sales For The Past Six Months (December 2009-May 2010)

Product	Number of Sales	Gross	Net
War in the Deep	2	$10.00	$6.50
The City of Talon	2	$10.00	$6.50
TOTAL	4	$20.00	$13.00

Sales For The Past Year (May 2009-May 2010)

Product	Number of Sales	Gross	Net
War in the Deep	7	$35.00	$22.75
The City of Talon	7	$35.00	$22.75
TOTAL	14	$70	$45.50

I won’t bother charting the month-to-month sales, as they’ve obviously tailed off even more dramatically than six months ago.

Web Traffic

Total hits for War in the Deep on DriveThruRPG: 8,549

Unique pageviews for War in the Deep on the Musaeum in past six months: 6

Total hits for The City of Talon on DriveThruRPG: 5,389

Unique pageviews for The City of Talon on the Musaeum in past six months: 34

Source	Pageviews
bluedwarf.co.uk	18
Direct	10
ENWorld.org	9
roleplayingtips.com	2
Yahoo	2
Bing	1
TOTAL	34

The keywords used to find Talon: “rpg medieval city maps” (2) and “talon city fantasy” (1)

bluedwarf.co.uk appears to be a text adventure inspired by Red Dwarf. No idea how that links back to Talon; maybe somebody linked to it on their forum?

Advertising

None.

Marketing

I described each project here on my blog in a couple of different blog posts. I’m a member of the RPG Bloggers Network, so those posts showed up there.

Analysis

RPG adventures and settings see big initial sales, then rapidly dwindling sales over time.

Plans

I still want to publish more supplements.  I’ve been horrifically slow at publishing them, though.  I now have another setting and another adventure each at the 80% mark.

So. Need to finish those and get them published.  I’ve added them both to my list of active projects. But a plan without a date is just a dream, so:

• By June 5 — Finish drafts of The Goblins of Winterkeep and The Pyrrean Depths and send out for review.
• By end of June — Receive feedback on Winterkeep and Depths, and start first draft of second adventure.
• By end of July — Incorporate feedback on Winterkeep and Depths, finish polishing them, and publish them.  Finish second draft of second adventure and send out for review.
• By end of August — Receive feedback on second adventure, and start first draft of third adventure.

And so on.  With this schedule, I should be able to publish three supplements a year.

I’ve become interested recently in the topic of role-playing social interactions. In a tabletop RPG, characters often have to talk with enemies as well as short-term antagonists — the arms dealer who’s willing to cut them a deal, the mayor from whom they need permission for an investigation, a boy who doesn’t want to talk.

A good example has just come up in my Star Wars Google Wave game; while investigating the disappearance of several Adascorp freighters–in which the Hutts looked to be involved–the players accepted a job delivering a strange package to someone named Klek. They found the bar where Klek lived, were sent into a back room, and were greeted by Klek the Hutt.

How do players deal with that sort of situation? Wouldn’t it be cool if a role-playing system provided specific mechanics to help the players wrap their brains around the challenge, in the same way that they provide mechanics for physical combat and uses of skills?

Note:  Yes, this could be treated like a skill challenge in D&D 4E, but skill challenges have simple binary outcomes. You succeed or you fail. Social interaction is never that simple.

In pursuit of this, I bought a copy of Blue Rose, “the role-playing game of romantic fantasy,” which focuses more on court intrigue than combat. Great! Then I discovered it uses a minor variation on the True20 system. I love True20, but I’m looking for something more tailored than that.

So I spent some time last week hashing out some variables for a social-oriented system. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Character Attributes

Each player-character has six characteristics:

• Honor
• Beauty
• Psychic/Magical Ability
• Charisma
• Craftiness
• Physical Endurance

To determine your character’s stats in these, roll a d100 (or a percentile die and a d10) for each of the above attributes. If all six rolls total 500 or more, re-roll. A low score indicates a low ability; a high score indicates a high ability.

Note: I’d like to add charts for each of these characteristics, indicating the overall distribution of these numbers across the population. Someone in the lowest 5% of psychic ability, for example, is anti-psychic; no psychic abilities can be used within 10 meters of the individual. Someone in the highest 93% are particularly gifted.

In addition, each character rolls a d100 for each of three types of resources:

• Knowledge
• Money
• Influence

That influence score can then be divided amongst the various organizations over which the character has influence, depending on the setting.  For example, in a Medieval European setting where one plays a noble, one may have influence over one’s serfs, the clergy, and the crown.

Each character also has at least one character goal.  These are all in-world accomplishments of any scope; rescue the princess, become a knight, make a million credits, or atone for my past sins.

Moreover, each character maps his or her relationships with the other notable characters and groups in the game, on a scale of -4 (worst enemy) to +4 (best friends/intimate lovers), and an emotional bank from 0 to 5, indicating how much energy they’re willing to devote to social interactions. I’m not sure whether the emotional bank should be one overall score, or individualized to specific people and groups.

Playing a Social Conflict

When a social conflict begins, each side in the conflict determines their conflict goals, such as “Increase the Queen’s relationship with me to +1” or “Find out what Don Ferrigno knows about the death of Jericho Fats.”

Character goals are kept hidden (unless they’re generally known), but may be revealed during the conflict.

There are no die rolls during a social conflict.  Each character asks for help, offers information or resources, etc., which may or may not be accepted by the other characters.

Doing a small favor for someone may increase that character’s emotional bank by 1; a big favor by 3.  Once the emotional bank hits 5, the relationship score increases by one rank and the emotional bank resets to 1.  If the emotional bank drops below 0, the relationship score decreases by one rank.

As characters interact with the world, their resources change. Their characteristics can also be affected, of course.

Were I to include a combat mechanic, I’d use something like Fudge: each weapon provides a small bonus (+1 to +3), as does significant armor.  Roll Fudge dice (which provide -4 to +4), add the result to any weapon bonuses, and compare to the opponent’s armor value. If you meet or beat the armor rating, you hit. There are enough damage systems in the world that I leave that to the reader’s imagination.

What do you think?

Cracked has an excellent article on 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted. It’s not simple scare-mongering — though there’s certainly a hushed tone of passion in the article — and it sparked some neurons in my brain about mental models and tabletop role-playing.

My first GMing experiences were spent with players themselves unfamiliar with tabletop role-playing. We mostly knew each other, and we had a shared, unspoken belief in exploration. We came into tabletop gaming with few preconceptions and fewer goals. We just wanted to try out this “new” thing.

When I began GMing in earnest later, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: players applying online gaming experience to tabletop gaming.  World of Warcraft players were–consciously or subconsciously–creating characters that fit their online gaming experience.

On the one hand, applying related knowledge makes sense. However, the key word here is related knowledge. It’s unwise to assume that computer gaming is similar to tabletop gaming.

Okay, time for an example: I had one player say that we needed a character who’d “pull aggro.” Direct quote. For those unfamiliar with World of Warcraft, aggro is a term for aggressiveness, a quality that monsters use to determine which enemy to attack.  A standard WoW tactic involves crafting characters that can attract the enemy’s attention and soak up large amounts of damage, distracting the enemy from physically weaker characters that are helping from the sidelines.

In tabletop games, there is no aggro. The GM decides in the moment which monster attacks which character. The mechanical rules required for a computer game are just that: mechanical rules, simplifications to give the monsters something reasonable to do.

Similarly, I’ve had players refuse to play characters that interest them because the party didn’t have a character that filled a particular standard party role.  I’m starting to get angry when I hear the oft-repeated claim, “We won’t last a week without a healer. Who wants to play a cleric?”

In tabletop, it’s the GM’s job to craft encounters that challenge the party. If the party doesn’t have healers, the GM has to take that into account. That’s not a deficiency in the party.  A GM who can’t deal with this–or who ignores it, or who exploits it to kill the party–is a bad GM, and should not be gamed with.

Play whatever character you want to play. A party of all monks isn’t imbalanced; it’s awesome.

This week, I started a new role-playing game. I’m running it very differently than I run most games. It’s a D&D 4th edition game, created primarily to test out the classes and races in the new third Player’s Handbook.

Since I’m already running two other games, which takes up much of my time, I decided to run this game using almost entirely pre-published materials. I bought a dungeon crawl-style adventure (more accurately, a “temple crawl”).  Very little world design is required on my end.

This is weird. I love to create worlds; I typically spend a lot of time fleshing out my gaming worlds.

But this frees me up to do that in other games, and to just run the game.  I can focus on NPCs and larger world questions (I’m thinking of adding a Tékumel-style empire).

As with so many things, denial is a form of freedom.

One primary design goal for Gunwave is simplicity. I want players to be able to pick up the game and start playing very, very quickly — without needing hours to absorb the game’s rules.

When I first wrote the Gunwave rule set, its D&D roots showed clearly — each player chose a Race and a Specialty, just like D&D’s race and class. Each Race and Class came with a menu of powers, from which the players could select a certain number for their character.

Players enjoyed this process, but I discovered several problems:

• Players spent quite a bit of time reviewing their options. They wanted to pick just the “right” powers.
• Players quickly became critical of powers that didn’t seem useful, dismissing them out-of-hand.
• After one game session, players complained about having picked “useless” powers (sometimes simply because those powers hadn’t been used in that session), and wanted to swap out their powers.

So I built a number of archetypes, common character profiles with a simplified menu of powers. Players now had a smaller menu of powers to choose from, but each power was tailored specifically to that character’s role and purpose in the game.

Did I succeed? No; I just lessened the above effects. Players still worried over their power choices, criticized “useless” powers, and wanted to swap powers.

So I pre-built a dozen characters. Early in the main game document, the players are presented with stats and powers for these characters, and are encouraged to use them for their initial sessions. Straight. The archetypes now reside in an appendix to the document.

This works extremely well for playtesting — players just choose a character and go. I’ve no idea how it’ll work for regular players, though; will they appreciate this structure?

Either way, this solution satisfies my design goals, so I’m going to use it until it breaks. May seem counter-intuitive, but that’s sometimes what happens with specific goals.

Now to try it out.

Not long after D&D 4th Edition appeared, Saalon pointed out during a chat that the basic D&D 4E system would be ideal for an RPG simulating giant robot combat, like Gundam or Robotech. It could emulate the feel of those shows, with rapid action and cool powers.

This idea so inspired me that I grabbed my laptop and wrote a few pages of a system just like that. To my surprise, not only did I enjoy writing it, more material came easily. Soon enough, I had a player’s guide several dozen pages long.

Fortunately, I also had a group of role-players who were interested in the system, and they were willing to playtest the game. So we played it, and I collected pages of notes.

And here’s where things got dicey: I started incorporating those notes.

As I incorporated notes, the game diverged from D&D 4E. That helped the system insofar as it removed elements that didn’t fit into a mecha war universe. However, D&D 4E’s design is surprisingly tight. Rules reinforce other rules. Adding new elements—or removing existing ones—can easily unbalance the game.

It’s like making a stew. Anyone can throw a lot of ingredients into a pot, but the results may taste terrible. Testing helps determine what works. But a knowledge of flavor balance ensures a good soup (and game) every time.

I don’t have an easy answer to this. I’d like to think the key is a relentless focus on the kind of game one is trying to play. It’s not that simple, though — some rules are more true to the mecha experience, but ruin other parts of the system.

Games must be very carefully designed. I’m realizing, increasingly, that there are no easy answers.

I subscribe to a bunch of role-playing blogs: Musings of the Chatty DM, NewbieDM, Some Space to Think, At Will, The Core Mechanic, Gnome Stew, Trollsmyth, and others.

I first started reading them in late 2008, when they were full of fire about role-playing. D&D 4th Edition had just come out and debates raged about its advantages and disadvantages compared to 3rd Edition. Cool indie games were getting attention, like Dogs in the Vineyard and Dread. Bloggers wrote about interesting subjects: how to adapt D&D concepts to other genres, how to get more players, how to organize one\’s materials, etc.

I\’m still subscribed to all those blogs, but I realized today that I only glance at them every week or two. And I\’ve been in that mode for several months now Partly, that\’s caused by my growth as an RPG player, runner, and designer; I need less hand-holding. On the other hand, the content of those blogs has begun to pale.

Much of the recent blogging in the RPG community has been very inwardly focused. \”Here\’s what I want to accomplish in the RPG industry.\” \”Here\’s the kind of game I like to run.\” \”Here are some things I\’ve been thinking of buying.\” \”Here\’s my quick review of source book X.\” Nothing wrong with any of this, but it\’s not particularly helpful, and it\’s thin gruel, especially considering the RPG blogging I\’m used to.

I\’d like to see more practical advice culled from real experience. I\’m not referring to campaign logs with a few comments; I mean building a blog post around a key concept illustrated during a play session.

I\’d also like to see a lot more blogging by game designers about the game design process.

While I can\’t change others, I can change myself. So I\’m planning to write those sorts of blog posts myself in the upcoming weeks and months, centering on the design of Gunwave.

Watch this space.

About a year ago, I published two role-playing PDFs, an adventure (War in the Deep) and a sandbox setting (The City of Talon). I posted my earnings-to-date six months ago. Here’s what I’ve earned since then:

Sales For The Past Six Months (June-November 2009)

Product	Number of Sales	Gross	Net
War in the Deep	4	$20.00	$13.00
The City of Talon	3	$15.00	$9.75
TOTAL	7	$35.00	$21.75

Sales For The Past Year (November 2008-November 2009)

Product	Number of Sales	Gross	Net
War in the Deep	19	$90.00	$58.80
The City of Talon	22	$100.00	$65.00
TOTAL	41	$190.00	$123.80

I won’t bother charting the month-to-month sales, as they’ve obviously tailed off dramatically.

Web Traffic

Total hits for War in the Deep on DriveThruRPG: 6,649.

Unique pageviews for War in the Deep on the Musaeum in past six months: 7

Total hits for The City of Talon on DriveThruRPG: 3,852

Unique pageviews for The City of Talon on the Musaeum in past six months:

Source	Pageviews
bluedwarf.co.uk	32
ENWorld.org	11
Direct	7
Google searches	8
DriveThruStuff.com	4
Others	3
TOTAL	71

The keywords used to find Talon: “the crimes of talon” (7!), “brent p. newhall”, and “d&d quest ideas”

bluedwarf.co.uk appears to be a text adventure inspired by Red Dwarf. No idea how that links back to Talon; maybe somebody linked to it on their forum?

Advertising

None.

Marketing

I described each project here on my blog in a couple of different blog posts. I’m a member of the RPG Bloggers Network, so those posts showed up there.

Analysis

I’m happy to have made over US $120 on two PDFs, though it’s still not that much considering the amount of time I put into them. Even so, $120 is at least a return on my time spent on this hobby.

Plans

I now want to publish more supplements, of course.

In my last “Plans” section, I wrote about my intention to publish two settings and one adventure by…now. That hasn’t happened, though one of those settings is now about 80% complete.

So. I will make that 80%-complete setting a focus, and will ramp up work on an adventure to publish.

I would like to develop an overall theme for my adventures, so I’m not just publishing random ideas. So, I’ve decided to build a broad campaign idea, and set each adventure somewhere within that campaign. Each adventure can be played alone, of course.

I’m also thinking about expanding into systems beyond D&D 4E. Everyone’s building for that. Imagine a series of adventures just for Star Wars players, for example.

Hmmmmmm.

Miniature picture courtesy adobemac on Flickr

What makes Google Wave work for role-playing games?

I’ve been playing around with Google Wave for a few weeks now, primarily with role-playing Waves. These are Waves in which people pretend to be characters in a story.

There are tons of ways to role-play; sitting around a table, over live text chat, or on a forum. Wave appears to be well-suited to role-playing.

I’ve noticed a few things:

• Players are less committed. That is, players leave for relatively long periods, then come back. This is partly due to Wave’s youth; checking Wave is not yet an ingrained habit for players.
• Parties are less cohesive. Same thing here; Wave’s not yet a habit. But I can see parties as being much more malleable; people will come and go.
• Systems must be simple. I’m observing a D&D 4E game on Wave, and one combat round took 2 days. I love D&D 4E, but I think it—and other relatively “heavy” systems—are less appropriate for Wave than their simpler cousins.
• Everything’s visible and malleable. Anyone can jump in and fix a mistake or restructure content.

My Response

I’ve created an RPG experiment on Google Wave. It’s a floating fantasy city that anyone can interact with. It’s a sandbox role-playing game of exploration and intrigue. It has elements of:

• Wikis
• Choose-your-own-adventure books
• Old school text adventures
• Tabletop RPGs

Even better, I’ve created a website where you can see all of this. I think it will be visible even if you don’t have a Google Wave account. Go here:

Sorashi (broken now that Google Wave is dead)There are already 10 locations you can explore and interact with, and a fairly robust (and original) system for creating your character. Hop on in!

What do you think? Does this interest you?