Posts tagged with keywords "roleplaying", page 3
In one of my recent posts, I was talking about a Fudge RPG project I’ve been silently working on and said:
Some thoughts about it though have pushed me to consider releasing it as an indie or even free project.
I foresaw two major problems to producing a decent quality RPG:
- Lack of decent tool for layout (I don’t have thousands to spend on some Adobe product)
- Artwork
First I find Scribus; an open-source Desktop Publishing Tool. Quite complicated and a bit of learning curve, but free. Along with OpenOffice and the Gimp, all the software is there.
For the second, while I can draw, I can’t draw to a professional or high quality level. But then I came across a blog post on design and found numerous photo and illustration sites, where you can buy artwork for use in your projects: sotck.xchng, istockphoto and veer.com (and there is always flickr). Just a quick browse I found pieces I could use. They aren’t on point but would do. If I add my own skill I’m sure I could generate some pieces based on what I found.
So yea it’s actually doable, I mused. (There is actually another issue but I’ll talk about those at the end.)
Then I catch this post from Fred Hicks in my newsreader about actually not publishing and doing your RPG for free. Did Fred Hicks read my mind? Probably not I thought but his advice hit the point. I had considered putting aside a small budget for the project, just enough that I don’t care about making any back. I also read the posts/blogs he linked to in that post. Both were completely relevant to my train of thinking. For me, getting something published was more about a personal milestone or goal than gaining audience or making money (both would be nice but not crucial).
I’m still not convinced but it’s not that important. I still have to do the new version of LH first before I actually need to decide. The content comes first before all that fancy stuff.
I’m certainly not averse to doing it for free. Just take a look at TDOMF my plugin for Wordpress. I’m making a small amount of money on it, not enough to write home about, but it’s a nice feedback. I get bug reports and feature requests every week and I try to respond to all. But that leads me to my last issue that turn me off giving an RPG away for free. With TDOMF, I’m releasing into an existing community who will use it. I have, therefore, an extended “play-testing” user-base that will tell me concisely what’s wrong with it how it works. They are also willing to download upgrades and keep up to date. Releasing a free RPG, there is no community there to release to. It’s a discussion that’s floated around the Irish gaming community for a while. Releasing into a vacuum is the same as copying a file to /dev/null. It goes nowhere and is pointless. Of course, maybe I’m just ignorant of a community out there that would be interested (please inform me!). I’m also acutely aware of the “pluggers”, people who register and logon to forums expecting people to be interested in your project but have no “credibility”. This is something I don’t want to do. I did it for the Irish Gaming Wiki and got slammed down many times. I don’t want to spend time promoting myself and playing the “status game” either. I mentioned in my previous post my “narrow creative bandwidth” and part of that would have to be spent on doing that and everything else would suffer. I’m also aware that the success of free media (RPG being a specific type of media) is dependant on luck and popularity.
Maybe I’ve gotta wait till the Internet starts shouting at me, before I really listen…
… they don’t’ work in a vacuum. Or rather, if there is no conflict, no amount of system can help.
Read More…
Anyone ever used a system to roleplay a social event (like a ball, court, political gathering, etc.) in a tabletop? My group has played through one or two big social events in our games and it’s always been a little hit and miss.
I was reading Spirit of the Century and it uses a generic system that is meant to be applied to any situation, sorta. But something didn’t sit right about it. Shadow of Yesterday use scene based resolution and I can see how it can be applied to a social event. But if your using a taks based or near-task based resolution… I’m not sure how that works at a social event unless you set it up Pulp-style with a villain that must be countered. Many there is examples further on in the book worth looking into.
So I’m curious if anyone knows of any systems or have used anything for social events?
Does anyone else have difficulty separating the author from the book?
I prefer to know little or nothing about the author of a book before I start reading it. This equally applies to roleplaying books and it’s a roleplaying book that I’m having difficulty at the moment separating the creator (and his/her actions/opinions) from the writing. I don’t have a problem with dead authors. Once they are dead, everything about them is becomes simply “context” (historical).
The FudgeList has awoken and it got a bit heated there for a little bit. But I saw a comment from a writer on a blog about when the whole “Fudge is dead” debacle started. He hadn’t gotten involved in the list or this particular argument and had no idea what he was talking about yet he said something nasty about the Fudge community. It was only one line. However, all I could think was “asshole!” It’s a pity, because I would have bought one of his forthcoming books, now I won’t. I’ll probably never look at his work. He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him, but that opinion has tainted my perception of his him and his work. If I pick up a book of his, I’ll remember the comment. I could get over it and let it drop, but the problem is that it creates a barrier to overcome and therefore it makes reading one of his books effort. Why should I bother reading a book if it’s just going to be work instead of enjoyment?
I think Fred Hicks was right when he talked about prompting RPGs and always being positive. A single negative can lose you a customer and then the power of the internet is that if you hit the wrong person, it can have a much bigger impact then just one dropped potential sale.
It’s another reason why I find it hard to objectively read the work of friends. I see my friend’s personality in the work and it, well, becomes hard to separate my opinion of my friend from my opinion of his writing. It becomes especially difficulty if the writing is in a field of shared interest like roleplaying, because more than likely we’d have argued and discussed RPG design issues and I’ll see that shining through their work.
Which is perhaps why it’s a good idea for me to keep some distance from many of the RPG design forums like RPG.net, theForge and story-games. My perspective of people’s work will become tainted by my opinion of the them, not their work. (TBH I think it’s more than likely that I have a tendency to shy away from very large online communities), I guess also perhaps that’s why I’m quite closed about my writing and my ideas. Afraid they’ll judge me rather than the work itself.
Anyone else feel the same about books?
Or rather: Should I know who Doc Savage is?
In less than 5 seconds I can get answer from the wikipedia pipe, but that’s not really my question. I got my copy of Spirit of the Century (and this is not meant to be a criticism of SOTC, I’ve only flicked through the introduction) which is a roleplaying gaming about “pulp” and specifically “era pulp”. I know what pulp is and I recognise it’s influences. But my first taste as a child was Indiana Jones. What came before that I don’t’ really know anything about. Should I? Have I missed some sci-fi cultural element? Who is Doc Savage, the atypical pulp hero? Am I a sci-fi philistine?
It just occurred to me why, after seeing the cover of White Wolf’s “Adventure!” when it was released, I never bothered to even look at the blurb. I knew what pulp was but I had no interest in it. Likewise SOTC, shrug, yea pulp looks fun but it’s not something I completely get. It’s not part of my… actually is there a word for that? Personal/historical culture/media/history? If it wasn’t for the internet noise (and that it uses Fate, a tangent/brew/derivative/insert-word of Fudge), I probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid about it.
Among them three Fudge books!
Read More…
Apparently, my last post on Fudge, got some people annoyed. Fred Hicks of EvilHat (Fate and “Spirit of the Century”) and Chris Helton of Seraphim Guard etc. both chipped on my blog to say they don’t believe Fudge is dead! (I didn’t know I was so popular). This weekend, on top of that, I got a message back from Brad at Now Playing that he is very interested in publishing Reboot as both a Fudge and Now Playing product. Sounds all good to me. So perhaps the “rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated”.
But I can’t shake that feeling of deja vu. I remember when specky caused a huge storm on the Irish online gaming community, things were shook up, events even happened. And then it seem to go quietly back to the mists it came from. Don’t get me wrong, the community is still there, particularly offline, but there is no cohesive online group. At best it is a distributed announcement list, at worse it’s just a pile of dead forums and mailing lists, still active because no-one has the heart to kill them off.
Is Fudge community going the same way? Fate seems to be super strong in terms of online presence. But it is not Fudge per say. It is a specific brew of Fudge, much like Now Playing and Seraphim Guard. People using Fate don’t come back to Fudge. The whole remaining Fudge community seems centred on the Fudge List which, doesn’t seem healthy as it’s part of a bigger site, the phoenyx which I really know little about. One of the people behind the software, seems to think Fudge is dead or at least the parts not in Fate (that’s certainly not good, no?). There are rumours of a “Fudge Planet” from GreyGhost that would be the place for Fudge publishers and fans… but it must be over a year since I’ve heard anything concrete on that. Why does it take so long to put together such a site? (I’d like to say, I’ll do a site next week! But I’m wouldn’t get the traction. I mean, “who the fuck am I?” to everyone else).
Deja vu. A community that feels like it’s crawling along. It’s still alive, but when you prod it, it kinda grumbles and turns to the other side. Fudge hasn’t changed. It can’t. Everything else has though: software, games, market, community-ethos… etc. I don’t think Fudge can die. From it’s burning embers, many things are still be crafted. That will go on for a long time. Is the community waiting for something or is that all it is now?
But you have to remember, an online community is just an online presence. The Irish online community is just a zombie, but there are still conventions every year, clubs and societies every where, the IGA still occasionally organise events, etc. It continues like it did before anyone claimed it was dead online. I think the same is true for Fudge. It will continue but by it’s nature, it’s buzz and community may not. People will produce Fudge games, re-discover Fudge, use Fudge in their own home brew worlds, etc. Fudge isn’t dead. It may be a bit of a recluse, but it has that “something” that brings people into it’s fold. If you put a positive spin on it, the success of Fate should allow you to recognise that Fudge still has something that appeals to modern-day gamers, not that Fudge is dead. IMHO, etc. etc.
I’m a big fan of the Fudge roleplaying system. Loved it so much I hoping to have my Reboot adventure (now a full setting) published under the Now Playing Fudge derivative and my bigger project LH published as a full Fudge product.
Don’t get me wrong, I like many of the new ideas of Fate system (which is a derivative of Fudge). There are elements I don’t like but I’ll put that aside. I plan even to get my hands on Spirit of the Century at some point. But when I saw this post on the Fudge List, it saddened me:
Sorry, I almost mentioned you. But I’m afraid Starblazer is going to overshadow Ignition both because Fate has more fans than Fudge, and because Starblazer is coming out first. Even if Ignition is a better product, it’s got a huge handicap.
HQ is apparently successful within its niche, but it’s a small niche… if you’re not interested in the genre/medium, no matter how great the revision is it’s not going to appeal.
Fudge Magic may do well, but there again I’m afraid it’s going to do best if you reach they “Heyyyyy, I could use this with *Fate*!” (or “…with SotC!”) crowd. It’s just a bigger market (and a market that doesn’t have the “I deserve all this for FREE!” mindset that much of the Fudge community is burdened with).
I could be wrong. For your sake, and for the future of Fudge-that-isn’t-Fate, I hope so… but I just don’t see it revitalizing the 1995 ruleset to the level of Fate. As far as people outside our dwindling community are concerned, it’s an antique set of rules… even if you did a rewrite at this point (of the text, without changing the rules), I’m afraid you’re going to run into “Hey, you stole that from Fate” - Fate’s simply a far better presentation, even of (or especially of) things that it inherited from Fudge unchanged.
(I just wish I liked the things it *didn’t* inherit from Fudge.)
It’s sad, because she’s probably right. The Fudge Planet that I thought was neat, no longer exists and instead the URLs point to EvilHat (makers of STOC) where they maintain the equivalent of a Fate planet. Not particularly the nicest way to find out tbh, wondering why my posts were appearing the feed and why it was all only STOC.
It’s enough to put me completely off FATE/STOC before I give it a chance. 
I was reading Castle in the Air’s latest post: ‘“Chess for Girls” — What women want from games’ and he mentions, in passing actually, that most roleplaying games have sexist language, the preference for ‘He’ over ‘She’. I know, I kinda of wandered around this topic already (and here too on LJ)…. but… could someone explain to me the problem with using “He” as a generic pronoun? I’m genuinely interested in an answer.
Until English has a common generic or singular gender-neutral pronoun, we seem to be stuck with a conundrum. If you use “She” explicitly in roleplaying games to say refer to the GM, is that being sort of sexist towards men as the use of “He” is sexist towards woman? If we switch equally between “He” and “She” in the text, I find that a bit disconcerting as a reader. Same goes for “it”, “they”, “s/he” etc. Though, to be correct, we should really use “they”. I did find this fascinating article on the use of “they” as the neutral pronoun and how it was changed (by an act of law) to be “he” and how that was later abused by men using it literally, as a male pronoun, instead of how it was intended, as a gender-neutral pronoun. I guess that’s a good argument to avoid using “he” (or “she”) specifically in law and other technical documents.
I do a lot of technical documentation on my job, and when you write such documentation you try to avoid using gender-specific terms. You know, saying “It can be done…” instead of “He can…” but this reads as very boring formal text. Well, it is meant to be technical documentation. You can’t write a roleplaying game that way, can you? I mean, part of a roleplaying book’s purpose is just as much to entertain you as provide you with information about the setting and rules. If it fails to entertain, people won’t be interested in playing or buying more of your books. Is it possible to write gender-neutral (as opposed to say balanced) text and still entertain?
What’s the best solution to all this?
Long time back, I setup a Wordpress blog to support our roleplaying games (you can see the site here if your really interested). The tech-savvy players and GMs used it store copies of their characters sheets, write-ups, house rules, etc. I did some hacking of Wordpress to do this, mostly so that each campaign we played had it’s own webpage and look and feel and that you could browse the site by game. It was all a bit ad-hoc structure, with each game working out differently with different degrees of use. Now Wordpress has evolved and my plugin-fu is much greater that can build some dedicated plugins and features for that.
So I’m curious, what web-based tools do you think are useful or could be useful for roleplaying and gaming, be it tabletop, LARP or even for play-by-blog?