Judd Karlman, designer of Dictionary of Mu, just played a game of Shock: with Powered Armor as the Shock and “post-traumatic stress disorder” as an Issue. It sounds like it was a pretty neat game, and he’s listed some of the Minutiæ from it. Minutiæ are, by definition, not talked about a whole lot outside of Shock: games in play, but they’re pretty important in action because they make the world more tangible and complex. I’m happy he’s put this list up!
Hey, the Durham 3’s podcast #55, the one including me, is up on iTunes. Go give it a listen there or download it from their site directly! The show’s short, only 11 minutes or so, cuz we were tired and started late.
Thanks, guys. That was a fun time.
Is this something that solves a problem you have when playing with your friends?
Do you and your friends enjoy playing with this?
Does it invoke a new way of looking at play?
Consider if you want to publish your game.
Do you want to share the experience you have at the table?
Do you want to be subject to critique, useful and otherwise?
Do you want to learn about writing, editing, typography, and the other technical aspects of publishing?
Consider whether you want to sell the game.
Do you want to make sure the game fits a particular market niche, and are you willing to alter it to fit a niche?
Do you want to make decisions about pricing, costs, distribution, and printing?
Do you want to make a profit selling your game?
Don’t just go down and blithely say “yes” to everything. Think about them. And you should take longer to think about each question than the last. And lemme tell you a cold, hard reason why.
I showed up at the Forge booth in 2004 with Under the Bed. There were, if I recall, 31 other games for sale there. I sold 40-some copies of UtB, a quirky little game about toys and children that had a funny way of making adults cry. That’s the year The Mountain Witch came out. It sold 92 copies.
Last year, the Forge/IPR booth had over 100 games for sale. I believe the top seller sold 40-some copies. I don’t remember who that was or what their game was, but I have no doubt that it sold a lot because it was good.
I’ll say that louder: The best-marketed, best-designed, best-sold game sold fewer than half as many copies as the top sellers in the two previous years. You, as a potential publisher, now have a lot of competition. It’s friendly comptetition, to be sure, and your friends will all help you sell your game as much as you help sell theirs, but it’s a crowded booth. You want to make sure your vision of your game is served by what you’re doing with it. So consider these possibilities:
You have a game that is fun to play with your friends and at cons. Play it with them! Have a great time! This may not need to be published. Playing with people and having fun is, after all, what this endeavor is all about.
You have a game that will interest a very particular niche: fans of another particular game, for instance, or enthusiasts of an unpopular genre, and should therefore invest as little as possible into the production of your game. PDFs, backpack trades, and an enthusiastic Wiki community might be a direction to look.
You can’t answer some key questions above and should wade in slowly, figuring out your answers as you go.
You have a brilliant mechanic, setting idea, or situation, but you haven’t really figure out how the rest of the game works, and are using a system based in assumptions that require questioning. This is a heartbreaker and it’s called that because other designers see the brilliant part, but see the rest of your game as holding back your brilliance.
You may resent the compromises you have to make in order to make your game a commercial success. You really don’t want to resent something that’s supposed to bring you joy.
Don’t do anything you’re going to resent. This is your creation, the fruit of your metaphorical loins! Don’t sell it out because you feel like your idea isn’t as valuable if you don’t sell a lot of copies or you want to play instead of formatting a PDF. Do what is right for this game, for you, right now. Being an independent developer means that you can make those choices for yourself. Don’t make the same choices someone else made just because they made them. Their circumstances were different. Make your own choices for your own art.
Two weeks ago, I took off for Dreamation with my deeply excellent Western Massive fellows and a lot of stuff went down. I’m gonna give a quick rundown, then I’ll write more detailed posts because some of what we discussed deserves more than a passing mention.
So, I played two games of Shock: The first was on Thursday night. Sorry, guys, I don’t have the records of your names — I had to hand it in! I have to start taking notes. Our Shock: was “Government Controlled Reincarnation.” We lived in this hideous 1984 world called Shangri-La, obviously in the Himalayas, where peoples’ reincarnations would be tracked and mandated. Criminals would be continually aborted (by one of our Protagonists, as it happened). Buddha kept trying to be born and, eventually, was. It was a really excellent game. Very sad, but the world looked like it was going to make it. There would again be compassion and enlightenment!
The other game was the 15-player game of Shock: below. We broke into four groups, then chose a Shock: communally. We went with “The Eve of the Clone Revolution”. It was a blast for me and everyone else involved. A million billion thanks to Judd, Evan, and Vincent for helping to facilitate that. I was sort of excited to have a common element because it sort of gives a moral carrier signal. The stories were really neat, but I lack the notes for all but my own. I’d love to hear from some people who ran the others.
Between those, I ran a playtest of Beowulf which introduced a funny problem that maybe has a funny solution. That’s certainly worth talking about later in detail.
I played in playtests of Omega Point by David Petroski, which has pacing issues, but seems like an otherwise good early phase of develpment for a cyberpunk game.
I also played in an epic, 8-player game of Food Holes, a comptetitive eating hack of Contenders by Remi Treuer and Jason Morningstar. That is some seriously revolting absurd funny.
And I played in Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies, Chad Underkoffler’s newest project. The game’s got some fun stuff in it, but the really great part was hanging out with Chad afterward. We drank a couple of pints, talked about politics, and waddaya know, talked about game design too.
Then we had the Independent Design Roundtable. This is what I want to write about first, because it really got me thinking about some hard questions that people need to ask themselves. That roundtable has been really good at showing folks how to slaughter sacred cows and there are some that snuck in under cover of night that are now in the herd. We’re gonna have to do some culling.
I ate dinner with excellent people I don’t get to see often, had the excellence of the Western Massive confirmed and re-confirmed (the Jeepform game run by Emily was, by all accounts, wildly successful, Julia ran The Saddest Game of Steal Away Jordan Ever, Meg had rowdy tables of people playing Thousand and One Nights, and Vincent and Evan jumped in to facilitate a full table of Shock: neophytes in The Big Game).
So thanks, Vinny and the rest of the Dreamation crowd. Thanks Western Massive, for being so excellent. Thanks to all my friends who I saw there and thanks to the people I didn’t know were my friends yet, but now do.
I just received this email from Vinny, one of the coördinators of Dreamation, a con I’m going to next week in New Jersey:
I have an interesting situation to report to you. So far, I have 4 people trying to get into [the first scheduled game of Shock:] and 8 people trying to get into [the second one], and we’ve barely gotten the bulk of event reservations yet.
Um; what can we do? DREAMATION is too structured to just “thrown extra rounds of the game” into the convention. Do you have a second (or even a third) GM who can take additional tables? Is there any way to raise the max number of players from 3?
If you’re gonna be at Dreamation (and why wouldn’t you?) and can run a game of Shock: might you?
Let me know here or over at Story Games!
I’ve just spent the last two weeks exploring the Mid-Atantic states, spending time with friends and family in Richmond, VA, Washington, DC, and Durham, NC. Thank you all for hosting me. I had a spectacular time. I am blessed with wonderful people. Thank you for your support, your indulgence, and your senses of humor.
A week ago Last Monday night, I landed with the Durham Three (who are, mysteriously, Four, but Jason was sick. And I was there. So that’s four…) for an evening and we played a game of Shock: about individuals sacrificed for politics, demagoguery, and the responsibility of the Press. These were amplified with the Shock of a robot running for President — John Toyota-Kennedy (he’d married in). He was running on the popular but divisive platform of citizen’s rights for all sentients. Political sentiment was anti-robot to the point that Green Cards — required for robots to work, since they’re not citizens — had been altogether eliminated. Many robots had become citizens over time, but the process of naturalization had been wholly suspended and now Joe’s Protag — a Salvadoran line cook — was the man with the Last Green Card. That made him politically valuable and a celebrity. His Story Goal was to be reunited with his family. Instead, the government (in the form of the Office of the Secretary of Media, played by Clinton as my Antag and the INS robot with a deep contempt for robotkind played by Remi) conspired to use him up and throw him out with false promises after making him do horrible things.
Clinton’s Protag was a militant Pete Seeger, a combat robot with a banjo and one leg. He traveled around the US and Canada as a veteran combatant pleading the case of his own obvious humanity to a receptive audience. His pleasant demeanor belied a calculating and clever politician — a very human character indeed. He eventually negotiated the secession of Alaska as a robot homeland to share with the First Nations who’d been (apparently) trying to figure out how do such a thing on their own. He wound up being assassinated alongside Remi’s Rabbi Vivek Shapiro.
R. Shapiro was alone in his niche. As the world’s religions had rejected the prodigious robotkind, he’d found himself in an amazing position: the only religious leader in the world for millions of robots using his television show to stay in touch with them. His wife, Hadassah, was a robot, and though she played little part in the story as a character herself, she set things nicely: in the opening scene of Remi’s story, he was confronted outside the TV studio where he worked by a woman babbling about her boy having been killed by a robot and it getting away scot-free. The Rabbi and she shot each other. The good rabbi had shot low and defensively. The woman, Susan, shot high at his face, shattering it. He’d decided to become converted, and in the process, became the Vice-Presidential candidate just as he was assassinated. The EMP bomb that killed him also killed Clinton’s protag — who later emerged, backed up, and still missing his leg. Hadassah also died in the assassination.
The whole time, my Protag, a journalist, was being yanked around by the atrocious Secretary of Media — Angelina Jolie on the outside, Joseph Goebbels on the inside. He job was to establish the safety of US media, using law, smokescreen controversies, and eventually assassination to achieve her ends. It was never stated, but she was pretty clearly the most powerful public figure in the country. In the end, she and her office’s mandate were exposed as violently anti-Constitutional. Also, I got to beat up my chickenshit editor. It was a rare shard of optimism for a game of Shock: frankly.
I’m not sure when the episode will be up. It looks like it’s the next one, but I’m not sure. But thanks, guys. I had a really good time. You really know how to bring it.
I’m starting a new project. I’m excited about it. Let’s see how it goes!
Dig that crazy shit. This frame has so little material, you can see through the spaces of its geodesic structure. It’s woven by hand for now, but they’re apparently developing a manufacturing technique (good luck, guys) that will allow mass production. Thanks, Evan, for the C|Net article that linked to this, though I’m not going to link back to it because it makes a stupid claim that this kind of frame is more aerodynamic that a smooth one. The aerodynamics of this are awful. But that’s not what mountain biking’s about anyway.
We’re going to see more and more airy engineering over the coming years, I think. In the 19th century, we discovered that using webs of steel instead of stacks of stones was an effective way to build. Carbon fiber — a fabric — is replacing steel with great frequency as a material of choice. I think that represents a general trend: using less material, configured cleverly, to satisfy our requirements.
Now, if we could just get our government to stop waging perpetual war and thereby sucking up all the carbon fiber…
A couple of days ago, I posted that I was approaching the finish line on building my new bike and asked around for a name. Thanks to Philip, meet Grey Fox!
(Click the images to zoom) Some features to note: The gear rati0 is 46:12. No front derailleur. Eight speeds on the rear and a big old school friction thumb shifter distorted and Dremeled into working on road bars. The brakes are time trial/triathalon levers and Tektro Oryx cantilevers. The back wheel is a Mavic laced onto a generic hub. The front is a DT Swiss laced onto a cheap Shimano hub. The frame is a Trek 7300 with frankly insufficient paint to have any real durability.
Right now, it’s got a top gear of a paltry 97.3 gear inches.I haven’t yet switched the chainring in from the Iron Monkey, which will give it a top gear of 121.4 gear inches. That is, the wheel will go 1/3 further around for each time I pedal. The Yellowjacket’s top gear is 108. That is, it should haul ass.
The shifter and right brake lever. Note the clever “TAPE OVER IT” technique. Those tires were a trash find, by the way.
The powertrain. I like those cranks and I can not lie. But they don’t fit a big chainring. So they’re going to move over to the Iron Monkey and the Grey Fox will get the big ring and old Dura Ace cranks. The Tektro Oryx brakes are nearly as good as V brakes. Pretty impressive. You may also note the seat clamp from the Iron Monkey. I gotta get a permanent solution for the Grey Fox.
EDIT: Hey, Makeketeers, I just finished the bike this eve! Check out this post to see the final product!
Like a lot of Americans, I was with my family over the last weekend celebrating Thanksgiving. Unlike most Americans, I’d come not just to hang with family, but to get some workshop time. My dad’s shop is a wonderful thing and he’s got some tools that I just can’t approximate. I’ve been working on a bike for a while now, but I wanted a hood to paint in because the weather’s gotten foul, and then there were a couple of parts that needed more force than I’m able to generate with the tools I’ve got. So I brought it along! I also had a homemade bike stand I’d made out of steel pipe and a clamp that needed delrin jaws and Dad had offered some stock and the use of his milling machine to make them. I could have made them with a band saw and drill press, but I lack a band saw and he had them already cut for another purpose.
The clamp clamping while the stand stands
So I got to work on the bike itself. I had to strip the paint, first using methylene chloride (nassty chemilcalses that it is), then switching to other stuff because I kept getting distracted and the stuff dried up before I could get all the paint off properly.
An out-of-focus picture of the methylene chloride attacking the enamel.
It took the ink right off the decals, but unfortunately left the decal substrate there. Invisibly. That had me stumped for a while.
This took me all afternoon, half a can of methylene chloride, and a surprisingly small amount of MEK. I don’t know if the MEK (methyl ethyl ketone) would have worked first. The stuff sure seems less nasty than the methlylene chloride, though. And as far as I know, it doesn’t REDUCE THE BLOOD’S OXYGEN CARRYING CAPACITY.
In any event, there was a fair amount of scraping and even some sanding at the end. Had I been on the ball a little more and gotten to use the methylene chloride at a stretch instead of having to run off and do family stuff, all the paint would have just flopped off.
That orange is an undercoat for masking purposes. The seat tube was an aborted idea.
The top tube masked with electrical tape. See where that tape overlaps? That’s a little problem. Thinner tape cut at the edge would have been a good idea. No big deal, fortunately.
… then I painted the whole thing “Machine Grey”. I really like this color.
Then I removed the mask. Rock. Yeah, I painted a lot of orange, then wanted just a little. I tried a bunch of patterns before I came up with this one.
See? Kinda neat. The light was low, but the camera did an admirable job.
So I threw together a bunch of the parts, and it starts to look like a bike! These are the wheels I built in a previous post, as well. Most of the parts, including the frame (from a Trek 7300) were from various folks on Ebay. As always, caveat emptor: the bottom bracked turns out to be cross-threaded, so I have to have it retapped tomorrow at Full Circle.
I think the cranks are gonna come off the Iron Monkey, which will then get my brother’s old cranks and chainwheel. I want the 53:12 ratio! I wanna haul ass! The Iron Monkey will probably be mostly ridden by guests (once I fix it up with a new rear wheel) who probably won’t appreciate a gear you can only be in for 5 minutes of the ride anyway.
And that brings me to a serious question: what should I name this bike? I called it Mithrandir over on Velospace for need of a name on the spot, but it doesn’t make me happy. Too nerdly. I’m happy to take recommendations, even ridiculous ones that I’ll reject out of hand because they’ll make me laugh.
