Star Crossed Musing

So there's a game I've been working on (or rather, it's been simmering on the back burner) for *mumble* years now. It's a cyberpunk game called Daedalus. You see, I wrote a setting way back in the 2000s for a company called Guardians of Order, which was published in their Ex Machina book -- there were four cyberpunk settings and mechanics for their system. My setting, the aforementioned Daedalus, was pretty kindly regarded, and I was pretty proud of it. When GoO folded, I got the rights back in lieu of payment for other debts, and we called it good. Cue Life. (Life enters, pursued by a bear.) Time passes, as it does, and in the interim I lived in Seattle and did a whole bunch of work for various other people and finished my bachelors degree. Then I moved to Cleveland, went to grad school, got married, and finished my doctorate. Gosh, it sounds so simple when I say it like that. Anyway, in the midst of all that, my husband Matthew and I started our own game compa...

From the app game Monument Valley So I've been bitten by the fantasy bug, probably at least part in reaction to the whole election stuff. This isn't unusual, really -- look at Tolkien -- but it's unusual for me, because working at WotC and on d20 stuff for so long had seemingly inoculated me against fantasy stuff. I still can't play D&D or Pathfinder. It's like a mental contact allergy, except it involves ranting and a reaction to classes and levels. However, I've started putting thought into a fantasy game, and I think it a) actually has some legs and b) would be fun to play and c) does enough that's different to be worthwhile and not just another heartbreaker. So I figured I'd post about it as I go along and see what people think. So, first of all, I've figured out I have rules for game design overall, and even fantasy games have to fit within them. Here are my rules. 1) There has to be a goal of play.  I have nothing against sandbox...

Oh friends, readers, and countrymen, what tales I have to tell you. I have returned from London and completed revisions on my first dissertation chapter. I have started writing using the research I did in London for my fourth (written second) chapter. I have been teaching a class and I have made a prototype for a new card game, which is not a thing I have ever done before. I have made hand-raised steak and ale pies for my gaming group, and shared the joy of Jaffa Cakes. My company has even just finished a successful Kickstarter for a new Chill 3rd Edition supplement -- Monsters. We not only met our very realistic (aka not lowballed) goal, but we exceeded it by 5k, and as a result will be adding extra content in the form of more monsters! Closer to home and the present day, the weather is currently giving me fits as it yo-yos from 40s to 70s and back again, all of which triggers my migraines. Metatopia is this weekend, and I am not really ready, but I am likely as ready as I will ev...

UPDATE, 8/1: Heading out tomorrow for GenCon, so I'm closing comments. Thanks to everyone for their thoughtful replies. I'm back from Rare Book School and so I'm just now getting to this -- my apologies. This is long and I go through a bit of social construction/community game theory to get there, but I think it's really valuable. Bear with me. ---------------------------------------------------------- Okay, so once upon a time I came up with a list of currency types in communities, the sort of thing that determines status and the types of actions that garner those varieties of status. In particular, I was thinking about online communities, but there's a lot of cross-over into real life. They were: expertise, service, activity, investment, proximity to source, and celebrity. So for example, let's say you're dealing with an online fan community. Expertise is a currency earned by knowing all the tiny details about whatever. If your fan group is about W...

So, despite the fact that I need to be dissertating (and I am, I promise!), I keep having ideas for games. Some people do this with short stories; some people do this with article ideas, or crafting ideas, or whatever. I've gotten to the point that I do it with games. Now, I'm a person who believes that it's not the idea, but the execution that makes something awesome, so I don't mind talking about my ideas. I also think there's only a couple of people in the industry I know of who might be willing to take them and run with them, so it's not like there's a huge risk. As such, I'm going to list out my game ideas and hope that they'll leave me alone until next year, when I can actually start to do something about some of them. If, of course, some of my fair readers wants to comment on some of these ideas and tell me what they think, I'd be interested. Do note, these are mostly working titles. Vovetas: My Game Chef entry from last year -- a r...

Their registration system is awful, but they've got a cute mascot! So we're back from Origins. Matt covers some of the general stuff that he did as well as the administrative headache stuff we experienced  here in his blog . I'm not going to retread a lot of that, because I lived it once and my stress levels don't need to repeat the experience at this point. I am deeply sad my "All My Circuits: A Tragedy in Five Acts" hack didn't get any players -- I chose the theme for the game to be in keeping with the theme for the con, and it looked like it was going to be a lot of fun. Now, that being said, what did we do at Origins? I worked the booth a lot, spent a lot of time I wanted to socialize off in my room by myself, which makes me sad too (stealthy pine nuts, I abjure thee! Cigarette smoke, my bronchitis-affected lungs abjure thee as well!). I didn't get to do anything like as many things or talk to as many people as I wanted to. That said, there w...

I did not Game Chef this year. I wanted to, and thought I might, but then this whole bronchitis/hives/low potassium/dissertation thing happened and I was like, yeah, maybe not. And so I didn't. No one in the McFarland household did, although my stepdaughter at least came up with an idea. From what I've seen on G+, a lot of people were really taken with the theme and ingredients, though, and there look to be a number of fun entries to come out of it, which is awesome.  One of the things I've been musing on since I decided not to do Game Chef this year, though, is how high the bar to entry actually is for making room in game design for new designers. I mean, on the face of it, it's simple. Anyone can design a game, any time. But in reality, game design is a time sink. You need free time to think, to plan, to come up with mock-ups, to play, to write. You need stability and space and a way to find at least an hour every few days to yourself when you're not so exh...

Now THAT, my friends, is a title. But I digress. This is me. Taken last fall, over on campus. I have too many things to carry with straps, as you can see. I am also heavier than I would like, but I've largely made peace with that. Also, I have this weird camera smile. I blame the overbite. But whatever. I am cis, female-identified, heterosexual. I have glasses and I dye my hair purple in places. I also, although this picture does not show it, have boobs. My chest is not going to go down in history as one of the perfect chests of womankind. I am no Phryne. But breasts, I have them. And now that that's settled... I am also a game designer. A game designer, and I have boobs! Imagine! How did this happen, may you ask. Were they added later? [No.] Do I have a secret lab of subordinate male game designers whose work I claim as my own, in exchange for baked goods (as that's one of the things that breasts enable, right)? [Er, No. How weird. What a terrible supervillain that w...

My apologies for the long delay in posting; I have a few things I want to wrap up on the last day of 2015. First of all, I want to post the end of Season 2 of the Rising Waters game, and then I want to comment a bit on the Dresden Files Accelerated playtest. When last we left our intrepid crew, they had gone to the librarian to get some word on their gifts. Jeffrey, said librarian, was impressed and rather horrified at the same time. He pointed out that these were some of the weirdest things he'd ever seen because of their combination of fae and demonic magics. These are not two great tastes that taste great together, and while it explained how fae magic could take on ghosts, for example, it did not in the least reassure him about what's going on. The group was equally chastened, realizing this just got a lot stranger than they'd bargained for. They had to get back to the tea shop, though, since Hui had made Dylan promise to have Eldi back before dark. Nobody wants t...

Mock-up cover, courtesy Evil Hat Productions Woo hoo! So my group and I were fortunate enough to get into the Dresden Files Accelerated Beta Playtest , which has been a complete blast. Rather than making characters from scratch, we converted the characters from our ongoing game into DFA characters last session.  Before I go into what we ended doing this evening, though, I want to talk a bit about the playtest and the effects the change in system have had. So, to no one's surprise, DFA is based on FAE ( Fate Accelerated Edition ). For those who've played the Dresden Files RPG , you'll know that it's FATE plus some clunkier bits as it tries to encompass the magic and setting and variety of critter abilities within one game. I love the game, don't get me wrong, but it's definitely not the most streamlined system in existence. The magic system in particular was far more complicated in practice than was convenient, and using it always slowed the game down f...

Game Design Thoughts Ahoy! Okay, so A Tragedy in Five Acts . It's actually done a lot better than I thought it had any right to, and I'm glad about that. Word of mouth has spread enough that people are starting to run it at cons who aren't me, and it's turning out to be something of an evergreen game -- it sells consistently if not hugely, and that makes me happy. It's never going to be a sales leader, but it has something of a following, and that makes me happy. That said, it's occurred to me of late that the endgame in Tragedy needs some reworking. It works great until you get to Act V, and then things stumble a bit in resolution -- it's not impossible to work it out, by any means, but the system that drives the game so well up until that point just stops mattering, and that feels rather abrupt to me. It's a thing I've been thinking about addressing in a second edition of the game, and the more I think about it, the more I want to press forw...

Bradley, by Timm Henson Man, that is just not an exciting title. But I'm currently writing a mentoring guide about diversity in games, and so that's where my mind is at. The pic to the right was drawn by the amazing Timm Henson, and it's one of the Agents available for play in our free downloadable Chill character pack . His name is Bradley. So, diversity means a lot of things. Basically it means "have a bit of everything involved, more or less equally spread around." That's harder than it sounds like when you're used to everything looking one way and you start changing it up. It can be difficult to think outside the box, and so most games and game companies historically haven't worried about it. There are some stand-out exceptions, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't so long ago we were having talks about passive cheesecake and chainmail bikinis being a righteous standard for portrayals of women in games (and in some places on the internet...

So designing games. One of the weird things I've discovered over the past year is that I actually have ideas about games. I have the game I made for Game Chef (called Vovetas), I have another all-ages game I'm still working out, I have Daedalus, and I have A Comedy in Five Acts still on my plate, in addition to some far flung ideas about the steampunk mad scientist game, and a couple other RPGs and other things that I'm doing freelance (and, you know, my dissertation and syllabi and whatnot but lets not talk about that right now ). I have discovered during this period of time that yes, I really am a game designer. Not just a mechanics inventor or writer or editor, but a designer, designing games from scratch. I have opinions about what works and what doesn't, and although I don't get things right all the time, I get them right often enough in games that I feel as though this is not going to be something I give up lightly. I think it's especially important gi...

So an interesting discussion has started about compensation for freelancers in the RPG industry (see here for David Hill's initial blog post and here for Ryan Macklin's continuation of the theme ). They basically bring up that working for hire on a per word basis at current RPG industry rates is frankly both unfair and untenable, and although they aren't sure what the alternative is right now. For those who aren't already familiar with the problem, freelance author rates in RPGs run from $.01 per word to $.08, with perhaps WotC and Paizo paying .08 and Onyx Path paying $.03 to new authors, with a cap at $.05 for established authors. Terms are typically half upon completion, half upon publication.* This level of pay is shit, to put it mildly. It is difficult to ask for more, however, because RPGs do not in any way make the money they once did. If you sell through a print run of 1000 books, you're doing well. The bigger names do far better than that, but by and lar...

GenCon's next week, and I'm going to be there! I'm wearing a few different hats this year: Co-owner of Growling Door Games, Convention Coordinator of IGDN, and manager of GenCon's very first quiet room, located in ICC 237! However busy I'll be, though, I'd love to say hello to people and talk to them (and possibly sell you some games). So, want to find me at GenCon? Here's where you should look! Wednesday, July 30th IGDN Social! -- We'll be at Loughmiller's Pub from 6:00 to 9:00, with special drinks just for the group. The menu will be available to our guests (or to take out) during that time, and we'll have drink tickets ($5 each, each one worth 2 drinks). Come on down! Thursday, July 31st IGDN Booth! (#734, beside IPR) -- I'll be at the booth bright and early to kick off the exhibit hall opening and there on and off through the day. Clue: A Tragedy in Five Acts -- 8:00 PM, Marriott Downtown, Ballroom 7. I'll be running ...

So I wrote an entry for Game Chef this year called Vovetas. It's a card game. I've included the link in case anyone would like to take a look: Vovetas game and cards I got my feedback on it today, and I'm really torn. On the one hand, people were intrigued enough to actually try to dig into the mechanics and tell me where they thought it needed more work (lots of it needs more work -- it hasn't been playtested yet). On the other hand, the theme seemed to go right over their heads. I didn't get accused of appropriation, which I pretty much expected, so that's something. I just also didn't manage to make a connection with people that I thought I made pretty obvious. The Game Chef ingredients are, I felt, crucial to the game, but a number of my reviewers simply didn't see it. I'm more disheartened by this than I want to be. I have a goal to actually playtest this, refine it, and bring it to market. I'm going to press forward with this, since t...