Here's the preview (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/847190685/1953406243?token=859ad2ab). I'll upload the playtest draft and a layout sample right before the launch date, and with any luck Ralph and Matt will set up teaser pages too. All comments are welcome!
So ... feedback at G+ includes some interesting suggestions from a perspective I do not share. My current inclination is mostly NO on every one. But that doesn't mean they're not right. So I want your feedback on all of these. If you think any of them is right, try to convince me.
1. Put myself up-front in the video, at the start, because I'm selling myself and only secondarily the game. I am a little too proud of the current video, in that it sucks a lot less than previous ones, and I consider myself the weakest part of any such presentation - hence I'm at the end.
2. Same thing for the page - all about me and then the game, why they should play it, first thing. At the very least, don't talk about heartbreakers at the opening.
3. Add a $1 level and make that the entry point for getting the playtest PDF. The person making this suggestion admitted that their kickstart had gone with this only due to a minor gut feeling that the buy-in mattered, but they did note that nearly everyone who did it upgraded by the end of the campaign.
4. Don't limit it to a single stretch goal at the outset. I am disgusted by stretch goals in general and especially the way that people use sequential stretch goals to whip people into a frenzy of pledging.
5. Put in a caveat about the Inner Circle pledge, so it's not a guarantee. Also make it a higher pledge level.
6. Include an add-on of a bundle of all my games, priced with an odd number. As a cool thing, that's not a bad idea. However, the Sorcerer kickstart soured me on add-ons, which are incredibly hard to manage when it's all done.
7. Add a super-limited edition, signed by me. Which means I have to receive it from the printer, paying for that packing and shipping, then sign the thing, then pack and ship it myself. Good-bye all money gained from the pledge.
8. Other suggestions include making all the copies hardcover, making the system OGL, and adding setting material and maps. I don't see the point of the first considering that all it does is drop my profit margin to nothing (I need this money for the art, God damn it), the OGL idea is completely worthless because one cannot copyright game mechanics in the first place, and whatever setting material I have or will have added by August 1, is going into the game anyway.
9. Contact various industry mags and stuff for massive traditional promotion, ads, interviews and stuff like that. More confessions - I hate all this too and would be most happy to let everyone else, i.e. everyone reading this, blitz social media and have that be that.
As to 1 and 2, I can tell you that I will be contributing to this Kickstarter, not because of the bullet points describing your game (they make it sound interesting, but they don't sell it for me.), nor because it's a fixed fantasy heartbreaker, but because it's Ron Edwards's fantasy heartbreaker. That matters to me because Ron Edwards is the guy who wrote System Does Matter, and started me down the path to playing decent games way back when. Also, because he wrote S/Lay w/Me, one of my favorite games.
As to number 9, I can tell you that I absolutely would have contributed to the S/Lay w/Me Kickstarter had I been aware of it, but I wasn't. For someone to pledge money, they have to be aware the Kickstarter's happening, and word of mouth is only one part of advertising.
The others I have no opinion on, though I think the OGL does cover the names for game mechanics, which can be copyrighted, and some of the text describing them, which can also, doesn't it? Not that it matters much. If I wanted to write a game that used Bangs, I'd ask your permission to call them that, and I'd be very surprised if I didn't get it.
To my mind the video should be about the project, and on that front I think it does a good job of serving it's purpose.
On 2, I think that the game should be dealt with upfront, but it might be a good idea to add a brief "who the heck am I" section to it towards the bottom of the description (maybe just above the section about the imprint). While we all know who you are, and while your name still is able to conjure a firestorm on some gaming forums, I run into a surprisingly large number of gamers who've never heard of you, the forge, or TBM.
I definitely disagree with suggestion 3.
6, I'm not a fan of add-ons either, even though I made use of them on the Sorcerer kickstarter. If you were to add a gaming bundle, I'd say you're better off making a pledge level of it.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on March 10, 2014, 11:10:56 AM
1. Put myself up-front in the video, at the start, because I'm selling myself and only secondarily the game. I am a little too proud of the current video, in that it sucks a lot less than previous ones, and I consider myself the weakest part of any such presentation - hence I'm at the end.
You being the "weaker part" is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy,,, when you do these video you tend to do them without a lot of care about lighting, background, image quality, etc, if you could improve on that they could be stronger....
Said that, can you use more that one video? If you can, this one could be the video at the start of the reclamation project description part (where is important to say that this is your old heartbreaker and there are others), and use instead a video concentrating on the game for the top spot.
Quote
2. Same thing for the page - all about me and then the game, why they should play it, first thing. At the very least, don't talk about heartbreakers at the opening.
See above. If you recall, I had a similar reaction at fist:
before: "Ron's old heartbreaker, dusted up and published? Mmmm... no, not really interested..."
After reading the game's description: "Wow, I must play this right now!"
The game description should be on the page, not in a link to a pdf...
Add to this that heartbreaker is used on the net in a negative way (OK, it was not like that in your essays, but a lot of people use it without having read your essays at all...)
Quote3. Add a $1 level and make that the entry point for getting the playtest PDF. The person making this suggestion admitted that their kickstart had gone with this only due to a minor gut feeling that the buy-in mattered, but they did note that nearly everyone who did it upgraded by the end of the campaign.
The only way to see if this is useful or not would be having read data for similar projects done one way or the other, but as a gut feeling, I don't like very much the "pay 1 dollar to see the playtest draft". Has the "people are more willing to playtest a game if the pay for it" idea ever been corroborated with real data? I know that I never, ever did playtest any of the ashcan I brought (it was not calculated, it simply happened. A couple I did not want to play after reading them, other I simply did not understand how to play, others simply I did not find the group or the time) and I ended up playtesting only the ones I got for free....
Quote4. Don't limit it to a single stretch goal at the outset. I am disgusted by stretch goals in general and especially the way that people use sequential stretch goals to whip people into a frenzy of pledging.
About this, it's simply your choice: it's something that works, yes, but if you don't like it, you don't like it.
Quote5. Put in a caveat about the Inner Circle pledge, so it's not a guarantee. Also make it a higher pledge level.
I think that the whole process of turning a hangout conversation into game text could be problematic: how do you think to do it?
Quote6. Include an add-on of a bundle of all my games, priced with an odd number. As a cool thing, that's not a bad idea. However, the Sorcerer kickstart soured me on add-ons, which are incredibly hard to manage when it's all done.
Well, in this case, you already have the pdfs, there is nothing to create or print or ship. If people buy the game they will have a forge bookshelf account in any case, so you will not even have to create it. I don't know how much work is to authorize a download, but you could even avoid the hassle of doing that game by game by having a separate bundle needing a single authorization.
Quote7. Add a super-limited edition, signed by me. Which means I have to receive it from the printer, paying for that packing and shipping, then sign the thing, then pack and ship it myself. Good-bye all money gained from the pledge.
Maybe you could simply sign a number of numbered cards, ship them to the printer, and have them glued to the frontispiece (I think Bud Plant did this with many books, creating store-exclusive "signer numbered editions". Kitchen Sink did it with their signer hardcover editions).
Quote8. Other suggestions include making all the copies hardcover, making the system OGL, and adding setting material and maps. I don't see the point of the first considering that all it does is drop my profit margin to nothing (I need this money for the art, God damn it), the OGL idea is completely worthless because one cannot copyright game mechanics in the first place, and whatever setting material I have or will have added by August 1, is going into the game anyway.
The point of the "all hardcovers" goal is that turns everybody who pledged for a softcover into a rabid evangelist for the game, hoping to convince enough people to pledge. And then, if the goal is reached, you get the people who would not have brought a softcover (that they could print themselves with the pdf) but now jump at the only chance they will ever have to have a hardcover for a relatively small price.
It works, I have seen it work, I have seen it work on me on a couple of occasion (I am a sucker for getting a hardcover for the price of a softcover), but
1) See reply to point 4: if you don't like it, don't do it.
2) The weight and bulk of an hardcover would increase the postal expenses too, so the amount needed to reach this goal will have to be high enough to cover that, too.
Quote9. Contact various industry mags and stuff for massive traditional promotion, ads, interviews and stuff like that. More confessions - I hate all this too and would be most happy to let everyone else, i.e. everyone reading this, blitz social media and have that be that.
Some promotions that would not cost a lot of time (or at least I think so):
- do interviews with gaming podcasts about the game (and don't forget to talk about Dragon genitals, it will get the OSR crowds attention...)
- organize (after the podcasts) a public Google hangout question & answers session answering questions about the game, and then link it into the kickstarter page.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on March 10, 2014, 11:10:56 AM1. Put myself up-front in the video, at the start, because I'm selling myself and only secondarily the game. I am a little too proud of the current video, in that it sucks a lot less than previous ones, and I consider myself the weakest part of any such presentation - hence I'm at the end.
Right now, for me, the most powerful part of the video is from 2:00 to 2:21, from "It's a Fantasy Roleplaying game" to "but everyone one of them is knocked askew in one fashion or another". To me that seems like the cleanest explanation you've given as to what the game is about, and I get a sense of what I'd be getting into if I bought the game. But I always prefer videos where people are trying to be simple and straightforward rather than trying to emulate slick production values, so maybe I'm weird.
Quote9. Contact various industry mags and stuff for massive traditional promotion, ads, interviews and stuff like that. More confessions - I hate all this too and would be most happy to let everyone else, i.e. everyone reading this, blitz social media and have that be that.
Personally I find standard promotional tactics kind of off-putting. I hate "I'm here to talk about my new game!" interviews, for example. But if there were things you'd be inclined to do anyway, e.g. go on a podcast to talk about a particular topic, there's little downside to timing that sort of activity so you do it concurrently with a crowdfunding campaign to maximize the "get the word out" effect.
Thanks to everyone! I'll be doing a makeover for the text of the page over the next couple of days.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on March 10, 2014, 11:10:56 AM
the OGL idea is completely worthless because one cannot copyright game mechanics in the first place,
It's true that lots of people in hobby gaming don't have a clue how copyright laws actually work, and for a time the impact of OGL was probably to muddle up things even worse (though I, for one, was only motivated to learn about how copyright actually works as a consequence of struggling to understand OGL as a 20-yrs old). Also, "OGL" works like a buzzword or logo amongst gamers, while the actual
license is a clunky, cumbersome, impractical horror when compared to something like, say, the Creative Commons ones (I'm speaking from the viewpoint of someone releasing most of my works as Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike).
But let's get over the technicalities and try to guess at the
point of the (formally incorrect) suggestion...
The point is: people are suggesting you make an open, public invitation to other people to release and circulate their own additions to your game. This is something that was never particularly front-and-center in Forge culture, I think, for a number of quite obvious reasons (such as that a close-knit circle of people who all know each other don't need a public invitation, such as the centrality of the fight for recognition of RPGs as the work of one individual auteur, and for author-owned copyright, feeling somewhat at odds with "the commons" before the fight was indeed won, etc.) but is very healthy and worthwhile on its own rights.
The correct technical way to go is probably not to adopt OGL, sure. I personally believe Dungeon World did it quite right, with the CC-BY text dumped on GitHub. But also look at what Vincent did with AW: literally a public invitation to people to remix and share, with no added formalities, and it worked like a charm.
Rafu: You mean an open public invitation like the one in the Sorcerer text? Because that book was my introduction to the philosophy behind the Forge, and it's pretty up front about encouraging you to create your own mini-supplements for the game.
I appreciate that! I wonder if anyone else remembers who opened that door. Clinton also deserves credit for doing the same with The Shadow of Yesterday, hence Lady Blackbird and so on.
No one is going to believe me probably, but unless you are lifting blocks of text or using a recognizable depiction (logo style) of a title, all this Open License and GNU and whatnot is totally not necessary. Go ahead and use any components of Sorcerer you want, even use the rules as written, and as long as you aren't straightforwardly plagiarizing or as long as a customer can't mistake your product for Sorcerer/Adept Press itself, then you don't need legal text or license of any kind.
When people finally admit that they want to use (e.g.) TSR D&D stuff or Apocalypse World or whatever as a form of marketing, not influence or inspiration, then we can actually have an honest conversation about all of this. Until then, blah.
... but I do need to face facts, one of which is that people are not going to get this. So do I offer these mechanics as "open license," redundant as that might be? Which only makes me complicit with both ignorance and marketing-centric logic? Fuck.
Well, the Apocalypse World crowd is overall savvy about copyright & licensing and is already having honest conversations about it. If you compare how Dungeon World vs Monsterhearts vs Monster of the Week vs tremulus treat the "Powered by the Apocalypse" graphic in their book design, for instance, what you'll see is the result of intentional marketing decisions, not superstitions about licensing.
I think you can just continue to be clear about it, people will believe you, and you won't have to be complicit in stupidity.
-Vincent
Wouldn't it be a simple and pleasing compromise to literally promise an "open license" without actually using one of the popular standard licenses? I mean, "license" just means a contract to grant some rights, and an "open license" is a contract open to the public without the need for separate negotiations each time somebody wants to sign up. So you could promise an open license in your Kickstarter, and then just have that license be like a paragraph of text in your copyright statement, and that's that. Something like: "I welcome any interested parties to build upon the work in this book, using the rules or setting concepts to further their own work, all according to best publishing practice and amity among practitioners of this fine art. Specifically, you may consider this an open license for the creation of supplements, expansions or hacks of the game, commercial or otherwise." That's already an "open license" in a sense, even if it doesn't actually grant much in the way of rights that you wouldn't have anyway :D
Of course you would get questions during the funding drive about which license you're planning to use, but those are easy to answer: you're promising an original license, not any specific pre-existing one such as OGL or CC. You could even publish your proposed licensing text for critique in advance, if you felt like it. The point here would be to get to use the magic words "open license" for marketing purposes, but without using unnecessarily vague (CC) or limiting (OGL) standard licenses.
Overall, though, I would myself expect this to be a minor point - won't cause the funding drive to either succeed or fail. There are no doubt a few vocal people for whom an open license is a most significant selling point, but I'd expect most people to either not care or know enough to not care.
I like the way the Powered by the Apocalypse seems to be working out, and I agree it doesn't seem to have foundered in illusions. Vincent, did you set it up to be explicitly available from the outset, or did it emerge from people doing hacks and thus became a thing which needed some (little) organization from there?
I mean, at this point, hardly anyone knows what the dice engine of Circle of Hands is like, and similar to Apocalypse World, it's very very good for a specific way to play, but not by any means a "universal mechanic." So I don't see much point in billing it as a skinnable or usable or even desirable system without evidence that anyone wants to.
On reflection, I think that's what puzzles me most about the suggestion.
Best, Ron
Hey, everybody, sure: Clinton Nixon's The Shadow of Yesterday was my very first rabbit hole into "free culture" (a.k.a. copyleft), in all possible ways, and after going down there I elected to stay. If anybody wants to have a deeper conversation about the history of complicated relationships between Forge culture and free culture, count me in, but I don't think it belongs here and now.
And, sure, "free culture" these days is totally messed up (and probably compromised) with branding, and marketing stunts and stuff. Just like everything else. No big surprise.
And, finally, I agree with Eero this is not going to be a big deal for the crowdfunding campaign. I guess I would
love it if such things were key to success, because of what it would imply about the world. But no, that's not the world we're living in.
But a point I really want to address right now...
Quote from: Ron Edwards on March 11, 2014, 10:36:48 AMbut unless you are lifting blocks of text or
Ron, since we're talking
books... Since RPG design as we know it is distributed through a text medium, and of course this particular project of yours is no exception...
THE WHOLE POINT OF FREE LICENSING, the only concrete thing it actually does, is allowing people to re-use your text. Whole blocks of text, probably the whole book, depending on the specific license. Since text is what copyright covers in a game, the only concrete action you can take to make it more "free" by the law is, of course, release the
text for other people to use.
If that isn't something you want to deal with, don't.
Now you're being obnoxious, Rafu. I don't need instruction on licensing. My point is that you could use all the Sorcerer mechanics you wanted without lifting my text - in fact, probably by writing better explanatory text or shifted in some way that's relevant to the vision of your game. Therefore using blocks of my text is a separate decision, e.g., I might want to offer it as a form of promotion, and you might want to do it as a form of association. These are marketing decisions and I see nothing wrong with doing it or not doing it. But in terms of actual game design there's no other point that I can see.
Don't read this as an attack on open licensing. I'm aware that all dialogue about these things is framed as attack/defense, approval/disapproval, endorsement/condemnation. That's not what I'm doing. If I don't make an open license for Sorcerer stuff, it's not because I hate the very idea and disapprove of anyone doing it. The question is what's best for the crowdfunding campaign for Circle of Hands.
Admitted up front - this is an entirely personal response that might have zero carry-over to others, but in case it does - I'm gonna go ahead and mention it. My concern on reading the info-dump was that I almost gave up with a "too dark - I probably wouldn't get anyone to play that" reaction before reaching the info about the Circle and what you actually DO in the setting/circumstance. The preview moves the Circle more front-and-center, but if I quibble ... is "gutsy" a strong-enough, um, positive word in the opening sentence? Does "stark, iron, smeared, bleeding, charred, and cruel" need a um, "determined/resolute/dedicated" attribute for the PCs in that stark etc. environment? Don't get me wrong, I love the pull-no-punches color, but as a selling point to most folks I play with, the "you are the guys and gals trying - against fierce circumstance - to put some hope into the despair" would be vital. As would the "you might not succeed, at least not as well as/in the way you wanted", but I'm not yet sure if the vibe I get from the text includes enough "you get to try and fix/deal with this shit" vibe.
I can accept "fuck, Gordon, the selling point here is the grit", and on the whole I think the preview gives the full picture eventually, but - maybe, for some folks, putting a little more "light(of a sort)-against-the-darkness" right in the opening would keep them from giving up before they see that it's there.
Oh, more personal reaction, fine by me if it's ignored I just don't want to regret not mentioning it: the Rbaja deadlive art is fine - and that an Rbaja deadlive is something that exists is cool. But purely as Kickstart/promo impress-me art, it's a bit underwhelming to my eyes. The skeletal lizardhorse in the video was more grabby.
Ron, sorry for sounding obnoxious, as I wasn't meaning to! Nor did I want to school you about licensing, nor to descend into an attack/defense mode of discussion. I blame my imperfect proficiency of English as a second language for all of that.
I completely agree with you (not that you need my agreement!) that it's only and purely a marketing thing, and not of course a game design thing, concerning Circle of Hands, and I'm not trying to affect your judgment any particular way — Sorry for making it sound otherwise, that would be obnoxious indeed.
The reason I was moved to comment that way is that I read your posts as carrying the assumption that whomever suggested "OGL" licensing in the first place was necessarily confused about copyright and licensing - interested in working with your mechanics, not your actual text. It didn't feel to me like that necessarily had to be the case, so... Well, I possibly misread your assumptions, for which I apologize.
Hi Gordon,
I'll tweak the text a bit. I agree that "gutsy" isn't the word for that spot, too. The deadalive sketch is a placeholder for its final version or for another illustration depending on what artists toss my way.
Your point about hope is interesting. There are two points about Circle of Hands which are probably not well suited to the Kickstarter promotion, much as the nuances of Humanity were not suitable to the early promotion of Sorcerer.
1. Hope isn't in the fiction of this game. The player-characters are in the position of seeking social justice without really knowing what it is. They have not even been indoctrinated in a code or belief. Instead, they have completely, experientially rejected the magical war and have dedicated their lives to defying it, which as it happens, has turned into leveling the social class structure which they have always experienced as no less than the air they breathed.
2. The slightly-vague missions which define each adventure succeed by default. This isn't a "can you complete the mission" game but rather a "what did you go through during the mission" game. It's possible for the missions to fail, but mainly through bad luck or very bad judgment; most if not all of them succeed, and that success is actually not even played, most of the time. The climax of play is not the success or failure of the mission, but instead the height of the characters' experiences there.
Putting these two things together: if anyone has hope, it's the players - hope that the magical war can be somehow brought to an end, hope that this immiserated society has some kind of chance for change. The general if not 100% success of the missions lays at least some foundation for that hope. By contrast, the characters may exemplify that hope, but they don't have the vocabulary to express it, to conceive of it, or even to feel it. They empowered by gray magic, by their own physical prowess, and by their willingness to rack their bodies.
Hi Rafu,
My initial post definitely pushed "critical" into the realm of "opinionated," so I apologize too.
Best, Ron
So the players are seeking justice in a world that has never shown any examples of what a just world would look like?
What do you mean when you describe the missions as vague?
After reading what you wrote, I picture a world unbalanced by this war between two types of magic, a war the players reject out of hand and this imbalance throughout history has created all of these barrows, ruins and dark places on the edge for the players to delve into for the glory of their newfound king and this crucible will be what scars them into the people who will possibly change the world somehow.
Feel free to reply with, "Judd, just wait until you get the PDF, please," which is fine.
I'm happy to adjust what you're seeing into what I'd like to say. It might help a bit with what I'm posting and how I'll promote during the campaign, so this is valuable.
1. "Seeking justice" isn't a good description from the point of view of the Circle knights. They're fighting against Rbaja and Amboriyon, and otherwise stabilizing the new king's rule or relations with other people. From the point of view of the players, well, I don't know. To a great extent that will be up to them.
2. "Vague" was a bad word choice for promotional purposes. The knights are working with limited information, one of 1-3 components that went into preparing the adventure, and little knowledge of the specific dynamics at that location. There's no pre-adventure investigation, intelligence work, or briefing. Therefore they arrive, and then have a wide-open range of how they assess the situation and what they want to do about it. It's up to them to decide what actions will best work toward their general mandate, and as I tried to describe above, the whole mission isn't made or broken by "making the wrong choice" or anything like that.
Your general picture isn't bad at all! "Throughout history" maybe isn't quite right, although since the characters and culture in general are deeply uneducated, they might see it that way. I see it as an area that used to be a pretty normal part of a much larger land-and-sea complex of continents, but has become isolated for at least a couple of centuries. Maybe it was on the outer reaches of an empire which has turned its attention to some other direction. Maybe there was a disaster of some kind. Whether the current magical war caused the isolation, or resulted from it, I don't know and don't care. Foreigners certainly still contact and trade with the parts of the Crescent land far outside of the player-character's range of action, but no one travels deep into it from elsewhere, these days.
I've taken some pains with ethnicity and customs to show that although the culture and people's appearance is quite visually distinctive, evidence of prior multicultural travel/contact is unmistakable, as is the evidence of a prior ethnic cleansing from long, long ago.
Sounds neat. I'm intrigued.
Boy king or young man king or we-won't-see-him-so-what-does-it-matter king?
I'd love to hear a bit more about the magic and spell lists of if it is helpful to go over it.
The text says "young king," and also briefly mentions that he's aided by a wizard who has never "leveled up" in either black or white magic. (System-wise, that means he would always have cast enough black magic to counteract his buildup of white magic and vice versa, which would have to be done in the extreme short term.) It also presumes a fairly intense if short period during which a whole lot of powerful people in Rolke were killed, exiled, or changed their ways, such that the influences of warring wizards were brought to practically zero.
So, young king, advisor wizard, militant and proactive followers with a circular motif - but that's exactly as far as the Arthuriana goes, because nothing else in the setting is like literary Arthurian motifs or narratives.
The home-base is never played, the king and wizard are never seen and are not NPCs, the situation back at home is never described or alluded to. The player-characters (twice the number of people at the table) are the inner veteran core of the Circle, but other Circle knights, who presumably exist, younger and/or more recent, are never observed in play or even mentioned. All adventures begin with a group of Circle knights, one per player, already on their way somewhere.
In case the players/characters concept hasn't been clear, let's say you and I are in a role-playing group, and I'm the GM, with a total of five people in it. The first session, we get together and each of us, me included, makes up two characters. So that's ten characters, who are our Circle. Each session after that, we play an adventure, and each adventure, the four players each choose any Circle knight from the Circle to play. Two minor rules for that: (i) the first adventure, play one of the ones you made up; (ii) you can't play the same character twice in a row.
Magic: spells are either white or black, and rated from 1 to 3 points. So that's 6 categories of spell (black 1-3, white 1-3), with approximately 14 spells in each. The number is (i) the points of Brawn you spend to cast the spell and (ii) the number of color points you fill in for your little color point diagram on the character sheet. You can see an example of (ii) in the video. The total number of color points you can have is 9, after that, the colors start to cancel each other, and if you end up with 9 of one single color, stuff happens - not necessary punitive, but really stuff.
Wizard characters know every single one of the spells. All of them. Non-wizards know 5 points of spells which must include both white and black.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on March 12, 2014, 04:44:09 PM
2. "Vague" was a bad word choice for promotional purposes. The knights are working with limited information, one of 1-3 components that went into preparing the adventure, and little knowledge of the specific dynamics at that location. There's no pre-adventure investigation, intelligence work, or briefing. Therefore they arrive, and then have a wide-open range of how they assess the situation and what they want to do about it. It's up to them to decide what actions will best work toward their general mandate, and as I tried to describe above, the whole mission isn't made or broken by "making the wrong choice" or anything like that.
Circle knights are thrust into dangerous situations on limited, maybe even faulty information, without the time or resources to seek more before being throwing themselves into peril. There aren't wrong answers but there certainly are answers with consequences.
No poorly written read-the-GM's-mind-pre-plotted module stuff...I gotcha.
The sharing of characters reminds me of that interesting part of Ars Magica, where the players share the frogs in a big pool (I think...might be making that up).
Any particular bibliography for this one (that isn't already in S&S)?
What would some sample missions be?
- Delve into the barrow of a white magic wizard who was rendered into a "perfect" being and buried in this holy state.
Visit a local bandit lord to make diplomatic overtures for the king
Go slit the throat of a merchant who is profiting off of the war and has begun to use his resources to make the conflict bloodier.
Ron,
On the missions and success: yeah, I think I did gather that the missions per se would tend to have positive results, but I'm assuming that big-picture success - does it actually MATTER that the Circle completes the missions? - is less certain. So to my eye that is in the current description, just a little more hidden than maybe you'd want.
I think the players having the hope rather than the characters is also like that - there in the current text if a little obscured - but ... I entirely see that the fiction requires the characters to NOT have hope in anything like the way the players might. I'm not sure I know many RPG groups where some glimmer of hope wouldn't show up in a couple of the characters, though. I can imagine the game design helping stifle that, but if the description could somehow evoke the inchoate longing of the characters, and if the game actually has room for the chance that that longing might develop even a little bit within the fiction, it might be a selling point to make sure that is communicated in the Kickstart.
Hi Gordon & Judd,
Thank you! You're both on top of a lot of this and helping me process it. But you're also both making my head hurt a little, and I don't know if it's because I'm explaining something wrong or if you are both doing something weird with what you're receiving. Let's see where I get, and I hope that working through it some more will help me in the writing.
JUDD
QuoteCircle knights are thrust into dangerous situations on limited, maybe even faulty information, without the time or resources to seek more before being throwing themselves into peril. There aren't wrong answers but there certainly are answers with consequences.
The "even faulty information" phrasing kicks off alarm bells from 25 years of bad Shadowrun scenarios:
we're supposed to figure out whether what we were told is totally true, mostly true, mostly a lie, or totally a lie. That's not how this works. Instead, the opening information is true. There may be more information, and what you have isn't detailed, but it's not a lie.
"Thrust" isn't the right word either because joining the Circle and doing stuff with your fellow Circle members are voluntary. These guys aren't the Green Berets. No command center sifted the available information and decided what they needed to know and what they didn't. It's not 3:16; they aren't out there in the depths of space addled by propaganda and with no other choice but to go.
I'm pretty sure that grogs didn't get traded around from player to player in Ars Magica. I think the biggie was that some people played wizards and some played grogs, which at the time seemed like a really big deal. I have always found, though, that Ars Magica is a slippery game to talk about – the various editions are apparently quite different, and it seems to mutate drastically at individual tables.
QuoteAny particular bibliography for this one (that isn't already in S&S)?
Not too much overlap with Sorcerer & Sword! I'm drawing more on non-fantasy stuff like Zoe Oldenburg's
The World is Not Enough and Henryk Sienkiewycz'
With Fire and Sword, and listing titles, but not pushing the lit class material as hard as I do in some other titles.
QuoteDelve into the barrow of a white magic wizard who was rendered into a "perfect" being and buried in this holy state.
Visit a local bandit lord to make diplomatic overtures for the king
Those are both pretty good. The first would be "hidden knowledge" and "Amboriyon interference." The second would be "opportunity for Rolke." But both are phrased too directively: go and do this, like an assignment. It's more like word got around that there's this bandit lord, or everyone knows that, or some guy showed up talking about it, and some of the Circle said, "Hey, sounds like a good opportunity, let's go."
QuoteGo slit the throat of a merchant who is profiting off of the war and has begun to use his resources to make the conflict bloodier.
Nope. That's a military-style mission assignment. I am beginning to think the word "mission" is so terribly specific in the hobby that I need something else. "Errand" would be great in its classical meaning, but has become trivialized, "errand boy," for instance.
GORDON
Quote... but I'm assuming that big-picture success - does it actually MATTER that the Circle completes the missions? - is less certain. So to my eye that is in the current description, just a little more hidden than maybe you'd want.
The outcomes of the missions relative to the fate of the new king in Rolke, and to the setting in general, are simply not relevant. As I said, the players may hope, and play itself, and the GM's opinion aside from being merely a fellow player, have no weight at all.
QuoteI think the players having the hope rather than the characters is also like that - there in the current text if a little obscured - but ... I entirely see that the fiction requires the characters to NOT have hope in anything like the way the players might. I'm not sure I know many RPG groups where some glimmer of hope wouldn't show up in a couple of the characters, though. I can imagine the game design helping stifle that, but if the description could somehow evoke the inchoate longing of the characters, and if the game actually has room for the chance that that longing might develop even a little bit within the fiction, it might be a selling point to make sure that is communicated in the Kickstart.
You lost me, badly. I didn't say anything about glimmers of hope among the characters not showing up. If any such thing emerges, there's nothing wrong with that. As I see it, "actually [having] room for the chance that that longing might develop even a little bit within the fiction" Is a feature of the game as written right now. That concept informs as much of the text as possible.
I currently think trying to bring this forward and clarifying it will not serve the crowdfunding well. I think the crowdfunding has to rely on fucking-cool bones-broken spear-combat black-and-white-magic gritty talk.
Best, Ron
Thanks Ron - I think the headaches are mostly just internet communication. By "does it matter" I didn't mean to the king/kingdom, necessarily - though it's interesting that you say as a fact of game design missions can't matter there. I was thinking mostly of mattering to the character development and/or the on-player impact, which (I guess I assume) is always uncertain. Does that put us on the same page?
And, "they don't have the vocabulary to express it, to conceive of it, or even to feel it," in the absence of some "but maybe they'll find/make something kinda like it" left me concerned that glimmers showing up would be "doing it wrong" somehow. I think my concern is that that absence might cost you customers. That if the internet communication which is the crowdfunding leaves a "Revel in the grit! - That's all there is to it!" vibe - it might lose some funders.
Now, obviously I AM seeing something more than just "revel in the grit", the grit that is there is flat-out awesome, and I'm just one reaction - but my instinct is to include just a bit more of the, um, more-than-that. Just a bit, and in just the right way (which hell if I know how to do, and even thinking about how seems presumptuous when you're the guy with the vision).
- edited to fix italics format - RE
Missions
More cool shit for missions, less verbs telling the players what to do, how to react or how to do it. Gotcha.
ArM
I think grogs were supposed to be thrown into the middle of the table like a pool of characters anyone could grab but no matter, I don't want to get bogged down with other games.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on March 13, 2014, 10:30:49 AM
I'm pretty sure that grogs didn't get traded around from player to player in Ars Magica. I think the biggie was that some people played wizards and some played grogs, which at the time seemed like a really big deal. I have always found, though, that Ars Magica is a slippery game to talk about – the various editions are apparently quite different, and it seems to mutate drastically at individual tables.
Nit-picker's corner: In Ars Magica the "default" (I think in every edition, but I did not check, this is what I remember) is that: (1) every players has a Mage character, (2) every player has a companion (important not-mage characters tied to the covenant and the order by alliance and loyalty: head of the guards, knight, famous outlaw, bishop, etc.), and (3) all the rest of the characters in the Covenant are grogs and are played "commonly" by everybody. They can change hands even during an adventure (so that in every scene the players can be active even if they have not one of their character present, by "using" one of the grog, just for that scene)
In every "adventure" you can play ONE of your principal characters (the Mage or the companion) and how many grogs you like. (I think that at least one edition had as a possibility to play ONLY grogs in an adventure, and to have one or more grogs "tied" to a specific player and playable only by that player. We played like this, with a lot of "personal grogs", because many players did not want to study all the rules for magi and preferred to play grogs, and I seems to recall it was not a house rule: Ron seems to remember this version, so probably we do remember that rule)
Real "troupe play" went even more over the edge with this: rotating GMs and players playing other characters in scenes, even not Grogs. (so that I as GM could assign any character in any scene to any player). I could never make the rotating GMs bit work, but I had a lot of fun assigning characters in that way (an a lot of frustration, too, depending on the specific player... some played these characters even better than their PC, and enriched the game, others... not)
Sorry about this digression, but this was too good an occasion for my occasional soapbox about "Ars Magica: incoherent but still the most innovative game of the '80s".
QuoteQuoteGo slit the throat of a merchant who is profiting off of the war and has begun to use his resources to make the conflict bloodier.
Nope. That's a military-style mission assignment. I am beginning to think the word "mission" is so terribly specific in the hobby that I need something else. "Errand" would be great in its classical meaning, but has become trivialized, "errand boy," for instance.
"Delving", "Adventure", "going", "episode", "venture", "job", "saga", or even world-specific terms, that have no meaning (or a totally different meaning) in English so that you can define them as you want in your game.
QUESTION: there is some sort of "end game" hardwired in the rules (apart from "everybody is dead", I mean) for the entire campaign, or not?
SUGGESTION: I think you should preface all the other informations about the game with something like "you play a awesome bad-ass warrior with the powers of heaven and hell bent to his will, in a dark, cruel and dangerous world". THAT should get the people to get interested and read the rest....
Hi Moreno,
QuoteQUESTION: there is some sort of "end game" hardwired in the rules (apart from "everybody is dead", I mean) for the entire campaign, or not?
I don't have anything like that in there. I am more oriented toward each unit of play being itself successful, and something about my process for this game design has rejected any big-scale planning or arc, even if it's emergent. I have no system to show, for example, the effects of a given [whatever it's called] on the realm as a whole.
Which reminds me: Gordon, your paraphrase gave me another sharp pang:
Quoteit's interesting that you say as a fact of game design missions can't matter there.
I didn't say that, quite. What I intended to convey, however badly, is that the missions [whatever] probably do contribute successfully to the king's regime and general purpose. But we don't see that or play it or address it in any way as play-content.
Anyway, back to the big-picture arc thing ... I find myself thinking in terms of Kurosawa's ronin movies or the Stars
Spartacus series. Each takes place in highly volatile political times, and the characters' plights - and very much, consequently, their sense of lethal purpose coupled with a willingness to suffer for it - are defined by, absolutely embedded in the politics. But the outcomes of the bigger political scenes are the dissolution of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and the failure of the Third Servile War, or actually, given the entire series and the inclusion of a Certain Person in the
War of the Damned series, I'd say the fall of the Republic is the biggest relevant setting-arc. The precise outcomes of these bigger events are actually not the point. It's the experience of individuals in extremely violent, dramatic, and heartfelt conflict within the most volatile political moments leading up to those outcomes.
It's that experience which is the heart of the game. So I'm in the position of saying the bigger picture does matter in terms "how we have come to this" for setting up situations, and it does matter in that great realm-changing, setting-redefining events are afoot, but precisely how
the stuff we see and the things characters do have a direct impact on those outcomes, is left out of our experiential picture.
Moreno, it strikes me that "venture" is precisely the right word. The Circle knights venture (go) somewhere, and they venture (try) actions/reactions when they get there. To "adventure" is to "go toward a venture," which is a given in this case. So no need for the "ad," and I can focus directly on the "venture." Thank you!
Best, Ron
edited to fix multiple grammatical and format errors - not doing too well with that tonight - RE
Ron, in terms of understanding what you've got going on with the big-picture vs. what, um, endeavors the characters are involved in, I think we're there - and you've had me in the neighborhood from the get-go. That the stuff we see and the things the characters do has some kind of impact on the big picture seems nigh-unavoidable. But saying that details about how that happens is not what we're looking at, that does make sense. Assuming that making connections too directly or in a too focused way ("Spartacus wins 'cause history eventually sees him as right!") is problematic for the game, I'll be interested in how the game design helps us resist that.
But specifically for the crowdfunding feedback ... I think it's all in the (format-screwed) last paragraph of my previous post. A slight, properly-finessed nudge up on the dial showing that these are characters striving for, or at least in search of, something better.
I'm not sure where you're at with the video, but I wanted to add - there's a quality to your closing narration that I hope stays there. I can imagine it being re-filmed/tweaked/improved (part of me found it a bit awkward), but wherever you were at emotionally when you recorded that, stay in the same place. I found it noticeable and powerful.
Fixed the italics in the post.
Perhaps one day my video-savvy friends will take pity on me and rescue me from crap screencam and Windows Live Moviemaker. "Awkward" isn't the half of it. Partly because I have no other option, I'm going for raw basement sincerity rather than flash. It worked well for Sorcerer and I hope it'll work here too. I don't plan on altering the video unless said rescue arrives.
The nearest video-savvy friend tells me that we can make a movie of playing a fight as part of the campaign promo, perhaps showing it about the halfway point of the 18-day campaign.
I'll see if I can find a good spot for a little text with a glimmer of hope-and-change.
Best, Ron
For me I like the grim and the gritty and wouldnt want to lose it or the emphasis on it. The way I'm reading the info "hope" comes into the games as an answer to why someone would join the circle though maybe not the only reason. The young king seems to be the hope for a world torn apart by the war between light and dark so if you are looking for somewhere to emphasize the hope element of the game world it would be in supporting him. If you get mythical, allegorical tied to the real world the battle between light and dark never ends so I can see why not resolving the big picture makes sense in game terms and why not really seeing much result matters to the question of why these characters continue the struggle. It's easy to keep on fighting if it looks like you are winning.
A characters reason for joining the circle says a lot about them is this reflected in the personality traits for characters? Do they speak towards motivations or are they only descriptive? Do character backgrounds matter in the game or do you see that as a trap that leads towards predetermined play and not engaging with the current situation?
Hi Vernon,
QuoteA characters reason for joining the circle says a lot about them is this reflected in the personality traits for characters? Do they speak towards motivations or are they only descriptive? Do character backgrounds matter in the game or do you see that as a trap that leads towards predetermined play and not engaging with the current situation?
I'm really happy about how this exact feature works right now. Character creation has some random elements, some chosen elements, some whole-group elements, and some written/made-up elements. The last bit is to write a couple of sentences called the Key Event, a description of the scene in which the character decided, then or later, to join the Circle. Given the character work before then, it serves as an effective glue and also carries a feeling of inevitability: given all these things,
of course this is why they joined. So it's not the Key Event alone as an isolated feature, it's a reliable synergy culminating in writing that event, which I see again and again at the table.
(The Key Event, incidentally, does not include any summarizing, generalizing, or motivational statements about the character. It's strictly only the description of the scene.)
I say with some pride that this feature comes from the original Gray Magick manuscript, long before the Forge and long before such things became common in RPG design. It was probably inspired by the "why you came to the island" feature of character creation in Over the Edge.
Best, Ron