Deadly Fredly

Dear Deadly continues! You can read the series on the “dear deadly” tag.

Dear Deadly,

I’ve been following your blog for some time, and I always enjoy and appreciate your views on the industry and the state of Evil Hat. I own Cracked Monocle, a new steampunk tabletop RPG company, and we’re constantly debating how small or how large our development team. On an almost daily basis, we flip-flop between wanting just 1 more person to help out and thinking that our team is too large to keep everyone on the same page.

So my question, when Evil Hat is working on a product, how large of a group is normally involved, and how do you split up the work?

Cheers & Gears,
Daniel

Daniel, to get this out of the way up front, there’s no normally at Evil Hat. We’ve seen too much change year to year to have had much time at any given point to establish the whole, okay, how the hell are we doing this kind of thing? thing.

Right-sizing your team is tough. It’s about finding a proper midpoint between too many cooks and not enough hands.

It can seem like latter is pretty easy to identify, even if it’s not easy to overcome. Dresden took a long time in part because we did not have enough hands on the job, but finding those hands — in terms of the correct fusion of quality, energy, drive, time, and willingness — wasn’t easy. But even getting to the point of realizing we needed more hands, really, was some work, especially when sitting there feeling like the problem is you, that you need to magically find your own stores of energy/drive/time/willingness to get the thing rolling. So on that end: be willing to say you need help, be willing to admit that you simply aren’t, yourself, up for doing the work, and find people you’re sympatico with who are. Look to your biggest fans and think about who can be deputized. Try to be up front with them and honest with yourself about what you can afford.

The former is something I have less experience with, but it’s the kind of concern that’s kept me always adding to a team slowly (perhaps too slowly). Each new person brings a new dynamic, so you want to be sure you’re giving time for the stress-impact of that addition to settle out. I think it’s pretty dangerous to bring on, like, three new people all at once, unless you’re right at the beginning of a project and haven’t gotten rolling yet.

In my own experience, I’ve done everything from a solo effort (Don’t Rest Your Head was 90-95% me on all fronts, with some valuable conversations, playtesting, and proofreading from some good friends) to a small team (Spirit of the Century was Rob, Lenny, and Fred on text, Lydia on editing, Fred on layout & art acquisition) to a large team (anything that rhymes with Mesden Miles). Large-team on our latest DFRPG book breaks down like:

• Project Management & Oversight – Ryan
• Authorial Pool – Chad, Clark, Jess, Lenny, Rob
• Editorial Pool – Amanda (lead), Chad, Ryan, Matt
• System Guru – Lenny
• Setting Guru – Chad
• Layout, Art Direction, Pre-press work, Publication – Fred

Where you see the same name multiple times, that’s someone wearing multiple hats. At this point, I wouldn’t ever recommend going beyond a small handful of people without someone getting tapped for the primary job of project management. Someone filling that role, and well, makes the difference between a larger team being a big band or a kitchen overstuffed with cooks.

Dear Deadly continues! You can read the series on the “dear deadly” tag.

Dear Deadly,

Some FATE games have PC skills form a perfect pyramid (i.e., one skill at the apex, two at the nest level down, etc.), some don’t. Is there any advantage to one way or the other? Mostly, I love the pyramid (focus!), and wonder why a designer would choose not to use it.

– buzz

Buzz, for me, the pyramid is ultimately all about serving up a heaping helping niche protection with a modest side of making sure the character has a good distribution of other skills. It’s both about the focus (what’s at the apex of the pyramid), which defines the niche, and about the base of the pyramid, which supports the apex but also makes sure you’ve got a spread of other stuff you can pitch in with if needed.

Not every implementation is going to need or want that kind of protection. Ultimately the “skill shape” you can achieve is a story effect, describing broadly the template for what makes a capable hero in your world. I’ll talk about a few examples.

The first is the Dresden Files RPG, where we keep to the spirit of the pyramid, but loosen up the structure a bit. There, we went for a column instead of a pyramid (equal quantities all the way down). In all the various shapes that can result from that, you still get a good sense of what the character’s niche is (top three skills), even if it’s not a perfect pyramidal peak. It also allows for the “generalist”, the guy who just doesn’t have any skills at the max, but has a very wide stack of them, and ends up being generally competent in a very wide set of circumstances. The motive there was to support the variety of characters found in the series. Harry D always struck me as a minmaxer, so his skills tend to be a narrow column focused on boosting his spell power as high as possible. Others are well-rounded, intentionally designed for a support role in a team. It felt right, whereas we could get away with the “everyone is some kind of hero chiseled out of the pyramid mold” philosophy of Spirit of the Century.

Then there’s something like Rob Donoghue’s Fate (Psychic) Spies game that he’s running for us locally. There, there’s no reason to use the pyramid because he’s using  a very short list of very wide skills, eight in all I believe. Similar goals pursued here, though: we each have one skill we suck at, one skill we’re world class in, two more we’re badass with, and the rest live in the middle.  That “one skill we suck at” is important; it’s just as hero-defining as the world-class choice.

Last, I’ll point you at an adaptation I did of Sorcerer for Fate by way of the Dictionary of Mu. There, I was pursuing a sort of larger, “What are your areas of focus?” question, hinging on the stats from Sorcerer. Points got allocated amongst the four, and skills hung off of each of those. It’s a little bit like Five Point Fudge, in that regard. Here, you can get a high level sense of what a character’s about simply by looking at those high-level point allocations, which is a useful shorthanding for the GM, while letting the players dig in with some differentiating details further on down in the individual skill allocations. It also drives at the themes from Sorcerer that hook into that system’s attributes, making sure each character touches on each of those themes, at least a little.

Dear Deadly continues! You can read the series on the “dear deadly” tag.

Dear Deadly,

In several of my hobbies, especially model railroading, one of the memes is “The best way to kill your interest in your hobby is to make it a business.” Where would you place yourself on the agree-disagree line, and why?

– Robert Slaughter

I’ve heard this one a number of times, too. It certainly has some truth to it, but I don’t know if I’m convinced it’s the truth, at least not for everyone.

But if you’re interested in making your hobby a business, you need to bring an interest in business itself to the enterprise. You can’t get into this line of work expecting the joy you get from the hobby to fully sustain your interest in the business. It’s work, pure and simple, and you’ve got to be up for that.

Unfortunately, I think various hobby industries are full of folks who went the “make it a business” route without having that intrinsic business interest at heart, and I’m not convinced that the results have been a net positive for those folks nor for the industry. Folks who find the joy sucked out of the thing they used to love tend to make for pretty bitter hobby-citizens, and that makes for a nasty psychic contagion in the community at large. And beyond that, they can get into some dire financial straits if they don’t have some business sense behind their decisions. As well, in today’s market, a strong sense of how to do excellent customer service is practically a necessity if you want to thrive. All in all, such folks might be better off looking to get some occasional freelance work in the industry instead of diving in whole-hog to try to make a business out of it.

Speaking personally, I do enjoy the business side of things, at least enough to get a bit of a charge from that part of the work. Most of the time, that’s enough to balance the emotional ledger. Which isn’t to say I can’t get sick of the business work — I can. Nor is it to say I can’t get sick of the hobby itself that it’s based on — I have, at least in some specific sections of it (there are days where I can’t really abide talking about, thinking about, running, or playing Fate, because I’ve been soaking in it forever). But those moments are just that, moments, and they’re survivable, recoverable. I’m not sure they would be if I didn’t enjoy the customer service, the number crunching, the product provisioning and assembly and so on. I’m lucky that I do.

A friend of mine is fond of the phrase, “Just because you can do a thing, doesn’t mean you should do a thing.” I think it’s just as applicable here. Plenty of people can make the effort to turn their hobby into a job (a “jobby”?). But if they do that without giving an honest assessment and personal inventory of what it’ll take and what it’ll take out of them to do it, chances are it’ll be a messy and, for many, demoralizing experience. But if they’re up for the job, it can be incredibly rewarding.

Really, it’s the difference between liking other people’s kids (i.e., playing the games, engaging in the hobby as a hobbyist) and having a kid of your own (engaging in the hobby as a businessperson). The latter is something you can’t just stop doing when you feel like it (not easily). The former is. Figure out what you’re really up for, and do that.