Fred Hicks

Don’t Hack This Game

 All
Dec 192011
 

Announcing Don’t Hack This Game!

Ryan Macklin and I have worked together on a few mad ideas, but the one we’re going to talk about today may be the maddest of them all! One of Evil Hat’s earliest games, Don’t Rest Your Head, has been out for five years now, and people have been doing all sorts of crazy hacks with it in that time. With its simple engine of exhaustion & madness, it’s inspired a lot of you awesome folks to do crazy-awesome things with it.

That’s the book we want to make, the next chapter in the Don’t Rest Your Head line: Don’t Hack This Game. And because you inspired it, we want you to be a part of it.

Articles We’re Looking For

We are looking for articles on hacking Don’t Rest Your Head’s system (exhaustion, madness, dice pools, responses, questionnaire, etc.), existing setting, new settings & rules supporting them, GM tricks, and so on. Articles may not be based on other intellectual property (so we can’t take your Shadowrun hack, but we could a generic or original cyberpunk-with-magic one).

Each article should be 1000-2000 words long.

Please read my post about hacking the dice pools in DRYH, as that’ll help understand where we see the handles in the game:
http://www.deadlyfredly.com/2011/12/for-the-archive-hacking-dice-pools-in-dryh/
(You’re free to post comments if you disagree, by the way! We welcome conversation.)

You may also want to grab the free DRYH adventure, The Bad Man. It contains revised rules (in condensed form) for the game, notably the PvP & helping rules:
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=97648

Pitching Us Ideas & Deadlines

If you have an article idea, send Ryan Macklin (macklin@evilhat.com) the following information:

1. Topic or subject of the article, summarized in 200 words or less
2. Expected length of article (i.e. a ballpark between 1000 and 2000 words)
3. Full name and contact information (e-mail address, etc).
4. A brief background of past game or hobby writing experience or publications, if any

You may submit up to five proposals, although in most cases only one proposal will be accepted. Multiple proposals may be submitted in a single e-mail; in this case, contact info and background info only need to be included once.

The deadline for proposals is Wednesday, January 4th, 2012. If your proposal is accepted, you will be notified within 7 days after the close of the open call window. Once you know if your proposal is accepted, you will have until Wednesday, February 8th, 2012 to submit your completed draft.

We’ll turn that around within four weeks, and if there’s anything we need to have you revise, you’ll get notes from us with expectation of four weeks to turn it around.

Compensation, etc.

Compensation for articles is 5 cents per word, 50% upon acceptance of your completed draft & 50% upon publication. You will also receive a copy of the final product and, of course, credit for your article.

If your article is accepted for publication, you’ll be licensing it to Evil Hat Productions for publication. That means you’ll own your work, but Evil Hat gets to publish it in Don’t Hack This Game first.

After six months, you may publish your article on your blog or wherever, so long as it’s non-commercial (otherwise, you’re using Evil Hat’s IP, Don’t Rest Your Head, without authorization). Naturally, you can contact us about this if that’s an issue.

What “acceptance” means: Your article is not considered accepted until we receive your draft and you have made any revisions we call for. Once we receive that and do a final review, we’ll let you know if it’s accepted and give you a contract for the work.

We are still currently evaluating our publishing options for this product, whether this will be electronic-only or electronic & print.

For More Information

If you have a question, you can either comment on Ryan’s mirror of this blog post, or you can email the anthology’s editor, Ryan Macklin, at macklin@evilhat.com.

All queries/pitches will be via email if you wish for a response. If you do it over Twitter or Facebook or whatever, Ryan will roll his eyes at yet another writer who can’t follow directions, and ignore it. :)

Comments should happen over on Ryan’s blog rather than here: http://RyanMacklin.com/2011/12/dont-hack-this-game/

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 Posted by Fred Hicks at 4:59 pm  2 Responses »  Tagged with: ,

For the Archive: Hacking Dice Pools in DRYH

 All
Dec 122011
 

I wrote this over on the Forge back in 2008 but I shouldn’t rely on its archival boards to be available in perpetuity nor speedily, so I’m replicating it here, now. This is a bit on some of my internal brain-map on how the dynamics of the Don’t Rest Your Head dice pools work, and ways they might be hacked. You can visit the original thread to get some larger context.

Dice pools in DRYH and DRYH-derived stuff do a few things, as they work inside my head.

  • There are Static pools, which do not change unless acted on under rare, special circumstances.  Example: Discipline
  • There are Slow Accretion pools, which you can only increase one at a time. Example: Exhaustion.
  • Or, there are Fast Surge pools, which can flash up to maximum or anywhere in the range in a single action.  Example: Madness.
  • Slow pools are almost always Sticky – once they’re established, they hang around and must be a part of every roll.  Example: Discipline, Exhaustion (and, to an extent, Permanent Madness).
  • Fast pools are usually Ephemeral– they’re established for a single roll, but they don’t persist afterwards.  Example: Madness.

Dominance of a given dice pool can have a few dominating effects:

  • Any pool can have Graded Consequences – when it dominates, some minor effect happens until you run out, at which point the next dominance produces a major effect.  Example: Madness and Responses and Snapping.
  • Any pool can be Lethal – When it exceeds a limit (or causes some other resource to exceed a limit), the character dies or is otherwise significantly transformed.  Example: Exhaustion, Madness.
  • Any pool can produce Erosion – when it dominates, you can lose a die from another Sticky pool.  Example: Madness and Snapping reduces Discipline; Discipline can reduce Exhaustion or clear off a checked Response.
  • Sticky pools can have Feedback – they can self-increase (add a die to themselves or another pool) when they dominate.  Example: Exhaustion
  • Sticky pools usually have a Pressure Valve that lets you slowly decrease their size over time.  Example: Exhaustion bleeds off when Discipline dominates.
  • I may be missing some other ideas that exist in DRYH, and there may be some that could be added here that aren’t in DRYH.

You’ve got several moving parts you could mess around with.  It’s entirely possible (if potentially dangerous) to create a Fast Surge pool that’s Sticky.  Such as: You could have a pool called Power that’s Fast and Sticky.  You decide that you want 3 dice of Power right now, and you get it, but after the roll those 3 dice hang around — you can’t shake ‘em, so each time you roll you’re rolling those Power dice as well, and are subject to the dominating effects.  You could also add a Feedback effect to Power, saying that it increases another pool called Paradox whenever Power dominates. Or give it Erosion, having it eat away at your Stability pool, etc.

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 Posted by Fred Hicks at 3:16 pm  4 Responses »  Tagged with:

Long-Term Themes in Evil Hat’s Gumshoe Projects

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Nov 282011
 

I’ve talked briefly before that we’ve got two Gumshoe system projects in the works at Evil Hat.

The first is Revengers, a Gumshoe game of ghostly investigators to be penned by Will Hindmarch. Take a look at that link to learn more, and also his recent Page XX article.

The second (previously unnamed) one is under the working (and possibly final) title of Bubblegumshoe, with the project team helmed by Kenneth Hite, who will join forces with Lisa Steele (of GURPS Mysteries and others) and Emily Care Boss (of Breaking the Ice and others) to bring you a game of teen girl detectives in the vein of Veronica Mars.

As mentioned in that earlier post, I’m damned excited about the opportunity to rough Gumshoe up a bit and take it in some new directions inspired by the best of the story-game set, but it’s hard not to get positively geeked by the talents working on both of these projects.

But today I want to talk, briefly, about the long term themes I see (potentially) at work in these two games. In olden times, this might be where I talk about the games’ metaplots, but really, so much of the story of each of these games will grow straight from the characters themselves. So, instead, I’m focusing on the themes that tell us how the long-term stories of the games will grow out of these characters. These long-term themes are likely to color the campaign, while the PCs will “day to day” be dealing with mysteries both episodic and sequential; but even in one shot scenarios they should see some relevance.

In Revengers,  the long-term theme I see at work is “You are the mystery.” PCs are ghosts, and the reasons they remain as ghosts instead of Moving On are opaque even to them (most of the time, at least). Moreover, they don’t (necessarily) want to solve it. Moving On holds as much mystery for them as death does for us. Regardless, those hidden reasons will color who they are, and how their long term story plays out. Naturally, that’s going to see some support in the mechanics as well, though Will and I are still sorting out the details.

In Bubblegumshoe, the long-term theme I see at work is “The town is the mystery.” Everything points inward; the fabric of relationships in the town makes the town; and long-term, the big mysteries that play out will occur wholly within that contained environment. Outside factors may come into play, but what’s going to matter long term is what the town does with it, and the town is the home base, the whole world for our teen girl detectives. We’ll almost certainly see some kind of relationship map mechanic brought to bear here (the story-game version of the Quade Diagram, perhaps). Important game mechanics will focus on defining, revealing, and occasionally reshaping the town by way of its relationship map (and not all connections of that map will be immediately “visible” either).

Hacker’s note: In Bubblegumshoe, the “town” ends up being a fairly portable concept, for folks who want to drift the game. Maybe it’s a college campus. Maybe it’s the backwoods of Eastern Kentucky — a recent epiphany: BGS will probably drift nicely for a Justified game. For that matter it might work great for something with a Twin Peaks vibe too, and so on. We’re already planning on a chapter that explores and discusses drifting the game through a variety of genres and applications.

Designer’s note: Folks familiar with my blather about how — in Fate — “everything is a character” might notice a similar principle at work in both of these long term themes. Each takes the notion that Gumshoe is a mystery game and decides to locate some of that mystery in the characters themselves, directly or indirectly. In Revengers, it’s the characters and their history — their murders — that got them to where they are in the afterlife. In Bubblegumshoe, it’s the relationships the characters have with the authority figures and movers and shakers of the town they’re “stuck” in, growing up, that will hide layers of mystery and backstory that the adults haven’t told — or are straight up hiding from — the kids. Sometimes design is about looking at what you already have established in a system and simply applying it to a different context. That’s a lot of what we’re looking to do with Evil Hat’s takes.

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 Posted by Fred Hicks at 2:19 pm  9 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,

Dear Deadly: Chain of Ownership in Distro

 All
Nov 152011
 

David Berg writes, over on the Evil Hat 2011 Q3 Sales Numbers post:

I have a bunch of distro questions!  If this isn’t the place for them, no prob, I can revisit some other time.

Basically, I’m wondering what those 1095 Q3 sales of DFRPG:YS look like, the chain of ownership from Evil Hat to the customer.  That’s 77% of the total 1427, which surprises me!

My (probably incorrect) understanding looks like this:
1) Alliance gets Dresden books from Evil hat.
2) Alliance offers Dresden books to American hobby stores.  The number of hobby stores is small and dwindling.  The number of those that carry RPGs is smaller still.  The number that carry anything other than D&D is vastly smaller still.
3) Those few retailers pay Alliance for Dresden.  Alliance then takes their cut and pays Evil Hat.
4) If the retailers can’t sell Dresden, they send it back and ask for their money back.  So Evil Hat hasn’t really sold a book until a customer’s taken it home with them.

1095 in 3 months seems like a staggeringly large number to me, based on that process.  Am I simply underestimating the number of people who go into hobby stores and buy a spiffy new RPG they’ve never heard of?  (I mean, if they’d heard of it, they probably would have bought it via another channel, right?)  Am I underestimating the overseas market?

Up front, I should say that the Dresden Files RPG books don’t necessarily behave like any other product in our catalog. That’s the strength of the license at work there. DF probably makes up a good 80-90% of our revenue — which can be a little nervewracking in the long term. Part of why I’ve been using this year and will be using the next couple to try to expand the variety of games that Evil Hat produces.

Anyway, to get into your question, the good thing here is that there’s plenty of history to peruse on this blog, so to get our context straight, let’s first figure out how that ’77%’ on DFRPG:YS has been trending over time:

Quarter – Total Sales – Distro Sales – % distro
Q3 2011 – 1427 – 1095 – 77%
Q2 2011 – 1099 – 819 – 75%
Q1 2011 - 1346 - 967 – 72%
Q4 2010 - 1373 – 1004 – 73%
Q3 2010 - 2531 - 1776 – 70%
Q2 2010 - 4545 - 2741 – 60%

Now, I think if you broke down the month-by-month of the book’s first quarter, you’d see that Evil Hat and distribution were going about neck and neck at the start. We have very solid reach and leveraged it to give us a strong direct sales preorder (which trapped a BUNCH more per-sale cash for us, a real boon), but over the long haul, that reach only goes so far. So while distro started at a 50/50 kind of split with us, they’ve trended upwards since. The reason for this is simple. Or, perhaps I should say, the reason for this is “simple”. The service that distribution is offering to retailers is a simplification of product acquisition: one stop shop, many publishers. It’s a pain, and a lot of time investment, for a retail store to contact and buy from each individual publisher, so most simply don’t. They form a favored relationship with one to three distributors, and they’re done. If your product isn’t there, there’s a decent chance they won’t have your product on their shelves.

Once the spike on DFRPG:YS sales settled down, we started averaging between 300 and 400 a month, with 3/4ths-or-so of that being due to distribution. (Note: The ‘total sales’ numbers on the above fold in our PDF sales numbers as well, so if we limited the data to strictly only physical books, distribution’s percentage would be even higher.) We might have captured some of those sales if we’d stayed out of distribution, but I’m pretty certain we wouldn’t have captured all of them. It’s likely, given the interest in the game, that distribution has brought us enough additional sales to accommodate for any “loss” of per-sale revenue due to the steeper discounts that product is sold into distro. It’s been a good partnership.

Now, to get into your (in fact, semi-correct, semi-incorrect) understanding of the process:

What you’re describing is a situation where a service holds the stock, but does not own the stock, and sells it on behalf of Evil Hat, providing revenue to Evil Hat only when that sale (to a retailer) occurs. That’s not how most distribution works, though (more on that in a moment). That’s consignment, which is essentially what IPR does (not counted in my distro tallies). IPR sells stock on behalf of publishers both to retailers and direct to customers, so they’re sort of a half-distributor — as far as the retailer client is concerned, they are a distributor, because they distribute products they have not themselves created to retailers. The consignment thing is what makes IPR a little different.

What most distributors do is buy the products from the publisher, at a steep discount (often just 40-44% of the cover price). At that point, the distributor owns the product and assumes the risk. They’re responsible for then turning those units around and selling them to retailers. Since most of Evil Hat’s distributor clients are placing reorders at least once per quarter, we can surmise that all the books sold to distribution in prior quarters have at least been sold to retailers. Hopefully, those retailers have then successfully sold those books to their customers, but that’s nearly impossible to get visibility into. But, to get to the heart of your question, yeah: there’s enough interest in the DFRPG by enough retailers out there to have sustained such numbers as these for over a year.

Now — to complicate this a bit, along the way, Alliance made me an offer to take over as Evil Hat’s fulfillment service. That’s a phrase that simply means “act as shipper for”. They also are doing flooring, which means they’re warehousing our stuff for a small monthly fee (which gets reduced a little if our stuff remains active at a certain level). Because they’re doing this, they don’t need to purchase our stuff in advance in order to have it available when a retailer places an order. So this has essentially moved Alliance into the same ownership-sequence space as IPR: consignment (matching the 1-2-3 chain of ownership you theorized was applicable for all other distributors, but isn’t). So the sales numbers I get from them each month are based on stuff they’ve actually sold. Now, for business partnership reasons I don’t want to put a specific number on what Alliance sold, but I can tell you that they account for over half of Q3′s distribution tally, with Esdevium (a UK-based distributor) and ACD (Alliance’s top domestic competitor) vying for the second place spot.

Where your theorized sequence breaks down is “4) If the retailers can’t sell Dresden, they send it back and ask for their money back.  So Evil Hat hasn’t really sold a book until a customer’s taken it home with them.” That situation only exists if the publisher offers returnability – basically a promise that if a book isn’t sold, it can be sent back or destroyed and the seller can get a refund.

If you think about it a bit, returnability sounds great to a middle man — it essentially says that they face no risk for buying the product and putting it on their shelves. Which is dandy for them, but poison for a publisher (and in fact has sunk publishers of various stripe over the years, especially those that sold into big chain bookstores) because it’s utterly unpredictable, and it means that you can’t trust that the money you’ve been paid is money you’ll get to keep. But money spends — so the publisher spends some of it, and hopes that they won’t end up with a negative balance when the returns come in. Worse, when publishers offered returnability with a time limit (say, 180 days), they’d see a scenario where buyers would buy a bunch of books, return them on the last day or so of the time period, and then rebuy, essentially rendering the time limit moot and the cash situation continually in question. (And since most buyers don’t have to pay right away — they usually defer payment by 30 or 60 days — that wasn’t a momentary dip in cash on hand for the publisher, it was a canyon.)

I know some publishers still offer this, but I don’t and won’t, and that’s going to limit what distributors and retailers will buy and sell to an extent. But that’s fine by me. To be perfectly frank, I don’t want them buying books they don’t have confidence they can sell, because the point here is to get them to the end consumer – the guy or gal who’ll actually take the product home and put it to use.

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 Posted by Fred Hicks at 11:23 am  7 Responses »  Tagged with: ,

Dear Deadly: Foot In The Door

 All
Nov 092011
 

Today’s Dear Deadly comes to us from Matt, who had a number of questions, but one in particular that I thought I might answer better in public.

How did you first get started working in the industry?  How did you get in the door?

Okay, first up, follow these directions:

  1. Decide to be in the industry.

You’re done. You’re now in the RPG hobby “industry”. Easy, right?

Obviously it’s not that easy, but that is something of the trick of it all the same. The notion that the “industry” hides behind some unclimbable wall riddled with secret entry-points is largely bunk.

But the reality is that the biggest barriers thrown up against entry are very likely in your head. The industry is made up of folks who decided they were the industry; therefore, the decision is the key.

Maybe the better question is: What happens when you make that decision? You:

  • Build a body of work
  • Build an audience that likes that work

The Big Wall might have been more of a reality in the days when self-publishing wasn’t nearly as easy as it is now, but these days the barrier is the quality of the work you create, and the effort you make to connect that quality work with folks who want to consume it.

There are a lot of side effects in that process, of course. Social media connects you with other folks who work in the field. Attending conventions gets you a chance to talk to people face to face, and for them to put a face to your name and work. (Networking is not a dirty word; it’s the only word, when it comes to “breaking in” beyond the “self-publisher with a name” level.)

The only way to get noticed is to make yourself noticeable — and I’m assuming that in this question, that’s sort of what you’re driving at. Not so much “how can I make myself be in the industry?” so much as “how can I make the industry include me?”

That networking gets you there, and works well when paired with a demonstrable body of work. Rob and I published Fate in the early 2000′s. It got noticed, eventually, by some award-givers. That award got us a phone call from an old friend named Jim asking if we wanted rights to a novel series. That phone call lead to our decision to try to become a “real” (commercial) publisher. Years passed; lots of hard effort happened.

During those years, a guy named Lenny Balsera made noise at us in our existing Fate-based community that made him look real smart. Time and again he had good ideas and good contributions on the mailing list. He and I would break into private side-conversations plumbing the details of the Fate system. I asked him to come on board and help us work on this Spirit of the Century project we were struggling with. Lenny got himself noticed with a body of work (just not in a traditional sense). Suddenly he was on the same path as us to “the industry” (you’ll note his name went on the cover of SotC, just like Rob’s and mine).

Along the way, I worked on a side-project that became our first commercially published game, Don’t Rest Your Head. Spirit of the Century followed close on the heels, but not before GenCon. Don’t Rest Your Head got noticed by some folks and I was invited to sit at the Lulu.com booth and provide some industry relevant customer testimony. Note that I wouldn’t have thought myself to be “industry relevant” in more than a scant sense at the time. But that got me meeting plenty of folks (including Robin Laws). We released SotC a few months later and made a splash.

Next year rolled around and I found myself going to lunch with Kenneth Hite at Origins, and helping Indie Press Revolution run their booth, their website. Somehow I was “in the industry”, but all that I’d ever done was just do the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, building work, building audience, meeting people.

How have you been gathering freelance projects these days besides Evil Hat?

The body of work does the job: It’s as much a resume as anything else you might do to “break in”. Even early on I was open to doing layout for other folks, and did work on books like Beast Hunters for Berengad Games and The Zorcerer of Zo for Atomic Sock Monkey Press. The work I’d done on DRYH and SotC were what got me there.

The audience does the job: With games I’d worked on as a public resume, I got invited to an industry mailing list. I’d also joined the GPA and got on their mailing list. When Hero Games posted that they were looking for a layout guy, it sounded like I was a fit, so I spoke up, and have since laid out over a dozen books for them.

Your work is your foot in the door. If it’s good, someone will notice your name in the credits. If you can be found easily, they’ll ask you to do some more for them. The network you’ve built on your way to an audience will help make those connections that get you work, too. And when those connections and jobs aren’t coming — there aren’t necessarily a lot of them, and each company usually sticks to its favorites unless they’re trying to grow or a standby is unavailable — you do your own thing and get that out there. That’s the industry, and that’s how you do work in it.

At least in general principle, that’s the how. The specifics of the how have to do with the specifics of you, and that’s not something I can magick away with my advice-stick. If you’re not building the body of work, or if you’re not finding an audience, you need to dig in hard on that and figure out the why.

What are some of the biggest concerns you have running Evil Hat?  What problems are you always seeking solutions for?

This one’s sort of a wibbly-wobbly one, and I’m not sure I can answer it right on the nose.

But the biggest problem I think I encounter with the company is simple deadline management, both in terms of figuring out what it should be at the start of a project, and in terms of enforcing them in a way that doesn’t tick off the folks collaborating on the project. I’m not sure I’ll ever get all of that 100% figured out. Related to that is the whole outlining thing — some folks need the outline determined already before you come to them, and when you’re more used to lobbing a loose concept-ball at your friends and seeing how it bounces, that’s rough. And related to that is stuff like word-count estimates. We’ve sucked at that. Still learning. Getting better.

Are there any practices you like to adopt to keep the writing and designing flowing as much as possible?  Did you do anything like this when working on Dresden Files, about which I read you pretty much had to reimagine from the ground up since FATE 2.0 couldn’t cut it?

I’m not the guy to ask this, oddly enough. I haven’t done deep/involved system design for a couple years now, and I’ve always found myself around superior writers (in terms of the ability to consistently and professionally deliver both setting and system content on deadline). Layout, where I’ve focused my non-business-running attention, does have a creative component to it, but it’s also got some routine elements to it that don’t tax me the way that writing does.

That said, I think the best way to keep whatever you’re doing is to plan for taking breaks from it. Distance is a huge win for any project; it’s how you freshen your eyes and your creative voice. (You’ll also more readily see the flaws. SotC’s core system got nuked from orbit after a year-plus of development; then we started over.) Long-term, the only way I was able to contribute positively to SotC was by taking a break from it during its development — that break lead to the creation & publication of DRYH. Without taking a break — hell, without asking for help when it was needed, as I did on SotC — I’m not sure either of those projects would have made it to the light of day.

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 Posted by Fred Hicks at 11:52 am  7 Responses »  Tagged with:
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