http://thatshowweroll.libsyn.com/webpage/that-s-how-we-roll-season-03-episode-04-evil-hat-level-s-up

I’m pointing you at it here because it’s very specifically Evil Hat stuff in this one — Chris and I spend an hour talking about Evil Hat, focusing on how its brand is maturing over time and digging into what the takeaways are from all that. For folks who are specifically fans of the company I’m running, it’s a great look under the hood. Check it out!

I thought it might be a good time to show you some of that sweet art from Christian N. St. Pierre, in case you missed it on my twitter feed yesterday.

First up: The Krill approaches sunken Atlantis.

Second, we flip to the shadow side – as Rocket Red raids the skies over Geneva!

Don’t forget to race back to home base, Centurion! The Race to Adventure ends at the Empire State Building, in shadow.

I shot him a couple quick tweets in response of other questions that I think a playtest process should try to answer. I’m not going to embellish them (much) here, but I thought the list might be useful to some folks.

• Is the game producing the effects and story trends you want to see in play?
• What excites folks about the game?
• What bores (or frustrates) them?
• What’s extraneous?
• Does the game work like it should when I am not in the room? (If it doesn’t, what am I doing when I am in the room that I need to put in the text?)
• What assumptions about play am I making that aren’t in the text?

So, what’s on your playtest list?

It’s easy to look at these numbers and respond with alarm, but remember that a) the 4th quarter of the year is typically pretty crappy, and b) Evil Hat’s catalog is aging without a lot of new-product blood, something which we should be remedying over the next two years.

Distribution continues to bring in a large portion of our long tail (seen after the cut).

Evil Hat Productions Announces ‘Atomic Robo’ RPG License

Double 2011 Origins Award Winner Licenses Eisner-Nominated Comic Book

SILVER SPRING, Maryland— January 10, 2012 — Evil Hat Productions, LLC, today announced an agreement to produce, publish, and distribute a role-playing game based on the Eisner-nominated Atomic Robo comic book. The Atomic Robo RPG will be co-written by Atomic Robo scribe Brian Clevinger and Kerberos Club: Fate Edition author Mike Olson, creator of the Strange Fate version of the Fate engine.

“I’m such a big fan of the world Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener create in every page of Atomic Robo,” said Fred Hicks of Evil Hat. “When I found out they were fans of role-playing games—including Evil Hat’s own Spirit of the Century—it was clear we had a giant-sized opportunity that had to be pursued.”

With The Atomic Robo RPG, Evil Hat will build on the legacy of Fate games like Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files RPG—together with the ideas of Evil Hat’s upcoming Fate Core project and Mike Olson’s Strange Fate work. The stand-alone game will deliver a fast-paced and fast-to-play role-playing experience focused on the themes of Atomic Robo—action-science, robots, angry talking dinosaurs, high weirdness, and more.

“Brian and I are lifelong RPG nerds, I mean enthusiasts, and we could not be more excited to partner with Evil Hat and Mike Olson to bring readers even closer to the world of Atomic Robo,” said Scott Wegener. “There’s over a century of adventure in our comic book, but we can only show you guys slices of the whole picture. This game opens up so many opportunities to play with that world, its history, the weird unexplored corners, and the might-have-beens,” added Brian Clevinger.

The Atomic Robo RPG  begins development in late February of 2012. “We’d love to get The Atomic Robo RPG out in 2012, and if everything comes together fast and smooth we might just manage that,” said Hicks. “But as with all licensed projects at Evil Hat, we want to take our time to make sure we serve the license and the fans well. Thankfully, Brian and Scott have the same opinion, here. The Atomic Robo RPG that we release will be the best one we can possibly make, period—and that may take us into 2013.”

For more information about Evil Hat Productions, the Fate system, Spirit of the Century, and the Dresden Files RPG, visit www.evilhat.com. For more information about Atomic Robo, visit www.atomic-robo.com. Atomic Robo is published by Red 5 Comics, available at www.red5comics.com and in comic stores everywhere. Kerberos Club: Fate Edition is published by Arc Dream Publishing, www.arcdream.com.

About Evil Hat Productions

Evil Hat Productions believes that passion makes the best games. It is this passion for gaming that raised Evil Hat to its acclaimed position in the RPG community. Our games can be used to build the best kinds of role-playing experiences—full of laughter, storytelling, and memorable moments. Today we don’t just run games, we don’t just make them, we work with you to make your play the best it can be—the kind that upholds and gives birth to passions of your own. That’s the Evil Hat mission, and we’re happy to have you along on it.

Since its inception, Evil Hat has won accolades ranging from the Indie RPG Awards, the Golden Geeks, the ENnies, and the Origins Awards, most recently claiming the Origins Awards for both Best Roleplaying Game (The Dresden Files RPG: Your Story) and Best Roleplaying Game Supplement (The Dresden Files: Our World).

About Atomic Robo

Brian Clevinger is a ten year veteran of online and independent comics. You can laugh at and sometimes with his early work at nuklearpower.com. Follow him on Twitter at bclevinger.

Scott Wegener used to fly planes until he found out it was nothing like High Road to China. Now he draws comic books as a form of very slow starvation. Follow him on Twitter at Scott_Wegna

Press contact

Fred Hicks
Email: feedback [AT] evilhat.com
Website: http://www.evilhat.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/fredhicks

(Click the image to learn what this Race to Adventure sneak peek is all about.)

And I’m wondering — is there a font that matches this? Clearly there’s some custom type design in the logo, but it’d be nifty if I could put together a header style that did a solid job of matching its look. I do some searching around via things like WhatTheFont, and I come across a pair of fonts that are sort of a match: Melrose Modern One & Two Okay, so Melrose Modern One is a bit closer of a fit, and so I start with that as my header style, getting something like this: Now the hunt for mismatches begins. The A isn’t rounded in One, but it is in Two. The I has serifts on it in One, but is a straight simple line in Two. The M isn’t really a match in either, so I have to set that aside as “it’d be nice, but this will be close enough”. Obviously the lightning bolts are added after the fact, so if I want those, I’ll have to hand-craft them. And the O in Atomic is simply different from the other O’s in the logo — but it looks a lot like the O in Two. I can solve this problem with the addition of two GREP styles (I could probably solve it with one depending on how far I wanted to go, but two will be easier for the teach, here). First, let’s look at the A and the I. I’d like these to be in Melrose Modern Two whenever I type them in the header. Prior to GREP styles, I’d need to find all the instances where I did, and apply a character style that makes them use the Two font instead of One. I’ll start by setting up a character style (“Mel 2″), because that much hasn’t changed. But to apply this effect simply and automatically in my header, I’m going to do this with a GREP style. I edit the paragraph style that I’m using for this header, and I go into the GREP Styles pane of it for the details. I create a new style that applies my character style, Mel 2. For the pattern, I want to do a single-character match for these, and I want it to apply whenever it encounters an A or an I (and as I mess around with it later, when it encounters an R and an N too, so I throw those in for good measure). My pattern is simple:

[AINR]

That’s regular expression speak for “a single character that is either uppercase A, I, N, or R”. What’s the header look like after I make that one change to the paragraph style, without me directly applying any character styles? Much better! And for a workaday header that feels consistent with the logo that inspired it, it’d work pretty much as is. But that O in Atomic hounds me a bit. It’d be fun if every time I typed “ATOMIC”, I got the alternative O from the Melrose Modern 2. I set up another GREP style in my header’s paragraph style, same as the first, but with a different pattern. This one’s a little more complicated — I want it to know that it’s “inside” of the ATOMIC word, but I don’t want it to apply my character style, Mel 2, to the other letters in the word — just the O. So I need it to be able to look to the left and the right of an O, and see if the letters around it spell AT MIC. That’s a concept called “positive lookbehind” and “positive lookahead”, which is a fancy way of saying look and verify, but don’t touch. In regular expression speak, that’s:

(?<=AT)O(?=MIC)

Look to the left: is AT there? That’s the first part. Look to the right: is MIC there? That’s the last part. The actually-matched thing, the O, that the character style is applied to, is in the middle. (Important tip: these are case sensitive by default. You’ve got to fiddle with the dials a bit if you want case insensitive.) If I use Mel 2 as my character style, I get this:

Boom! If I really wanted to go nuts on this, I could create a copy of Mel 2 that was maybe 10-15% bigger in size, with a baseline adjustment so the big O would drop down a bit below the other letters on the line, but that probably won’t look as good as I’d want it to because the weight of the O would change as it increased in size. So for now, with the font that I’ve got here, this is my best fit. (If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll see that before all of this I did a font size override on Robo to make it smaller than Atomic, and gave it some different spacing settings, but that’s outside of scope for what I’m demoing here.)

Now, that might seem like a lot of trouble just to do a few letter substitutions in a single logo or header when I could simply apply the character style a few times and be done with it. But as with anything involving regular expressions, the real power comes in when you have to do something a few hundred or more times. With the GREP Style enabled header I’ve made, I can just type FRED DEFINITELY LOVES THOSE ATOMIC GREP STYLES and I get all my A’s, I’s, N’s and R’S substituted out all proper, without having to do anything other than apply the paragraph style to the text — here’s a before and after, without and with the GREP styles involved:

This isn’t always about one font for another font, of course. It’s all in what you do with the character style that you’re applying. Maybe you’re just changing the weight of the same typeface; maybe you’re giving it a different color or a slightly different size; maybe you’re turning on or off certain OpenType features (like swashes) — I did a lot of that last bit with the headers for the Dresden Files RPG, because its header font, Newcomen, has some crazy-great OpenType features, but not always ones that I like consistently turned on or off for every letter or letter combo.

GREP styles are incredibly versatile, and with a few smartly constructed patterns, you can save yourself a lot of work and cause your text to conditionally format itself with a single click.

Can’t recommend them enough.

Dear Deadly,

Licenses seem to be a mixed blessing in the industry. Clearly a popular license can increase sales, but the difficulty in getting stuff reviewed and the delays that can introduce seem to be a huge burden, above and beyond the cost of the license.

I know that you had an “in” with the Dresden Files, but what advice can you give for determining if a license is worth the effort and cost? How do you manage the licensor to keep things on track?

Thanks,
Steve

Steve asks good questions here (the subject line is the killer one, though). This is something I’m hoping Chris Hanrahan will be able to cover with me in a future That’s How We Roll, but I can share a few thoughts here as well.

Ultimately, a license is all about managing expectations — both yours the licensor’s. Every license is its own kind of special snowflake, really; it’s hard to really dig into generalized truths because of the differences in morphology here. But all the same, here’s a noncomprehensive list of things you should be thinking about and discussions you should be having with the licensor.

Does the license come with free or low cost assets you can repurpose to or debut in your product?

At its most basic, a license brings you extra audience you wouldn’t otherwise have. Licenses that are really worth it either bring an incredibly large audience to you that you aren’t otherwise reaching, or bring extras along for the ride that help you keep your budget from spiraling out of control.

In the case of the Dresden Files RPG, we got two major boosts. One, we got low-cost access to much of the art done for the Dresden Files comic book that was at the time being published by the Dabel Brothers. The Dabels did not always manage their business well (and so the comic has since moved over to Dynamite Entertainment), but they were very kind to us by giving us broad access to the amazing art done for the comic by Ardian Syaf.  Two, Jim Butcher was willing to write a short story specifically for the RPG. It’ll show up in a collection of short stories elsewhere eventually, I’m sure, but having a period of time where we had exclusive first-source content of our own for the RPG certainly hasn’t hurt.

Do you and/or the licensor think that the game will sell in numbers that are far outside of how non-licensed RPGs tend to sell?

There’s always a decent chance that the value of a well-known license will boost sales of the RPG — but there’s absolutely no guarantee it will. It’s best to set expectations for all involved parties that the game will sell no better than an unlicensed RPG, and to make sure the financials make sense with that being the case (more on that in a bit). You can’t get yourself caught up in an agreement that more or less demands or expects you to sell thousands upon thousands of copies.

The costs of the license — often expressed in terms of down payment up front to the licensor and percentage of royalty paid to the licensor on a per sale basis — can’t take your unit cost to the point where you aren’t making money on a sale into your lowest margin sales channel (usually distribution). Run the damn numbers in a genuinely worst-case scenario, and make sure they still add up to you at least breaking even, or in the event of disaster, losing only what you can afford to lose.

Do you think the name alone is justification for a higher price point?

And while we’re on that topic, don’t think that you can simply make up for license costs by slapping a higher cover price on the game. Push your cover price high enough and you’ll lose the extra audience you’re supposedly gaining by acquiring the license. You shouldn’t be boosting the price of your product on the name alone; it’s gotta bring the cracklingly good content along to justify that. The two DFRPG books together are a hefty price tag, but the playable single core book, Your Story, is not outside the range of unlicensed games with a similar form factor; on top of that, we jammed it full of love-for-the-license content. All of that is a deliberate choice made to make sure the game competes as a game in its own right, sans the influence of the license.  We wouldn’t have been able to put that price on the book if the license costs were high. Thankfully, they weren’t, for us, so it was all viable.

Can you reasonably assess how large of an audience you’re getting access to with the license?

… And how much of a percentage of them (think very small: maybe 3-5% on a novel series?) do you think you’ll be able to acquire from that license’s fandom that you aren’t already getting access to? Overlap is the key calculation here: of a property’s audience, how many of them are likely gamers or willing-to-become-gamers? Not a lot. So divide by 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 or more.

I recently looked at a potential license and was lucky to be able to get some honest numbers on what the readership/viewership was for that property. When I looked at the probable RPG sub-portion of that number, it ended up not making sense to pursue the license, because the audience boost we’d likely get from the license didn’t outweigh the costs of acquiring the license and developing the project. It doesn’t always have to come down to a cold calculation like that, and sometimes you can decide to forge ahead even if those numbers don’t say you should. But it’s good to know what they’re saying, because that’s the mountain you’re gonna climb.

How important is your project to the licensor?

You’re going to be asking for a lot of initially uncompensated, additional work out of the licensor throughout the process, in all likelihood. You’ll be asking them to read through mountains of text, scour your draft for things that don’t fit with their vision of the license, etc. It’s a big time investment for them (and they’re busy generating the primary content for the property in the first place) and will be very time consuming for you as you wait for their feedback. Yes, it’s important to work out this process and make sure inefficiencies are identified and medicated in advance, but that’s just time and project management stuff. Important, but it won’t matter one bit if your project isn’t important to the licensor. They have to want to see it succeed; that’s going to motivate them to donate that extra time and effort, help you find resources you need, and figure out when they need to be delegating the approval and Q&A work to someone who does have the time to respond to you. What you want here is a collaborator who’s excited about seeing the project happen and wants to help — or someone who’s happy to take your check and stay hands off with the design of the final product. There’s a big swampy zone in between those two where your project can and will get bogged down because of a lack of time and/or enthusiasm, and in that swamp your project will also start to acquire a stink of mediocrity. Avoid it.

How fast are you expecting all of this to happen?

Because it’s going to take a lot longer than you think, and that’s okay. But you need to learn how to believe that it’s okay.

Are you going after this license because it’s popular (in the minds of the gamer populace), or because it’s personally exciting to you?

If you didn’t answer “yes” to that, you might want to reconsider. The best licenses are probably the ones that are both. You’ll get the audience you want because it’s popular. You’ll make sure you’re doing the best possible job because it’s personally exciting to you — exciting enough that you’ll still like it after you’re done. Which is no mean feat.

Plenty more to be said about this, but I think those are good places to start your exploration.

It’s worth saying that some of these things aren’t surefire, definitely-happening projects — sometimes the project is figuring out if it’s a project — but most of them are capturing some amount of my attention on a regular basis, and I certainly want them to happen.

Do we have the money to make all of these projects happen at once, simultaneously? No. (We do have enough money to make sure the creative folks working on the projects get paid for their efforts — that’s my necessary minimum.) But they won’t be happening simultaneously, and in at least a few (or maybe even many) cases, we’ve got the option to throw a little Kickstarter juice at them. Our ambitions would be just a tad smaller if we didn’t have the option of crowdfunding in the mix. Thanks to Kickstarter, our ambitions are having a bit of a right time, right place quality to them, which is great.

Let’s get into the details.

Role-Playing Games

Don’t Rest Your Head

Don’t Hack This Game: Hopefully you’ve read the post about this already. Don’t Rest Your Head is over 5 years old at this point, and Ryan Macklin & I think there’s been a lot of great, creative play and hackery going on out there. Don’t Hack This Game will be a supplement for Don’t Rest Your Head where we collect some of the best ideas and give folks a roadmap for hacking the game to be what they want it to be. The system can be bent into all sorts of shapes, but that’s really only one piece of the puzzle.

Dresden Files

The Paranet Papers: This has been one of the “big dog” projects since the Dresden Files RPG launched. The Paranet Papers is part system update and setting catch-up (getting us mostly current into the beginning bits of Ghost Story), part campaign starter kit. That latter part is being addressed by us cracking up the city creation mold a bit and looking at six different “cities” that do it a little differently, all viewed in light of the fallout from Changes. Those locations: Las Vegas; the “Neverglades”; the open road (taking the Dresden Files in more of a Supernatural direction); the Russian Revolution; South America; and some of the “outlands” of the Nevernever.

DF Adventures: Fairly recently we got ink on a contract addendum that lets us do a handful of “for-pay” adventure arcs for the Dresden Files RPG. Previously we were only in the clear to do free web support type stuff, which is where our collection of one-shots for the Dresden Files (as well as a Fiasco scenario) came from. Now, we’re going to get to do some more ambitious stuff. We’ve got three such projects slated, and the option to do more. You’ll probably see these parcel out over the course of the next two years; at least one of them will include some new details about the Dresdenverse gathered straight from the Word of Jim.

Fate

Fate Core: This would be that new core Fate book that we’ve been promising folks since Spirit of the Century. We haven’t been burbling about this as much as we could over on FateRPG.com, but that doesn’t mean the project’s on hold. Lenny is in straight up nose to the grindstone mode with this one; we’re hoping to have the full text to an editorial squad by February.

Gumshoe

Bubblegumshoe: Evil Hat’s going to be exploring Pelgrane Press’s Gumshoe system a bit, with a focus on taking it in some more deeply “story-game” directions, in a pair of projects. The first of these is Bubblegumshoe, the teen detective roleplaying game. In essence, we’re looking for something that runs the gamut from Nancy Drew to Veronica Mars here — a mostly female-protagonist perspective, but with plenty of room for Hardy Boys and The Great Brain besides — with a focus on how our teen investigators interact with the authority figures and other relationships in their lives. This one’s got a trio of RPG experts working on it: Kenneth Hite, Emily Care Boss, and Lisa Steele.

Revengers: Evil Hat’s other Gumshoe system game will be penned by Will Hindmarch and features ghosts-as-cops who investigate murders for the recently dead and, when possible, get revenge for them. This one will be half whodunit, half let’s-get-’em, and Will and I have been talking about making several system decisions that put some real story-shaping power in the players’ hands, as well as building some unity between the game-space and the story-space. That’s a bit gearheaddy, so let me stress again: you’re dead cops solving murder mysteries and haunting the bejeezus out of the murderers. Badass.

Spirit of the Century

Strange Tales of the Century: A Spirit of the Century inflected tour of the mostly-real international pulps that existed in the first half of the 20th Century, with geek librarian superstar Jess Nevins as your tour guide.  This will be a must-have for fans of pulp who want to break outside of the often-common American-inflected mold. Strange Tales of the Century is one has been in the works for a while, but got spun into an editorial limbo a few years back. We’ve managed to breathe new life into it with an expanded editorial team and believe we’ll see this one out in 2012 for sure.

Board/Card Game

Race to Adventure: One of our two big forays into the board game arena. Race to Adventure!™ is an easy-to-learn family board game you can play in 20-30 minutes. It features heroes from the Spirit of the Century setting racing around the globe on a scavenger hunt, trying to be the first to get their passports stamped and return to the Century Club’s home base. Of course, they run into all sorts of complications from the villainous masterminds of the SOTC setting along the way. The game was designed by Evan Denbaum, Eric Lytle, and Chris Ruggiero, features card art by Spirit of the Century illustrator Christian N. St. Pierre, and graphic design by Daniel Solis.

Zeppelin Armada: The flipside of Race to Adventure, Zeppelin Armada is a fightin’ card game featuring the villainous masterminds of the Spirit of the Century setting. An artifact of ultimate power has been discovered — and EVERYONE wants it. So they gas up their zeppelins, and of course, all arrive at the site of the artifact at the same time. A nasty brawl ensues! Featuring rules designed by Jeff Tidball. This one’s going to end up coming up a little bit behind Race to Adventure in part because we’re using the same artist for both projects — there’s only so much he can draw at once!

Fiction

Don’t Read This Book: A fiction anthology set in the Don’t Rest Your Head setting, edited by Chuck Wendig. This features some incredible authors — I’m seriously agog we got the roster we did for this — but I can’t list all the names just yet. I can say that it will contain a new short story by one of my favorite authors, Harry Connolly, and that I have read it, and that it is fantastic.

Dinocalypse Now: A novel — possibly the start of a trilogy if it is well-received — set in the Spirit of the Century universe, as psychic dinosaurs from the distant past try to take over the present and rule the future. Chuck Wendig will be writing this one, with the pulp action and strange science dials cranked to eleven. Expect to see the heroes from Race to Adventure put in an appearance, including our game’s classic love triangle, Jet, Sally, and Mack.

Graphic Novel

ElectriCity: ElectriCity will be a stand-alone graphic novel written by longtime friend C. E. Murphy – a superhero story set in a new world, with the rivalry between Tesla and Edison as part of the backstory of it all. We’ve been having a lot of fun developing the script and are working on finishing that up and assembling the artistic team. More than any other project on our roster, we’ll be relying on Kickstarter to help us determine if this is just a lovely dream or something we can actually bring to the world.

Mystery Projects

We do have a couple of them — pipe dreams, or opportunities that haven’t gotten any momentum yet. In nearly all of these cases that adds up to shouldn’t or can’t when it comes to talking about them, so I’m going to simply put a footnote here at the bottom that what I have listed above is not necessarily the whole span of what we’re hoping to do. In most cases, though, if something’s not listed above, it’s a project more likely to happen in 2013 than 2012 — though any of the above projects could end up in 2013 as well simply due to scheduling and effort particulars.

But it’s also given me a chance to reflect on the difference between Fear and Caution, as a publisher.

Here, I’m going to define Fear as “being scared of doing something because it’s scary”, and Caution as “being careful about what you’re doing because you aren’t bringing the resources to bear you should be”.  By those definitions it’s probably obvious that I’m saying that Caution is something you need to listen to, and Fear is something you should ignore, but it’s not as clean-cut as all that experientially speaking, and I’m not sure that it’s easy to teach folks how to suss out the difference between the two.

The thing is, both things just feel scary when you’re in the middle of them. And when you’re scared, you get risk averse. Sometimes that risk aversion is a good thing, and keeps you from losing your shirt. But completely avoiding risk means you limit your opportunities for growth. In short, without taking a chance at something  that includes the risk of failure, you stagnate.

(Worth noting: Don’t read too much into the connotations of “stagnate” here. A stagnant venture can still muddle along for a good long time, but it’ll never soar; that said, it also won’t ever crash — at worst, it’ll just slowly wind down over time. For some folks that might be desirable, because a stagnant venture also doesn’t require all that much work to maintain. It’s purely a momentum-as-it-is play, and may be the right way to go for  mildly commercialized hobbyists.)

If I let the Fear drive, Evil Hat would not be trying to push into new venues: there would be no fiction projects (Don’t Read This Book and Dinocalypse Now), no graphic novel project (ElectriCity), and no projects for moving into board games (Zeppelin Armada and Race to Adventure). It’s entirely possible we’ll lose some or a lot of money on these projects if they tank. For the Race budget, I’m looking at a production and printing budget that adds up to 20-30% of Evil Hat’s current (prior-to-getting-its-ass-taxed-off-again) bank balance, a figure that’s roughly three times the amount of money Rob & I invested in the company to get it started in the first place.

Evil Hat could have a perfectly fine time going for as-is RPG production more on the Spirit of the Century scale than the Dresden Files RPG scale and simply coast a long for a good long while. And we absolutely will continue to work on projects in the RPG space … but it’d be that momentum play, all the same. But Rob and I would like to play a little what if with the money the company has made, and see what happens if we deliberately try to grow into new (new to Evil Hat) markets, games, and media.

Fear wants us not to do that. Fear wants us to stay as we are.

Caution wants us to do that, but do it right. Caution is what told me to recognize where I didn’t have all of the pieces of the job in the right hands, and to bring in Dan.

I’m starting to think that experience is entirely about the journey of telling those two things apart.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was particularly pleased to see Cindy Au from Kickstarter come out to talk to the Metatopians about Kickstarter. Her presentation focused right at the heart of what makes a good kickstarter drive, enough so that I think a checklist could be extracted from it, so I’m going to write down my hastily-scrawled bullet points here in case they happen to be useful to you, the prospective kickstarter. If you have any questions for her, you can reach her at cindy at kickstarter dot com. She’s super-approachable.

Those of you who are already kickstarter-savvy may know a bunch of this stuff already, but I was reminded this weekend when I had to explain what the heck I was talking about that not everyone has heard of kickstarter.

Some of these bullet points came from the experienced members of the audience rather than Cindy.

Presentation

Incentives & Goals

• The average goal is $4500. The average amount raised is $6000.
• The most common pledge is $25.
• The average pledge is $70.
• Between 5 and 7 tiers is the sweet spot. This probably has to do with how much reading someone needs to do to make a choice. Avoid overwhelming with choices.

Finances & Timing

• The largest number of successful kickstarters have a length of only 30 days.
• Projects that hit 30% of their goal are 90% likely to succeed. That’s true whether they hit 30% early in the drive or late in it.
• Amazon takes 3-5% of the total pledge amount; Kickstarter’s fee is 5%. So plan for getting 90% of the money you raise.
• End your project on a Sunday.
• Get your Amazon Payments account set up well in advance of starting your kickstarter. Give it at least a week.
• Make sure to calculate shipping costs and make sure your incentive tiers cover those costs. And make sure your total goal accounts for both production and shipping!

Folks who were at this panel — what’d I miss?

I’ll be there, running my mouth on panels and hopefully helping a few people test their stuff.

Here’s my schedule as I currently understand it; stuff with asterisks indicates that I haven’t confirmed it as actually on my schedule yet.

Friday 9pm-10pm – D021 (Resource Management – nuts & bolts of putting together your resources for manufacturing a RPG)
Friday 10pm-11pm – F025 (Sojourn focus group)
Friday 11pm-midnight – D028 (Remixology Panel – using existing rulesets)
Friday midnight-2am – D034 (Surviving Success panel – discussing how to keep success from overwhelming you)

Saturday 9am-11am – R050 (Project Ninja Panda Taco playtest)
Saturday, 11:00AM – 2:00PM – R064 (Fortune Cookie Kung Fu)
Saturday, 2pm-3pm – D074 (An Introduction to Kickstarter)
Saturday, 3pm-5pm – D084 (Game Design Roundtable)
Saturday, 5pm-7pm – D090 (Independent Gaming Roundtable)
Saturday 8pm-midnight – R106 (Hyperreality)

Sunday, 12:00PM – 1:00PM, T149 (Video Session of “Fortune Cookie Kung Fu”)

Obviously, Saturday is my big long march of a day. Friday starts late, intentionally; I intend to arrive earlier in the day, but having several hours to get my bearings and talk with people is important. Sunday’s been left largely open, so I can depart any time I care to in the afternoon, but also so I can get to the conversations I couldn’t have on Saturday and failed to have on Friday.

Resource Management is a panel where we’ll be giving advice and answering questions about the financial & logistical nuts and bolts of getting your game put together.

Sojourn I have no read on yet; it’s a focus group, which means we’ll hear an idea and give some directed feedback on what we think of it, and how it might be improved.

Remixology is a panel where we’ll be talking about game design using someone else’s game system. I’m sure Fate will come up, but I sure hope we’ll be talking about lots of other options as well (Apocalypse World, d20, etc). It’s a pity John Harper won’t be out for that one, as he’s the master of the remixology form, as shown in Lady Blackbird.

Surviving Success is a panel that might well be titled surviving this fucking schedule, since it starts at midnight! I’ll be running this panel, talking about the whole “So, you published a game, and it’s a hit — how do you keep that from overwhelming you?” thing. I sometimes think the real work of publishing starts after you’ve gotten your game out the gate and into the world, and this panel will be an opportunity to examine and discuss that phase.

Project Ninja Panda Taco. I have said all I need to say there, other than to observe that you should be listening to the Jennisodes if you’re not already. Given that I’m scheduled until 2am the previous night, I must really like Jenn to be getting my ass operational by 9! (Spoiler alert: I really like Jenn.)

Fortune Cookie Kung Fu brilliantly involves ordering Chinese food as the first step; you create your character from the fortune you get in your cookie. This means that I can have some pretty nonstop schedule action and still have a bite to eat at a few key points in my schedule! I’ve gotten signed up to two sessions of this, but, hey — food.

I don’t really need An Introduction to Kickstarter, but they’re sending an actual person from Kickstarter to the con, and I’m curious to see what their presentation is like.

Game Design Roundtable is the usual Dreamation/Dexcon finisher, only this is Metatopia, so it’s positioned right smack in the middle, and it’s being run by Kenneth Hite. Metatopia does not dick around.

Independent Gaming Roundtable will cover indie games and gamers present and past, with Darren Watts of IPR leading.

Hyperreality is from Dice, Food, Lodging podcaster Tim Rodriguez. Tim has very interesting ideas. I’m hoping I can get a faceful of this one.

Will calls what we’re going to be doing “a substantial hack” of Gumshoe, and he’s right. My hope is that the Evil Hat flavor of Gumshoe will be something that folks who normally don’t get into Gumshoe will be willing to give another chance, and will also appeal to folks who think it’s great just the way it is.

Personally I sit somewhere between those two positions, which is part of what motivated me to get this project — and another Gumshoe hack of a different flavor with Ken Hite that’s still on the drawing board — rolling. (I see some really interesting things in Gumshoe as a system, and I’ll get into that in a bit — it may not be what you think — so in a way this is an attempt to take the things I like about the system and the things I think are underused and tune them to produce a play experience more like what I would want from it.)

Will and I are still sorting out what the hacks will be, so I can’t get into the details of Revengers specifically just yet; the project’s still quite early in its life cycle. I can tell you that I’ve set a few ground rules about what I’d like to see addressed, including things like reducing the number of abilities from (my opinion here) overwhelming quantities to something more manageable, closely examining the necessity of the dividing line between investigative and general abilities, and what sorts of things a player can do to the story with a “spend”.

That latter bit — the utility and implementation of a “spend” in Gumshoe — is where I think a lot of juice can be squeezed, and I’ll touch on that in a moment. But you may have noticed one thing I don’t touch on in that above list, and that’s the bit about Gumshoe that gets all the press: the whole thing about “discovery is inevitable”. If you’re not familiar with Gumshoe, the gig is that the system places importance on the notion that access to information is important for moving the story of the game ahead, therefore, it should not ever be something at risk of staying hidden on a failed roll. So, investigative abilities in the system carry an element of inevitable discovery: if you have the ability to know a thing, you’ll come to know it, and the plot will move ahead. That’s a great gimmick, and I get why it gets the press, but it’s highly portable to other systems and when it comes down to it, it’s just one gimmick. It works, and there’s little need to fiddle with it (aside from maybe expanding the underlying concept of inevitability to other abilities or widgets in the system)[1].

So instead I’m inclined to look at the rest of the system and ask how it could do its job a little differently, and maybe a little better. Setting aside the inevitable discovery aspect, what do we have in the core system?

At the end of the day, it’s a resource allocation game that’s paired with a flat distribution randomizer (a single d6 roll). Without the randomizer in play, the resources (points in your various abilities) can be spent to do things like buy access to additional, non-essential, but still elucidating pieces of information, or to absorb stressors placed on the character (Health and Stability being the examples there), and possibly a few other things. With the randomizer in play, the resources are spent as a one for one adder to the d6 roll. In essence, you spend points to purchase certainty of outcome.[2] Roll a d6 to shoot the monster, and maybe you hit; roll a d6 and spend some points, you’re more likely to hit. As resources dwindle, tension about their allocation escalates, as does the character’s exposure to randomness. Actions may be undertaken to refresh those resources under appropriate circumstances.

But for some — occasionally, me included — there’s not a lot of there there with that resource allocation game. While each ability has points tied to it, giving us our resource source, those points don’t feel particularly pregnant with meaning on a story level. Abilities end up having three states: abundant, scarce, and depleted, and while you can ascribe some meaning to those states, it’s only with a few  particular abilities (like Health) where they really seem to have some narrative punch. I’m not sure what it means, exactly, to have run out of points in my Stealth or Driving ability, other than that I’m gonna be more at the mercy of fate.

So in a way, that forms the root of our mandate as we create the Evil Hat brand of Gumshoe. Give those points more meaning. Tie them and the resulting ability-states to explicit story effects whenever possible. Figure out other things which could be given points like abilities, and use that as an engine to drive story.[3]

At the end of the day, the system is posing questions like What price are you willing to pay in order to get the outcome you want? and What are the consequences of paying that price? But in its present form, it might not be posing those questions in a particularly interesting way.[4]

It’s on us to change that.

[1] Some might even argue that the effect of the gimmick is that clue discovery becomes less of the point of a mystery game, and thus it creates an experience that feels less like a mystery, but I’m not sure I buy into that take. For me clues are less about their discovery (though that’s when “the reveal” happens) and more about their content. What new questions do clues create? What discussions do they trigger? What actions do they call the characters to? None of those aspects of clues hinge on the method of their discovery. [Back]

[2] Perhaps not immediately obvious is that this “certainty economy” needs the randomizer to be a flat one, a single die where all the outcomes are equally likely. On a flat distribution, you can’t be sure that any particular part of its range is going to happen more often. If two or more dice were used, you’d get a bell curve, with outcomes in the middle being more likely than outcomes at the extremes. This would muddle the source of certainty in Gumshoe; Gumshoe wants certainty to come from those points, period. [Back]

[3] Consider: what happens if you stat up relationships like you stat up abilities in Gumshoe? What’s it mean when your relationship is an abundant, scarce, or depleted state? What does a point spent from a relationship do? What sorts of actions do you need to take to refresh the points in a relationship? [Back]

[4] Or maybe it is, in which case, great! This is more a statement about taste and perception. Clearly, not everyone experiences Gumshoe the same way. [Back]

I really like going with domestic printers where I can, but sometimes the math just doesn’t add up in favor of it. Right now, it’s coming down to this:

The Leading Domestic Option

Pros

• Strong customer service
• Turnaround times from placement of order to delivery of product are ideal

It’s a bitch; they’re exact opposites of each other, and each has pros that I’d really like to have, and cons that I have a hard time finding a place to be comfortable about.

That $1.34 per unit gap (or even 79 cent gap) you’re seeing on the hard number side is nothing to sneeze at — when you’re intending to price your product at $25, you want your unit cost to be $5 or lower, and the lower the better (assuming all things held equal on quality), because your $25 product is probably selling for $10 per unit into distribution, where you’ll likely make the bulk of your sales. So if I was making a choice based strictly on price, the International Option would be the clear winner.

But damn if I’m not having a hard time finding my peace with that. In my personal life I’m likely to make a choice of customer service over bottom dollar nearly every time, because I’m buying an experience as well as a product, and I want the experience to color my use of the product positively. So my instincts pull strongly in that direction, and push me to find compromises I can live with, like dumping the linen finish intention from the games, and so on.

And after my chance to do a ride-along on a shipment-from-China experience with Hero System 6th Edition (there’s a reason it didn’t get to GenCon in time, and it had everything to do with the international factor), I’m super gun-shy about international shipping times. When I’m publishing books, that’s a decision I can make comfortably. The turnaround I see with my domestic printing options, from POD operations to hard cover full color offset jobs, is just stellar, along with strong customer service, etc, etc. But I can also operate at a comfortably smaller scale with my printings, there.

Not so much with card games, where you’re likely to commit at a 3000-5000 unit level at least — they’d tell you that 10,000 copies is the better entry level, though I’m sticking to my “test the waters” instincts of keeping it down in the 3k-5k range. (Yes, yes, I know about the POD offerings that are in the works out there but I haven’t yet seen the data that tells me they’re ready for prime time.)  So the gulf between those two price points starts to add up, and worse yet if I push to add quality-enhancing value adds that push me over the $5/unit max. As shown above, we’re talking a four thousand dollar difference at 3000 copies. And, yeah: I could kickstarter the thing, make the initial target $4k (or more) to cover the difference between the domestic and the international option. But, guys? I’d rather that $4k go towards getting me a larger print run, or covering more of the other costs on the table. Angst, angst, angst.

So, I feel stuck. Luckily, I don’t have to commit to either of these options right away — I probably have a couple months yet to decide, and frankly January would be just peachy by me, though I expect the ball to start rolling a touch earlier than that. Still: stuck. When it all adds up, the cons are weighing down the pros in each scenario enough that I don’t really like either choice. But them’s my choices, given my constraints.

Which would you choose?

To get a little quarter-to-quarter perspective, I’ve added in a “LQ vs TQ” column showing the percentage change between last quarter and the more recent one. An uptick for most titles — but not a shock. We’ll probably see some significant dropoff in Q4, so tune back in in three months to see that.

More detailed breakdown behind the cut.

My love of remixes came up again today on twitter. Cam Banks, who’s leading the team over at Margaret Weis Productions on the next Marvel universe RPG, said something about a “doom pool” when alluding to mechanics getting playtested. Being a big fan of the Doom Patrol run that Grant Morrison did in days of old, I misread it as an implication of the Doom Patrol showing up in the Marvel universe and, well… I was off to the races:

In my amalgamverse the Doom Patrol has everything to do with Dr. Doom.  They’re like an International special forces Hulkbuster unit. One of them is a reprogrammed Doombot code-named Robotman.

I can leave it just there and feel the larger shape, iceberg-like, of the whole of that thing. Negative Man as a stealth operative flitting between bodies in the Latverian Underground. Elasti-Girl as a legacy-of-Reed-Richards type passionately committed to stopping Dr. Doom’s agenda on the global scale and less distracted by wild science. And so on.

Mash-ups are powerful juju. And they can get a little addictive once you get started.

So there’s your mission for this Wednesday. In the comments, mash up concepts from two comic book universes and show me the even more awesome amalgam that results! Bonus points for finding an “overt” connection that joins the two universes together (the way I used “Doom” from one to connect to the “Doom” of another).

Dear Deadly,

I’m getting pretty close to publishing my book and am considering a .pdf distribution along with print as you do with your products.

Obviously there is some concern for a small publisher for releasing something as .pdf not least losing potential sales. If I recall correctly your personal view is that this constitutes free advertising. Have your opinions changed and or do you place any protections on your .pdfs?

Secondly, given that there’s no way I will probably ever recoup the time I put into producing my game how do you set a price? $25 feels right to me (225-250 pages A4 with pictures and original art) but that’s without doing market research and so forth. Printing costs are ~$10 per book.

On PDFs, my opinions haven’t changed. “Protections” (i.e., restrictions) on PDFs only end up punishing the paying customer, in the long run. They get cracked by the pirates. Better to offer a restriction-free, more positive experience to the customer. For a lot of folks that’s a perspective akin to religion (be you for or against), so I’m going to leave that topic there.

Onward to pricing.

So, at $10 per book I’m assuming you’re doing very small or individual book-by-book print runs, because at volume you should be able to get a price considerably lower than that. (In fact, with Lightning Source, you could probably do more like $7 per unit, after $75 or so in set up costs, and that’s at an individually priced level, with volume discounts kicking in at as few as 50-100 copies. I’m assuming we’re talking *black and white* interior here, and paperback, when I make that assessment.)

At any rate, with a $10 book cost, $25 is your bare minimum, but good enough if you know for sure that you’ll only ever be selling the copies yourself, as directly as possible to consumers. If you want to start selling into retail, that $25 pricepoint won’t do you any favors vis a vis your costs. I sell into distribution, which means I get about 40% of my cover price (sometimes a tad more) not counting any free shipping subsidy I offer for volume orders. Sometimes I sell straight to retail at a 50% of cover price. So looking at your $25 MSRP, we’re talking a range of $10 to $12.50 of income (not counting any expenses of making that sale and getting it to the customer) vs. a cost of $10, so between $0 and $2.50 of profit (10% in your best case retail scenario).

The way “traditional” publishing tends to do the pricing calculation is to apply a multiplier to the printing cost. That multiplier is a slider depending on individual publisher philosophy, but if you put ‘em all in a blender you’d probably see that averaging out to at least 4. Making the book you’re talking about a $40 item, tho, will probably price it too high for consumer willingness. Faced with this, trad pub goes to push that unit cost down as far as possible. The folks pricing similar books at $25 may well be getting them printed for around $5 — which, given the distro/retail scenario I used above, is a profit range of $5 to $7.50, or 20-30%, aka doubling or tripling the margin.

Bottom line for the TL;DR set: Before you worry too much about pricing your book, shop around on your printing options.

In this new episode for a new season, Chris Hanrahan and I ask, “WTFotC?”

(Direct link to the audio here, but you should follow the link above to get Clyde’s excellent show notes.)

You should check it out!

I’m particularly fond of this week’s video, which helps delve into where we got the name for the game:

World War G’s setup is basically like this: take World War II, but with its timeline utterly changed by the presence of one man. The Manhattan Project has brought together the best scientists of the era — Oppenheimer, Einstein, and Banner – working together on a secret weapon:

They have a working G-Bomb in less than a year. Two significant tests of the bomb produce significant side effects:

In the Pacific, on an uninhabited island, a G-Bomb is detonated. A lizard there gets irradiated with Gamma Radiation and grows huge and green and angry — undetected at first, until it begins its rampage. The Americans once they become aware of it refer to it as the gammasaur. Chinese observers call old legends of dragons to mind and refer to it as Fin Fang Foom. When it surfaces in the harbor waters of Japan, they name it Gojira. Other irradiated reptiles and critters emerge over time (Gamma-ra, an irradiated turtle, among others, makes an appearance). The ravaging of a radioactive, building-tall lizard gives Japan cause to attack America much more ahead of our history’s schedule. (I’m no great historian, so this also does the service in the game of allowing the events and battles of WW2 to head in utterly different directions.)

In the American southwest, a desert test goes several kinds of wrong. Dr. Banner fails to halt a test in time and gets irradiated. What happens to him afterwards gets deeply classified and studied for a time — an experimental super-soldier serum is derived from his new physiology and given to a few allied soldiers. Steve Rogers is the American, and shows promising early results, with incredible muscular development and no loss of intellect and control (unlike Banner, though he’s no dumb hulk either); the Russian Emil Blonsky, however, becomes an abomination, and creates enough collateral damage that the serum is lost. Meanwhile, a desert spider that survived on the edges of the blast bites one of the base guardsmen, a young soldier by the name of Parker, imbuing him with amazing powers. Eventually, the military puts Banner, Rogers, and Parker together in Special Team A — or, as they come to be known, The Avengers: Sergeant Hulk, Captain America, and Private Parker, the Amazing Spider.

(Naturally, the Axis manages to get hold of some intelligence about this and the effects of gamma radiation, but without Banner on the job, they have a hard time with their successes. A few subjects do emerge, of course — The Green Skull for the Germans; the Green Goblin for Italy; there are more.)

An unexpected dust storm sweeps through the testing grounds and travels further on, blowing Gamma-radioactive fallout on an internment camp housing Italian-American, German-American, and Japanese-American prisoners. The “G-Men” this creates break out — one Japanese-American couple features a man who can shoot green energy beams from his eyes, and a woman green-hued telekinesis and other powers of the mind; a German-American man named Kurt vanishes into the night leaving behind only a green puff of smoke; and there are others. Originally patriots, and no fan of the Axis, these G-Men aren’t sure what to make of their new powers or their role in the war, but they’re going to try to join the fight however they can. But can they be trusted as an unpredictable x-factor in a war that’s already gone strange?

The “rampaging kaiju” attacks on Japan spread around enough secondary gamma radiation that a few survivors emerge with strange powers they only partly control. They form a revenge squad, styled after the kamikaze pilots really, but they tend to survive the destruction they cause. They style themselves as Ascending Jade Strike Team, but American intelligence designates them G-Force.

The cover on the trade paperback collection shows Captain America, no shield but the uniform we know, arms akimbo, eyes glowing bright green, bulletproof. At his side, carrying what may as well be a hand-held automatic howitzer, is Sergeant Hulk. He’s wearing the Allied man’s uniform of the time, complete with the helmet — he doesn’t wear that because he needs it, he wears it to fit in. He is, of course, chomping on a cigar. They’re standing on top of a wrecked tank; the Amazing Spider, in his trademark green-and-black outfit, clings to the side of its armor.

Welcome to World War G.

That’s the pitch at least. Really, the idea is simple: take a Marvel character you want to play, drop him or her into the middle of an unfamiliar World War Two, and rework the origin story such that it arises from the side-effects of the emergence of a gamma radiation based arms race kicked off earlier in the war’s timeline than what got us the atom bomb in our native timeline.

So, who are your World War G characters? What World War G inflected villains do they face? Enlist now!