About Fred
Fred Hicks does layout and art direction for role-playing games. He also publishes and plays them. He likes his television and he likes his cooking. He loves his wife and daughter. Life is good.
Tag Archives: gaming
Holy Crap Friday
So, it’s Friday, and I don’t have a food post for you. Once I do, it’ll be about The Banana Bread I Grew Up On. Promise.
Today, I’ve taken some painkillers, so I have very little to say that doesn’t dissolve into a suffusion of yellow.
I’ve got some interesting things to say about how a distributor [...]
It’s Game Theory
What it all comes down to is what Russell Crowe as John Nash was on about in A Beautiful Mind. Watch this clip — it’ll only take a few minutes — then come back:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0ywiYboCLk
This Time It’s Personal
This is nominally the next part in my rambling about the elements of community building. This time I’d like to talk about the value of the personal connection.
The good news here is that I’m not suggesting that you, the community “organizer”, are obligated to make a personal and direct connection with each and every member [...]
Critical Mass
I’ve seen a few people ask me how I build communities. Most of what I do relative to communities that I’ve been in a nominal leadership role with just seems to proceed from natural instinct. I’ve tried to deconstruct this in the more distant past, but it’s a topic worth revisiting, even if I’m not [...]
The Shelf Is A Gamble
I want to talk about the notion of a book on a shelf in a game store (and relatedly, in a book store), as well as how that ties into the math of pricepoints in RPG publishing.
This is on my mind because at Evil Hat we’re getting ever closer to the release of the Dresden [...]
Evil Hat Sales: Finishing 2009
IPR numbers are in!
Here’s the skinny.
Invincible
My wife got me Invincible: The Ultimate Collection Volume 4 for my birthday, and of course I’ve already read through the whole thing. I love this comic, though I say that as someone who doesn’t really have a regular comic reading habit. (Mainly I read stuff in collections, often gifted or borrowed from a friend. [...]
Midnight Post: Help Haiti, Get $1400 free
So, over at DriveThruRPG, they’ve set up a “donate $20 to Haiti” thing. That’s cool in and of itself. But that’s not where it stops. Because publishers have donated products which you get when you donate. Their total value? $1,481.31.
So that’s somewhere around a “get these products for 99% off!” deal.
You should perhaps take all [...]
To (Sell|Talk|Play)
Short post today.
I was looking at Chad Underkoffler talking about whether or not to go to Dreamation this year, and it reminded me of my perspective on conventions in general. Since I’m both a publisher and a hobbyist, conventions are always composed of some mix of selling (and buying), talking (networking), and playing. The question, [...]
Evil Hat Sales: 2009 Observations
On Monday I posted the missing 8 months of sales data I’d been too busy most of this year to post. So, that’s done, bringing us up to the end of the year (save for a big chunk of sales reckoning from IPR — I don’t get confirmed, official reporting on that until the 15th [...]
Evil Hat Sales: 2009 Catch-Up
So, once upon a time I regularly updated my livejournal with Evil Hat’s sales numbers. I fell off that horse a goodly time back — evidence points to May 1st as the last time I did this — so it’s time to play catch-up. I don’t have the end of year numbers from IPR yet, [...]
Indirect
Conversation via comments with Joshua A. C. Newman, maker of Shock:, went pretty well after I confessed to my reasons of disconnection from the game. Josh deserves some serious kudos for how he handles critiques of his game. I know I’m personally inclined to try to look like I’m as calm about negative feedback as [...]
Bandwidth
So, common gaming question: if we had superheroes in the actual world, what government agency would regulate them? If you’re from the United States like me, your first answer is probably The Department of Homeland Security. But that’s too pat and too boring of an answer for me.
So I’m looking to head in another direction, [...]
PDF, Print, Pricing
Today I want to talk about PDF pricing, after seeing my friend Matt react poorly to the pricing of the recently released Dr. Who RPG PDF. (Don’t take this post as an attempt to jump on Cubicle 7’s case. As I’ve said before, I like the guys at Cubicle 7, and there are things I [...]
Brutal
I just finished reading Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold, a sort-of sequel to his The First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and The Last Argument of Kings), in that it’s set in the same world.
I like grim fantasy (at least in some varieties). The horrible things that happen to characters in [...]
Obligation.PDF
There are a lot of good things I could say (and have said) about Diaspora. I liked it enough that I offered to run the publication of it for VSCA, the current publisher, if they wanted to transition off of Lulu (which at least as of a couple weeks ago looks like it might have [...]
Starblazer
So back in late October, I jumped in on a thread on RPG.net comparing Starblazer Adventures and Diaspora. I got more than a little colorful with my praise of Diaspora, but before I got there I felt I had to give some background as to why I found myself personally favoring Diaspora over Starblazer Adventures. [...]
Discount
This isn’t a full-blooded real blog post. It’s a plug. Because Diaspora is back, and with a discount available until the end of the year.
I’ll just quote the publisher:
Not strictly blogworthy, but it links to prior posts a little. Anyway, you can again get Diaspora at Lulu now. Problem resolved and Lulu has assuaged our [...]
Diaspora:
This is a continuation of yesterday’s post about Shock:, which was itself a continuation of the one about Vernor Vinge’s writing.
So, Diaspora.
(First off, let me note that Diaspora is normally available only through Lulu.com, but Lulu screwed the pooch recently and the title isn’t currently listed. As soon as it’s back, you want to get [...]
Sales and Origins Gaming