RPGaDay 29,30&31

Influenza, bronchitis, man-flu, not sure what it is... but I'm off sick at the moment, so that gives me time to finish off the run.

29. Labour

The first phrase to come to mind here is a "labour of love", and in 30 years of designing games that's what it's always been for me. The number of hours I've spent discussing game design, running games of differet types as research, sharing my games with the world, writing this blog, and organising my shopfronts on various game-trading websites over the years has easily been in the months if they were combined together (24hrs a day, 7 days a week, ≂4⅓ weeks per month... 728 hours for a solid month, so yeah, I've easily done this. It'd be fair to say that I've spent thousands of hours on the hobby.) In that time I've probably spent about $10,000-$12,000 on RPGs, and have probably earned $12,000-15,000 from the products I've sold. At worst, it's been a self-sustaining hobby, at best I've earned about $5,000 for thousands of hours of work... well below minimum wage, but it's been fun and I wouldn't trade it for another hobby. After all, it's how I met my wife of 23 years.

30. Pride

Am I proud of my labour of love? Yeah, totally. A couple of the games I've designed by myself, and some oif the games I've co-designed have seen thousands of downloads. I'm also proud that I've been able to help Erin get her start in game design and potentially might see her join a new generation of game designers. 

The one moment that always gives me a sense of pride is when I expose new players to the concepts underlying a lot of my games, a multimodal resolution system for actions, where success on an activity is measured differently to any sacrifice that the action might incur. Unlike the basic linear binary of "Pass/fail", or even the linear scale of "failure/mixed-success/full-success", this gives four outputs of "failure with added problems", "failure with no extra problems", "success with added problems" and "success with no problems", and it allows the player to prioritise whether their focus is on getting a successful result, or on avoiding new problems coming into the story. I know it's not my innovation, but I've been refining it and tinkering with it for years. FUBAR has seen almost ten thousands of people download a version of the system, The Law has seen a few hundred more encounter more refined version of the system. Walkabout, Familiar and SNAFU use the most updated version and I really want to get that out into the public's hands soon. 

31. Edge

In this final one, there's again a few ways that I can interpret the prompt.

Do we look at the way different characters are given an edge over their companions at different points of a session to spread the spotlight time across the entire group?

Do we look at the designer's bane of edge cases in the rules and wondering whether those situations will make or break the game?

The edgelords who often linger in TTRPG spaces? 

Maybe the edges and boundaries that border the liminal space of our TTRPG sessions?

Any of those is valid for exploration.

...but I've looked at those many times over the years. So I'm not going to go over them again today.

 

ambulance-like bed / adult change table 

 

 

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