Observations of the Fox

Let's finish off those last few April posts, now that we're almost a week into May. 29: Your Community There are massive communities of gamers on G+ and Facebook, often orbiting "big name gamers", or some particular gaming product. I tried doing that with some of the games I've written, but nothing ever caught on. I feel like I drift through numerous other people's communities, but certainly don't feel like I have any communities of my own. 30: Top Tips and Advice If I had any of those worth listening to, I'd probably be one of those "big name gamers". Even if I didn't have any of these worth listening to, if I was a "big name gamer" people would hang off my every utterance and treat it like gospel even if it was a load of crap. I'm probably not in the best of moods to be to fishing off these questions. 

This is one of those weird questions. I guess every selection of monthly question lists and drawing prompts has at least one odd one. As indicated earlier, I really don't listen to podcasts or streams, I don't religiously read a lot of blogs. But, I think it was yesterday when I saw John Harper's History of Blades starting to do the rounds.  I don't know that it's my favourite interview, I haven't even finished watching it, but the first few minutes got me hooked and I love the idea of an open discussion where dead-ends, and creative obstacles are at least as important as the final end product. I know there have been influential interviews in magazines in the past, interviews that got me thinking "Hey, I can do that", but as I'm writing this I can't think of any other specifics...sorry.

I've held off on this one...knowing I wouldn't get a mention on anyone else's responses, but curious to see who else has been mentioned. I've seen a few of the usual suspects come up, so I've naturally decided to go with a designer who hasn't been featured so far... ...another Aussie game designer. Nathan Russell  (he doesn't seem to have done much on G+ lately, so it's probably a bit silly linking to his profile there, but I feel dirty linking to Facebook.) The Peril Planet Website can be found HERE The DrivethruRPG Shopfront can be found HERE Nathan is the founder of Peril Planet games, while also being a drama teacher, father, and all round nice guy who lives in Newcastle, just north of Sydney, Australia. I first met Nathan almost a decade ago at GenCon Oz 2008, but had known him a little while before that online through forums such as Storygames and 1km1kt. I've since been to his house at least once, visited his gaming club in New...

No. Actually, I erratically read a few, but most of the people I regularly follow (see the lists on the side of this blog for those names) don't post that often. More often than not, I'll do a Google search for a specific game topic, and that will lead me to someone's blog. I'll read a few related posts, then move on. I used to listen to Clyde Rhoer's Theory from the Closet podcast pretty religiously, and I always keep an eye out for new Core Mechanics vlogs from Paul Stefko, but generally between university work, looking after a sick wife, and trying to get my own ideas out there, I don't have much time to read or listen to other stuff. If anyone has some good suggestions, I'm all ears.

Being any kind of designer means looking at the world and seeing it for more than just it's surface features. It means seeing the patterns that lie beneath and reaching conclusions about how those patterns have been shaped by forces such as functionality, intentions and motivations of the concept's originator, the way a viewer or participant engages in the design, and considering where outside forces such as social values, economic constraints, and technological barriers have impacted on the final product and it's experience. (Sorry, I've spent too long studying design, art, sociology, and para-linguistic communication at university). Being a TTRPG designer means creating a system that may be used to emulate an experience on the table. Such an experience may strive to emulate elements of reality (but attempting to do so with any sense of comprehensive simulation has always proven problematic in my experience), or it may strive to emulate a specific genre of fict...

I'm looking at the other people running with this hashtag... I see things like "That time I won the Ennie for this"..."the time I won two Ennies for that"..."this particular high profile game that's sold tens of thousands of copies"..."the kickstarter I ran, which earned tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands"..."that critically acclaimed rpg that people still talk about"... ...yeah. Here... the best I can say is maybe the 750,000+ page views here on the blog... or the free game FUBAR which has seen several thousand downloads (but not even 50 paid downloads to be considered a copper best seller on DrivethruRPG/RPGNow)... Maybe my most notable achievement was not appearing on anyone's "people who helped you" posts yesterday...or "biggest influences" posts earlier in the series. My greatest achievement seems to be my ability to obfuscate myself.

Still waiting on that elusive help... No, actually, there have been a few people around the design scene who've been useful contacts and friends. It's just that none of them have led to regular work in the industry, often providing plans that never eventuated, one-off commissions, or occasion feedback. One of the driving forces in the local gaming scene, who has offered me more work through his game Relics... Steve Dee A dynamo of energy in the Blue Mountains, who set up his own twice-annual convention and has always been supportive... Matt Horam An owner of a comic shop in Melbourne who has offered to be the first Brick-&-mortar store to sell my gaming products (I really need to get back to him about that)... Jim Vinton An assortment of game design locals who I've met and have discussed game related things with on several occasions... Jez Gordon, Benjamin Davis, Nathan Roberts, Keiran Sparksman, Nathan Russell, Andrew Smith One of the driving forces behi...

Too much uni work, falling behind. Notebooks, scraps of paper, memo files on tablets and laptops. When the muse strikes, I have to get the ideas out of my head while I can. Often the notes sit and fester for a while before they get integrated into a project, at which point a word document is used to compile ideas into a semi-logical state. It might be easy to say that for every 100 scribblings on paper and in memo files, I get 10 semi-logical games or settings, and a single final product. But it's more like 50 crude ideas getting mixed and matched into 20 half complete ideas, which then become 4-5 more specific ideas, of which 1 might get published... I documented my process back on day 9. 

The answer to this is always "one more"... but if I waited until enough playtests were completed, I'd never get things done. Perfect is the enemy of good. I usually try to test my games at least three times. Write, initial private testing (either running through the mechanisms myself, or spitballing with one or two others), then rewrite or refine. Second test is usually done in a more formal game set up, among friends or perhaps online. With the feedback from that wider community, a second revision is done. If I had the resources, here's where I'd add in more tests and refinements. Instead the final test is usually done at a convention, with random strangers playing the game... I'd love to get blind playtesting happening with strangers both running and playing things, but if anyone has a reliable way to get that happening I really want to hear it. Usually, by this stage, I either put the game aside, letting it sit and mature for a while, or start workin...

So many...in no particular order. Mad Max Judge Dredd The assorted folklore of various local Indigenous groups The ferrets we share our house with (Red Sonja, Agent Brodie, Agent Ellie Bartowski, Machete, Monroe, Rosalie, Lucifer, Mazikeen, and Chloe) The other animals in our house (Okami, Inari, Rhubarb, and Peking) My wife, Leah. The animations of Ralph Bakshi Getting magic "right" by way of John Constantine, Newt Scamander, Dr. Stephen Strange, Aleister Crowley, Taoist alchemy, and assorted indigenous folklore. ...that'll do for now.

Heavy guitar distortion and fuzz... Oh. You still mean regarding game making... Most beneficial form of feedback, and favourite feedback are different. My favourite feedback would be hallowed praise and words claiming my genius, along with numerous sales and seeing word-of-mouth spreading across the internet. My most beneficial feedback is constructive criticism, where it really shows that someone has read the work, possibly even put it into play. I don't expect people to know what was in my head when I've put together a cluster of mechanisms to create a game, I don't often try to expose those processes in the final product, but when someone gets it, I'm happy. Conversely, when someone offers a "suggestion" which returns one of the problems I've been avoiding in the ecosystem of play, that bugs me... bit at least it makes me think. Feedback that makes me think is good.

Honestly, I've just spent five years retraining at University because my previous career was filled with psychopaths, sociopaths, and pressure to succeed at the expense of the wider community. RPG and game design was always my outlet and pressure valve. I hoped it could be a long term career, but I didn't win the fame lottery and I don't have bucketloads of cash to promote a lacklustre product, so that never got anywhere. At the moment, my gaming endeavours are spread between LARP, miniatures, boardgaming, and traditional RPGs. I've tried fusing two or three of these elements together, but every time I'm working on a combo, some other more prominent designer or company does something similar and releases it to wide acclaim as an "innovation in the industry"...and I get demoralised and start something else. I guess that's where a cluster of my hopes and dreams lie. I'd like to ride the zeitgeist and actually get something out there which inspire...

I think this is a trick question. It seems that if I want a game, I have to run the game. I've got a crowd of players who irregularly are willing to show up to games when I run them, but rounding them up can be like herding stray cats... and there's never the opportunity to just sit back and let someone else do the heavy lifting.  The only real time I get to relax with a game is when I go to a convention, and even then it's more a case of knowing who is on the table more than knowing what game we're playing. I can honestly say that I don't have an answer to this one.

It's a bit complicated for words, I think in a more visual manner.

I've mentioned it many times over the years, but I love the concept of Vincent Baker's "Otherkind Dice", I think it was a regressive step back to the mechanisms of the Apocalypse engine. The concept of having multiple outcomes associated with a task, all determined simultaneously by the rolling of multiple dice, then allowing the player to decide which results are allocated where to direct the narrative... that's an amazing concept. Pulling it back to a linear scale of degree of success, that feels like a cop-out from someone who saw the brilliance of the sun then decided to hide back in their cave... maybe not regressing to the shadow-puppetry by firelight of Plato's cave of D&D/OSR flat linear pass-fail, but certainly not working out a way to shine that brilliance into the troglodytes. Yes, I'm that passionate about the concept.  Trying to tie that core mechanic into a coherent system has been an ongoing quest for several years now. 

Of course my favourite completed game at the moment is The Law . It feels like the best possible evolution and convergence of the systems I've been developing and publishing for years. A few of my other games will always have a special place in my heart, and in the future I might create another game that becomes my new favourite. My favourite uncompleted game would be my Walkabout project. But it demands a degree of attention that I just can't afford to give it at the moment.  Sometimes I wish that I had worked on one of those big tentpole games that everyone knows, but just because I'm a white male designer it doesn't mean I automatically get in on those prestigious titles. Being on the opposite side of the world to those conventions where everyone gets to meet each other face to face doesn't help. 

My work mostly consists of free, pay-what-you-want, or nominally charged products. It's often in pdf form, typically available from DrivethruRPG , usually on the lower side of page counts, and lighter in rules than most "mainstream" RPGs (while heavier in rules than many of the popular "indie" games). When I dabbled in comic book artistry a while ago, I was told by some people that my work was too formal for their company, while other people told me my work was too loose...my game design work seems to exist in a similar niche that's hard for people to pigeonhole. The rule sets I try to produce have enough flexibility that the core system can be minimally adapted (on the fly if necessary) to fit a variety of situations in the story being told, while having enough sturdiness to keep going without major issues if something unexpected does come up (without needing to create ad hoc new rulings). While I believe the overall system does impact the ongoing nar...

(Apparently there is a hashtag for this thing, I didn't realise that yesterday) I live just over 100km southwest of the city of Sydney, Australia... on the edge of a region called the Southern Highlands.  Here's a map of where I am. And here's a few pictures of the typical environment I see every day... The time I have to wake up to catch the only morning bus that will get me into the city at a reasonable hour... The train line that was closed down in the early 80s, because it wasn't profitable to keep it running regular services, but now sees steam trains from the local railway museum every Sunday. I will probably move house during the second half of this year as I'm finishing off my teaching degree. I have no idea where I'll be moving to, I'm willing to go anywhere in the state where a woodwork/metalwork/visual-arts/photography teacher is needed.

Hi, I'm Michael. I'm a freelance illustrator, cartographer, game designer, and LARP organiser. I'm in my early 40s, and have been running games for 30 years, running games at conventions and designing my own games for 25 years, selling my own games for 20 years, and offering my services to other companies and designers for 10 years.  My most downloaded game is FUBAR (which has seen about 8000 downloads from various locations), my most recent game is The Law . When I'm not designing games, I've been a product designer, back-end database developer, retail buyer, offset printer, logistics coordinator, roller-coaster technician, and tech troubleshooter. I've been married to the same lady for almost 15 years.

If you've had a look at my work in progress "Ghost City Raiders", or if you've even been kind enough to download the components...you'll find two basic character types. One is meant to be pretty fast, while the other one is mean in combat. What other types of characters would you like to see? Psychics? Mutants? Secretive masters of ancient technologies? Barbaric savages? Stealthy Assassins? Dieselpunk tinkerers? Anything else?