Audio Version of the Interview on Anchor here!
You're on the
vanishing tower. I'm Jay Murphy of the Vanishing Tower, Vanishing Tower Press, all things
Vanishing Tower. You are my second interview. The first one was Matthew Finch.
Oh, yeah, I
interviewed him, too. He's a great guy.
Great interview.
Just like him. You're way off the main street of the gaming world. I'm in the
back alleys of the DIY scene. How did you find me then? Decide that, hey, we
should reach out to this person because I'm in the bad neighborhood man.
Probably the same
person who brought you Mat Finch, John Barnhouse. John keeps his fingers on the
podcast interview show scene. So, I reached out to him and I said, look, you
know, I want to I have to I'm trying something new. Basically, my current
project tower in the moon went right to backerkit. I didn't do
Kickstarter because I didn't need to fund it. It wasn't that expensive. But
more importantly, I had already paid for it. I paid for the art. It was all
that.
So, you printed
physical copies?
I did. And then Backer
Kit is, hey, I've got this product. You can buy it now.
Now, why is that
something you would do on Drivethru or any other outlet?
Well, I mean, for
one thing, drive through, takes a third of your money.
Yes, it's so if
you're in in it for the long haul, those are that's margins that you can't
absorb.
If I were. It's
one of these sort of a vicious circle things. If I were pulling in routinely a
thousand or fifteen hundred or so backers, everything would be different. And
you could potentially just go to drive thru or whatever and whatever. But but
I'm not. I am attempting to stake out my little corner of the world. And I'm
not where I need to be in terms of sustainability as a long term. Yeah, I got
this gaming ballistic.
Is that your full-time
job?
It is.
Fantastic. So,
you made the leap. I'm so glad you said that, because if you said you were
working another job at forty hours a week, I would just feel really bad.
I was for a
while. I was doing up until this last year. I drew my last paycheck a little
from the company a little over a year ago and was formally laid off in June of 2020.
Can't get a callback.
Really?
Yeah, and my
resume is strong, but I cannot. Get. A response worth anything? So apparently
my resume isn't quite as strong as I'd like to think, but it really ought to at
least generate some.
It's the dead
silence that is odd. So you were kind of pushed into it.
Pushed into it a
little bit. I said, well, maybe I should try to do this for real.
Yeah, that's very
exciting.
Well, yeah, but
basically what it came down to is I had a project run long. My last one, the
manuscripts that were turned in were not what they needed to be. They weren't
what I thought that they should be. And so, I sent back for corrections, and
they came back and they were not adjusted the way I needed. I said, okay, fine,
I will do this. It was the project for character collections. I didn’t like it.
It was OK. It was more Perilous Journeys Project for the Fantasy Trip, which
was five books written by other people. But three of them were the third,
fourth and fifth in a campaign series, fourth and fifth. I didn't feel the
fifth one in particular started to be the NPC show. It was not characters
having agency doing cool things. It was, Ooh, look at this good NPC and isn't
he cool and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, no, absolutely not. That
that's not why people, if you want to do that, read a book or watch a movie.
And so, I basically rewrote it. Had I been writing an adventure from scratch it
would have been easier than trying to tie all the pieces together and preserve
the core of it while basically making it something that the players were in the
driver's seat. So that ran long. It was the only Kickstarter I've ever been
late on that set me back, and then I was finishing that up. As the year turned,
I was like, all right, I'm not going to go really job hunting until I deliver
onto to my backers what I told them I would deliver. And I did that. And it was
difficult and painful and made me gnash my teeth and whatever.
But it's very
admirable because a lot of people throw in the towel and go dark.I wouldn’t say
a lot. It just happens enough.
I've had people
say, I will not preorder, I will not back. When you have a product talk to me,
until then. Forget it. And it is stuff like that when people throw in the towel
or they're like, well, gee, I have this money from a prior project, but I've
used it and now I need more. So, I will use that money to make a new product
because this one isn't going they will forward or whatever. But no, I might if
I have a rep, it's on time, high quality. Give the backers what I told them and
don't start something new until I finish the old thing. I don’t mean I don't
feather. I try to keep my promises.
Very good. Your
new product is Tower of the Moon.
It is.
It's a great
looking module if you don't mind me calling it a module.
No, no.
Absolutely.
I notice you're a
fan of two column black and white, and I applaud that. Many game companies give
you pages with drawings underneath it, illustrations underneath it, colors on
the pages. And I find that very difficult to use as a game master.
Yeah, I do have
some products that have the color or whatever, but the fantasy trip is
delightfully old school and the black and white form factor is actually a
production requirement.
Interesting.
As part of my license
because Steve Jackson Games holds the copyright on the fantasy trip
And let's dive
into this because this is intriguing you are doing backer kit, your stuff is
out there, it's available for sale.
That's working
out Kickstarter. You start with maybe an idea or maybe a half-finished product
somewhere there, and you're looking for funding to make it come into existence.
From what I've
been reading on your blog, it seems that correct me if I'm wrong. Kickstarter
gave you a flood of interest in action. Financially wise for a project
different than backer kit.
That is correct.
That's weird.
It is. And it's
not. And I have three quarter composed in my head and have to post on the page
trying to help backer kit saying, look, you know, the thing that Kickstarter is
really good at is the countdown timer sense of urgency. Yes, I need this now.
It gives you a feeling of participating in something and making something
happen. So, it's not just, oh, I'm spending my money, it's I'm making this.
Oh, the participators
feel a part ownership.
Yes, absolutely.
I think they do. I want to help fund this kind of thing. And let me come back
to that. Not right away, but in a minute, because I think I'll come back to it.
And then the third thing that Kickstarter does pretty well is they have call it
a mini forum. It's not spectacular, but the little community posts thing and
that people can comment on the updates. And there's a level of interaction
there that they provide around the project. And everyone at Kickstarter can
theoretically see your thing. So, there is a built in on ramp for curious
people taking advantage of the network effect that is Kickstarter and come in.
And every project my audience would grow by a few dozen people.
Interesting.
Ideally,
something takes off and you do something, and everyone loves it, and you get a
million backers or whatever, or a thousand backers or 10000 backers. And then,
you know, you've got what you need for like the rest of time, in a way, as long
as you keep doing interesting things so it is mostly about reaching out to
people who have already bought your stuff, because that's the mailing list that
they provide. And I've curated one as well. So, for that, you're trying to
leverage the marketing philosophy that the people most likely to give you money
are people who have given you money before. They like this stuff, they bought
your stuff, and I've run 12 projects now, or maybe this is my 13th makes my
job. So I'm not an unknown to the people, to the 500 or so people who usually
show up to get my stuff. I'm not unknown to them. They know that when they
close, they know more or less what they've gotten. They've probably gotten it
before and hopefully they want more of it. But what I'm not seeing in this case
is the same number of people showing up to say, yes, give me Tower of the Moon.
My fantasy audience has been very strong to this point between five hundred and
six hundred and twenty people. But the backer kit, which was admittedly an
experiment, is drawing about half that. So, it's not pulling people along. Now,
the funny thing about Kickstarter and why it's just a little surprising is that
while in the beginning you were funding your dream. Now most people come to
Kickstarter. I think they were the most successful. People come with a project
already.
Yes. Yes. Right.
Yeah. Because the novelty has worn off a bit. The horror stories are well. So,
I got to see a little more. You've got more skin in the game before I give you
some cash. Show me sweat equity if you would.
Lay out. Show me
a writing sample. Show me a cover if you can show me something that says that
you can get there from here. And so you're the only real difference how I
usually come to Kickstarter and how I came back at this time. It was two
things. One is all the art was in hand instead of ending. And two, I placed a
risk order for 100 copies of the physical product ahead of time.
That is a risk. A
hundred copies is, in the game world is who knows?
So, if my prior
projects had usually moved about 60 to 65 percent physical or, you know, real
physical plus media. So usually about three to two. So I said, well, you know,
three to two, 60 percent of all, you know, go low. Five hundred people. Right.
That's 300. So, I'll order a third of that. That makes sense. And I sold
through those right-away.
That was very fast.
I placed another order for a hundred. And then I, I waited a day or so. I'm
like now I'm on track to have the entire project fulfilled. OK. So, I might as
well order the final 100 copies to make sure that I can basically as soon as people
are placing their orders they can go out the door. And in the middle of this, I
got an order from a retail outlet who has supported me before. And I was like,
wow, you know, if I get more retail orders, I'm going to need a bunch more
books. So, and that's where that third came from. Now, I haven't gotten into
that yet, but I'm 12 copies away from finishing the second hundred.
So, in no ways
has it been a failure.
So, where I am
and I tend to be kind of open kimono, I find that if you look up, I do
postmortems I publish.
I read those.
I've read those before. They had my curiosity here at the Vanishing tower. I
usually give an annual report in January to show the meager offerings that I
got. But hey, people out in the world, there's, you know, 20 new people with
these products. And it's, you know, it lives and breeze.
The project has
paid for itself. And I had spent on international shipping. I'm sure everyone's
heard this before. The international shipping is a Charlie Foxtrot right now.
It is hopelessly, fully dorked up. So, people are paying 20 times what they 10,
20 times what they used to for a container. And, you know, like today, I got a
note from ship station saying that the United States was suspending certain
class of mail to Australia.
There you go.
Well, fortunately, Doug, you're in the largest consumer market already. If you
want to sell something, you go to America.
That's right. And
but for the first time in my product history, I did not offer international
print during this campaign. And while the campaign is, I think, you know, has
been successful, not as successful as I'd like. And, you know, these projects
are interesting because, you know, gaming projects in particular, you have a
fairly large outlay on a per page or per product basis to get to a printable
PDF. And first, you have to make that back. And then after that, the profit
margin of each marginal sale goes way up because, you know you’re not digging
yourself out of the hole. International shipping over my last project, my last
project was Delvers to Go, powered by GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. Brilliantly
executed by Kevin Smith, the author and something that I had written about in
twenty fifteen or twenty sixteen saying this is what group's needs. I have
always been a fan of GURPS since 1989. And the system. I love it. I play it.
But this is what it needs. And I really thought that people would look at that
and say, even if I'm an expert in the system, my friends aren't. And this lets
me get to the table in 15 minutes. It's OSR fast. It's TFT fast, right? It's
all west end game StarWars d6 fast. And now that a fan has created GURPS
character sheet support and the author of GURPS Characters, this the officially
licensed character generator is writing game aids for this. Some of my backers
for this project can make a fully competent, ready to play, totally decked out
dungeon fantasy role playing game characters. Three minutes, you can literally
have a character die. And by the time your turn comes around, be ready to play
with a new one in GURPS, even if you've never played GURPS.
I have played GURPS.
We will be going into that a little bit.
Right. But it's a
system that is heavily front loaded for both the game master and the player.
You need to invest time to make your character. You usually need to chat with
your game master. You go through the rules. The game master has to go and
remove, is like the old line about the sculpture. First, take away everything
that isn't your campaign. Then you have to take away everything that isn't
available for characters. And then you have to as a player, you say, OK, now
let me take away everything is in my character. And that can be laborious. It
can take days or even weeks or whatever.
A lot of back and
forth between the game master and the players.
There can be a
lot of back and forth. Right. Whereas with Delvers to Go you have a lot of
advantages playing. You can just do it and get done. You're like, I want to
start here and then choose this and make these two or three other choices. So, it
did OK. But because of international shipping, there were thousands of dollars
in unforeseen expenses that left my working capital a little lighter than I'd
like. And Tower of the Moon had brought me back. David has really
brought me back to a solid foundation of working capital. If it continues to
sell over the next two weeks of the campaign, I will have, you know, something
to walk away with. Right, because I'm doing this for a job. It is no longer just
kind of a pay for my hobby. But it's something that I need. I have an
opportunity cost, right. I've got a Ph.D. in material science. I've got skills
that I could bring. If I'm just sitting here not bringing anything to the family,
I have to make different life choices. If I find myself making the same money
as I did as a hobbyist when I was just kind of out there saying, yeah, I’m
going to starve. The lights are out. But so, you know, I need to I need to
contribute. And there's an opportunity cost to being a Full-Time game designer
that my other skills would make up for. So I am in competition with myself, so
to speak.
Well, you have Dragon
Heresy and there's Dungeon Fantasy. What's the difference?
What's going on there? Because I see that they're both GURPS. Am I wrong?
Dragon Heresy is
not GURPS. It is a fantasy heartbreaker. It's D&D, but different. And many
games are. But in this particular case, once fifth edition came out, I was
reasonably impressed and pleased with the robustness of the game engine itself.
I liked how the designers had whittled things down to a couple core mechanics
that they used faithfully and attempted to, with reasonable success, simplify
and streamline the resolution mechanics that would be brought to bear.
It's what I call
the internal logic of a game.
That is a great
way of putting it. The internal logic of the game is is straightforward. Some
of the implementation of certain things were a little bit troublesome to people
with certain outlooks. So, I don't know if you know Tim Short at Gothridge
Manor or read his blog.
I've listened to
his podcast, so I know the sound of the man's voice.
And Tim's a good
guy, but one of the things that really bugged him and we were talking because
we used to play in Tenkar’s Sword and Wizardry game together and that's how we
got to know each other. But he just thought that the short rest and the long
rest was just killing his willingness of suspension of disbelief because you
know, you do a fight and you have a hard fight and you get done with it and
then you take a long rest and you're just better. Everything's better. Your hit
points are fully restored.
Yep. My reaction
as well.
And he was like,
I didn't like that. Yeah, I don't like it. And, you know, there are people who
will point to page 82 of the old Dungeon Masters Guide first edition and say,
look, hit points out what you think. They're not blood and guts and intestines
on the floor. It's maybe the last couple of blows, like in Lord of the Rings
movie. The Balrog and Gandalf are fighting and fighting and fighting and
fighting. And he pulls up the sword and lightning hits it and he stabs the guy.
And that's when he goes over to a negative hit point and he dies and that's it.
But in my gaming life since 1981. I had never had it described to me by a game
master or described it to other people as, oh, you swung your sword at the orc
and he wet his pants a little bit, right. He swung the sword and he got hit or
you hit and you try to describe it in a way that brings your players into the
game. And so the bright blood flows.
You have to step
back a little bit as the game master and the player and embellish the action at
maybe a greater distance because of the narrative mechanical disconnect, the
narrative isn’t just, oh, you lost hit points, you probably had a close call.
You were driven
back a step. Right. But that's usually not how it was done. And I thought to
myself, well, why not? Why not have a wound's track and a defense track or a
vigor? I called it vigor. And as it turns out, that had already been invented,
although I invented it on my own. But there's a wound and vigor system in, I
think, the back and one of the Pathfinder books. And I know that when the Star
Wars game had a separate wound effect. So. Okay, great parallel evolution. No
problem. But what if we did that? What would happen if you enable wound and vigor
and you said, well, what if I can get past the defense because I'm an old GURPS
player. Right. And you're you have a defense role which totally negates an
attack.
It's similar to Chaosium’s
style of you taking offensive action and the defensive player has a chance to negate
it.
Exactly. If I
start doing defense roles, I might as well play GURPS, right? So, the defense
role itself is neat and it has options to it, but it does come at a mechanical
overhead cost. What do you mean? I hit, but then I didn't? There's a bit of a disconnect.
And you know, when you have a one second tactical combat game, you know, you
want to try and move things along. And so in any case, the one roll I thought
one roll resolution was important to the 5E experience. So I didn't want to
lose it. So what I said is, if you make your role by enough, you bypass vigor
and go right to wounds. So, if you're decked out head to toe in plate, you
don't even have to necessarily defend. I'll swing. You don't care because I'm
not hitting you hard enough. And again, I'm not the only one to do it, but I
really like how it works. You could spend a reaction to throw yourself out of
the way by absorbing twice the roll damage.
As a designer,
how extensively tested were these ideas?
Pretty extensive.
Really?
Yeah, I think we
put, I played the hell out of them before I wrote it up, because what happened
was the 5E thing came out and say, hey, this is really cool. I talked to Tim,
blah, blah, blah, you know, this would be cool. And then I had started like,
oh, look, the shield is -you’re your Armor Class. But that's only 10 percent
change in hit posture. It is not a big factor. Like how come like the first
thing that you put on after a helmet or a little head protection, the first
thing that you picked up for like thousands of years is a shield. But it's not
mechanically advantaged, really, in 5E. You see a lot more two weapon fighters
and stuff that you didn't see in history. So, what's up with that? So, I wanted
the shield, as it turned out, the shield rules that I came up with were later,
again, parallel evolution. But the Pathfinder reaction to employ the shield to
block the blow was we've sort of ended up the same place. But I wanted shields
to be cooler. And I was like, you know, that's my hunch. But. I didn't have any
practical experience, so I went and got some I. I joined a HEMA, a group that
does short sword and shield fighting, and you can see that on my blog.
You do Viking
style sword and shield fighting.
And that was a
fun coincidence because while playtesting the rules went through several
iterations, I mean, I revised the heck out of them because I was doing all the
stuff. I was like, oh, wouldn't this be cool?
When you had the
rules ready to get tested was it three years before you, or in two years. When
did this edition come out?
When did 5E come
out? Twenty fifteen? Twenty sixteen?
Twenty sixteen is
a good approximation.
The kick starter
for Dragon Heresy was I think in late seventeen or twenty
eighteen. The thing is though by the time that I had gotten there, I had four
hundred thousand words written.
That's a lot of
words.
I had three
complete volumes and a complete monster manual. I had a complete campaign
setting in the guide equivalent, and I had a very complete players book, level
one through 20, blah, blah, blah. And they had announced the SRD. They had announced
the DMS Guild or whatever. And I was like, oh, wow, they're going to let me do
this sort of thing. You know, maybe I could throw a quick rules mod up. But as
I was playtesting…
You have a
different game.
I have a
different game. And most importantly is one of these things where because of
wounds and vigor and a few other things, when you went to look up a spell or whatever,
you were going to have to constantly stop and say, how does this convert? And I
feel that if you're a paying customer of mine, it is my job as the author and
publisher to do the work for you.
Yes, I would
agree.
And so very
quickly, it became something where I was like, you know, I really ought to you
know, if I'm going to turn all spells into wounds and vigor, I'm going to need
a grimoire. If I'm going to turn character generation into wounds and vigor and
blah, blah, blah, I'm you need the books. I was like, I might as well just do
this. And then shortly after, I'm like, well, this is going to be challenging.
They came out with the SRD and, you know, they didn't say, you know, I'm going
to tell a total untruth, plagiarize all you want we’ll make more. They said
here are the things, here's all the mechanics crunch, the one big daddy game. Here's
the mechanics that that we cannot copyright and said, Yeah, go ahead, let a thousand
flowers bloom very quickly. I realized that I could absolutely write all my own
fluff around that, the mechanics that I want. I wanted a spear, the most common
weapon in medieval history. I wanted those to be a little cooler. So, I
invented a martial spear fighting style. I wanted to be able to take advantage
of certain things, and I thought the advantage disadvantage was great. I said,
oh, if you take a turn and attack action to evaluate or aim, you'd have
advantage on the next attack. You can do that sort of thing to punch through an
opponent's defenses or get around them or whatever.
Ever considered
simultaneous rolls? The roll to hit and damage is decided in one? And both
players, players and NPCs are rolling the dice at the same time. And that gives
you a degree of success. I wrote USR Sword and Sorcery so I could plung
down into that rabbit hole and I was quite happy with it.
That's not
something that I wanted in my heart. It wasn't necessarily that I looked at it
and said, no, I'm not going to do that. It was instead an affirmative decision
where I wanted to say, look, 5E, it looks like a really good system. There are
some things that I want to change, but I wanted to keep it the 5E experience.
And so I did. And that was a very deliberate decision on my part to try and
make it as approachable as possible to the point where an experienced player
could pick up. One of the play tests that I did before I published was, I
grabbed an adventure off of drivethru and without doing much more than prepping
the math, ran it spontaneously and did conversion on the fly with only what I
had in front of me.
If the game
master is steeped or understands the internal logic of the game, you can do
that, right? You can do that pretty fairly.
It must be
capable of that. You can't be like, oh, I have calculations to do, right? You
need to be quick enough, like, oh, this is this and this and both. But like,
for example, I had a monster manual, so I said, oh, you're fighting three
skeletons so I can look up the skeleton entries. I was able to use the
references in the system to just play. And it was balanced enough because the
places where Dragon Heresy was harder, like, you know, a little more
brutal. It was more brutal to the bad guys to. It was an even handed kind of
brutality. Ultimately, though, Rob Connelly from Bat in the Attic said, you
know, there's a really famous game designer who you ought to talk to because
he's really good at all this stuff. You should send him an email. And I sent
him an email.
Care to say who
this designer is?
I never do.
OK.
Yeah, I never do,
it's just one of these things. He's like, look, this is a terrible plan. You've
got four hundred thousand words and no history with Kickstarter. There's no
proof that anyone should give you a dollar let alone one hundred and fifty
thousand. And you are going to fail. You're going to fail huge because the rule
about joint ventures, don't, because ninety five percent don't work. The rule
for venture capital is don't, because ninety five percent of them lose money. Another
four percent. Maybe break even then you're looking for that one percent that
goes above and beyond. And the odds of being in that one percent are not
awesome. They're one percent. And you need to have all the right things. So, this
suggests to me I really shouldn't even respond. You're going be mad at me, but
just don't. Get a rep. Do something else.
Well, that's one
of the key things I think is important to be successful in a publishing enterprise
is, you know, you can put your ego in the right place. You have to take the
criticism from other people, reflect on it and find the truth out of it. And
act on it.
Exactly, and that
was what I sort of didn't I don't even remember thinking that I needed to argue
with this guy when I remember thinking, I'm going to ask for advice. I needed
to give it serious thought. And so what I did is I pulled out the old adage, if
you're asking for advice and you're not going to take it, you're…
Why ask? You're
just talking about yourself now.
So, I pulled the
grappling system out of Dragon Heresy, which was based on a
system that I had written for years. I published Dungeon Grappling. I went
to conventions and stuff. I say, here are the rules for D&D grappling which
don't suck?
A tall order.
Dungeon Grappling
was my first published book. It's about 50 pages long, for Swords and Wizardry,
5E and Pathfinder.
It's the same philosophy
like arms law, character law back in the 80s. You don't need a whole new game.
Here's just something to add some punch to what you're doing.
Exactly.
Ironically, First Sergeant Wizardry is the easiest.
And I had
published a simplified version of this with Peter Dell'Orto in Gothard manor.
Sword and Wizardry
is old school, the little little brown books, or Holmes? Probably little brown
books.
That is an
excellent question.
I got to ask. We
got to get ask Mat.
That's the right
place. In any case, the point of dungeon grappling was quite simply, if you are
willing to abstract away all the complexity of the sword fighting and fencing
and offense and defense in the role, 1D20 plus a bonus against an armor class, don't
pull out some alternate system when it comes time to grappling, because as you
study sword play the old fight manuals and stuff, there was really no
separation between grappling and cutting and punching and stuff. They’re the
same thing. So, use the same thing. Roll your D20 plus a bonus against some
kind of armor class or grapple DC or whatever.
You're saying
that hand-to-hand combat is eventually going to get really close.
Here's an
example. You attack me with a sword. I parry. Push your blade off-line and use
that to come in. Anyone who does unarmed combat will recognize those motions in
the flow and that control. As whether it's Muay Thai or whatever, you know,
wrestling, whatever. A lot of these moves and stuff that you do are
foundational and they're universal.
So, wax on. Wax
off.
Exactly. And the
thing is that I do the Viking sword and shield thing and the style that we do.
You don't just sit there with the shoulder. I’m trying to use the edge of the
shield to dynamically move the opponent, open them up, you're not doing a bash,
although you could if there's an opening. But what you're trying to do is
control your opponent, control the line through pressure in order to open up
for a strike where you can enter that space, strike, one strike fatally and get
out without being struck back and grappling and striking merged together.
In that case,
with sword binds and shield binds, Corker disarms, all of that stuff was not. And,
you know, every attack leaves an opening and then throw the guy down, you know.
Does that break
down, that those ideas break down in large formations, large field combat? The
reason I asked that, Romans, how they fought with shields back then. It sounded
a little more like rugby. There is a couple of hours of pressing, pushing and
exerting pressure.
Right. And
running in. And then when the someone is just exhausted and breaks down, then
comes...
Yeah. Chop, chop,
chop, chop.
Let me answer it
in three ways. One is I'm not entirely sure that it breaks down because you
have mutually reinforcing defensive lines. Control on you doesn't necessarily
relieve the other two people who are helping you hold that line. Number two,
what I would say is that it does kind of start to break down, but nobody cares
because we're not simulating in a role-playing game exact combat. You're dueling.
You're dueling one. And besides, if your players play the way mine play
anything involving a formation is crazy talk.
Well, you know, you
say crazy talk. And to me, that's a, that's a challenge. That's a creative
challenge. How do you run the mass combat like any other encounter? The action
is where the player is. They can't see the other side of the battlefield unless
they're at a command position. And so how do you role play that out? So far,
I've come up with some simple mass combat rules, as well as a lot of random
tables to generate flavor on the battlefield and adjudicate it in a breezy
manner.
I suspect that
ultimately what you wind up doing there is if you're looking for mechanical
inspiration, all that stuff, I think what you're probably going to do is say,
OK, well, you're going to have an overall pressure feel. But instead of saying
that happens over one second or five seconds or six seconds or whatever time
span, it's a minute or six minutes. And what opportunity to do something
interesting happens in that six minutes or ten minutes, because as you say,
battles last a long time. And if you look at the casualty figure, while I'm
sure that they were tragic to all involved, relatively speaking, what you
usually see in a movie where a thousand people oh, my God, it's like three
people standing in the field was carpeted with bodies or whatever.
That's just like,
that way is Robert E Howard.
A few dozen
people die. So, I've had quite enough of this. Thank you. They run away. And if
there's going to be a slaughter, that's when it happens. But if two formations
advance on each other, they poke at each other a little bit or do whatever and
then like, yeah, you know, whatever. Then they fall back and maybe the nobles
do their dueling thing and honor is satisfied. But by and large, the unusual
circumstances like Agincourt where one side just mops the floor with the other.
Even then, when you look at it, the casualty rates are not what you think based
on media. So, you know, it's a lot of running and fleeing for your life and
hiding and stuff. And like even in modern combat, the last man thing is rare.
First of all, nobody really wants to do that because you get tired of it.
And formations
could be reconstituted, and the savagery of the battle doesn't equate to destruction.
You know, where does he get these other men? Well, it's some of the same it's a
lot of the same guys. They just form up. So, I think. Yeah, you make it
personalized. I'm going to solve it. Yeah.
So, you asked
about Dragon Heresy, and what basically happened is I had three books
ready to go. Person says start smaller. So, I started with Dungeon Grappling.
I made a convention adventure called Lost Hall of Tyr, which is like sixty-four
pages. I demoed the dungeon to demonstrate Dungeon grappling in twenty
eighteen. Then I did the Kickstarter for that adventure, that gave me two under
my belt and then I did the Dragon Heresy Kickstarter and I said because I
wasn't doing it as a job if I get to this funding level, then I do an offset
print run, big thing overseas and whatever, and I wasn't going to make it. And
then at the last minute, someone came in and I had been saying, you know, for
the top tier pledge, I would make you a Viking style shield…
I saw that on your
blog.
If people are
curious, go to gaming ballistic. You can see Viking shields. It's a five-hundred-dollar
product. It's expensive. The shields that I made then are nowhere near as good
as the shields that I can make now.
Is it like a
book? Your next book is always better.
Yes, but in this case,
it's you know, you get better at it. And my technique improved. I actually had
better materials. I actually went and cut down a tree instead of going to Home
Depot or Menard's and getting the wood. I've since learned to work with rawhide
that I import. That is the proper thickness for a Viking shield. Stuff like
that. And so these are very robust, really historically accurate. The only
thing that I'm having a hard time now with is the person apparently who used to
make the bosses of the shield that was the right historical weight and
thickness, which is thin and light. He died. The company that I used to get
them from can't find a thin light boss that I can put my own rivet holes in. Wow.
So it's just one of those very surprising things. My Viking martial arts
instructor does have the capability to forge the bosses. But someone said, you
know, I was like, you know, if we get to fifteen thousand or sixteen thousand
dollars, I'll do this awesome print run. I was like fifteen thousand forty
five. It's 20 minutes before the end of the campaign. I'm watching the clock
tick down like, oh, you know, we've only got four hundred and twenty some odd
people. Not having this offset print run is probably OK and somebody bought two
shields. Bingo. They dropped a thousand dollars on me. Wow. And pushed it over.
Then I made the rookie mistake and then I said, you know, thousand dollars, a
thousand book has the cost of whatever, but fifteen hundred bucks is much
cheaper. I mean, those five hundred are a marginal cost. I have a lot of Dragon
Heresy sitting in a warehouse somewhere. I talked to Steve Jackson and Phil
Reed and said, hey, your Dungeon Fantasy role playing game box set is
straight up what we talked about earlier. Take away everything that isn't a
dungeon crawl roleplaying. Take it away, box it up and say this is what you
need to play in this genre and all you're going to need is in the box. It's a
physical corral
Do players come
to a game of GURPS expecting all rules aew in force at all times?
I think there's
two and three. Again, three answers in that. One is just. Yes. I think that
they do.
That sucks for
the GM.
The second answer
is it's not just the players who come with that expectation. The GMs come with
that expectation, too.
Not this guy, not
Varnishing Tower. That's antithetical to our approach to the art of roleplaying
games.
Operating within
the constraints of a particular genre is not cheating. It's what you need in
order to have a set of mutually satisfactory shared expectations without having
to spend nine years talking about them and interrupting the game. If you are
playing a sword and sorcery game and someone pulls out a blaster rifle someone going
to get mad unless you're in expedition to the blaster peaks. That's the big
reveal. It's not a castle but a spaceship. I'm sorry, spoilers, you know, 30
years ago adventure. But the thing is, is that when all of a sudden your
expectations change and I had a great example of this in a modern game that I
was playing when they were infiltrating a bad guy base and they're like, oh,
there's a sentry over there. Like, yeah, no problem. I got this silencer. Like,
they kill them and then, oh, you know, but no one heard, of course, because I
have a silenced rifle. I'm like, no, it's suppressed. It's silence. It's not a
movie. It's as loud as dropping a book on the floor. It just doesn't damage
your hearing. That doesn't mean it's quiet and they're looking at me like I
have violated them. Because I had violated their expectations unexpectedly. You
know, there's no give backs with “I shot the guy.” Right. So it ended the
session early and we actually did a reboot, said, OK, do we want to do
cinematic suppressors?
Yes, we do. OK,
cinematics suppressors. Goes for both sides now. So we actually sort of did a
restart and then ran that session again.
The best a game
master could do to prepare for these what I call genre tropes, genre
expectations is to be well steeped in the source material. I'm talking about
the books. I'm talking about the movies mostly. For me, it's books, it's
fantasy books, it's sci fi books from way back. Sometimes I think that gets
lost. There's a disconnect between people looking to the rules for the
connection to the genre when it's just a tool to facilitate the genre that's
already been written. And you're not going to tap into that visceral feel
unless you read the source material or watch it.
That leads to the
disconnect there, is that the media that I had set myself in were technical
manuals, real work videos and battle reports and whatever, the hardcore way,
because that had been an interest in my blog and my company for gaming
ballistic, it is no surprise that the nitty gritty of that is of interest to
me. Now, the people who were playing with me, my good friends, whatever the
people who were playing with me knew of weapons and combat and stuff from
action movies. When you pull out the pistol, you go off and three shots kill all
the bad guys.
The classic one
in this is I pull out my like two inch knife and I throw it from across the
room and it hits in the chest and they're just that cinematic. What my former
martial arts master used to say is knife throwing is the art of tossing away a
perfectly useful weapon, accurately tossing away a perfectly usable weapon.
You're just not, first of all, you're probably not going to hit. Second of all,
even if you do. It's more of a distraction than a fatality. And it's certainly
not the instant kill sort of thing that you'd get with a gun at the base of the
skull and you're off like a switch. Right. That's not any of these things. But
that's what people are familiar with. They see the knife throwing thing and
they want to do that. They see Legolas doing the thing and they don't realize
that the expected rate of fire of a bow was six arrows a minute. The sustained
rate of fire is about 10 to 12 hours a minute, if you were good. And if you've
ever tried one the pull is one hundred and some odd pounds. You draw it with
your legs. I had the experience of drawing about an eighty-five pound bow some
years back. And that's work.
I did see a guy.
What is the guy's name? Not Stretton. There's another gentleman who casually
draws a one hundred- and seventy-five-pound bow. Like it's nothing. It's the
darndest thing. He's skinny. You wouldn't even know it to look at him.
Those are the
people that gets the biomechanics just spot on.
Some of the
people at the local archery range was saying is that you can get like these
big, long linebacker guys coming in and will try and pull a compound bow and
they can bench 350, but they can't pull the compound because it's a very
specific kind of muscle. Now, once they figure out how to use it, they can they
do it, no problem. But they struggle initially because it's a very specific
technique, and we are a little far afield, but the point is, is that the box set
in a universal generic flexible game is an absolute requirement. You have to
start somewhere. And what this was for the most popular genre of roleplaying is
fantasy. Nine or nine and a half dollars out of every 10 are spent in that
genre.
So, you believe
that the first role play game that was wildly popular. Spread throughout
popular culture stamped the genre that was going to be played. What if Mark
Miller's Traveller sold?
Well, it did. If
Traveler had taken off or Gammel World or something else and had exploded. Maybe.
Maybe it's well, what happened? But Star Wars was already. It was. No, it
wasn't. It was seventy-seven and the games that were coming out. But it didn't
have. No, I can't even say that because there was Buck Rogers and all the
serials. It just didn't for whatever reason, the distributor just hit it. And
then I think there was network effects. You played it because other people were
playing it and you had a first mover advantage. And I think the thing is, is
it's such a fertile ground. Yes. For that. Yes. Yes. Regardless of what might
have happened, the Dungeon Fantasy role playing game came out in twenty
fifteen or so. Twenty eighteen. And so by attacking the market leader, the
market leading genre, saying, OK, this is the biggest thing we're going to get
the most people. And this was not this is not just theory. They've had a Dungeon
Fantasy subline that was out for a while and had sold multiple, multiple
books. Right. I mean, they were like Dungeon Fantasy Nine or something.
Right. So, I mean, people were buying them and they were selling. And so they
it wasn't just, oh, well, maybe we'll cautiously do the most popular genre of
the. We're no, we're going you know, we got to go all in with both of them.
We're playing. That's what people are playing. And I went to Steve and Phil at
the time. I said I would really like to take this Lost Hall of Tyre
adventure I've written and support your game by converting it to this. And they
said, talk to me later. I said, I will. So I waited. I said, how about now? Not
now. And I did the Kickstarter. And Phil was flying through Minneapolis. And I
came by and I said, here's this, Lost Hall of Tyre and here's Dungeon
Grappler. So here are three examples of me successfully delivering a
product that you can take home to Texas with. He said, OK, thank you. And then
not terribly long thereafter we had a conversation and I said, I want to do
this. And they said, OK, let's do this. I said, I would like to offer more than
just my sixty-four pages because I've played this, I've seen it, I've got some
reviews and I want to do more with it. They said, OK. I said, I want to do a
lot more with it. This is OK. OK, so we're going to see what happens. And it
wound up being one hundred and twenty-eight pages, had a town to base off called
Ishtiaq, Mountain of Ice. It had better maps. I paid for better maps by the Midderlands
guy, fantastic cartographer. Fantastic guy in the UK. He did my maps and it
just got better. And it was quite successful, You know, I got five hundred or
so people and people dug it and I got a great print run. And then I said, hey,
you know, I'd like to do this again. And they said, yeah, do that. I said, I
want to do it in the same Viking Norse inspired thing, because there's such
great culture for role playing in Vikings. I mean, talk about your OG, go out,
kill monsters and take your stuff.
They traveled too.
They were farmers
and agrarians or whatever. However, their legends and their ideals are so
squarely aligned with the fantasy RPG tropes. Yes. And the popular
consciousness. Of those things are like this is what you expect, you expect
shield maidens and fighting and so you deliver that and people enjoy it. And it
really allows you to do a lot of things in mythology. So deep in the stories,
in the monsters. Let me do a setting, and they said, all right. Shakespeare and
Spider-Man. All right. And the really the two of them intersect. So, first of
all, we'll start with Spiderman. Like any good story, this one's about a girl. Hmm.
Right. So that's the opening line from the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie. And
I said, well, if you're going to have a girl, it's got to be a Romeo and Juliet
thing, because you have to have star crossed lovers. They want to get together
and they can't. Why not? OK, there's one layer. And what I wound up doing is creating
a mind map, a relationship map you started with the star crossed lovers and
then their immediate relations. And then who was influencing them and then who
were supporting them?
That's what I
did, what I focused on when I found myself in my own searchings and
exploration's for creating my sword and sorcery city. That's how it developed.
And I just made it cool.
Louise McMaster
Bujold, who wrote the Proposition series, had something that she used to say,
which was, let me think of the worst possible thing that could happen to the
character and then I'll just write that. And that's kind of what you do, is you
go and say, OK, how can these persons lives get complex. Right. And so you get
all these branches and what ends up happening is you get the spider web of
interactions, primary interactions, hostile interactions, friendly
interactions, whatever, that create a web of relationships. Every time the
player characters interact with somebody, they send ripples through that web.
And what I have found is if you have a reasonably doesn't even have to be that
deep, a reasonably robust relationship, you no longer have to plan. Because you
can just let the characters do what they're going to do, they have an agenda.
Right. And so you say, OK, this person just talk to these players, just had a
friendly interaction with NPC A. NPC B is friendly with A. Okay. So B is going
to want to help the players. F G and E don't care and H hates the PCs with a
fiery passion of a thousand suns. So, when the ninjas show up, it's going to be
one of them. And then because NPC F tries to kill the players, whoever was keeping
an eye on the PC says, oh my goodness, there's a new faction in town and it
just builds. And now NPC H goes and tries to ally with NPC D because it has aligning
interest.
You're delivering
the player's holy grail. They call it a living world.
That's right.
That's right. And if you ever run out of things to do, you're like, all right,
well, I have it mapped out, the relationships, and as long as you're about
three deep you can almost always keep ahead. And so that's what Nordlandr
does. And you're not supposed to pick favorites of your children. But I really
think I did a good job with Nordlandr.
