What Can GenCon Do for You?
In a previous column about working in the RPG industry as a game designer, one of my suggestions was to run as many different kinds of games as you can, as often as you can, for a variety of people and in a variety of settings. In my own freelance career, one of the most valuable experiences I can point to as putting me and keeping me on the right track is running games at large conventions like GenCon, Origins, and DDXP/Winter Fantasy—as well as at countless smaller conventions and game days.
Think Locally, DM Globally
For the first 20 years of my gaming life, across a variety of RPGs and campaigns, I ran games for many people. These were usually heavily house-ruled home campaigns where I knew the players well, or the players were invited by friends who were already playing. Rarely was I running a game for a true stranger. It is a comfortable feeling running a game for friends and acquaintances, whose quirks and biases and preferences you know very well. And more importantly, running a game for familiar people puts you more at ease—because you know they know you well, and they know what to expect from your games. They are accustomed to your strengths and weaknesses, and there is a natural rhythm that gets established. [Read the rest of this article]
The Plastic Is Too Damn High: Miniatures Pricing Primer
Like many of you, I was dismayed at the cancellation of the D&D minis line. I had been collecting (and playing the miniatures game) since the very beginning. Even before that, I had seen some very early Mage Knight demos at conventions and loved the idea of plastic pre-painted miniatures, having previously burned out on painting Games Workshop minis for many years.
Anyway, I was sad for the D&D minis to go- I thought the last set had been a huge step up from the past few, and was hoping to see more minis to fill in all the new stuff coming from 4e, even if the release schedule had been cut back to something like once a year. Instead, the announcement was made that D&D minis was ended, citing rising costs and other factors.
Understandably, this raised some questions among the community. “Are minis really that expensive to make?” “Why can’t I just buy a box of assorted monsters?” “Isn’t it stupid to reuse sculpts?” I hope to be able to answer some of these questions, with what limited knowledge I have about the situation.
First a fairly strong disclaimer: I am not an expert. My experience comes from working with/for a few board game companies, most notably for Robot Martini who first put out my game Get Bit! which used plastic figures that were produced under similar circumstances to how a miniature would be made. Thus, my experience is slightly tangental, and many of the numbers I can provide for it are based on something different, and are 4-5 years old. And I absolutely have no insider knowledge into WotC’s business numbers whatsoever. Still, I hope that it can at least provide some context for the whole situation, and will help you understand some of the economic realities of miniature production.
Still with me? Let’s start off with one of the most important parts of the plastic figure-making process: the mold.
Molds, and I Don’t Mean the Kind That Cause Disease
Meet the Dismembermen
The process used to create the Get Bit! plastic “dismembermen” involved a factory in China injecting liquid plastic into the mold to give it its shape, after which it cools off, becomes solid, and you have your hunk of plastic in the shape of a dude ready to have his limbs torn off by a shark.
That mold isn’t a trivial cost, though. Each shape you want your minis to form requires a different one. So that D&D minis set with 80 different minis requires 80 different molds, and possibly even more depending on how fancy/multipart you get with the set. On Get Bit!, I was working with someone who had previous worked for a defunct toy company who already had this mold created for their product line. Thus, we didn’t have to pay to get the mold created, which was a huge savings. At one point, we priced it out (including for a shark figure to include) and some estimates came in the $5,000 to $10,000 range. The pieces aren’t very detailed, though they are articulated. For something more detailed, the cost might even be higher, or for something simple, might be cheaper. (I can’t discuss numbers on the new Get Bit! run with a new company, but I can say the goal was to make it cheaper.)
Another cost that is easy to overlook is that someone has to design that mold. Depending on the process, you might be paying someone to do it all in a 3D design program, or actually starting from a sculpted figure then translating it into whatever form the factory needs to actually make it.
More Filled Than a Gelatinous Cube
Of course, what you hope is that the cost of the mold will get spread out. Since you only have to pay that mold cost once, usually no matter how many figures you make with it. So if you have to make the mold for $5k, and you make 5k of that particular figure, you’re potentially adding $1 to the cost to make each individual mini. However, if you make another run, you already have the mold, and you’ve already paid to have it created. Thus, the more of the same exact mini you make, the more you’re spreading out that cost.
And speaking of spreading out the cost, plastics factories are classic economies of scale, just like printing. The more you make at once, the more of a discount there is. Our original run of Get Bit! was 500 copies- a very small run by the factory’s standards. For just solid colors of plastic, our cost for each piece in dismemberman ran around $0.60 each. We priced out paint jobs for the figures that would have added painted on eyes, clothes, etc. but it would have added further to the cost for each color of paint they would use on each figure. This could easily have added another $1 to the cost of each plastic guy we were making. So mold cost + plastics cost + paint cost, and you have a rough estimate of the minis cost.
Your Owlbear Cares About International Diplomacy
Now, let’s throw some curveballs in here. Remember how I mentioned that the factory we dealt with was in China? That’s because, by far, the world leader in mass manufacturing of cheap plastics like these is China. So taking your business anywhere else is likely to come with a hike in those raw costs I’ve already given you.
But, those low prices come with some setbacks. The factory in China has made them, but how do you get them back to the US in order to sell them in Friendly Local Game Stores? The cheapest way is to put them on, literally, the slow boat from China. Of course, you’re going to have to pay the transportation costs on those too, as well as any import costs once the ship hits shores… and account for the time that all is going to take. Now what if the US and China are having a spat over, say, a human rights violation or any number of other international issues? You might have all those costs and processes changed by foreign policy- something out of the control of a company like Wizards of the Coast (until they hire a LOT more Enchanters on staff.)
That’s one potential problem with keeping the costs manageable and predictable, but there’s one that we all deal with: the cost of oil. As Wikipedia says, “The raw materials needed to make most plastics come from petroleum and natural gas.” That’s right, the next time you’re cringing at how much it costs to fill up at the pump, realize that your plastic orcish hordes were affected by the same thing. That’s why the rising cost of oil was cited at DDXP for a reason to discontinue the minis line. So that $0.60 cents per model I quoted earlier has probably gone up quite a bit since I was involved in 2007- and much higher than the state of things when Harbinger was released in 2003.
That’s not the only things that can go wrong either. Just as an example, the factory with the original Get Bit! mold went out of business and, so I heard, burned down. The original mold is gone, gone, gone. So in order to make a new version of the game, a new mold has to be created. In the case of WotC’s miniatures, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the old molds were long gone, whether it was because they changed factories and couldn’t take the mold with them, the factories changed technologies and couldn’t use the old mold, or like my example, they were just plain lost.
Collectability and Extra Unicorns
So now that you have some idea of the costs involved in producing miniatures, and how much they can quickly go out of control, here’s some closing thoughts about how this relates to WotC’s business model.
Remember just in the past year or two when WotC released miniatures that weren’t blind and collectible, the PC heroes set and the monster sets with one visible? From what I’ve heard, those didn’t go over too well, and it’s where blind packs have the edge: gamers like you and me are more likely to buy multiple packs in the hopes that we get what we need, instead of buying multiple packs of something we don’t need.
Obviously, any unsold packs sit around on game shelves and don’t make money. That has to be factored into the cost too- if something doesn’t sell, you won’t recoup the costs put into making it in the first place, and orders for subsequent products go down, which is likely what happened in the last few sets. Couple that with there just plain being a lot of minis already out there from previous sets, with a strong secondary market, and you have a recipe for likely flagging sales and rising costs.
Now, one question that came up while thinking about their minis cost is why can’t they just use the molds they have, and produce some of the boxed sets filled with minis that many DMs have clamored for since the beginning? They’re doing it, just with a bunch of other stuff included: it’s called Castle Ravenloft (and Wrath of Ashardalon.) Those are all molds they had previously, but with solid color filling, and no extra money being spent on paints. They’re also producing them in enough quantities to manage the costs, and bundling them up with a fun board game and rolling the costs all into one package.
Yes, this isn’t the same as being able to buy a big bag of orcs or whatnot, but is a way around the “sit around unsold” problem, since you can buy it for the minis, or you want the game, or both (thus creating a more varied demand.)
Would I like to see something like the orc bag (that sounds dirty) or even better, more new miniatures? Yes, definitely. Unfortunately, with these economic realities I don’t see it significantly changing until technology changes. That’s one reason I’m following technologies like 3D printing: maybe someday, instead of needing to buy a box of minis, I’ll just be able to download a pattern from the internet, hit print, and wait for the resultant Dwarf with a santa hat wielding a double battleaxe with a fox on his shoulder. There’s some possibilities, I’d say.
Can 4e Be Old-School D&D?
My most recent design project for Wizards of the Coast has left me thinking a lot about old-school D&D. I have been reminiscing about my early days of playing, when my Jr. High school friends and I could play first-edition AD&D for 72 hours straight without having to worry about jobs or families or responsibilities any more onerous than a paper route and little league baseball games.
The adventures and campaigns we played were home-brewed by necessity, because the only published adventures we had access to were very short and very light on details, but they gave us just enough to let our imaginations run wild through horrific tombs, around keeps on borderlands, and into certain lost caverns. What happened between those adventures, and often during those adventures, was always open to interpretation, alteration, and complete reconstitution by whichever one of us was DMing at the time.
But What is Old-School? And What is New-School?
Of course, “old-school” has become one of those ubiquitous terms that loses any semblance of meaning the more it gets used. So let me define a little more clearly what I mean when I use the term “old-school,” especially in relation to the way I see the game being played in more recent years. Since third-edition D&D was introduced, I have not really played in a true long-term, home-brewed campaign. Almost everything I have consumed (and most everything I have created) has been published content in one form or another. And a great deal of that content has been meant to for use in an organized-play setting.
That means DMs using the content are expected to run the games with at least some semblance of continuity, with an established plot and flow detailing where the adventure is supposed to begin and end. In other words, both the players and the DM have to agree to a contract that is unwritten but understood in organized-play campaigns: the party cannot go anywhere and do anything it wants, and the DM must keep the adventure-as-written somewhere in front of the players, even if some detours are taken along the way. Similarly, the adventure designers understand their implicit contract with these people: the writers must make an effort to be as thorough and clear as possible about how to DM the adventure.
While this type of gaming is not for everyone, it has certainly proved to be quite popular since the concept was introduced. And as much as I have given my time and energy to this sort of gaming, and gained much from it, part of me is a little sad to think that many DMs and players might never know the other type of gaming, where the word on the page is just a guide instead of a script—or where there is no page at all!
I think about an adventure like Gygax’s classic The Village of Hommlet. It starts out famously as the characters stroll into the village looking for adventure, probably finding themselves in the Inn of the Welcome Wench. Then there is the trek to the moathouse to battle the now-infamous Lareth the Beautiful and his forces. So much of the game, however, happens outside the pages. How the PCs interact with the NPCs in Hommlet has to be improvised by the DM. How much information about the temple’s past is revealed is up to the DM. How to keep the PCs from stealing that 1300 gp service set from the farmhouse is definitely the job of the DM!
For my money, the most interesting and important part of that adventure was the afterthought: an assassin comes to Hommlet to take out the PCs for messing up the plans of the Temple at the moathouse. This is the awesome stuff that makes a campaign memorable, yet when and how this assassination attempt is made is completely up to the DM. If that slight mention of a plot continuation is made in a published adventure today, how many DMs take the time to add it? There are no stat blocks, maps, or tactics supplied: how many DMs have the skill to make that happen in a cool and intriguing way.
Where There’s a Rule (or Lack Thereof), There’s a Way
I’ve loved every version of D&D I’ve ever played, and I have played ‘em all. Looking at the evolution of the rules over the years, and at the evolution of the way the game is delivered and discussed and consumed by the players, I have to say with all seriousness that the earliest version of D&D rules, game-mechanically speaking, were not good.
Yet, in a strangely paradoxical way, that was the best thing that could have happened to the game at that point in its development. Remember, there was no Internet to discuss or argue over rules. There were no instant errata updates. Unclear, wacky, or incredibly unbalanced rules were resolved in one place: at the individual tables. And even though this meant there were enough house rules to make the game look very different from one group to the next, that was fine.
In fact, it was more than fine. It gave each player and each DM the opportunity—if not the responsibility—to think about the game a little more deeply. Just like adventures had to be created and modified on the fly to make the game fun for everyone, so the rules often had to be adjudicated or created on the fly for that same reason.
As the editions of the game progressed through the years, I daresay that the rules became—game-mechanically speaking—better and better. And also more voluminous. And also more nit-picky and prone to rules-lawyering. Of course, some of that was a result of the advancements in technology and communication. But the more you try to make something as clear and resistant to alternative interpretation as possible, the more interpretation and the less clarity you will have.
With the push to create better mechanics to support the game, there was a similar push to create adventures that were easier to run for DMs who didn’t have the time to prepare their own stuff. That means adventures had to be more balanced, more clear, and more easily run—sometimes without any preparation at all. This is great in the way that microwave meals are good: they can be convenient and tasty and even just as good as some homemade dishes, but the downside is that people can rely on them so much that they forget how to cook, and how much fun cooking can be.
So, I return to my original question: can 4e rules support an old-school D&D campaign? I think the answer is a resounding yes. The rules are more entrenched, and the way the rules are consumed and the way players can communicate globally leads to a more homogeneous experience. And this might be what the market wants. DMs might want to just take the same material in the same format and run it in the same way, and that’s OK. Fun games can be played that way. But I hope there are DMs out there willing and able to create their own stuff, or to take published content and make it their own, and show their players that not every game has to look the same, even when it is the same adventure.
Junk Punch
You have been sucker punched. As a gamer, you’ve been categorized and used as a negative stereotype to illustrate points about terrible movies. Video games and gamers get a bum rap in film criticism. Film critics seem to like to use video games and the people who play them as a culturally understood idiom. This practice makes the critics look as bad as what they might be criticizing.
Roger Ebert, with his starkly ignorant opinion of video games as art, might have brought this mistreatment to a head in popular media. This lack of actual cultural awareness has been around for a long time, however, with film critics decrying just about anything that’s based on a video game or seems gamish. The trend degenerates from there, with critics using the term “video game” to condemn crappy adventure movies, as well as the term “gamer” to refer to insipid consumers of such dreck. This sort of condescension is a refuge only of someone who can’t come up with a meaningful metaphor and, therefore, takes the lazy route of uninformed comparison. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: On Dungeons
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the iconic “Dungeon” concept that many of us think of when we think of it in the context of Dungeons & Dragons. Also because only a month or two ago Dave wrapped up his 4E run through the Temple of Elemental Evil with custom mechanics to add to the “large dungeon crawl” feel of the adventures. Now I find my own campaign on the verge of the epic tier (the characters are currently level 19/20), and I am beginning to brainstorm a series of elemental dungeons that they will have to go through as a form of the Temple of Elemental Evil now fractured and embodied in five separate temples. Yes, I loved The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and I plan on stealing liberally from it.
My first inclination when thinking about the classic dungeon is to envision a many of the old D&D module dungeon maps, or even some of the newer ones from modules, and for the most part the style of dungeon that is represented enrages me more than it interests me. I feel that many classic D&D dungeons seem to be embodied by hap-hazard and random design that appears as if it was put together by a child. I will be the first to say that there is a time and a place for that style of design, and that it is not always a bad thing, but I’ve seen more than a handful of dungeons designed in that style which leads me to believe that it is a style some people purposefully apply to their “classic dungeons”. I believe designing a standard dungeon in that style is a big mistake.
I began to address this topic a month ago when I discussed Negative Space in Dungeons, but at the time I kept my thoughts focused on the idea of having space the your players can’t occupy to add differentiation into a dungeon. This post is about a higher concept level of design but is grounded in the same ideas.
Design with Purpose and Style
Let’s face it, the D&D dungeon you’re looking at has been designed by someone who set out to design a dungeon for the specific purpose of it being used in a game of D&D. I believe this is why we see the kind of nonsensical dungeon that feels so “classic”, because the design mindset used is that of making it appear as if the dungeon was not designed by a person setting out to design a D&D dungeon. The intent has completely eroded over the years so that now it is painfully obvious when you’re looking at a dungeon that can be described as stereotypically “D&D” in design. [Read the rest of this article]
Dealing the Wildcards
In past columns I have talked about how DMs are the best friends of both players and adventure designers. The DMs possess the power and the means to help the players have fun, while at the same time making the adventure designers look good. (And believe me, we need all the help we can get!) In subsequent columns I plan to talk about how DMs can adjust pre-made adventures to fit their players’ needs and expectations while still remaining true to the story. However, before I get there, I want to talk about some steps adventure designers can take to make life easier for the DMs. In particular, this column will discuss what I call the “wildcard.” In card games, especially poker, a wildcard is a card that can be used by the player to represent anything. The same versatility offered by a wildcard to a poker hand can make an RPG session awesome.
Wildcards: What and How?
I started thinking about wildcards in RPGs because I dislike using a DM screen. Bear with me, this will get somewhere. Also I prefer to roll in the open where players can see the results. Because I do not want to fudge die rolls and have no screen to hide behind, I needed another way as a DM to tailor the play experience without ruining that experience with obvious fudging. I don’t like to kill characters, but I also let the dice fall where they may. However, I always have the fun of the players in mind. I am willing to take the adventure in any direction, be it story-wise or combat-wise, if I think the players might have a better time.
Since I don’t want to fudge die rolls, and I don’t want the game to be cheapened with obvious stunts like deus ex machina or the like, I had to come up with tools that I could use as the DM to influence the game more subtly. I learned about wildcards in the first D&D adventure I ever ran, way back when I was just a wee lad. (People who know me can insert the short jokes here.) I was too young and inexperienced to be able to put a name to it and recognize it for what it was, but I was using a wildcard nonetheless. That adventure was The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, and the wildcard was a wily assassin named Ned Shakeshaft. For those young’uns who don’t remember that adventure, the PCs are investigating a supposedly haunted house, and they find Mr. Shakeshaft tied up in one of the rooms. He knows how to use a sword, so the PCs might welcome him into their group to help with the investigations. Of course Ned is a bad guy, and he turns on the PCs at some point.
Ned is the perfect example of a wildcard that a DM has in his proverbial game-mastering poker hand. If an adventure is too easy and the players are getting bored, Ned can attack the PCs at the worst possible moment for them, making the adventure more challenging for the PCs and exciting for the players. If the PCs are having a rough go of it and the players are getting frustrated, Ned can continue to fight on their side, biding his time. [Read the rest of this article]
Danny’s PAX East 2011 Recap
Just over a week ago we returned from Boston and from my first PAX ever, which I’m very happy to say was incredibly fun for both myself and my wife from start to finish. Without a doubt the highlight of PAX East for me is much the same as other conventions like GenCon, and that’s meeting great people and getting to play games with people that I don’t normally have the opportunity to game with. However there are a few big differences that I noticed which really made PAX East stand out from the other conventions that I’ve been to.
First and foremost PAX East is very clearly a convention designed with gamers in mind, and this concept oozes through every aspect of the con that we experienced. The amount of open console and computer gaming is absolutely staggering, if you wanted to go to the con and do nothing but play console games you could do it and have a hell of a time while you’re at it. I’m talking about an entire hallway of rooms set up with hundreds and hundreds of TVs and computers alongside libraries of nearly every game you could wish for, all there simply for your entertainment and enjoyment!
Who Knew that Gamers like Playing Games?
As if the amount of electronic gaming was not enough, a section of the convention center main hall as large as the exhibit hall itself was willed with tables and dedicated to open tabletop gaming of all kinds. When we first arrived on Friday morning this area was mostly underutilized but through the rest of the convention the area was packed to the brim with thousands of gamers playing various card games, board games, and roleplaying games. It should be no surprise that this room became our designated meeting area, as several of us would stake out a table and sit down to gather friends through the next few hours as they inevitably walked by.
One of the best decisions made about this room, that I hope to see replicated at places like GenCon someday soon, is that a handful of local gaming shops had sales booths set up around the open gaming area. If that doesn’t sound good enough to you, the real icing of the set up is that these vendors often stayed open well beyond the exhibit hall closing which I’m sure only benefited them as gamers seemed incredibly eager to buy all kinds of Magic: The Gathering cards and various board games well into their evenings of frivolous gaming. It was at several of these booths that I did the majority of my shopping at PAX East. I finally purchased a copy of Fiasco to play with friends when Dave isn’t around (who likes gaming with him, anyway?), but the item that made me positively giddy as a school girl was the brand new, still unreleased, boxed set of Battletech from Catalyst Game Labs which I was very happy to get my hands on. A full review of that boxed set is coming very soon, oh yes!
The Exhibits, Let Me Show You Them!
Throughout the three days of PAX East I spent a lot of time around the exhibit hall, but as a matter of choice I decided not to spend any of that time waiting in line. Let me assure you that there were plenty of lines available for waiting, and almost as many that I would have been very eager to join, but I couldn’t allow myself to waste much time at the convention waiting to see a video of a game or play a few minutes of a game that I would inevitably see/play in the next few weeks anyway. The consistently biggest line definitely belonged to Star Wars: The Old Republic, which even had a waiting line during the hours the hall was open early exclusively for press.
The nice thing about not waiting in line to play The Old Republic is that there were still several places that you could watch those people who had waited in line playing the game, and several monitors playing awesome trailers and gameplay footage of the game. For the most part everyone that I know who watched the game at this booth is dying to play the game, and probably the best way for me to summarize it is that it looks like the ‘World of Warcraft’ of Star Wars MMOs. [Read the rest of this article]
So You Want to Write RPGs?
I listen to all sorts of gaming podcasts and read all sorts of gaming blogs. So when I heard that my friend and game-design and OP-admin colleague Teos Abadia was going to be a guest on a new gaming podcast called Going Last, I checked it out. I took a shine to it right away, because it gave good information that interested me, but the two hosts Ian and Justin did not take themselves too seriously.
I dropped Teos a note saying that I enjoyed his talk on the podcast, as well as the podcast in general, and before long I had traded a couple of emails with the Going Last guys, and they wondered if I wanted to talk to them about freelancing and organized-play campaigns. Sure, no problem.
My chat with them was recorded and released earlier this week, and one of the questions they asked me is one that I get asked quite frequently. Because a concise and coherent answer is not something I am known for, I wanted to take the time to write a more measured and clear answer.
How Does One Become an RPG Freelancer?
When I get asked this question, I feel like I just got stupid-drunk, climbed a steep hill, fell off the cliff at the top, somehow landed on my feet, and then got asked, “Hey, since you were just up there on that hill, can you let me know how to get down?” I sort of remember the trip, but I don’t quite know how I got from point A to point B.
Some of the answers and advice I give here, I gave for the podcast. Others were things that I did not get to, or did not think of in time to answer coherently. It is also important to note that I can only speak from my own experiences—as well as the experiences of those who I have talked to about this topic. There is no single right path to regular freelancing or organized-play work, but I think there are strategies and considerations that are common to many paths. [Read the rest of this article]
RPGs and Fiction: An Interview with Alana Abbott
I have spent the better part of the last three years with my head buried deep in the Forgotten Realms, a game world that lives and breathes at least as deeply through its fiction as through its game products. My background and education are tied to fiction-writing, first and foremost. As I become more familiar with the craft of designing games and adventures, the contrast and the synergy between the stuff of games and the stuff of fiction always leaves me pondering: What game design skills carry over from fiction-writing skills, and vice versa? Can fiction capture the essence of a game system or a game setting, while still working as good fiction?
I have enlisted someone to help me look into those questions. I first met Alana Abbott while writing adventures for the Living Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign, where she was the campaign’s director. Even then, before I knew her well, I was impressed with her chops as a writer. When I heard that she’d written a novel as a tie-in for an RPG game and setting, I was intrigued. I read that first novel called Into the Reach, and I was taken with how much the characters and the story drew me into that world. Despite my love of fantasy RPGs, I was never much a fan of fantasy fiction. The field is no doubt full of talented authors, but the redundancy of the tropes within the genre just didn’t do it for me.
At the time, I was also teaching fiction writing at the college level, so my brain was engaged in a sort of “read and feedback” loop that led me to contact Alana, offer my admiration for the work, as well as providing some (hopefully) constructive criticism. I was surprised and flattered when Alana suggested to her publisher that I take over as editor for the second novel in the trilogy. It was a pleasure to do so.
Alana’s talents have been noticed by many others, and her resume speaks for itself. As long as it is diverse, her list of credits includes the Origins Award-winning supplement Serenity Adventures for the Serenity RPG from Margaret Weis Productions. She was also the writer for the comic Cowboys and Aliens II. (A film version of the original Cowboys and Aliens hits theaters soon, starring Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig.)
The first two novels in “The Redemption Trilogy” — Into the Reach and Departure — are available now available as e-books at DriveThruRPG, and they are well worth the read for fans of well-written fantasy literature. Alana’s vision of the setting, game, and characters is expertly rendered on the page, and I hold the novels up as an example of what can happen when a very talented writer finds a way to turn an RPG into excellent fiction.
I recently got the chance to ask Alana about the intersection of RPGs and fiction, as well as a number of other topics of interest to gamers, fantasy fans, and would-be writers. I hope you find the results enlightening: [Read the rest of this article]
Brief Encounters…
Various real-life issues have left me little time for my column this week, but I had something on my mind that will not wait. I have never had an FLGS (a “friendly local gaming store”) close enough for me to truly support one, or for me to get the sense of community that one can bring to a gamer.
A great FLGS not only has the products you want to buy, but it also offers a place to meet new gamers, try new games, and even make new gaming friends. I’ve had some FGSes and some LGSes, but I’ve never found that combination of gaming store that was close enough to be convenient and friendly enough to be a place to try new games and meet new folks.
When the D&D Encounters program from Wizards of the Coast started a little over a year ago, I never felt that lack of a good FLGS more profoundly. Here was a program that was practically built for me. I have trouble finding the time to game for several hours a week (mostly because my free time for gaming is spent writing for games rather than playing them). I have a kid who wants to play, but doesn’t always have the time or focus for longer games. I was having trouble finding local gamers to play with. Encounters, with its (roughly) 90-minute play experience once each week, seemed to be the answer to my gaming prayers. But since the program can only be run at gaming stores on Wednesday nights, I was looking at least a 120-minute round-trip drive to play a 90-minute session—usually on a school night.
I actually made the trip a few times with my daughter to play, and we had a lot of fun. But it quickly became apparent that the logistics just were not going to work. The fourth season of D&D Encounters was set to start February 9th, and I knew that it too would have to pass me by. In an act of self-torture, I typed in my zip code on the Wizards game locator web page just to remind myself how far away I was from the fun. I did a double-take as a stared at the screen, and lo and behold, there was a store I had never heard of 10 minutes from my house running this new season.
Being the eternal realist with a heavily dose of pessimism taken twice a day with a full glass of water, I didn’t get too excited. Maybe the store wasn’t really running it. Maybe there wouldn’t be enough players. Maybe the players would be so vile that I couldn’t even stand to be there, much less take my daughter. I emailed the store contact and asked about the specifics, even offering to DM if needed to make a game happen.
I am happy to report that I am starting to get the feeling I have found my very first FLGS. The place is called Water Street Games, and it is not the largest store. It isn’t the fanciest store. But after three weeks of running March of the Phantom Brigade for six players, I couldn’t be more pleased. The players range from experienced 4e players/DMs to people new to 4e to people brand new to D&D. All of them are good players who are eager to get into the game, willing to give and take with the table banter, and are extremely courteous with a youngster at the table. I attended the store’s monthly board game day and am looking forward to learning new games and bringing some of my own knowledge and experience to the community.
Equally helpful and community-building are the forums at the Wizards site where DMs and players can get together and talk about their experiences. DMs share everything from suggestions on modifying the adventure to great props and methods of tracking initiative. This sharing of knowledge and excitement about the game is a breath of fresh air in a cyber-landscape that sometimes gets a little hard to endure—with flame wars and edition wars and people seeking attention in unproductive ways.
I have talked in previous columns about the joys and rewards of gaming with strangers, and it is an awesome experience to be reminded of your own beliefs in such a real way. Between running and playing several games at DDXP, and getting into the D&D Encounters program at my new FLGS, I haven’t been this excited about actually playing the game of D&D in a long time.
If you are a player without a game, I suggest looking for a game again if you haven’t played in a while, even if it is stepping outside your comfort zone. Teos Abadia (known in gaming forums as Alphastream) has a great post on ENworld about Organized Play, giving a ton of information in a very succinct manner that might help people find a game they’ll enjoy.
You might just be surprised at how much fun there is to be had.
