* (0:29) Nut up and GM!
* (3:35) An update on the postcard contest.
* (4:17) Fear the Con is coming up. If you’re arriving early for the tourism, please send an email to Dan with your contact information, arrival time, and method of travel, so we can keep you in the loop. Failing that, we’ll also be updating our Twitter feed with event information as we migrate about the area.
* (7:57) Playing a character with a disability. The motivations for playing such a character. Handling it with dignity and sensitivity. When it’s probably best to avoid the topic completely.
Hosts: Dan, John, Julia, Wayne
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* (0:24) The traits to expect from a good editor. Determining the kinds of edits you’re looking for. Separating style and other subjective choices from genuine problems with the writing.
* (9:32) Choosing traditional publication versus self-publication.
* (18:08) Name placement on a list or bookstore shelf.
* (20:17) The importance of marketing your book and yourself as an author. How name recognition led to the creation of Fear the Boot.
* (42:38) A few quick notes on Kickstarter and other methods of fundraising. Monte Cooke’s book, Kicking It. Joel and Tristan’s first interview with Postcards from the Dungeon. (As of this release, the follow-up has not yet been posted, but be sure to keep watching their site!)
* (44:18) A wrap-up of what everyone is doing and where you can find their work.
Hosts: Chuck, Dan, Joel, John, Tristan
Chuck Wills’ Chronicles of Spire in ebook or print.
Joel Dalenberg and Tristan Zimmerman’s The GM’s Real World Reference on DriveThru. You can also find Tristan over at Dragonlance Canticle.
John Grana’s Bloodmoon Goblins on DriveThru and Paizo.
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* (0:27) Introducing our guests and setting up the discussion. You can find the relevant links at the bottom of this post.
* (11:18) What motivated each author to get started.
* (17:18) Tips for seeing a project through to completion. Collaboration, accountability to an audience, and the danger of relying on a “future self”. The importance of small, realistic milestones.
* (28:45) The closest they came to failure and what kept it from happening.
* (41:14) Setting a reasonable view of success.
* (49:08) Editing non-fiction. The relationship between legends, history, and the cultural context of both.
Hosts: Chuck, Dan, Joel, John, Tristan
The discussion continues in part 2! In the meantime, you can find the work of these fine folks at the following links.
Chuck Wills’ Chronicles of Spire in ebook or print.
Joel Dalenberg and Tristan Zimmerman’s The GM’s Real World Reference on DriveThru. You can also find Tristan over at Dragonlance Canticle.
John Grana’s Bloodmoon Goblins on DriveThru and Paizo.
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* (1:05) Dan blames Chris for the burpee. Jackie Joyner-Kersee and fartleks.
* (5:49) Fear the Fruit.
* (6:38) Boots the Pegasus t-shirt orders.
* (7:38) Signup for Fear the Con 6 rolls on, and tickets are now available for purchase!
* (9:45) The death of a bard. Just how much a Game Master should warn a player about the risks they’re taking.
* (19:36) Why Pat should play Skyrim: naked mods.
* (21:09) Why cyberpunk isn’t as accessible as it used to be, and how Shadowrun bridges that by swapping out certain themes.
* (31:49) The persistence of roleplaying games when compared to other forms of entertainment. Whether an RPG can feel too dated in its premise or setting to be playable.
Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Julia, Pat
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* (0:28) Registration is running for Fear the Con 6.
* (0:57) John makes a Shadowrun character.
* (7:26) The various models roleplaying games use for representing damage to your character. Shaken, stunned, and otherwise losing control of your character.
* (11:49) What damage actually represents: injuries versus the loss of will to fight.
* (13:53) The relationship between damage, the duration of combat, and the feel of the game.
* (18:13) Accumulating wounds instead of losing health.
* (20:42) How a setting can make less descriptive damage more helpful to the feeling and flow of a game.
* (26:25) The models we each prefer and the reasons why.
* (35:10) How healers affect the way we view injuries.
* (41:01) Swapping out the combat system of a particular game.
Hosts: Dan, John, Pat, Wayne
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* (0:51) Sign-up is open for Fear the Con 6! There are some changes to the scheduling this year, which are detailed in the podcast. Ticket sales will be available soon.
* (5:37) Chad takes umbrage with Wayne’s comments about spelling errors in his games. If you want to check out his free one-shotters, you can grab them right here.
* (8:55) The movies of 2013. Django. Trying to see movies when you have young kids. Pacific Rim. Oblivion. All Superheroes Must Die. Man of Steel.
* (28:05) Getting too into a character. The baggage brought to a table, and the blurry line between character and player. Compartmentalizing who you associate with.
* (54:55) Soap baby, round three. Fight.
Hosts: Chad, Johann, Pat, Wayne
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* (1:15) Voting for the postcards contest rolls on! Be sure to get your votes in here.
* (1:37) Gaming New Years resolutions for 2013.
* (22:01) The various approaches to personal wealth and the broader economy of a roleplaying game.
* (25:44) A quick update on the new things we’ve learned about soap baby.
* (27:14) Back to your regularly schedule episode…
* (29:17) The methods for determining a character’s starting cash and gear.
* (46:32) Wealth and economy during the course of play.
* (54:53) Character wealth from the standpoint of the GM.
Hosts: Chris, Dan, John, Julia, Pat
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I’ve heard that in marketing, the population is segmented by how much people are willing to pay for a product of a given type. In intellectual property, entertainment, computer programs, any sort of digital bits, there’s always a large segment of the population that has a maximum price point of zero. In other words, they’ll use it if they can get it for free. And if you’re marketing a product that you want to make money on, you will waste a lot less effort and money if you can find a way to market your product to everyone but them.
I’m one of these consumers. My budget for entertainment products is zero. Actually, if you do the math, it’s slightly less than zero: I’m an independent worker with an irregular income. After necessities, in a given month, most of what I earn has to be saved in case the next month I don’t earn as much. At some point I generally fall behind, meaning that at any given moment, my total entertainment budget has fallen into negative numbers. This is why I don’t spend money on video games. I play what I can get for free, when I have time to play at all. I play the version of Angry Birds with the ads on it. 99 cents is too much.
So how did I go from spending zero on entertainment to backing Goblinworks’s Pathfinder Online MMO project on Kickstarter bazed on Paizo Publishing’s Pathfinder at the $175 Crowdforger Buddy level? Well, I did get quite a bit of work this last month, so that definitely plays a role, although the smart thing for me to do would be, again, to save it for a rainy day. But the Pathfinder Online project speaks to me. Its value proposition is especially worthwhile to me. Why? Because the project as proposed is attempting to address everything I hate about MMOs and finally do it right.
I’ve played some (free to play, recall, entertainment budget = 0) MMOs that I won’t name here, but the theme park-style game is completely uninteresting to me. Sure, I’ve played hack and slash dungeon crawl video games before and had fun, but why would I pay a monthly fee just to play Diablo I on the same server where a bunch of other people are also running around playing Diablo I, possibly joining into groups that provide just about the same level of human interaction as hiring an NPC, except they don’t do what you say, and creating a situation where anyone who doesn’t play obsessively all day every day falls way behind the curve in PvE groups or PvP combat? It just feels like a fool’s errand. Why do I need to be online to do a dungeon crawl?
It’s clear when you hear them talk about their project that the designers at Pathfinder Online understand this way of thinking. It’s certainly up in the air how well they’ll do at it, but if they meet their design goals, they will have a very different kind of MMO. The goal of the project really appears to be to create a world that people collectively build and interact in, not a PvE shared waiting room with doors to different dungeons or a PvP free-for-all bloodbath where Scumbag John waits by your spawn point to stab you in the back.
This is actually one of the most controversial aspects of the game, based on the conversations I’ve seen on forums: the fact that there is only one big server. But despite the fact that being new at these games, I will be an easy target for griefers, this actually makes sense to me. If you have to choose a world with violence and a world without violence, only people who are planning to murder each other will choose the first world, where people who choose the second world will miss out on the point of the game, which is to live in a world where there is crime and punishment, war and diplomacy, building up cities and burning and looting them, the kinds of thing that make for story, plot, and meaning, especially when they happen organically, as intended by the designers of this game. And in order to make this work, the bloodthirsty and the innocent have to learn to get along in the same world.
In a system where you need certain resources to do certain things, a functional economy will be created in the game that will necessitate adventuring. So instead of the NPC tavern owner sending you down to his basement to kill some rats, a real-life tavern owner ($5000 on the Kickstarter) might actually have giant rats in his basement that he needs you to kill. Or more likely, a new settlement will need some recruits to go clear out some goblins, or an artificer will need someone to go kill some giant spiders because she needs their furry legs for some kind of potion.
In other words, you may end up doing similar things in this game that you might be doing as quests for NPCs, but you’ll be doing them for a real person who really needs those items to do what they want to do in the game. Or you’ll be engaged as a soldier in actual battle lines between two guilds that are really at war. Again, as the developers put it, this is meaningful interaction between human players, something I’ve always wanted in an MMO and something I don’t believe exists in most MMOs today.
This is the kind of thing you see in EVE Online, of course (although speaking of futuristic space MMOs, what I’d really like to see and would pay every dollar I can scrounge and every penny I can find in my couch for would be an Eclipse Phase MMO), but the design concept isn’t EVE with ElVEs. They’re proposing better controls on griefing, as well as real penalties for general bloodthirsty behavior. You will be allowed to take vengeance on your murderer, making more of their stuff lootable after killing an innocent player and being marked as an acceptable target without an alignment shift or reputation drop, even including safeguards against workarounds like having a friend kill them to have their curse lifted without getting looted, by connecting the curse system to the player who was killed and other players of their choice.
But most importantly, the level curve is not as extreme in other MMOs. The design concept is for someone who’s been playing longer to be more powerful than new players, of course, but nowhere near unstoppable. If they do it right, these will be interactions between more and less powerful people of the same species rather than one player being a bug to be stepped on by another player who is a god. This is an extremely important feature for me as a person who doesn’t have time to play all day every day. As an independent worker, I could spend a month with zero time to play (but my character will still be gaining experience) and then follow that up with a week of having nothing better to do than play, but I won’t fall too far behind.
Of course, being new to these games, I do understand that there will be a learning curve for me, but I’m hoping the system will make it possible to survive as a casual player and get something out of the game. I’m sure Scumbag John is itching to prove me wrong. But I’m glad that by backing the project, I get access to the Crowdforger early enrollment beta, which will hopefully make me powerful enough at open enrollment that experienced PvP MMO players coming in won’t terrorize me from the get-go.
John’s still going to kill me, though. I’m sure of it.
Of course, there are some things I would add to what they’re planning to include in this MMO. For one thing, I think they should incorporate secret societies in addition to guilds, an affiliation that you don’t wear on your sleeve. It would be sort of a Kobold Fight Club, or an Illuminati, or secret cults that you could join, but that other people can’t tell you’re in, unless, for example, they kill you and find a ring or other item identifying your affiliation. It would add an interesting level of intrigue. Another great feature in settlement building would be the ability to design your own structures. The building blocks of castle pieces could be individually purchased and placed to create the structures each settlement wants. It worked for Minecraft. But as this project is being crowdforged, hopefully ideas like these (and the idea that we should all be able to play lizardmen and kobolds and goblins) will be taken into account by the designers. Eventually. When they have time.
The best roleplaying game sessions are the ones in which a good game master can roll with what the players do, and provide realistic consequences to their actions in a realistic world. Based on the design concepts, this is the MMO that sounds like it will come closest to simulating that kind of GM experience, not by attempting to code realistic NPC dialogue or anything like that, but by actually creating a world where the roles usually filled by NPCs are filled by real people with their own goals and needs in a functional economy and a very real community, a complete online world.
So if this sounds like as much fun to you as it does to me, help Goblinworks meet their Kickstarter funding goal and make an honest gamer out of me. I don’t know if I’m representative of any kind of demographic, but if Pathfinder Online managed to get me to open my wallet for them, they must be doing something right. So look for me in the River Kingdoms when Pathfinder Online comes out. I’ll be the one with John’s dagger in my back.
* (0:05) This was originally going to be the next Bedtime Stories before Wayne happened. Regardless, we start with Julia’s misunderstanding of what we mean by “bedtime stories”.
* (1:23) You can find Chad’s free games through Morning Skye Studio.
* (2:29) Dan guest hosted on two other shows: Dragonlance Canticle and MasterCast.
* (3:17) Julia gets pantsed.
* (5:26) Dan goes to first grade with Dawn. The many nations of Missouri and the misspelled town of Rolla.
* (9:22) Dan almost gets pantsed.
* (12:34) John and Pat go bowling.
* (16:38) Wayne and the bingo wand.
* (20:32) Wayne and the soap baby.
* (27:08) What an actual non-crush looks like.
* (30:39) The Hamburglar ring and an actual robbery.
* (35:28) Wayne ups the ante.
* (38:19) Julia loves America. Pat attributes it to…something else.
* (40:40) The playoffs + Action Nerds: Go! + Dan’s house = damage to Dan’s house? Aggression, sports, and the intersection thereof. You can find Dungeon Crawl Classics here.
Hosts: Dan, Julia, Pat, Wayne
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You can find a transcript of this show here!
* (0:20) John’s Bloodmoon Goblins Pathfinder supplement is now available for sale as a PDF, with print soon to follow.
* (2:22) The ecology and agenda of monsters in Pathfinder Online.
* (3:42) The nature of existing (and eventually expanded) “theme park” content as opposed to the “sandbox” content.
* (6:08) The reason we need to ask hard questions about this MMO.
* (8:06) Does the gaming world really need another fantasy MMO? The historical context for Pathfinder Online’s creation.
* (16:29) The cash model for the game. The points at which it will likely be subscription-based versus “freemium” or completely free-to-play.
* (18:02) Given the market climate — and Paizo’s obvious claim to fame — why not focus the resources into a high-end virtual tabletop instead of an MMO?
* (19:26) The graphical enhancements planned between the tech demo and actual game.
* (21:15) The purpose of the second Kickstarter, particularly in light of investor funding.
* (31:53) How is player feedback going to be gathered and used to alter the game world during the design process? How is Paizo involved in the game’s development?
* (35:52) Balancing the influence of project backers when comparing the number of people on one side against the depth of pocketbooks on the other.
* (37:27) How Goblinworks is defining the game’s “beta” and why there’s a subscription attached to it. Whether there’s intended to be any character-resource resets or similar setbacks during the beta.
* (45:58) Mark’s interest in seeing large-scale combat look more like authentic, Medieval warfare.
* (48:45) A round-up of the relevant links. You can checkout the Pathfinder Online Kickstarter right here. If you want to visit Mark’s blog, that would be here. And finally, our postcards contest is up for voting over here.
Hosts: Dan, Johann, John, Pat
Guests: Mark Kalmes
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December 26th, 2012 in
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