Today I am going to lament a trend I see in small-press roleplaying publishing, and then try to explain why I think the trend is sadly inevitable.
The trend in question is the publishing of semi-complete games. This particular rant was kicked off by John Harper’s extremely cool game Agon. Don’t get me wrong, Agon is one of my favorite games of the year so far. It’s tons of fun.
But it’s also flawed, and clearly so. I will not be at all surprised to see a revised edition out by next year (since it’s printed through Lulu, it could be even sooner). Agon’s not alone here, either. Primetime Adventures and Dogs in the Vineyard both did similar things (though the tweaks to Dogs are pretty minor).
This drives me crazy. When I plunk down my hard-earned wage-slave cash for a game, I want that game to be polished and clean. I don’t want a work-in-progress game, I want a complete and excellent game.
This is compounded by the nature of the medium of delivery. I buy books. Those books are static, and if I want the new and improved version of the game, I’ve got to spend even more money to get it. Thus rendering my initial investment sort of obsolete.
This sort of behavior is generally not tolerated in console video games, but is in PC video games, mostly due to the fact that you can patch a PC game. But you can’t patch a book. Like a console video game, you’ve just got to buy everything all over again.
Sadly, I think this trend will not only continue in roleplaying, but I think that it is inevitable. As more and more people produce indie roleplaying games, there are more and more games clamoring for attention. This forces members of the community to apply stricter and stricter criteria to the things that they will spend their attention on.
When there were fewer games, you could get away with just paying attention to the stuff from people who were willing to discuss their games intelligently. Now, however, there are too many people involved to do that. This generates some pretty obvious problems for playtesting, especially for playtesting outside of your local group which is a super-important thing to do.
So people are moving to publishing sooner. Often, one of the big things that will boost discussion and play of a game is having it in print. Part of this is that it’s an illustration of dedication: you were willing to put in the work to get it done. Part of this is that it’s an indication of excellence: you feel that your game is, right now, good enough for people to buy and play. And part of it is added value: people can talk about your layout, cover, form-factor, art, and all sorts of stuff in addition to the content of the game itself. This means people will talk more about your game.
All of this comes together to make this early publishing phenomenon inevitable: if you want people to play your game, putting it in book form is one of the single most effective pieces of marketing you can do. And really, I’m glad. This means that more people are writing (and finishing) cool new games. But it makes me sad too, because it seems that some of these games really needed another dozen hours of playtesting, but they weren’t going to get it without a book.
Thomas
Tags: Dense-post, Publishing
Funnily enough, I’ve recently been thinking about similar things. Underdevelopment is a complaint that comes up a lot among boardgamers (including me), but I especially got intrigued by the topic after reading a comment by Chris Farrell about Iron Heroes.
I think that the biggest problem is the perception that a game HAS to be launched at one of the major conventions (primarily Gen Con for North American games, including RPGs, Essen and Nuremburg for European boardgames). This results in an artificial rush to finish a game up and get it out “in time” rather than take the necessary time to get the last details that make the difference between a good (or adequate or even bad) game and a great game.
Obviously, there are real, albeit overemphasized, business pressures to launch at a major convention, since it is possible to generate a larger amount of money making buzz in a shorter amount of time at a con than it is in any other way. While this is an unspophisticated view of things, it is an understandible one for someone that has their life’s savings (or more) invested in a product, as is frequently the case with minor “mainstream” publishers.
One would think that indie designers, who are (supposedly) focused on viral marketing and evergreen products would be able to see the wisdom of getting things right over gettings things done, but I think the history of the Forge indicates how hard it is to slay established beliefs.
Small price to pay, I say.
I tried really hard to make Mortal Coil a finished project, and it pretty much is. However, there are always things you miss when you release a game, and when the same questions start popping up over and over again, it’s very tempting to make corrections and release a new version of the game. I think that’s what you’re seeing with the Dogs in the Vineyard and Universalis revisions, for example.
Flat-out broken games (basically beta version RPGs) are a different matter, though.
[...] After GenCon 2006, a similar discussion has begun in the indie RPG community [EDIT: this post at Thomas Robertson’s blog Musings and Mental Meanserings is also part of the discussion, and played a large part in getting me to write this post], while traditional RPGs have always suffered from the same problem. Cynics have always accused companies of deliberately releasing flawed RPGs in order to have an excuse for a Second (and Third, etc.) Edition cash grab. I suspect that playtesting an old school, complex RPG like Shadowrun or D&D 3.x enough to ensure absolute balance would bankrupt a company, though. [...]