Brain Dump

I’ve been talking this week about some of the ways that the dominant model of roleplaying game publishing constrains roleplaying both economically (in that there isn’t a solid existing market spot in the mass market for the purchase of rules), and in design (limits on the sorts of mechanics that can be functionally used). In doing so, I’ve been advocating the consideration of other models for publishing.

But there are some pretty big hurdles to new models. The two big ones are that you are starting from scratch, and that they cost more money.

The current model of roleplaying publishing (by which I mean the publishing of rules/procedures and expecting players to provide all other components) has been extensively developed by some really smart and dedicated people. Just take a look through the Forge’s publishing forum to get a good look. The dominant model has been honed over years, with hundreds (if not thousands) of man-hours invested in learning and teaching techniques.

New models are going to lose a lot of that accumulated knowledge. While some of the lessons will still hold, a lot of them will need to be reconsidered, and some of them will simply no longer apply. This means that new models of publishing are going to require significantly more time and effort to work through. This is compounded by the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, there are not analagous communities (at least not in terms of accumulated experience/knowledge) for other models (such as board game or card game publishing).

Second problem is one of money. The current dominant model is basically built upon the sale of information. In the digital age, information is cheap to produce. Publishing a game that includes components is necessarily going to be more expensive to make. It also requires a higher level of capital investment in materials for prototyping. In the current model, all you need is a word processor; but in a more component-oriented model you need scissors and glue and markers and all sorts of other things.

So, while it’s easy for me to advocate new models, I acknowledge that it’s way easier to talk about them than to build them. That doesn’t dent my enthusiasm, but it does suggest that changes are going to be slower than I might like.

That’s it for crazy publishing models for a while.  Tune in next week for an exciting discussion of why low-permanency mediums of play (such as face-to-face play) are amazingly cool.

Continuing with the theme of what, precisely, we are publishing in roleplaying, today I’m going to suggest one reason I consider extremely powerful for trying new ways of publishing games: adopting new models allows us to publish games that we can’t publish in the current model.

The publishing model that is typically used for roleplaying games acts as a constraint on design in similar ways that games act as constraints on fictional input.  The constraints can foster creativity, but in doing so they place limits on creativity.  That is, the constraints are powerful tools, but they are artificial ones that sometimes need to be discarded.

Consider Joshua Newman’s Under the Bed as an example.  It’s a game that is practically unworkable within the traditional roleplaying publishing model.  Sure the rules could call for the player to write down the various traits on their own, but that’s not going to fly with most gamers.  And look at Jason Morningstar’s Shab al-Hiri Roach, with its roach cards.  Both of these are games that don’t work in that traditional publishing model.

Most board and card games have components that act as short-cuts and reminders more than they act as necessary elements of play.  Games with scoring tracks, or fake currency allow you to track important numbers without relying on memory or scribbled notes.  Contrast this with roleplaying games in which you are forced to rely on memory or scribbled notes.  This limits how complex you can make the game.  Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard is a great example of this: there’s a practical cap to how complex a character can get and how long a conflict can go based on how many traits you can track in your head.  A character should never get so complex that players might forget whether they have used any given trait in the conflict yet or not.  This is fine, but it’s also limiting; there’s nothing wrong with having characters who can be played completely mnemonically, but there’s nothing wrong with having characters that can’t either, as long as you have the tools to make that possible.

The current publishing model for roleplaying games, with its focus on publishing texts and not components, must therefore rely on ‘found’ or ‘common’ components for play.  This, in turn, forces an interesting inverse consideration on publishers.  Games can be published that require relatively common components (d6s instead of d12s, for instance) in order to target a wider market, but doing so inherently limits the design.  In the current indie roleplaying game market, if it requires anything more esoteric than a polyhedral dice set, some glass beads, a deck (or two) of playing cards, a pack of poker chips, or a print-out of a provided PDF file then it’s hard to sell.

I’d love to see some of the ideas that would surface if we weren’t so constrained by our ‘selling books’ publishing model.

Building on our discussion from yesterday in which I suggested that the model that is generally used for publishing roleplaying games is similar to the model used for publishing card and board games, today I want to discuss a fundamental, and possibly important, difference.

Publishing roleplaying games is about selling procedures and rules. When you think about it, this is not the model employed by other forms of games (with the possible exception of CCGs, which I’m hoping to go into more depth on tomorrow). Board and card games are about selling components not rules. In fact, most game publishers have their rules available online for free.

Most roleplaying games don’t provide components at all. You are required to print your own character sheets (though the resources to do so are generally provided), and you have to bring your own dice/cards/whatever to the table.

This puts roleplaying games in an odd position commercially. They don’t fit into the conceptual slot for games because what is being ‘sold’ is fundamentally different. They don’t quite fit into the traditional how-to model (things like cookbooks), at least not in the Forge paradigm, because it is expected that you will follow the directions provided precisely, and not change things up.

The question that comes to my mind when considering all this is: must we publish roleplaying games in this idiosyncratic manner? Must it be about selling procedures? Could a workable model of roleplaying publishing be built around selling components? What about selling teaching texts? Would those still be roleplaying games?

Thomas