There’s a thread on ENWorld chronicling the more than a year long quest for a freelancer to get paid by a RPG company. He went a long time and was quite long-suffering before naming the company, and it’s Dog Soul Publishing. Feel free to read the thread, make your own judgements, and not buy anything from Dog Soul ever. And don’t do work for them, Deborah Balsam, or Sean Frolich, because it’s quite likely you won’t get paid for your effort.
Mongoose Publishing, one of the recent publishers of the venerable Traveller universe, has released their “Developer’s Pack” that describes licensing terms for others to put out Traveller material. And it’s groundbreakingly liberal! But somewhat complicated, so let me break it down. (Direct download link)
1. First of all, the new Mongoose Traveller rules are released under the Open Gaming License (OGL), and a complete System Resource Document (SRD) is included. So as far as open licensing allows – go nuts! But wait, there’s more.
2. There is a Fair Use Policy document – actually provided by Far Future Enterprises, who owns Traveller and licenses it out – that allows you to do stuff based on all previous (non-Mongoose) Traveller versions and publish noncommercially on a Web site or whatnot. Make copies, write programs/spreadsheets to automate stuff, whatever. They ask you don’t directly reproduce more than a page or two of rules straight out of previous rulebooks and that you post a FFA copyright notice somewhere. There’s some unavoidable complication here – they note that they didn’t have all the rights to some art/maps from previous editions and so technically you need that artist’s permissions for those – sad, but unavoidable.
They don’t explicitly mention the ticky things that White Wolf did in their site policy, like not being able to take advertising.
3. There is a Traveller logo license (TLL). You get to use the logo but you have to agree to a bunch of lame restrictions – send a form in, can’t use “Traveller” in the title, avoid naughty content (sex/violence), they can ask you to destroy your stock, the whole litany of unpleasant restrictions in most licenses (though they do note that “It should be noted that Mongoose Publishing is committed to a strong relationship with third parties using the Traveller logo and that this instruction will only be given under extreme circumstances that threaten to bring the Traveller trademark into disrepute. If in doubt, third parties may always discuss potential projects with Mongoose Publishing first.” I’m not sure it’s worth it.
4. There is a “Foreven Free Sector” license. This is an interesting one. The other licenses are basically about rules. This one lets you use the Original Traveller Universe (OTU) intellectual property (IP)! I wish this wasn’t so groundbreaking but it is – you can publish stuff set in the OTU – Aslan, K’kree, the Empire, and all of it, in any time period. You have to “keep it in the Foreven sector” – you can reference all the rightness of the OTU but can only develop/change this one “sandbox” sector. This license has a similar set of restrictions to the TLL, but in this case it might be worth it; it’s like WotC letting anyone write a Forgotten Realms book as long as it’s set in Sembia.
All in all this is a pretty cool set of licenses. I think things like the content clauses are 1970s leftover crap, but in general a) the rules are open and b) you can use the OTU even commercially under restriction and c) you can do whatever a normal fan would do under Fair Use. Props to Mongoose and Fast Forward for this approach! Any company that thinks it’s not in their best interest to be open like this is either delusional or WotC.
Role-playing games are a diverse medium. Sure, mostly they are trapped in the genre ghetto of standard fantasy/horror/SF plots, but really you can play anything from a kid in the Polish resistance during the failed uprising of 1944 (Grey Ranks), a space-babe trying to win the love of a humanoid rat (Space Rat: The Jack Cosmos Adventure Game), a slave in pre-Civil War America (Steal Away Jordan), and more. But I can’t help but notice that three of the absolute most prominent fiction genres are severely underrepresented in RPGs. These are:
This seems odd, as players love to kill things and flaunt convention, and these genres are definitely the ones you tune in to on TV if you want to see someone get their ticket punched or act out.
In my next posts, I’ll investigate these genres, canvas what RPGs do exist in those areas, and examine common “problems” with those kinds of games and what, perhaps, we can do about them.
Given my recent gripe about RPG companies’ Web sites, I thought I’d do the community a public service by talking a little about the ‘standard’ concept of a sales and marketing funnel and what you need to do to attract customers.
Now, even if you’re giving your game away for free, you have customers. You may or may not be less motivated to do work to get them, but if you have something that you’d like other people to get, for whatever reason, you’re looking at sales and marketing.
And though people can make it complicated, it’s not. Use the analogy of a store in the mall that wants to sell items to people in the mall. You need to help people move through a pretty simple sequence of steps. Attention, interest, desire, action, and satisfaction. Skipping any of these steps causes people to get derailed.
You don’t really need to worry about the technical terms here, unless you want to Google for more. But for the record, you want to get “leads,” “qualify” them into “prospects,” and then “convert” them down each step in the “funnel” until you “close” the “sale” and get “moolah.” Often they break up the process into “marketing,” which is the process of attracting and initially informing the customer, and “sales,” which focuses more on taking a prospect through to closing, but that’s for megacorps not your one-man thing.
Let me file the serial numbers of a certain billion-dollar company’s funnel as an example.
1. Product
It should go without saying. But unfortunately sometimes it goes without doing as well. You need a product, ideally a quality, compelling product. You don’t have to wait till you have one to start generating interest, but you need one. Sure, we’ve all seen people that get some success by combining extensive sophistry and marketing with a crap product or vaporware, but a) those are bad people and b) it’s not sustainable, unless being a scam artist is your stock in trade. The better the products, and if you have complementary products/product lines, the better. Even good-hearted people get into this one with lighting up the marketing machine (or even taking preorders) before the product is done, and they aren’t so good with the deadlines.
2. Awareness and Interest
How do people find out about you and your product? There are a couple things that go into this, from traditional advertising to social networks to search engine optimization to reputation development. People often hear about and interact with you/your company/your game/your previous games a good bit before they decide to buy, so reputation development is key. What’s your plan here? Talking it up on forums? Pushing it at cons? Getting it sold on a lot of download sites and hoping that people will just run across it and decide to shell out $30 sight unseen? Signing on to a license to slap a logo on it? People cold searching on “I want to buy a Wild West RPG today?” An open beta? A free demo download? Trying to get comped reviews on rpg.net or similar? Paying for standups at gaming stores across America? There are better and worse plans here, but having a plan besides “Uhhhhhh…” is the key.
I was sitting here in South Texas, surrounded by the mostly ridiculous Hurricane Ike frenzy, thinking about the role of weather in RPGs. Then, I came across a good post from Advanced Gaming & Theory on the seasons and its effects in D&D and thought I’d chip in.
Weather that’s always the same is lame, especially if it’s always inoffensive. Sure, you can use weather as specific plot points, but is it really 72 degrees and clear every other day in your campaign world when you’re not thinking about it?
I always liked the weather generation tables in the old World of Greyhawk boxed set and got a lot of mileage out of them. Then, I ran a super long campaign (5 years) that was slow-paced and simulation/roleplay intensive, and I got the idea of swiping weather from an almanac. In fact, at the time I had to use the print version of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, but now it’s online and ready for you to plunder.
How to use it? Pick a place that seems like your campaign’s location. Let’s say I think the Gran March in Greyhawk seems kinda like Lexington, Kentucky. Pick a random year (year of your birth is good) and then line up the month/season with whatever the starting season is in your game. Then just use it, day by day! So in my campaign’s locale today, it’s in the mid-sixties with some morning fog. Thunderstorms are coming next Thursday. Of course, if you need a specific kind of weather you can totally overrule it, but it keeps a very low cost sense of realism going to have realistic weather. I appreciate it even in WoW, when sometimes the rain’s just coming on down out there.
I’m ignoring most of it because I don’t like 4e, but these are of interest:
1. The new GSL is still on a collision course with nowhere. Scott Rouse is working on it but with Lidda gone, it’s not coming soon and when it does, probably won’t be significantly changed. Yay.
2. WotC may be releasing non-random minis! This would be welcome. The price and prepaint of their minis are great, the randomness not. I’ve only bought about 5 packs because of that, even though I’ve desperately wanted more from playing a summoner recently. Thought some of the commons are pretty cheap from the secondary market.
3. More and more people are relating their 4e experiences, and learning that, as I said, the new rules are not indeed streamlined, but take even longer to run a combat.
Well, Wizards is never going to get off their lawyered up asses to release a new GSL, let alone a fansite policy. But White Wolf has a new one!
I don’t usually play WW games myself. It’s not a fault of the games usually. I feel like the people out there that play White Wolf fall into three categories – the gothy goth ‘take it real seriously’ pagan types (not my crowd), the teenagers in Dr. Seuss ‘Cat in the Hat’ hats (definitely not my crowd), and the normal gamers that play WW games like they’re D&D, all about the combat no roleplay (pointless, there’s better wargames). I’d like the opportunity to do some WW gaming with normal-but-deep-RP people.
But while researching my article on RPG site Web traffic, I went to look at the WW site to see if I could figure out why their traffic has dropped off 54% in 3 months. Not sure this is the answer, but I came across their new fan site guidelines (the “Dark Pack”). They try to make them reasonable, but the resultant list of rules is a mess that will inhibit fansites substantially.
They do a good job of separating the carrot from the stick. If you do the things at the top of the page, you get to be listed in the Dark Pack links on their site, which is a good incentive-based approach. Unfortunately, this section is just “use this standard Dark Pack logo and link.”
Then once you get into the “restrictions for all sites” section it gets a lot harder.
1. No revenue of any sort – including no ads or Google Adwords – they specify that even your hoster can’t put ads or AdWords on your pages. That’s a problem. Sure, it’s WW’s “right” to be the only one making money of their content but it’s problematic when many fansites have gone over to hosted blogs or free-for-ads Web hosts. Even LiveJournal is now inserting ads into their Basic accounts. This effectively excludes lots of people who rely on free Web hosting or blogs of one stripe or another.
Did you know that you can see an estimate of any Web site’s traffic, gathered by Alexa (a subsidiary of amazon.com)? It’s just an estimate from people that have the Alexa toolbar installed, but that’s “millions” of users and it’s generally considered valid. I thought I’d run some of our favorite RPG communities through Alexa and see what happened!
Unfortunately, you can’t put JavaScript into WordPress so I can’t paste the pretty graph. But you can do it yourself and verify my findings. I thought I’d put in rpg.net, enworld.org, paizo.com, therpgsite.com, rpglife.com, wizards.com, rpgbloggers.com,and some others. The numbers are in “percent of daily reach,” which means what percent of the internet goes there on a given day. For comparison, wordpress.com is 3%. (The #1, Google, is 30%). A fraction of 1% isn’t bad – the company I work for makes tens of millions of dollars a month through its Web site and its reach is listed as .0065% (about 2 million visits per month). The results are interesting…
1. All of the RPG sites’ traffic has been dropping off badly. From July to September, the leader, wizards.com, had its estimated daily reach drop steadily from .06% to .025%. Other sites had drops too, on average all of them are off nearly 50% in 3 months! Why is this, especially during convention season? Perhaps it’s reflective that all the releases from gaming companies and all the news from the cons seems to be board game crap and not RPGs.
2. Rankings!
Below this, at traffic ranks below 100,000, Alexa says samples are low enough you can’t guarantee reliability. But, it’ll show ya numbers anyway – and I see:
No, I’m not trying to horn in on dungeon_grrrl’s turf. But I just ran across this oldie but goodie link – “Sex Advice From a Dungeons & Dragons Player“. Apparently nerve.com didn’t like that and went with cosplayer advice instead.
Do you have any D&D-oriented sex advice, or questions that need a good D&D answer? Add them below!
Back “in the day,” I built a more dynamic, chi-power fueled monk class using AD&D 2e (the current edition at the time, this was a little more than 10 years ago). I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that it largely predicted what the much-later Book of Nine Swords and other attempts at making martial classes more interesting would look like. The powers were granted pretty much just like spells, using the standard spell progression chart and being used up for the day when you use them (which made balancing the class easy). Many of the powers use “swift” or “immediate” actions, at least my early conception of them. I’m pretty proud of it – my gaming group playtested it and it was fun but balanced. Being a long time Greyhawk wonk I also put together “Monastic Orders of the Flanaess” to incorporate monkiness into Greyhawk better, which drew from Erik Mona’s Baklunish Delights articles from the Oerth Journal.
Cool but retro, why are you mentioning this, you ask? Well, suddenly (starting in about April), I’m seeing an incredible surge in traffic to that Monk class. It’s hosted on my old Mindspring Geek Related site that has Web stats for shit and I can’t see referrers so I don’t know where the traffic’s coming from. But it’s leapt way, way past the perennial favorites I host there, the Death to Jar Jar Binks Homepage and the Scooby Doo Cthulhu site (all the Scooby gang in CoC BRP stats). Like thousands of hits a month. So I thought I’d ask – anyone know where I got linked from? I’m interested to know if anyone’s using/interested in my old Monk class…
(And yes, I know how to do Google link: searches, and those never work…)
For kicks, I just took the “Dante’s Inferno Hell Test,” which I found out about from the Morbidgames blog. Yay, I ended up in Purgatory! (If you’re a gamer, you may consider the personality disorder identification quiz instead.)
| Level | Score |
|---|---|
| Purgatory (Repenting Believers) | Very High |
| Level 1 – Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers) | Low |
| Level 2 (Lustful) | High |
| Level 3 (Gluttonous) | High |
| Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious) | Very Low |
| Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy) | Low |
| Level 6 – The City of Dis (Heretics) | Very Low |
| Level 7 (Violent) | Low |
| Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers) | Low |
| Level 9 – Cocytus (Treacherous) | Low |
Anyway, this brings up an interesting question as I plan to run a cleric in our next campaign, which will be a Pathfinder Beta playtest running through the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path. Real-world moral systems have a lot of weird fiddly bits in them, but they are taken quite seriously by large numbers of people. It’s not all about “do I kill the baby orc,” but what you do with your money, what you eat, et cetera. D&D has tried hard to shed even the limited amount of this it contained (paladin poverty, etc.) over time. But in a living, breathing world, this should be part of it (I know, many of my fellow gamers, being inherently amoral, prefer a world without anyone but maybe a couple bad guys that have any kind of serious moral code… We all do a little wish fulfillment in RPGs but I’m not so into that.)
IRL, there are a host of moral rules in terms of dealing with the dead. In D&D, even party members are lucky to get a burial with their looting. The simplistic domains of most D&D deities don’t provide a lot of help – “I’m the God of Wrasslin’!” Uh, so in everyday life I…. Wrassle? I don’t know. This leads to the common stereotype of the paladin being the only guy who ever has a moral code, and his is so restrictive that it’s annoying.
One of the things that attracts me to games like Legend of the Five Rings is that they do have a strong societal code that impacts the game substantially – I guess it escaped the chopping block on the grounds that “it’s cool cause it’s Asian”.
What games have you been in that have had reasonably realistic moral codes, and how did that play out?
We may be approaching the climax of the campaign in Part III of Spires of Xin-Shalast. Valgrim calls an angel to help, and the group rolls into a devil-haunted arena to do battle… And then to the Pinnacle of Avarice to find and defeat the Runelord himself. Wave after wave of giants broke upon us and fell apart like surf upon the rocks – once, twice, three times. We slay without respite, or hesitation, or mercy. The summary ends in media res as more enemies stir in the darkness beyond the piles of cloud and storm giant carcasses. Who shall fall?!?
Posted in session summaries
Tagged 3.5e, adventure path, D&D, Pathfinder, rise of the runelords, RPG, RPGs, runelords
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