Shameful Dungeons & Dragons Characters

Posted on October 7, 2008 | 9 comments

One of my favorite genre blogs, Topless Robot, has published a list of the 5 most and least shameful Dungeons & Dragons characters! Take a look, it’s fun.

Here’s my own list of the 5 most shameful…

5) Drizzt Do’Urden.  I agree with the Topless Robot guy, he’s overexposed for sure but was lame even before that.  “Oooooh, the angst!  But I’m sexxxy!  But the angst!  I am mighty!  Pet my kitty!”  Leave it to White Wolf.

4) Elminster.  Has a more transparent Mary Sue character ever appeared in any D&D setting?  He’s old and wise!  But all the chicks want him!  He’s super powerful, and super wise, and super special, and WE LOVES HIM MY PRECIOUS!

3) Anyone from the Dungeons & Dragons movie, which mind-raped all the poor D&D fans that waited for decades for the film to finally get made.  But mainly “Snails,” the incompetent thief played by Marlon Wayans.  Snails.  Wayans.  KILL!

2) Elfstar.  Sound familiar?  That’s right, she’s the cleric (and Satanist, and Fundamentalist) from the infamous Jack Chick “Dark Dungeons” tract!  Apparently she’s a dumb twat.  Black Leaf, too.

1) Mika-Oba the Wolf Nomad.  OK, Gygax’s novel writing skills are not something to write home about, and it’s fair that Gord is on the TR shame list.  But this list is for the most, not the “pretty darn,” shameful.  Rose Estes picked up the mantle of Greyhawk novelist once TSR screwed over Gary and tossed him out into the dumpster.   And though Gygax wasn’t good, she was terrible.  Every Greyhawk fan since has pretended she didn’t exist or worse – check out the Rose Estes Hate Page for some examples of her purple prose.  Mika, with his pet wolf “Tam-Tur,” was a wuss and a rapist (and rape-ee).  And liked pooing on people, and spanking the monkey.  No, seriously.  I wish I were kidding.  He’s the worst of the worst.

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Some Random New RPG Stuff

Posted on October 5, 2008 | 3 comments

It’s slow lately in the RPG realms, but here’s a couple items of interest.

1.  The “Shaintar” high fantasy setting for Savage Worlds is now available in print!, as well as the rest of Talisman Studios‘ stuff.

2.  There’s also a new “Slipstream” pulp SF setting for Savage Worlds.  Vacuum is optional!

3.  OK, this one makes me throw up a little in my mouth, but here it is.  The guys from Evil Hat Games (Spirit of the Century) and Blue Devil Games (Dawning Star) have come together to form “One Bad Egg“, which will be generating 4e content (early release is a new race, the Apelord).  Why they want to take actual talent and spill its seed on the rocky ground of 4e is anyone’s guess.  I don’t begrudge 4e players some 4e, but I do resent that this likely means less true innovation like “Don’t Rest Your Head” and “Spirit of the Century.”  At least they’re not vainly vomiting forth gnomes and barbarians in preparation for being crushed by Wizards directly like many of these 3p companies.

4.  Starblazer Adventures, billed as “Rock and Roll Space Opera Adventure” and based on the comic series Starblazer, is out and was a hit at Gen Con.  It uses the FATE system as seen in Spirit of the Century!  <glares at the Evil Hat guys again>

5.  Along the same lines (it seems to be Space Opera Month!) I just came across a cool game, Rocketship Empires 1936.  It’s completely systemless, and described an anime fan’s dream – a WWII era pulp/space opera game.

Seems like pulp’s the big thing now – like every time I go to Erik Mona’s blog it’s babbling on about it.  Seems like a lot of motion on that era right now, space opera, pulp, and clasisc swords and sorcery.

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RPGs – Is It The End?

Posted on October 5, 2008 | 12 comments

About a month ago I did an article comparing the Web traffic of major RPG companies and communities using Alexa data.  It was interesting to see how they ranked, but of more concern was that traffic appeared to be spiraling downwards hard.  I just went and re-checked and that trend continues; over the last three months all sites are down and some sites are down by more than 70%!

What

A quick rundown on traffic change over the last 3 months –

From looking at the graphs, a couple of these properties had a big spike in the June-July timeframe that is hurting their compare.  Take a look at Palladium.  But even without that they are way down off pre-spike numbers, more than 50% easily, and continuing to decline at a good rate.

Heck, even looking through the smaller properties, the best showing is Flames Rising, only dropping by 3%.

This seems to be to be a crisis.  At the company I work for, a large computer-related manufacturing concern, we know that Web traffic is directly proportional to our company revenue over time.  If our traffic was down 50% our CFO would shit a brick.  We’re down a little due to the economy, but nothing near this amount.

Why

Why is traffic to every RPG company and community site dropping?

It’s not the school year starting, if you go look at the maximum data Alexa will give you there’s no similar drop in 2007.  Basically, everything was doing fine, slipping slightly, until June-July 2008.  Some properties got a bump then, but ever since everyone from Wizards to dungeonmastering.com is in a death spiral.

Is it “the economy?”  Well, despite all of the furor in the media (in  my opinion this is a largely manufactured crisis by the current administration, YMMV) major sites aren’t going down.  dell.com is down just 2%, for example.  You could argue that the economic problems would have a more vigorous effect especially on discretionary/entertainment spending.  But I’m not seeing that anywhere else.  Check out amazon.com‘s stats – they are down only 11%.  (They had a June bump too!)   worldofwarcraft.com is down 25%, with no June bump.  Heck, fandango.com (movie ticket sales) is up 14%.  So there is certainly some slippage overall, and you could chalk up some 10-20% of it to the economy if you wanted to (though given some of the stats I’m seeing I think that’s more excuse than reality), but why is it is much worse in the RPG realm?  Also, the dropoff has been in progress for a while and the current “economic crisis” really just got sprung on us in September.

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First Curse of the Crimson Throne “Edge of Anarchy” Session Summary Posted

Posted on October 3, 2008 | Leave a comment

Well, our gaming group completed the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path from Paizo.  It took a year of hard gaming.  But there’s no rest for the wicked!  We’re starting in on our next campaign, the next AP from Paizo – Curse of the Crimson Throne.  And we’re using the Pathfinder RPG Beta playtest rules, as it’s way better than D&D 4e.  This one starts in the city of Korvosa, with our brave characters coming together to get even with the crime lord Gaedren Lamm.  That goes well, but then the King dies and the entire city breaks out into riot and rebellion!  Thrill to our urban adventures in… Edge of Anarchy, Part I!

And as a bonus here’s my character, Annata Vieri, cleric of Sarenrae the Dawnflower.  She’s cute!!!

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Fourth “Xin-Shalast” Session Summary Posted – End Of Campaign!

Posted on September 27, 2008 | 3 comments

Part IV of Spires of Xin-Shalast tells the tale of how our brave band – myself, a dwarf entitled Valgrim the Summoner, and my human comrades – Lord Roscoe Dillon, priest of Gorum, God of War; Phiravno the Varisian scarf fighter; Maru Maru, Shoanti Sun Clan monk; Vaelyn, Shoanti Sun Clan dragon shaman; Yenneck Grumman, Ranger of the Black Arrows – ended the schemes of Kharzoug the Claimer, Runelord of Greed.  Inside his ruined capital of Xin-Shalast, indeed atop the very Runewell of Greed, we met him and withstood his arcane assault to end his life.  Golarion slumbers, safer now but largely unaware of the fate our brave heroes averted.

And so ends the Rise of the Runelords campaign, almost exactly a year to the day after we began it.  Props to Paizo Publishing for one of the best D&D campaigns ever, especially James Jacobs, Nick Logue, and Richard Pett.

But there’s no rest for the wicked!  This week, we start the next Adventure Path, Curse of the Crimson Throne, this time using the Pathfinder RPG beta rules!

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Underserved Gaming Genres 2: Crime Fiction

Posted on September 25, 2008 | 10 comments

Coming in second right after cop fiction in popular entertainment is crime fiction.  Whether it’s Mafia-oriented drama like The Sopranos, Goodfellas, or Donnie Brasco; gang oriented fiction like Colors, Sons of Anarchy, Gangs of New York, or Boyz N The Hood; heist capers like Ocean’s Eleven through Twenty-Nine or Reservoir Dogs; assassin fiction like The Professional or La Femme Nikita – it comes close to law enforcement fiction in popularity in the dramatic end of popular entertainment.  In fact, often it’s mixed in, either as “dirty cops” (The Shield) or dramas with both the law and crime side heavily represented (The Wire).  Conan was a thief, people!

You can play a gangbanger, a pirate (sea or space), a bandit, a Mafioso, an elegant art thief, a pimp, a safecracker/security expert, a prisoner, a con man…  So many of these archetypes find their way into other RPGs, but are consigned to a bit part.  Very few RPGs have any meaningful coverage of criminal activity.

What’s the Problem?

Crime fiction is just as underrepresented as cop fiction in the RPG market.  The most popular old saw trotted out as to why this may be the case is that “people want to play good guys.”  This is tripe.  Three words – Grand Theft Auto.  Playing a criminal in video games is way, way in.  From Hitman to The Suffering, the wide variety of crime fiction subgenres are well represented in video gaming and are immensely popular.

Besides, the crime genre is full of characters that are good enough that we can identify with them – though technically criminals, they are set up as at least partially honorable protagonists, often opposed to someone who’s “even worse” for some reason (more vicious criminals, corrupt cops, etc.).  In fact, the crime genre crosses over heavily with more traditional game setups where the ruling class is wicked or indifferent and thus being “good” is a crime – Midnight for d20 and SLA Industries are like that.  It is very seldom that the protagonists of crime fiction are utterly irredeemable super evil people.  You can be “wrongly convicted,” an undercover cop, the system may be corrupt, you’re just providing for your family the only way you can, it’s a culture clash, all the morals of the setting are in shades of grey… There’s any number of reasons why your criminal isn’t really a big ol’ meanie.

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Bit of ENnies Furor

Posted on September 25, 2008 | Leave a comment

The ENnies are a set of yearly RPG awards put on by ENWorld.  I usually like the results, though I did note that the results seemed a bit wonky this year.  Now there’s a bit of breaking news; one of the ENnies judges, Zachary the First, has resigned over what he feels are unfair practices re: publisher favoritism and lack of transparency.   The ENnies have responded already at the bottom of their main page.

My take – Zachary’s whole thing about podcasts is a little drama queeny but he has some good points, the best of which (lack of transparency, bending of rules for publisher favorites) the ENnies don’t respond to in their statement.  Although I am not privy to anything going on over at the ENnies, I’ve been involved in a lot of online RPG organizations and they seem to attract people who like closeted power.  I resigned as VP of the Christian Gamers Guild over similar behavior, and saw the same thing with the RPGA especially regarding how Living Greyhawk was run (I was an original Triad for the Yeomanry region).

Whether it’s at the President of the US level or the online group of like 12 people level, there’s a lot of people who like to hoard power and make back room decisions, it validates them somehow.   (Many of these people end up as forum mods somehow.)  And for every one of those, there are five people who enable them by not calling them on their BS.  So, I don’t know whether Zachary is “in the right” or not, but I like to see people willing to call shenanigans on a group even when it is not in their interest to do so (no more free games for Zach this year!).   I raise a Lone Star to you.  Fight the power!

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Underserved Gaming Genres 1: Cop Fiction

Posted on September 23, 2008 | 7 comments

In my Underserved Gaming Genres post, I said I would start going through some of the popular genres that seem perfect for RPGs but, strangely, are massively ignored by them for some reason.  The first of these, and the most underserved in my opinion – cop fiction!

Cop shows are part of our DNA.  From T.J. Hooker and Hill Street Blues to X-Files and Ghost In The Shell to The Shield and CSI, law enforcement fiction has often been at the forefront of popular entertainment.  You get to be a good guy.  You get to shoot people.  Hell, most of the goofy “what is roleplaying” intros that RPGs use cite the childhood play of “cops and robbers” (Has anyone really done that since the 1950s?).  But as RPG content, not so much.

There are some games where law enforcement is portrayed as one campaign option.  My first RPG, Star Frontiers, had a lot of people play Star Law officers, but this had very little explicit support in the game.  Then there are many games where your character might be affiliated with some law enforcement organization, but this is largely just character background and perhaps some color of authority, with the players “really” serving some other organization (Delta Green, Conspiracy X, Alternity Dark*Matter).  And of course in many RPGs you can play a character who happens to be a cop or FBI agent, but not really, like choosing some law enforcement character type in Call of Cthulhu – it’s just an archetype, no real law enforcement need apply – somehow your adventuring is always “off duty”.  But as for real cop RPGs, pickings are slim!

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Dog Soul Publishing: Welshing A-holes?

Posted on September 22, 2008 | 9 comments

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.

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Mongoose Traveller Licensing Unveiled

Posted on September 22, 2008 | 3 comments

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.

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Underserved Gaming Genres

Posted on September 21, 2008 | 6 comments

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:

  • Cop Fiction
  • Crime Fiction
  • Military Fiction

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.

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Sales and Marketing Funnel for Dummies (and RPG Authors)

Posted on September 15, 2008 | 1 comment

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.

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