Jim – Yes, THAT Jim

(The audio of this interview is available at the bottom of this post!)

JR: I am talking to author and game designer Matt Forbeck. Hello, sir!

MF: How are you doing, Jim?

JR: Good, good! Good to have you on here.

MF: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it!

JR: Of your many projects that you’ve got going on, something that I find particularly interesting as a writer is this 12 for 12 project that you’ve got going. For anyone who’s not familiar, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what that is?

MF: Sure. It’s this crazy idea I had last summer. I thought, “Hey, I write pretty quickly. I bet you I could write a novel a month.” (chuckles) Which is like this insane bar bet. And you know, it may have come up at Gen Con, actually last year – the gaming convention.

JR: Oh yeah?

MF: And I looked at it and I thought, you know, I’d love to do that, actually. I think it’d be a lot of fun. I think I could certainly do it. The trouble is that I also have a lot of other gigs that I do as a freelance writer. Like I write the Magic: the Gathering comic book for IDW. And I have a few other things: computer games, toy work, a novel – Carpathia – coming out at the end of the month here from Angry Robot. So I didn’t think I could give all that up and I didn’t want to give all that up, right?

JR: Yeah.

MF: So, I thought, “Let me trim this down a little bit and instead of writing like 80,000 word novels, which is what I usually go for, I’ll try writing 50,000 word novels, which will give me a little bit more breathing room.” And I decided to launch that program back in last November as a Kickstarter and said, “Look, hey guys, I really want to do this but I need to be able to eat so I’d like to basically take preorders for these books. And we’ll do some special editions. There’ll be autographed and hard covers and soft covers and things like that for people who are interested, and you can sign up for a high pledge and get your name in the book or create a character or something like that.” And it did pretty well. It started in November and ended on December 4^th and we ended up racking up something over $13,000 for the first three novels. And I’m currently – just about a week and a half ago, launched the second Kickstarter for the second trilogy of novels. And that’s already up just shy of $5000 at the moment, I believe.

JR: That is awesome. As someone who has tried NaNoWriMo and just sitting there – and I’m still at like 30,000 words from last November…

MF: (chuckles)

JR:  …when I saw this project I was like, “Is he insane?!” (chuckles)

MF: Well you know, I’m a full time writer, right? This is my day job. I look at my daily word count and I know I can do this, right? Back before I had a whole bunch of kids as a full-time freelance role-playing game designer I would write regularly 5000 words a day. Since the kids came along they cut into my writing time a little bit so I’m down to about 3000 words a day. But on good days I get to the 5-6,000 words.

JR: That is very cool, and I think anyone who’s aspiring towards being a writer full time is definitely going to try to hit that goal.

MF: Well, now if you’re getting paid by the word, generating more words helps. They all have to be quality words, mind you.

JR: (laughs) That’s true.

MF: They have to be publishable words. But being able to generate them quickly – and after you’ve been doing it for some 10-20 years you do get quite a little bit quicker at it.

JR: Very cool, very cool. So the first trilogy you already mentioned is already funded.

MF: Yes.

JR: And that was for your Brave New World novels.

MF: Yes.

JR: And why don’t you tell us a little bit about those?

MF: Yeah, that’s based on a role-playing game – not the Aldous Huxley novel. The original quote for Brave New World comes from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” actually, where Miranda, who’s the daughter of the wizard Prospero, sees a man washed up on the shore of their private island – for the first time in her life she’s ever seen anybody but her father. And she looks up at this handsome guy who’s about to become her love interest and she says, “Oh brave new world, that has such people in it.” And I thought that was perfect for a superhero role-playing game. So, back in 1999 I came out with a superhero role-playing game called Brave New World through Pinnacle Entertainment Group and it was later published by Alderac Entertainment Group, or AEG. And it’s been basically lying fallow for the last ten years or so. We did about eight or nine different books in the line and then cut it off. But we’ve had some people over at Reactor 88 Studios working on doing an independent film based on it. And I said, “Geez, you know, we’ve got this good fan base of game players out there and we’ve got a lot of people who are interested in my writing. Let’s see what happens if we cross the streams and combine them for this first set of trilogies.” And so far it seems to be going pretty well. For me it’s a lot of fun because I get to return to this world that I spent a lot of time and effort creating a dozen years ago.

JR: Yeah.

MF: And the fans seem to really be enjoying it so far, too.

JR: Can you actually tell us anything about how the movie’s going?

MF: Yeah. It’s currently on hiatus. We got a proof of concept video made which is about five to eight minutes long – I forget. It depends on which edit you look at. And basically the first eight pages of the role playing game are a comic book, and we took those and filmed those. And then we have a screenplay that follows it off after that and tells you what’s going to happen in the world. But we filmed the proof of concept hoping to go out and find funding for the rest of the movie. The problem is that being an over-the-top, high-action role-playing game with superheroes in it, this is not a cheap movie to make, right? (chuckles)

JR: (chuckles) Yeah, I can imagine.

MF: So, you know, we went back to the – well I mean we actually are now working on a couple of different movies, one of which is InSpectres, which is based on the role-playing game by Jared Sorensen.

JR: That is such an awesome game.

MF: Yeah!

JR: I really enjoy it.

MF: Oh, we got a kick out of it. We love that stuff. I love Jared’s stuff from way back, actually. And so we have a screenplay that I and a guy named Jeff Dohm worked on that actually was shot last year and is currently in post-production, so that’ll be out some time later this year. And the idea there again is to prove to people with money that we have a team of people who can make these kind of movies and make them do well. And then hopefully use that as a means of leveraging funding out of people so we can make a bigger movie later on.

JR: Excellent. I wish you the best of luck with that because I really want to see these movies! (chuckles)

MF:  The InSpectres one is a boatload of fun and I honestly think this kind of slacker ghostbuster thing is a lot easier to shoot on a shoestring budget than you would expect.

JR: Let’s move on to your second trilogy, which is – as of this recording – still being funded.

MF: Yes.

JR: So the Kickstarter is still open for it. That’s the Shotguns & Sorcery novels. And why don’t you tell us a little bit about those?

MF: Yeah, people have until March 11^th to get in on this Kickstarter. And just go to kickstarter.com or go to my web site at forbeck.com and you can find out about it. But it’s based on a setting called Shotguns & Sorcery that I originally developed as, again, a role-playing game setting for Mongoose Publishing back in about 2001. But then my wife got pregnant with quadruplets and that kind of shattered everything to hell as far as getting that done. (chuckles) So I never actually got very far beyond the notes and selling it to Mongoose. And the rights reverted back to me. I said, “Geez, I’ve had this idea sitting around for a long time. I’d love to get back to this! It’s a lot of fun.” It’s kind of this noir-ish fantasy setting in this city called the Dragon City which is on the coast of this continent that’s basically overtaken by undead and other types of zombies. The city basically has a dragon emperor who controls the entire place and protects the people from the dead. But it’s striated – as you go up the mountain you get more and more powerful people. Like the orcs live at the bottom and the humans and the halflings live about a quarter of the way up, then you have the dwarves, then you have the elves, and then you have the dragon, who sits up top. So it’s got this great Chandler-esque, Hammett-esque kind of noir going on, but in a fantasy setting, right?

JR: Yeah, that is very cool. I really love that mashup. I was actually just last night – I was looking at Goblintown Justice, the short story that you’ve put out.

MF: Yes, that’s available for free for anybody who wants to read it, of course.

JR: As soon as I got to the part where you’re using flying carpets as taxis, I was totally sold on it.

MF: Yeah, I think that’s such a great image, you know.

JR: Yeah!

MF: It’s like I can flag down a flying carpet, you know. “Oh! Yeah, okay!” Suddenly you know exactly where you are – even if you’ve never seen this before.

JR: I love both genres and just the whole mixing of them – the sweet and sour effect – is very cool there, I really like that.

MF: Thank you.

JR: So folks again have until March 11^th if they want to get in on that.

MF: The way it works is – what I did was I set a very low goal for the first book in the trilogy and then we try to see if we can hit stretch goals where we can unlock the second and third books in the trilogy. So right now we shattered the first one very quickly, I think in 32 hours. And now we’re stretching out to see if we can get the second book unlocked and then the third book unlocked. And usually this has me chewing my nails right until the last second. (laughs)

JR: (laughs)

MF: But it’s good fun and you know, usually what happens is you have this big spike at the beginning, and then it kind of levels out in the middle. And then in the last week everybody says, “Oh! Oh! Oh! I’ve got to do that or I’m going to forget it!” And then it spikes up again. And you know, the trouble of course is during that middle period you’re always sitting there going, “I hope the spike comes! I hope the spike comes!”

JR: (laughs) Yeah, totally! Totally. Well, let us hope that that happens! Can you tell us anything about the remaining two trilogies you have planned?

MF: Well, I can tell you a little bit. The fourth one I’m not quite sure about yet. I’m actually contemplating a set of thrillers for the next one that are more modern-day stuff. And for the fourth one I’m thinking either science fiction or maybe some combination of three individual one-shot books. So I’m going back and forth between them. Those are still a little bit off for me. Actually I have a really good idea for the thrillers that’s going to set them apart from everything else but I’m not quite ready to announce it yet.

JR: Cool, well we’re looking forward to that, then. And just looking over your Coming Soon list on your web site here, you’ve got – to put it mildly – quite a few plates in the air.

MF: Yeah.

JR: But I noticed that you have here – and you also mentioned that at the end of the month you’ve got a novel called Carpathia coming out. What’s that about?

MF: The 100^th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is coming up on April 15^th and the ship that picks up the survivors of the Titanic was called the Carpathia. And the Carpathia, of course, is also named after a set of mountains that ring part of Transylvania and is actually the mountain range in which Castle Dracula sits. So the connection here is: what happens if the ship that picks up the Titanic survivors is actually full of vampires on their way back to Europe?

JR: (laughs) That’s awesome.

MF: What kind of hell comes out of that? (chuckles)

JR: (laughs) I think that qualifies as irony.

MF: (laughs) Yeah, I mean my publisher is like, “The lucky ones went down with the ship.”

JR: (laughs) Yeah.

MF: You want to be respectful because this is a real disaster, right? I mean, it’s been 100 years, so that means we can play with it a little bit. But I mean there were a lot of people who died in this, but I’m taking care to be very respectful of the actual real-life individuals. And I concoct a lot of – obviously – fabricated vampires and such to battle it out with each other. So it’s good fun.

JR: That’s excellent. Is there anything else you’d like to mention before we go?

MF: Well, I do also have the Magic: the Gathering comic book I’m doing for IDW, and that’s coming out. The next issue will be on February 29^th.

JR: Is that based in like their core world or is there a separate world?

MF: It kind of jumps around. It starts out in Ravnica. They don’t have really one core world, but the first issue starts out in Ravnica and from there it goes to Innistrad, which is where the current block is. It’s a kind of horror-themed block. And from there – I shouldn’t probably reveal where it’s going to go from there quite yet.

JR: Okay.

MF: But it’s a four-issue miniseries for that. And then they just announced that we’re going to be doing a second four-issue miniseries starting in the month after that.

JR: That sounds like a lot of fun.

MF: Yeah, let’s hope we can keep rolling on with them.

JR: Well, now if folks want to find you online – you and your various projects – where should they go?

MF: Go to forbeck.com. That’s F-O-R-B-E-C-K dot com. And I try to keep it updated fairly regularly.

JR: I’ve been there. There is a lot of stuff on there and it is all very awesome. Thanks very much for talking to us!

MF: Thanks for talking to me, Jim. I really appreciate it!

JR: Thank you, take care.

MF: You too.

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Music by Kevin MacLeod

(The audio of this interview is available at the bottom of this post!)

JR: I am talking to Eloy Lasanta of Third Eye Games and we’re going to be talking about his game Part-Time Gods. Welcome, sir!

EL: Hello everyone!

JR: First off, for anyone who might not be familiar, tell us a little bit about the game Part-Time Gods.

EL: The game Part-Time Gods is where you play characters who are just regular people who have been imbued with the powers of gods. And you are given this huge amount of divine responsibility that you then must go and enact. And there’s a certain amount of juggling that has to be done – as in, you have to juggle your real life versus your divine responsibilities, and going and trying to obtain power is actually the same thing as leaving your mortal life behind. And it’s a fun kind of balancing game that Part-Time Gods has become.

JR: Let’s talk a little bit about the Source. What’s that?

EL: The Source – oh, the Source is the entity within the setting that has released the energy that then produces what a god actually is. Way back in the day the gods actually sealed it away and found a way to kind of siphon its power and it has now recently erupted again and it’s trying to escape. And that’s why now, in the game, there’s a big surge of a lot more gods popping up in the modern day – very suddenly, and it’s because the Source is trying to come back. So you might just be walking down the street – all of a sudden, you get hit with this immense power and you find out that you’re the God of Sidewalks or whatever. And then all of a sudden you have this giant Cyclops coming after you at that point and it’s like, “Wait! What’s going on here?!” And it’s very much about that. It’s very much about a regular person – what if a regular person was put in these types of situations?

JR: So I guess the primary conflict… well, it’s that you have two different layers of conflict, which – let’s talk about that a second. I find that very interesting that you’ve got both the supernatural conflicts and then the mundane conflicts that you have to deal with. I’m curious how you weave that together in the game.

EL: Well, very… very awesomely, I’d like to think.

JR: It sounds it!

EL: (chuckles) The divine conflicts are mostly between the gods, themselves. So a lot of it is god-on-god. You and your other people in your group – they are the pantheon that rules that area. And a lot of the game is contingent upon the pantheon getting along, maybe doing things to countermand each other – kind of like how gods used to be back in the day. Also other gods coming in to try and take your territory or even if you and your group want to go and try and expand into other gods’ territory, you can do that as well. But the way that the game works and how it kind of interweaves the mundane and the divine is you create what are called Bonds during character creation for your character. And these are the things in their life that link them to their humanity, which link them to being a regular person. And as these things come under fire or get damaged, they then start to take on some of the worst aspects of humanity, basically. And then they start to kind of drift away from being a regular person and more into becoming a god. The reason for this is because it’s more to reflect kind of what the gods of myth all kind of represent. You know, and it was Hera – at one time – was a very motherly deity.

JR: Yeah.

EL: And then she was consumed with jealousy and hatred and all of these things, and these are very real things that can happen to your character – where, you know, it’s no longer the love of your wife that starts to motivate you, it’s the hatred for this thing. And it starts to become a balance of you becoming less caring about the things that a human would care about.

JR: How do you set up the mechanics in a game like this? What are the mechanics like?

EL: The mechanics for this game actually follow the DGS Lite, which is a slightly lighter version than the classic DGS – Dynamic Gaming System – which I created for my other two games, Apocalypse Prevention, Inc. and Wu Xing: The Ninja Crusade. And this one is broken down a little bit more, but just like the classic DGS it only uses a single d20 and it uses difficulties from 10, 20, 30 and up to 40. And you can go higher as you get more and more powerful but 40 is usually about the max that a starting character can actually get to. It’s a simple – roll a d20, add your attributes plus skills plus applicable modifiers and see what you roll and then see what happens. It works really nicely and the playtests for Part-Time Gods have come back and everybody’s very happy with the results so far.

JR: Okay, that’s very cool. And part of what I guess I was wondering when you were talking about that was if there was any sort of mechanic that had been put in there specifically to represent that whole balancing act.

EL: You know, when you get your Bonds, you have to have actually built them and they get numbers to represent the strength of the Bond. And these numbers are counterbalanced with the strength of your divine Spark. And the more powerful that your Spark becomes, you’ll eventually have to start giving up some of your Bonds or weakening the ones that you have.

JR: That is very cool. I really like that idea because it’s just so often that you see in RPGs where people seem to have superpowers of some kind with absolutely no consequences for wielding them.

EL: Exactly.

JR: That is very good. So where did you get the idea for this game?

EL: It came from me watching a TV show called Dead Like Me, and I was watching the show I mean, like, “You know, that would be really interesting. What if it wasn’t just grim reapers? What if they were just a collection of gods? What if they were a pantheon who sat in a coffee shop just talking about baseball? It kind of became the idea of these very mundane things where basically being a god isn’t what it’s really cracked up to be.

JR: Yeah.

EL: Being a god is actually more of a hassle than, you know, “I’m a divine person and I ought to go on mythic quests!” No, sometimes it’s like, “You know what, I really would just like to go home and eat dinner with my wife but I can’t do that because I have to go get this goblet from the Fire.”

JR: (laugs) “Sorry, I’m going to be late for dinner, honey. I’m fighting Titans this evening.”

EL: Exactly. That’s kind of where the humor of the game also comes out. Anything that I write has to have at least a little bit of humor. I don’t have it in me to write a completely serious thing. So yeah, it has to have a little bit of humor and that’s kind of the tone that Part-Time Gods is taking.

JR: There have been one or two other games that try to do something similar – I believe Scion is one of the bigger ones – and so the question would be what really separates Part-Time Gods from something like that?

EL: When you play Scion, first of all the power levels get ridiculously wonky as soon as you are not like a starting character. And so, I mean, there’s that. The whole thing about Scion was you aren’t really a regular person. You’re the child of a god and you have to go and you fight things that are just destroying everything and you are super-powerful and you eventually become a god yourself and travel and will join the pantheon and stuff. And Part-Time Gods actually leaves a lot of what you would expect from a quote-unquote “god game” behind and I’m trying to really kind of take a new angle at it. The other game that tried this was Nobilis, but then Nobilis is more of a – like you are a concept. Like you’re not a God of Death, you ARE Death. You’re not a God of Enlightenment, you ARE Enlightenment. And that’s why there’s no dice and whatever.

JR: More sort of anthropomorphic personifications rather than gods.

EL: Yeah, yeah. Like it gets kind of weird. And what I tried to do is I read up on both of the games and I’m trying to hit a nice balance between the two. When I say that you can be the god of fill-in-the-blank, you really can.

JR: Whenever I actually get around to playing this game I now have a terrible urge to play the God of Fill-In-the-Blank.

EL: “I am the God of Mad Libs!”

JR: Yes! “I can take any concept and replace it with another concept!”

EL: You know, if I was actually going to be the God of Mad Libs I would just make it sound like you’re saying ridiculous things.

JR: Yes, exactly!

EL: And you have no clue you’re saying it, but everyone else is hearing you saying ridiculous things.

JR: That would be so cool.

EL: It would be hilarious. I try and gear people away from that sort of thing when in the character creation (chuckles).

JR: (chuckles)

EL: You know, there really should not be a Goddess of Cheese or Jeff, the God of Tacos. There really shouldn’t be these types of things. Gods should be like big, mythic, flashy things. You know, like you really don’t need a God of Sidewalks.

JR: Well, the sidewalks aren’t going to go on existing by themselves, are they?!

EL: I mean it’s gonna happen, but I’m just saying… (chuckles)

JR: (laughs)

EL: I try to give people a way…

JR: Doing what tiny amount of damage control you can get in at this point?

EL: Exactly. I also give tons of examples so I try to cover all my bases and – giving lots and lots of examples of different things that you can do with the power sets and stuff like that. So, I’m hoping it goes off well.

JR: One of the interesting things about this project is the way that you’re funding it. You actually have set up a Kickstarter campaign for it. So what led you to decide you wanted to do that?

EL: You know, I actually hadn’t heard about Kickstarter until a friend of mine actually mentioned it and they said, “I saw this kickstarter for Do.” And I’m like, “What’s a kickstarter?” So, they sent me a link to this game called Do and it’s pretty cool, and I went ahead and contributed to that and I started thinking about what I could do. And I like the setup. It reminds me of back in the day when the kings would become a patron to an artist and would take an artist under their wing and pay their room and board and make sure that they had all the materials they had and everything. Then like the king gets to say, “I found this artist and look at all of the wonderful things that I have allowed him to do!” It kind of reminds me of that, only instead of a nobleman, it’s all of the fans. All of the fans get to let me make a game for them. It’s a really fun concept and a fun way of approaching it versus the, “I’m going to release a game and I hope people like it.” You know, it’s more of a, “Hey, here’s what I’m doing! If you are interested in this type of thing, preorder.” Because basically I’m using it as a preorder but I’m also giving lots of incentives, T-shirts, stuff like that. Trying to make sure that anybody who does give to the kickstarter is gonna get their money’s worth for helping up front.

JR: It’s an interesting thing because you feel kind of like you’re a part of the project…

EL: Yeah!

JR: …when you contribute to it.

EL: And I’ve even gone through and I’ve started taking some chances on a couple of smaller projects to see if they go through. You know, and that’s kind of the thing, is – Kickstarter isn’t guaranteed. If you don’t make enough money then…

JR: Yeah.

EL: …it all kind of falls through and then whatever. But if you hit your goal, then it’s awesome!

JR: As of this recording, you’ve still got a bit over a month left if anyone wants to go on and contribute to this project. I think it’s really cool and I’m looking forward to playing it – I really want to play this game. So I really encourage folks to do that. Before we sign off here and we give information for people who want to go and check that out, is there anything else that you’ve got going on you want to give any quick little plugs for?

EL: Yeah, most definitely! The newest sourcebook for Wu Xing: the Ninja Crusade, my second game line of warring clans of ninja, just dropped its first sourcebook and it already has a 10 out of 10 review. So if you guys are waiting for a review, it’s got a perfect review on RPGnet so yay! Just got that today – so happy about that. And the newest sourcebook for Apocalypse Prevention, Inc., which is Demon Codex: Spectrals just dropped a couple of months ago. And it’s getting also very good reviews, so if you’re a fan of Apocalypse Prevention, Inc., don’t forget to go get that thing.

JR: Cool, awesome. I actually have some friends in a gaming group that I think are wanting to try out API sometime soon, so there may be more of that happening.

EL: (chuckles) Well, and we’re also working on an API: Savage Worlds Edition.

JR: Oh, cool!

EL: …which I’m really, really hoping that I can get out by GenCon. I’m REALLY, really hoping that we can. (chuckles) It’s hitting all of its playtest marks so it’s looking like there should be no issue, however it COULD not make it, but I’m really, really hoping it does.

JR: Nice! Me too, that sounds great. Savage Worlds obviously being a system I’m a lot more familiar with, so… (chuckles) That always makes me happy.

EL: Savage Worlds is a setting that I kind of fell in love with from the first time that I played it. And you know it has a different flavor from the Dynamic Gaming System that I designed, but both are really fun ways to play. So, API: Savage Worlds Edition – we’ve been working really hard to make sure that it keeps the feel that the DGS has, but reflecting in Savage Worlds rules and it’s coming along VERY nicely.

JR: Yeah, Savage Worlds is moldable enough that you can do a lot of different things with it.

EL: Most definitely.

JR: So that’s always very cool that that’s working out. So if anyone wanted to go online to find you or your site or the Part-Time Gods project, where would they go?

EL: Well, the Part-Time Gods project is primarily on Kickstarter. If you just go to search and hit “part time” it’s gonna come up, it’s gonna be the first one. Our web site is thirdeyegames.net. I also have a blog and that’s eloythesaint.com.

JR: Excellent. Well, I urge everyone out there to go and check it out. And thanks very much for coming and talking to me. I appreciate it!

EL: Thanks, Jim.

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I’ve been playing a ridiculous amount of World of Warcraft lately.

I’m sure if a cyber-cop pulled me over on the Information Superhighway and gave me a virtual breathalyzer test I’d be several points over the legal WoW limit.

Why am I so captivated?  What is it about this game that’s got me wondering if I need to join a 12-step program?

When he's not busy fighting for the Horde, Gorbirian likes to kick back and do some bass fishing.

Is it the Immersion?

Have I begun to slip heedlessly into a fantasy world and lost all sense of reality?  Nah, probably not.  I’m more of what one would call a “casual gamer.”  I understand the fear of entering a game world and feeling as though one is more a part of it than one’s own life.  That’s often the kind of problem one sees in science fiction stories about people entering virtual reality and losing all sense of self.  But the truth of the matter is that World of Warcraft is pretty cool, but the Matrix it’s not.  Heck, even the Matrix MMO wasn’t.  Besides, I don’t have all that much of a sense of reality to lose in the first place.

Is it the Simplicity?

World of Warcraft is very easy to play.  The controls are easy to learn.  There’s very little in the way of resource management (aside from how much space you have in the bags you carry around to stuff quest items, fishing poles, alchemy bottles and magical pairs of pants into).  You receive instructions, get pointed in a direction and usually go off to either kill things or pick things up off the ground – sometimes both.  Not a lot of thought is required.  If you want to interact with other players, you can, but recent updates to the game mean that you don’t really have to socialize if you’d rather go solo.  I must admit that the game’s convenience factor is a pretty big deal.  The fact that I don’t have to devote a lot of time to it means that I end up… devoting a lot of time to it.

The world of Azeroth. As you can see, there's a high pressure system currently moving in on southeastern Kalimdor and a Level 6 Maelstrom in the vicinity of the Lost Isles, so goblin commuters are urged to proceed with caution.

Is it the Potential?

One of the major draws for me with games like World of Warcraft is not what you can do with it, but what you COULD do with it.  Azeroth is a huge, new, shiny, undiscovered world (okay, maybe a bit less shiny since the Cataclysm) and I haven’t visited every single corner of it yet.  I’m one of those obsessive bastards who tries to see ALL of a game’s available content.  Some of it – like, say, any given dungeon – requires you to team up with other players, which is something I don’t usually have a lot of time for, but I still feel a need to keep quests involving said content on my to-do list.  Even though it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever get to them.  If you add to that the fact that they’re regularly updating the game with MORE shiny, new things, you can see that this game may be holding my attention for a very long time.

Is it the Adventure Gaminess?

Back in the crazy, carefree days of the 1980’s, we had these things called “adventure games.”  Among my favorites were the games in the Quest For Glory series.  These were games in which you had a character with RPG-like stats and the freedom to have him wander around, fight monsters and explore different plot threads.  The developers at one time had an idea to make it into an online game, but that plan never came to fruition.  World of Warcraft seems, to me, to be the closest thing to what they had been hoping to do.  So maybe I play it as a way of trying to recapture my youth – which I’m told is much safer and cheaper than the usual method of buying a muscle car and treating every road as though it’s the Daytona Speedway.

But, anyway…

My gnomish wizard, Map. He's currently working on a degree in Engineering.

I think that if I try to be brutally honest with myself, World of Warcraft – or any other MMO, for that matter – is, more than anything, an excuse to listen to a bunch of podcasts.  I like the game music and only listened to it while playing at first, but as soon as I got comfortable enough with the game that it didn’t require my full concentration, I started playing podcasts in the background instead.  MMOs and podcasts can make an awesome combination.  I’ve already blogged about my deep podcast affliction, so I won’t go into detail about it here.  But I think it’s interesting that I’ve essentially got two addictions that feed into each other.  If one desperate need wanes, the other will always be there to drag me back to my plush Obsession Suite in the Junkie Hotel overlooking Dependence City.  Lucky me.

All kidding aside, though, I’ve gone several months at a time without playing WoW, and if my schedule requires it, I’ll go cold turkey once again.  I’ve done it voluntarily before – most recently when I hit a point in the game at which I felt I couldn’t progress further on my own and decided to just park my characters in a corner and wait for the Cataclysm.  And, lo and behold, when the Cataclysm happened, there was enough new content to pull me back in.  I’m not sure what it says about me that it takes a near-apocalypse to garner my interest these days, but that’s another topic entirely.

To return to somewhere in the general vicinity of the point, I’m sure that what with all the various things I’ve got going on my life, sooner or later I’ll need to take another break from WoW.  It will be a sad day indeed but I’ll find some way to survive.  After all, there’s always City of Heroes.

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(The audio of this interview is available at the bottom of this post!)

When I went to ConCarolinas this year I got a chance to sit down and talk to Joel Kinstle, VP of Pinnacle Entertainment Group, the makers of Deadlands and Savage Worlds.  The interview was for one of the shows I do on War Pig Radio and we talked mostly about the Savage Worlds Showdown rules – and tapioca!  Here’s the interview in full.

JR: I’m here at ConCarolinas and I’m talking to Joel Kinstle, who is Vice President of Pinnacle Entertainment Group!

JK: Well hello, folks!

JR: Greetings, sir!  And the specific thing that I wanted to talk about today is the Showdown rules, skirmish rules for Savage Worlds, because I don’t think that gets very much attention.

JK: Well that’s kind of sad.  They’re actually very nice rules and, special bonus: they’re free!

JR: Yeah, that’s always the really awesome thing.  You guys are giving things away left and right.  It’s like, every time I go to the web site, they’re giving away more stuff and I’m like, “I hope they can stay in business!” (laughs)

JK: That’s because we love our fans so much and are such foolish business people that we’re desperate for milk for our children.  All donations are welcome!

JR: (laughs) Awesome.  Just for those who may not be familiar, how do the skirmish rules differ from the regular RPG rules in general?

JK: The skirmish rules differ from the regular RPG rules in general in that they focus pretty much on the mechanical aspects and tabletop use.  All the Hindrances and most of the social Edges that you might run across tend to be washed out or transmuted into something that would apply on the tabletop.  Some of the Edges that tend toward being social or like a quirk that may be in how you play a character get defined mechanically in a way that you can repeat on a tabletop setting.  That doesn’t really make for a good role playing experience, but the role playing experience does not translate at all directly to a pure minis game.

JR: How many different Showdown settings do you have out right now?

JK: The Showdown rules, themselves, the 2.0 version, are somewhat recent.  Probably out for about five months or so…?

JR: Okay.

JK: But, my brain’s something like tapioca, so you’re gonna have to take that with a… well, grain of tapioca.

JR: I know the feeling.

JK: (chuckles) But, what we have out right now for them is… we have a couple of scenarios that are not really so much setting-specific on the web.  We have Raid on Fort 51, which is a Deadlands-specific scenario.  It’s really more of a mini-campaign.  It’s a series of engagements that things change for one engagement based on what happened in the prior engagement, and the force makes changes a little bit as the story unfolds and that’s a product for sale on the web site.  We’ve got a Weird War II scenario that will be coming out on the web site hopefully soon.  I’m not sure what will be the next piece out but it can be easily suited to any of the settings.  If you could’ve played it in Savage Worlds, you can play it with Savage Showdown.

JR: That’s cool.  Now, I remember Rippers started as a Showdown setting, didn’t it?

JK: Well, for the history of Showdown – for those folks who remember The Great Rail Wars, which was the minis version of Deadlands – Deadlands Classic – that was the game that’s kind of turned into the Savage Worlds game itself.

JR: Yeah.

JK: And so, distilling it back down to minis only wasn’t so tough since a lot of that had really already been done.  But with prior rules and trying to get everything balanced out there was still some work to do to it.  So, the minis game that came of Deadlands Classic turned into Savage Worlds, which produced, of course, Deadlands: Reloaded. (chuckles) So really, it’s all very much related.  There’s a lot of similarities amongst it all.  Rippers: The Horror Wars was sort of a Great Rail Wars or Showdown-ification of the Rippers setting.  There’s nothing out there right now for Showdown 2.0 that is in the Rippers setting, but that’s a setting that’s rife with stuff that can be turned into Showdown.

JR: Well, it seems to me that virtually any setting, because of how simple Savage Worlds is… and by simple I mean easy to play with!

JK: I know what you mean!

JR: (chuckles) It seems to me that any setting – any of your settings could easily be converted over to a Showdown setting.

JK: Oh, they really could.  But what you don’t tend to have is a lot of the social, discussion, investigation.  Because at that point you’ve turned it into a me-versus-you or us-versus-them fight game.  Which I’m not about to say is a bad idea!  There’s a lot to be said for sitting down and going, “You know, that boy needs to die.”  And putting him down.  There’s a LOT to be said.

JR: Well yeah, sometimes you’ve just gotta go bust some heads.  But, er… I know that there was probably another question in there… floating around in my melon and I… have to now fish for it…

JK: You may borrow some of my tapioca. (chuckles)

JR: Ah, thank you!  I appreciate it!  Mmm… delicious Brain Tapioca… (chuckles)

JK: For the younger folks out there, tapioca used to be a form of pudding that only old people like me and my father ate.

JR: (laughs) I remember tapioca!  We used to have that served to us in my grade school cafeteria, and that’s probably…  I’m going to try to blame the fact that I can’t remember my next question on the fact that I was served tapioca as a child somehow…

JK: I will admit that I’m wandering very far afield here, but when I was in elementary school our lunch ladies tended to like to make homemade chocolate pudding, which was great!  The pudding was excellent.  But they really did make homemade-cooked pudding, so they would always end up with this not quite inch-thick layer of skin on the top that they would pull off, cut into squares and give to children who wanted it.  And there were FIGHTS for that stuff, man.

JR: Wow.

JK: There is no accounting for the taste of children.  But since I never had it, in full fairness I can’t claim it was horrible.

JR: (groans) I can’t imagine – just the…  They get into fights over pudding skin in a school cafeteria… I think…

JK: I grew up in a rural area. (chuckles)

JR: Well, you know that actually…  You’re talk about kids getting into fights in a school cafeteria over pudding skins.  That… You may be coming up right now with a possible new Showdown setting.

JK: That could EASILY be a Showdown scenario!  Special bonus points if you dunk the nerdy kid straight head-first into the pot.

JR: That would be great! (laughs) Well, let’s see…  Is there anything that you can tell us that we might look for in the future at some point with respect to the Showdown rules?

JK: The Showdown rules are broad and kind of all-inclusive and occasionally when you try and use the building tools to simulate a specific setting very closely, you can run into a few points mismatches.  You can produce something that just seems like, “X seems more powerful than Y, but really, shouldn’t Y cost less, I mean something’s wrong here…”  They’re kind of rare, but when you’re trying to pin something down PRECISELY, if you’ve got that persnickety feel that you know exactly how that setting ought to go, it can go a little bit around it.  And one of the things we’re considering doing is making setting-specific packages for Showdown.  Like, perhaps – and this is pure speculation – perhaps repackaging an actual Great Rail Wars-specific set of Showdown bits.

JR: That would be cool!

JK: Or something like that for some of the other settings.  I would say the ones most prone to having so much combat that you’d want to do that for would be Great Rail Wars and the Weird Wars lines.  What I CAN promise, though, for sure, are more actual Showdown scenarios that’ll be up on the web site and maybe some more freebies for it as well.

JR: Awesome.  Well, believe it or not – perhaps it was the ingestion of tapioca, I don’t know – but my brain has returned to me the question I wanted to ask.

JK: Oh, so we’re getting to the ambush part of the interview, is that it?

JR: Potentially, potentially.

JK: You can’t prove I was there, I tell you!

JR: Ah ha!  I’d like you to look at these photos and tell me your immediate reaction…

JK: Never seen that girl before in my life.

JR: Wait… those are the wrong photos… never mind.  (chuckles) ANYWAY.  Well, one of the questions I wanted to ask is have you had a chance to play the skirmish rules at all at any point?

JK: A little bit.  I’ve honestly not played a whole lot of them myself because when I have gamer buddies handy, they tend to be handy in big “we wanna role play” clumps.  I don’t tend to have the occasional gamer buddy show up and just want to blow stuff up.

JR: Ahhh.

JK: If they’re mad, they just want to blow stuff up, they don’t come looking to me. (laughs) I’m not sure exactly what that says but it tends to be true.

JR: (laughs) Well, you know, yeah…  I was gonna ask what you think your favorite setting might be for use with the Showdown rules?

JK: My favorite setting…  One thing I’d really like to see done in Showdown rules which I think would be very nifty – and now that you’ve brought it up I think I may have to set somebody to it – is some material for Sticks and Stones.  Sticks and Stones had come out as a minis game a long time ago and we’ve reproduced it in a different format.  Last year it came out as a card game.  The actual role playing game is in the works.  So, yes, I’m sure somebody out there will have an “Ooga Booga” stat, but… (chuckles) or perhaps it’s a skill, I’m not quite sure.  It’s not finished yet.  But having some scenarios for Sticks and Stones I think would be a lot of fun.

JR: I’d love to see that.  That would be great.  If people want to come and find your products and they’re roving about online, where do they go?

JK: They would go to the Pinnacle home page, which is www.peginc.com.

JR: Thanks very much!

JK: Any time, happy to help.

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Hey, folks!

Just in case anyone might still be wondering, no, I was NOT really hacked!  That last blog entry was a promo.  So, no need to worry about that!

Just wanted to record a quick update and let you know that I shall be conspicuously absent for the next few days because I am going to ICC.

What’s ICC?

Why, the International Camarilla Conclave! (Or, in layman’s terms, “the big meeting of all of the people who are in that pretending-to-be-vampires club that I’m in.”)  So, I’m afraid no new journal entries until after this weekend, but just wanted to give you the heads-up on that and record at least a tiny little something so that you know I am, in fact, still around and desire to continue to produce content for ya!

Take care, folks.  See you later!

——————————-

Um…

Looks like some last minute issues came up and it turns out I will not be going after all.

So.  Feel free to ignore everything I just said.

Ha ha ha ha… ha.  Ha.

Right.  As you were!

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Here’s a question that comes up from time to time when I’m playing role-playing games.  Is it better for your character to have a mechanical advantage on its character sheet or to have a non-mechanical advantage gained through role-playing with NPCs and interacting with the plot?

I realize that with a question of that level of complexity the immediate reaction is probably, “Wha… huh?”  So, let’s break this down and analyze it a bit.  There are a couple of types of gamers that personify the extreme end of each option: the Grinder and the Showboat.

1: The Grinder

In the lingo of MMORPG players, a “grinder” is someone who goes out and kills things repeatedly just to get the experience necessary to level up.  This term has mutated a little and drifted over to tabletop, where it refers to a player who’s only interested in gaining more and more of a mechanical and tactical advantage – and often does so by focusing solely on the hack and slash elements of the game.

Grinders can be fun to play with if you’re not taking the game too seriously.  Unfortunately, they can also kill the role playing element by encouraging the rest of the group to focus solely on the game’s tactical or mechanical aspects.  Now, some groups are fine with this.  If you have a group full of Grinders, then there isn’t really a problem.

If the group is a bit more diverse, however, then having one or more Grinders can become more of an issue.  If they just keep going on unchecked without considering the rest of the group, they can hog attention and make the game less fun for everyone else.  Similarly, if the GM or other players crack down too hard on the Grinders in a group, then that means less fun for the Grinders, which isn’t good either.

So when I feel like grinding as a player I try to keep it reined in enough that it won’t stomp all over other players’ fun.  When I’m running a game with a Grinder in it, I try to make sure that there’s enough action to satisfy him or her without it getting too ridiculous for the other players.

2: The Showboat

The term “showboat,” while originally referring to a paddle-wheel steam ship used as a traveling theatre, has also come to mean a person who likes to show off for the sake of attention.  I’m sure anyone who’s played a lot of RPGs has run into their fair share of individuals who like to role-play their characters and are very good at talking.  That’s all well and good and even encouraged in most games, but when they overdo it to the point that they’re showboating, it can become a problem.  I will admit that as a former theatre student, this is a trap I’m a bit more prone to fall into.

Like Grinders, Showboats can draw a lot of attention away from other players if they don’t watch themselves.  Some will deliberately play their characters to the hilt with the express purpose of hijacking the game’s narrative.  That means they can end up taking control of the plot to make their characters more important or to gain advantages that aren’t mechanical but effectively exempt a character from game mechanics the other players still have to deal with.

When I feel like I’m starting to show off too much I try to take it down a notch.  These kinds of players can be tough to keep in line, but the important thing for a GM to remember is to keep paying attention to the other players as well as the Showboat.

Whether you’re dealing with mechanical rewards or story rewards, the key is moderation.

As a GM, I think it’s important to have a good balance of rewards in a game.  Offering both mechanical and story rewards will encourage players to go for both.  Keeping an eye on what aspects of the game each player enjoys and scaling the different elements of the game accordingly will go a long way towards keeping the players happy.

As a player, I think that having mechanical advantages on your character sheet is very helpful – after all, it’s much cooler when your character’s effective – but those advantages always need to line up with the concept you have for the character.  That includes how you’re going to role-play him or her.  Similarly, gaining power, influence or other story-based perks through role-playing is great, but not to the extent that you completely undermine the game’s mechanics.

So which kind of advantage is better?  Neither.  Or both.  It really depends on your playing style, but in my opinion if you try to set a balance between the two, you’ll get a lot more out of the experience – without having to grind OR showboat.

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The amount of vitriol being spewed all over the place over the most recent edition wars going on with Dungeons & Dragons – even more than a year after 4^th Edition’s premier – is mind-boggling, but I try not to let it affect me.

I’ve heard a lot of people say, “4^th Edition ISN’T Dungeons & Dragons!”  I kind of find this analogous to saying “The current Volkswagen Beetle ISN’T a Volkswagen Beetle!”  But what exactly does it mean?  My basic assumption is that they’re saying the new version doesn’t do the same things that the old version did, and because of that the two versions are completely different products.

That part sounds reasonable, but there’s more to it than that.  When someone makes a statement that bold they usually have an emotional attachment to the subject matter.  What they’re really telling us is that they will never accept the new product in their heart of hearts as being the One True D&D (or the One True Beetle).  Of course the problem with that is that it calls for an absolute definition of truth – which is NOT something I’m going to get into right now, so let’s just stick to the basics, shall we?

When the new Volkswagen Beetle came out, they pretty much changed everything that I’d liked about the original Beetle.  Notably, the engine was now up front, which not only changed the way the car handled, but took away most of the storage space.  To me, the whole POINT of the Beetle was that it was a tiny car that you could cram a LOT into.  I didn’t want to accept that the new car was also called the Beetle.  But, that said, I’ve ridden in one of the new Beetles and it’s pretty much like being in any other small car being made these days.  Not brilliant, but acceptable.

I played the 1^st and 2^nd editions of D&D growing up and had a good time with them.  I really liked 3^rd Edition when it came out and continued to enjoy playing it right up until the release of 4^th Edition.  Around the time 4E was being released I began to hear rumors about it being just like MMORPGs, which worried me a little – after all, if I want to play World of Warcraft, I just go to my computer.  Why try to recreate that in a tabletop game?

Then I played 4^th Edition and it turned out I enjoyed it.  I’ve been playing in a 4^th Edition campaign for a few months now and am having a great time.  Even though, as advertised, it IS a lot more like an MMO.

Not absolutely everything is different.  For example, I think some folks might lose sight of the fact that there were ALWAYS party roles in D&D, even back in 1^st edition.  You had to have a magic-user type to take out enemies from a distance.  You had to have a fighter type to generally kick butt, take names and act as a meat shield for the magic-user.  You had to have a thief type to disarm traps, open doors and get at those targets the fighter just couldn’t get to alone.  And, of course, you had to have a cleric to keep everyone on their feet.

Sure, the specifics of how each class worked would shift around from edition to edition, but the idea of party roles was always there.  4^th Edition just took a page from the MMO playbook and formalized those roles.  Sure, it makes it a little more like a computer game, but it’s still fun to play and – this is the important part – it doesn’t discount the human element.

It DOES treat the human element a bit differently from the way previous editions did, and I’ll probably talk more about that in another article.  It also behaves much more like a tactical skirmish game than previous editions.  But does that mean it isn’t “really” D&D?

Let’s be honest, here.  The meanings of names – and words in general, for that matter – change from generation to generation.  What we say isn’t “really” a VW Beetle now will probably be called a VW Beetle by our grandkids whether we like it or not, and who knows what THEIR grandkids will call it?  You can try to fight it – good luck with that, by the way – or you can accept it.

I look at it this way.  There are these two different models of cars.  They’re both called the VW Beetle.  I also accept the fact that there are four different games out there each called Dungeons & Dragons.  It’s kind of like understanding that there are millions of guys out there who are all named Jim.  Unless I snap one day and decide that There Can Be Only One, I expect that state of affairs to continue for the foreseeable future.

I’ve by no means abandoned earlier editions.  They still hold a special meaning for me, and I hold out hope for the coming of that day when I can drive off in my original Beetle to the Gamer Retirement Community and play original D&D with the rest of the Old Guard until the end of time.  I’m just saying that while there will always be a place for those originals in my heart, I’m glad I still have enough room in my head for new ideas.

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“There’s a large group of people in the park all wearing black.  They must be dangerous!”

No, we’re not.  We’re just playing a game.

Thankfully, the stigma associated with live-action role playing looks to have diminished a bit over the years.  I play in a Vampire: the Requiem LARP with about thirty to fifty people every other weekend and I can tell as new people keep coming in that our player base is becoming much more diverse.  Which is a really good thing.

But not everyone has decided to embrace live-action gaming.  Even a lot of tabletop RPG players are still on the fence about it.  If you’re thinking about experimenting with live-action, here are a few things I can tell you right off the bat to try to make sure you’re not going in with the wrong impression.

First off, a lot of people see LARPers dressing in strange costumes and wandering around in semi-public areas and think they’re a bit nuts.  Having interacted with LARPers regularly, I can confirm that they’re no crazier than the average tabletop role player.  While I realize that sounds like a setup for a joke – one that I’m trying heartily to resist as I write this – what it really means is that in live-action you get a range of people, just like you do with any hobby.  Some are going to be stranger than others.  Some will be perfectly normal folks you could easily see hanging out with on a Friday night.  Others will be a bit odd and socially awkward, but basically all right once you get to know them.  A few others will act like they’re going for the title of Bull-Moose Bozo of the Psycho Ward, and you can generally spot those types pretty quickly and do what most of the rest of us who LARP do – avoid them!

One little caveat, though: if you do run into someone acting strangely there’s a chance they might be role-playing.  If you’re not sure, the best way to find out is to just ask someone nearby.

“Hey, is he for real or is he role playing?”

That’s all it takes, honestly.  Anyone who’s there to have a good time and behaves like a civil human being should be happy to tell you what’s going on.

That leads me to my next point.  If you’re used to tabletop games, there are a few little differences you’ll notice aside from the fact that you’re up and walking around now instead of at a table.  One of those differences is that there’s generally more of a focus on role playing and less of one on game mechanics.  The mechanics do tend to come into play a little more often in “boffer” style LARPs – in which you strike people with soft, foam weapons – than in “salon” style LARPs – in which there’s generally little or no physical contact – but overall there’s still less of an emphasis on game mechanics in live-action than in tabletop games.

LARPs will usually have more players than a tabletop game, and while the Game Master or Storyteller will be doing things all the while to let the players interact with a plot line that may be running in the background, the main focus of the game is going to be your interaction with the other players.  You might want to think of going to a LARP as being like going to a party, hanging out and socializing as a character you’ve created.  Instead of waiting to follow a pre-determined plot, you and your friends are creating your own stories and intertwining those stories with the GM’s plots when the opportunity presents itself.  In quite a few live-action games, you get to decide when and if you involve yourself in the game’s various storylines.

So, if you’re thinking about getting into a LARP, go ahead and give it a try.  You don’t have to have any special skills for it.  Costumes are usually optional; in those rare cases when they’re not, they’ll probably have something you can throw on so you can join in.  Most of the LARPers I know also play tabletop games so chances are you’d see the same kinds of folks at a LARP as you’d see at the gaming table.

Whether the interest is in tabletop, live-action or something else, when it comes down to it, we’re all gamers.  Some of us just like to get up and walk around every now and then.

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