Adam Jury

One of the common misconceptions about gamers is that they’re all plugged in—they’re all on the internet, they all read forums and keep up with publisher’s blogs, they subscribe to podcasts and know what’s being released when.

This is hogwash. There are many gamers that don’t get news from anyplace except their local gaming store, and are largely or entirely insulated from trends in the gaming industry. Their hobby is one or two games that they buy and/or play. They come into the store once every few months, pick up anything new for their game of choice, and go home. They may see other games on the shelf, but they don’t know what’s in them and they don’t have the time or inclination to learn. They don’t participate in public/organized games at the store, they don’t go to conventions — they have friends that they game with, and that’s that.

Last fall I was in my FLGS and another customer saw me picking up a wide variety of new releases. He asked if I was a “game collector” and I said no, I just try to keep up-to-date on what other companies are doing, as I work in the game industry. He then asked me what superhero games were good these days, and I pointed him to Mutants and Masterminds on the shelf (I also mentioned HERO, but said local store doesn’t stock it). He asked how you make characters, and I said “Well, it’s a point-based system” — his reply was “What’s a point-based system?”

I briefly explained what a point-based system was, and he found it incredibly difficult to understand that you could make a character in this game without picking some sort of archetype/class/template first: “So how do I make a speedster?” “Well, you build up the right stats and buy powers to make him faster.” “But how do you know he’s a speedster?!”

So, three things that a five minute conversation with this guy revealed:

1. Even though he likes supers, he’s never read or even flipped through Mutants & Masterminds, one of the two most popular superhero RPGs of the last decade, despite the title being in regular stock at the local store we both shop at.
2. He didn’t know what a point-based system was and had never (knowingly) played a game that used them.
3. He had never (knowingly) played a game that didn’t involve archetypes/classes/templates of some sort.

None of those things are bad — if he’s having fun gaming, that’s great. But it does show that until someone actually stepped in and directly gave him that information, he had never learned or experienced three things that I suspect the average “tabletop gamer on the internet” would consider common knowledge.

2D6 Feet in a Random Direction is one of my favorite gaming podcasts. It delivers gaming news from well-connected and knowledgeable hosts [Chris Hanrahan and Brian Isikoff] and guests, reviews, actual play reports, and California and USA west-coast gaming scene news.

The show’s producers recently had some issues with their web hosting, and so I offered to and have taken over hosting the site—leaving Chris and Brian free to work on the show itself.

If you’re a gamer, the perspectives from the 2D6 cast are well-worth listening to. If you’re regularly buying and trying new games, I’d classify it as a must-listen!

Trask over at Living Dice has posted the most recent news about Gen Con LLC’s Chapter 11 Bankruptcy filing, including a nice summary and some of the documents themselves.

In short, Gen Con LLC has come up with a plan to pay back their debts, and the creditors have until the end of December to decide on whether to accept those terms. So, it’s likely that everyone will have to wait a few more months for further news.

For my previous posts on Lucasfilm’s lawsuit against Gen Con LLC and the Chapter 11 filing, please check the posts under the gencon tag.

Things We Think About Games is the first book published by Gameplaywright Press, a joint effort between game industry veterans Will Hindmarch [who I consider a good friend] and Jeff Tidball [who I have met once, a few years back ... in the middle of a discussion about television cooking shows, not a subject that I have exhaustive knowledge on.] Both guys have written and designed all around the gaming industry, and the book has dozens of other contributors.

About the Book

I expected this book to be a series of essays. I don’t think any of the promotions for the books misled me — they just didn’t really specify what was in the book, so I just assumed it was essays. It isn’t; the majority of the book are short “proverbs” about game design, game playing, game teaching, and more. It’s introduced by Wil Wheaton, and closes with am modified version of John August’s Seven Lessons I learned from World of Warcraft and an essay from S. John Ross.

So while a quick flip-through of the book showed me that it wasn’t what I anticipated, that flip-through sold me on the book, as I was able to instantly absorb, agree, and disagree with several of the entries. It sparked instant conversation with the people I was hanging out with, and Rob Donoghue made great use of the book’s format, having various friends and industry people sign his copy of the book … on a page they strongly agreed or disagreed with.

About the Contents

Will Hindmarch was inebriated a few nights ago, and via Twitter gave me permission to quote a few entries for purposes of this review.

001 – The player of any game has, at most, two hands

If your game requires a player to hold, handle, or move more than two things, you should know where the player sets one item while she is manipulating another. You should have a good reason for not including some indication of that place on your game board, in the rulebook, or in the money shot of your game on the box.

In poker, for example, the placement of cards and chips is customary. Even still, a nice poker tabletop has a chip rack and maybe a designated place for hole cards. A board game should provide a designated place for a draw deck, discard pile, and scoring if at all possible.

Hell yeah! I’d pay for an expansion to Ticket to Ride that contained the following:

• A number of racks suitable for stacking destination tickets again (much like tile holders in Scrabble).
• A cool board for setting the 5 face-up cards, the draw pile, and the destination tickets draw pile.

That’s it! I’d put down my money for that product right away. It would be great to replace the handmade racks I currently have to stack destination tickets against, and the board for placing the various draw piles would be a nice bonus.

The game is by no means defective without them, but it could be that much better with. I’m actually relatively new to Ticket To Ride [been playing less than a year, have probably played 50-75 times], but each time when I teach it to someone, they find it confusing that they have two different types of cards, and no place to easily put and refer to the destination tickets.

030 – Dollar for dollar, a roleplaying game is very nearly the most efficient entertainment you can buy.

I want to agree with this, but I think for the majority of groups, the majority of the monetary cost and the majority of prep-time/organizational work is placed on the gamemaster. It’s efficient entertainment for players, but not necessarily for the GM.

023 – In a tabletop roleplaying games, the characters are all wearing pants.

This is true even though none of the players informed the gamemaster that their characters were putting their pants on.

Issues such as these–things that any person would do without comment–are collectively “pants issues,” and players in any sane game may always assert that they have done such things if it ever becomes important.

This is one of those issues that makes me stress that all roleplaying groups should talk in advance of the campaign about expectations and defaults. It shouldn’t be necessary to say “I grab my cel phone when I leave the apartment.” each and every time your character prepares to go out, nor “I load my gun.” before going out on a shadowrun. If your character is going to be a goofball unless you “babysit” him during the entire game session, is that really fun?

078 – If a rule is optional, give it a name.

Players should be able to quickly describe their house game to other players by casually citing rule names.

Jargon is good. It creates a culture of player and is just more fun than quoting a rulebook. Part of what makes poker excellent is the swollen insider vocabulary that comes with it. For example, “We’re playing Chicago, Follow the Queen, so high spade in the hole splits the pot.”

If you can get players talking like your game talks, then you’ve got them.

I heavily agree with this, especially as it pertains to RPGS and properly calling out rules that are truly optional. However, this doesn’t pertain to inventing new slang for common terms–this is covered elsewhere in the book, and it’s viewed as a bad thing.

There you go — that’s a quick sampling of the type of material that makes up the majority of the book.

Criticisms

While many of the entries in the book are numbered [as the examples show], the pages aren’t. This bugs me. Rationally, I know I don’t really need page numbers in this book, but it still bugs me.

Most of the pages have tags — just like a blog — in the corner. Samples are “all games”, “play”, “poker”, “history”, “teaching games”, etc. Sadly, there is no “tag cloud” in the book; no reference to tell you which pages talk about game design vs. game teaching vs. poker.

Both of these problems could be fixed relatively quickly in a future print run …

Buy It

Bite-sized and approachable, Things We Think About Games is well worth reading for both casual and hardcore gamers, and especially for game designers. You won’t agree with all of it, and that’s part of its charm: one page may make you smile and nod, the next will have you curling your lip in a bitter sneer. Hopefully, it will help you avoid that sneer during the next game you play.

One of the nice things about being friends with someone who works part-time at my friendly local gaming store: the D&D Fourth Edition books were delivered to my door yesterday, and I got to support my FLGS with the purchase.

I haven’t had time to do more than flip through the books yet, but I’m looking forward to taking a few evenings over the next week to give them a good reading.

Living Dice has posted a document from Gen Con’s LLC bankruptcy filing. I haven’t really looked over the document and Living Dice says there may be more and updated documents available, but they didn’t dig them up.

Got back to Seattle last night from the GAMA Trade Show. We had a good time in Vegas, and a very productive show for Catalyst Game Labs — we heard a lot of good things about our current product lines, and a very positive response to the new games that we’ll be releasing later this year. I’m in meetings for the next couple days, and I didn’t get as much of a chance as I would have liked to wander the show floor, but I’ll probably post a bit more about the show soon-ish.

Last month I asked my local game store to order me a copy of Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition. I had read Savage Worlds years ago and wasn’t too interested in it, but with the relative popularity it still enjoys and the low price I figured I should give it a second chance.

On the 6th of March, I ordered it. On the 14th, I had a note from my FLGS saying that it was in. I finally got the chance to pick it up on the 29th.

My FLGS has a shelf behind the counter where they display the books and games that have been set aside for pre-orders. In the 15 days from the time he put that book on the shelf, he has taken 3 other orders for the exact same book, all from people who had no idea the book existed. The simple act of stocking one copy — and it didn’t even sit on the New Releases shelf — exposed it to enough people that they sold 3 more copies.

A few thoughts about this:

• If the book had been on the new releases shelf and I had walked in and picked it up, those sales might not have happened — the customers that saw my pre-order copy may have never seen this fictional non pre-ordered copy.
• The low price of Savage World Explorer’s Edition probably factored into the good conversation rate: Who thinks twice about dropping $11 on a book?
• Providing “display/reader” copies to game stores would be interesting … but aside from Wizards of the Coast and perhaps White Wolf, I don’t think any hobby publisher could afford to do so on a regular basis for a large amount of stores. I think there’s probably a way to do it on a limited opt-in basis for the small [50-100] number of stores that would take advantage of such a promotion, but would that help grow sales in any appreciable way?

My friendly local game store, Treasure Chest in Lethbridge, Alberta, has been relatively low-tech for a long time. They don’t have a website, but they’re on the web with a new Facebook group now. The store moved last year to a bigger and better location right next door to the old one, with a distinct play area and a nicer layout. I don’t get to hit the store as much as I’d like, but I’m happy to see it growing and improving even in these tight times for hobby gaming.

A few excerpts from indystar.com:

This year, Gen Con Indy is expected to attract 25,000 attendees who will spend more than $25 million on lodging and entertainment.

So the average Gen Con Indy attendee spends about $1000 dollars over the entire convention. That seems a little high to me, based on the number of times I’ve seen gamers discuss how they attend Gen Con as cheaply as possibly — it seems to be part of “gamer pride” to try and work the system as much as possible.

Indeed, in a statement issued Feb. 15, Gen Con said the “flagship” convention “remains a vibrant, profitable event” and will take place as scheduled from Aug. 14-17. The Chapter 11 filing won’t affect its other conventions in France, Australia and the United Kingdom, either.

“Gen Con LLC will continue to operate without interruption during this process,” the company said in a statement.

Seattle-based Gen Con said it had to file for bankruptcy in Washington state because of “significant unforeseen expenses associated with attempts to expand its core business to encompass externally licensed events.”

In the filing, Gen Con lists its assets and liabilities as each between $1 million and $10 million. It owes $748,956.81 to its largest creditor, convention services company George E. Fern Co. of Columbus, Ohio. Gen Con owes the Indiana Department of Revenue $116,858.70 in sales and income taxes, but Gen Con disputes that claim, according to the filing.

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