the full-text abduction of paul czege

Come to STAPLE! The Independent Media Expo in Austin, TX, on March 7, 2009

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 04:07:39 +0000

Half Meme Press will have a table at STAPLE! The Independent Media Expo, on Saturday March 7th, at the Monarch Event Center in Austin, Texas. I'll be sharing a table with my wife Danielle's Cream Alien Games (site under construction). Her game, Kagematsu, is currently soliciting playtesting and feedback as an ashcan.

Come and see us at the show.

Will Terrell, who did My Life with Master's gorgeous cover illustration is a Texan, and he will have his own table at the show. If you already own My Life with Master, bring your copy for him to sign the cover art.

If you think you can come to the show, send me an email at:

paul (aatt) halfmeme.comAnd if you're an indie RPG designer with a published game or an ashcan, consider doing a table. (But decide quickly. Chris Nicholas, one of the show's two coordinators, says there are fewer than a dozen tables left. And email me.)

Though STAPLE! has historically been primarily indie comics, they have also had a horror novelist, zine publishers, and always have a radical co-op bookstore. And Chris Nicholas is serious about his "independent media" tag line and about broadening the focus of the show beyond comics.

So I'm doing STAPLE! because I think the indie RPG community should be developing relationships and synergies with the indie comics guys. Have you seen my thoughts about how Gen Con could better support the creative dynamics of the indie community? The indie comics guys already know this. Tables at STAPLE! are an affordable $75 for a full 8' table or $40 for a half table (4'). Indie comics guys maintain their creative vitality by forming up into projects, splintering off into side projects, and doing special event projects. They recognize that a creative identity is about both independence and finding shared purposes. And their shows, and their fans support this with enthusiasm. We have a lot more in common with the indie comics guys than we do with the paradigms of freelancer-driven RPG publishing.

In the Clutches of a Game Design (part two)

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 21:53:03 +0000

In The Sorcerer's Soul Ron suggests playing a game of Sorcerer, and then playing a second game, this time among the prior generation of characters, and which results in the situation that was dealt with by the characters in the first game. When I read that suggestion I asked him how it played. And he said he didn't know. That he'd never done it.

Recently, for only the second time ever, I had the experience of playing My Life with Master, as a minion, rather than running it. My wife Danielle ran the game. So in that game there's this scene where I'm wanting the Sincerity die and I'm roleplaying for it. And Danielle says, "If you want the Sincerity die you're going to have to do better than that." So I close my eyes and think for a bit, and then I come back with more passion, and more intensity. And she gives me the die.

What I've realized is that I designed My Life with Master to do that.

Honestly, I don't think I'm a very good player. I tend to create emotionally repressed characters who aren't particularly interesting for other players to watch. Yes, if the GM does everything right with his or her delivery of antagonism to my character, for maybe three sessions, everything, then my character explodes into dramatic protagonism. And it has happened. Once. Usually the GM doesn't do everything right, and my character fizzles, or rather, remains...unaccessed.

I designed My Life with Master to stretch me as a player, to train me where my skills are weak. And as a GM too. The whole group gives me, as GM, a challenge of delivering meaningful antagonism through the concept of Master they create, stretching the range of my creativity.

Bacchanal teaches me to create narrative that holds the interest of the other players using uncommon content. And in current local Acts of Evil playtesting I've realized the game is a crash course for the GM (with a player feedback loop) in creating interesting NPCs.

What I've realized is that I design games, at least in part, from an awareness of my own creative weaknesses and a desire to move through them. And I think then my games are compelling to folks who share my creative desires. Acts of Evil still has me in its clutches (in a way that Nicotine Girls doesn't), because it still has something to teach me.

I think that's what My Life with Master tries to show other designers that I'd be excited to see from them as a consumer: games you designed to challenge the limits you perceive to your own creative and collaborative skills when you play them.

In the Clutches of a Game Design

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:04:11 +0000

I used to say I created My Life with Master to show other designers the kind of games I'd be excited to see from them as a consumer. Of late I've realized that's only part of the reason, and that myself I didn't even understand what exactly I was trying to "show". And as a result I've started to understand why I've kept designing games.

If you file the serial numbers off of My Life with Master, and then keep filing until all that's left is the underlying framework, you find a social structure for collaboratively creating a story that relies on: shared creation of antagonism, to be managed in play by the GM; conflict resolution, based on a few thematically meaningful character stats that fluctuate with each and every conflict outcome and manage progress toward story closure; and an institutionalized preservation of the protagonism of player character.

Now take a look around. Take some recent games and file them down to the framework, and you find shared creation of antagonism, conflict resolution built from a small knot of thematically relevant character stats that fluctuate with every conflict, etc. You find what's effectively the same architecture of collaboration, transported to new themes.

So, mission accomplished, right? Time to retire.

But damn if I haven't been dug in on Acts of Evil for all I'm worth since early 2005. I spent the better part of a year working on a game called Soul of Man prior to Acts of Evil, and then put it on the shelf after alpha playtesting. But Acts of Evil has had me in its clutches for three fucking years!

Why?

(Enjoy psychoanalyzing me in the comments if you're so inclined. I'll hold off on what I've realized until tomorrow.)

Who In the World Would Want a Game Like That?

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:49:00 +0000

When Patrick Dugan's review of My Life with Master appeared last month on Boing Boing and then StumbleUpon, I started inquiring of international buyers requesting shipping/handling quotes whether they were "active (or lapsed) RPGers," or just curious from hearing about the game online. Their replies, reproduced with permission:

***

The Ashcan Front at Gen Con 2008

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:35:52 +0000

Matt Snyder and I are organizing an Ashcan Front booth for Gen Con again this year. The main changes are:

Gen Con raised its booth prices by quite a bit, and so we had to raise the buy-in cost by a little as well.
And we're partnering with The Playcollective on a two-booth endcap. It'll be a clearly divided space, with separate shelving and everything. But the Playcollective shares our enthusiasm for ashcans, and so we'll have some of theirs on our shelves and Matt and I will have My Life with Master and Nine Worlds in with their other games. (We're excited about this partnership, because it means Matt and I can represent for our core titles without diluting a stand-alone Ashcan Front presence with them, and because it means Ashcan Front participants will be right in with the community of designers, working together, making connections, feeding each other's enthusiasm, and talking about design.)

A 2008 FAQ has been posted at http://www.ashcanfront.net/2008faq.html. Give it a look.

Why Isn't Anyone Playing Your Sophomore Milestone Game?

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:39:44 +0000

In working on Acts of Evil lately I've found myself thinking a lot about sophomore milestone games. And by "sophomore milestone" I mean the second game a designer produces as a project of the same or larger scale as the effort behind his or her freshman signature game. So Bacchanal, for instance, the second game I put out in print, doesn't satisfy the "same or larger scale" project requirement. And Soul of Man, which received a lot of development and playtesting, was never "produced," because I shelved the project. My sophomore milestone game will be Acts of Evil.

Ben Lehman blogged recently that Bliss Stage is selling slower than Polaris did after release. I can see that it's getting less actual play. I see Nine Worlds not getting much actual play. I see Burning Empires getting less actual play than Burning Wheel. Etc.

We playtested a supers game that Scott Knipe was working on last year. It had some structural similarities to With Great Power, except Scott had pared back on the enrichment scenes in favor of more screen time for the villains. And the result was a less fun game for the players.

My feedback to him was that the best indie RPGs are the ones created to be games the designer wants to play. And it was clear he was creating a game he wanted to run. This motive behind a game design project (game-I-want-to-play vs. game-I-want-to-run), I'm thinking, is fundamental to the game that gets produced, and I think it warrants some reflection on the part of the designer.

I think the key social challenge faced by a game that wants to be played is, and has been as long as I've been a gamer: How do you hook the player? The best, most engaging blogs are the ones where the writer manages to be consistently personal and honest, not a manufactured identity. But write your game-I-want-to-run rules text honestly and who do you hook? Answer: a prospective GM.

And then...he or she tries to create some player enthusiasm.

I've heard the lower incidence of actual play for more recent games attributed to an increasing crowding of games for the attention of indie gamers. Back in the 2001-2003 timeframe, indie game designers were so frustrated about unsatisfying play experiences in the 90s, and excited about new possibilities, that what we designed were games we wanted to play. But...having first written the games we want to play, and high then on the endorphins flooding our creativity, do we go on (without thinking about it) to write the games we want to run? Games that carry a fundamental challenge to actual play?

The Parable of Paths

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 11:55:21 +0000

One day, Fulgencio, Elequemedo, Anier, and Oswardo found themselves in the rainforest, surrounded on all sides by intractable flora. Each of the men in turn (starting with Fulgencio, who was the leader), took up his machete, chose a position along the perimeter, and delivered a powerful slash to the encircling brush. And upon doing so, each announced the discovery of "a path".

Mysteriously, with each slash, a quantity of pesetas was dislodged from the brush to settle at the foot of the man wielding the machete. Elequemedo's "path" was met with approving grunts from the others, though it produced the least pesetas. And more than one of the men thought they heard voices speaking a strange language beyond the mist that shrouded Elequemedo's "path".

Each man collected the pesetas that had fallen at his own feet.

The "path" created by Oswardo's blow was wider than that of the others, twice as wide as Anier's path, and arrayed with orchids in bloom, and so, was quite pleasing to the eye and senses. And the quantity of pesetas that settled at Oswardo's feet was substantial.

"That was a gross endeavor of peseta harvesting," said Fulgencio.

"That is not the path we want to take," said Anier.

"Why do you fear my path, Anier?" asked Oswardo.

"It is very pretty, and it is greater than my path in every dimension."

"That's bullshit," said Oswardo.

And then, Oswardo stepped out into his path to deliver another slash to the foliage. Vines parted to reveal the man JaJuan standing among the flora. He handed an additional quantity of loose pesetas to Oswardo.

The other men frowned a bit at each other, but there was no need for actual conversation. They each knew they could create such a path as Oswardo if they chose, but they also knew that none of them would choose to do so.

In the context of a creative community, each individual's creative product asserts that it represents a significant creative direction, and aims to influence the community with its values. For RPG designers, creating structures for co-creation is the creative medium; and it's an exciting and engaging new medium that many of us wish we could spend more time with, if only we didn't have full time jobs and other obligations. Fulgencio, Elequemedo, and Anier don't fear Oswardo's path for its aesthetics and values. They fear there's a connection between its aesthetics and values and enough pesetas to afford spending more time with the creative medium.

72 Hours of Boinging

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:11:58 +0000

On Tuesday, Patrick Dugan posted a review of My Life with Master to Greg Costikyan's Play This Thing blog. The review was picked up by Cory Doctorow's Boing Boing blog (within an hour if I'm guessing the time zones correctly). Boing Boing was at one time the world's most popular blog, according to Technorati, which rates such things. (It's currently ranked no. 5.) The title of the Boing Boing post was "My Life With Master: 'As seminal to RPGs as Frankenstein was for literature,'" a quote from Patrick's review.

And then people started buying it. A lot. Mostly the pdf at first, and then increasingly the book. It's only now, 72 hours or so later that things are pretty calm.

So, I can guess your question. How much is "a lot"?

Check out this year-over-year chart of My Life with Master sales I posted to halfmeme.com about this time last year:

Note how sales have tapered off year-over-year since I first started selling the game in 2003. 237 units from July to the end of 2003. 364 units in 2004. 295 units in 2005. 223 units in 2006. And I haven't done my 2007 Half Meme Press taxes yet, but I roughly estimate 2007 sales of My Life with Master at around 183 units (maybe 46 of which were the pdf version).

In the 72 hours since My Life with Master appeared on Boing Boing I've sold 71 units (39 of which are the pdf), plus two copies of the Acts of Evil ashcan, and one copy of Bacchanal.

Pretty damn cool, to be sure, but actually not the coolest part.

Huh? Well, back in 2003 when I first put the print version of the game up for sale the best rate for shipping it internationally via the U.S. Postal Service was "Air Letter Post". But there was significant cost variation across the various destination "zones," which I didn't understand well, and I wasn't particularly wise in the ways of PayPal buttons anyway, so my order page asked international buyers to email for a shipping and handling quote (which, knowing the weight of a packed copy of the game from past experience I could easily calculate via the USPS website, no knowledge of zones required). More recently the most economical rate is First Class International, and it has less cost variation across destinations. But having come to enjoy emailing with prospective international buyers about shipping and handling and how they heard about the game, I haven't bothered implementing a button for international orders. So when My Life with Master appeared on Boing Boing on Tuesday I started inquiring of international buyers requesting shipping/handling quotes whether they were "active (or lapsed) RPGers," or just curious from hearing about the game online.

And yeah, I only had the conversation with five or six buyers, but they were board gamers, and graphic designers, and WoW players, and only one was an active RPGer. Think again about that year-over-year tapering off in the chart; getting attention beyond the self-identifying RPG community...now that's cool.

My Life with Master: The Architecture of Protagonism

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:51:01 +0000

The article I wrote about My Life with Master for Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (MIT Press, 2007) is now up at the Electronic Book Review. It's an actively edited site, so your ripostes should be sent to editors@electronicbookreview.com.

I honestly didn't expect the articles from other RPG designers (Will Hindmarch, Rebecca Borgstrom, etc.) would be so expansive compared to my own when I submitted it, so I'd be quite glad to see you take this as an opportunity to expand on me, if you're so inclined.

Will you be searching eBay for this year's ashcans next year?

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 20:11:32 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to play a couple of games of Shadows Over Camelot (at Dr. Stidd's birthday party in early November). My best man Tom has been telling me to play the game for probably a year, and now having played it I can see why. It's the rare boardgame that's (mostly) collaborative for the players. You're not playing against them so much as against the game itself. (And Tom knows that when I was heavy into video games in the later '90s it was for collaboration against computer AI.) And it's a very very tight game, very nicely balanced. You quickly get some white swords onto the Round Table, and there are only a couple of siege engines out, and you're thinking it's going to be a rout. But damn if the game doesn't manage to create tension and then maintain it all the way to the end. I liked it a lot.

Well, what I've heard is that at some point in 2004, Days of Wonder decided to move the game's release date to 2005, to give it more playtesting and development time. And damn, if that story is true, after playing it, I'd pay ca$h for a prototype from the game session that drove the decision to delay the game. Just for the opportunity to experience the hitches behind the decision and mentally walk my way through the same design insights that solved them.

Post-GenCon Forge Designer Buzzkill

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 04:30:00 +0000

Friends, this is tough love. (And damn I wish I had a stern looking photo of myself as the avatar for it.) I know right now you're thrilled with the roll of cash you brought back from GenCon, but designers you need to learn about the Overjustification Effect.

Researchers played math games with children that the children seemed to enjoy. And then with one group they started giving a reward (coins, or gold stars or something) for the playing of the games. After a while they stopped playing the games with the children, which also ended the rewards to those that had been receiving them.

And what they observed is that the children in the group that hadn't been given rewards was significantly more likely to continue playing the games among themselves than the children in the rewarded group. The rewarded children generally lost interest in the games once the context of rewarding had clearly ended.

Social psychologists call the initial unrewarded enjoyment the intrinsic motivation, and they call the reward the extrinsic motivation. Their explanation is that extrinsic motivations will supplant intrinsic motivations so completely that when they're removed there's almost no intrinsic motivation left. And they have consistently demonstrated this same loss of intrinsic motivation not just in children, but also in adults of all ages.

So every year the successful young turks of the Forge booth come howling home from GenCon, geeked (with good justification) by their achievements, high as kites on the smell of Franklins, and announce plans to write and publish three or four games in the next year. And then...maybe they force one game out. Maybe. (And maybe they aren't too pleased with it.) But mostly they come to GenCon the next year with just the same game they were selling the previous year and a deeply buried knot of regret, confusion, and feelings of failure and inadequacy.

So designers, my advice is to hold on tight to the motivations that brought you to GenCon in the first place. The studies show it's possible to stay grounded in your intrinsic motivations if you recognize the extrinsic motivations for what they are.

Paul

A Gently Burning Wallet

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 04:30:00 +0000

As demonstrated by the ginormous stack of games I picked up at GenCon Indy, the rpg design community is on freakin' fire:

Contenders: A RolePlaying Game of Blood & Sweat, Pain & Hope

Death's Door

Don't Rest Your Head: A Game of Insomnia In the Mad City

Faery's Tale

Hero's Banner: The Fury of Free Will

Lacuna: Part 1, The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City

Mister Lincoln Experiment

Mortal Coil

Noumenon

Push: New Thinking About Roleplaying

Shock: Social Science Fiction

I also picked up a resale copy of GURPS Goblins, and a set of Sicherman dice. And I only barely held off on a couple of other indie rpgs by assuring myself I could order them online.

Danielle bought:

Best Friends: A Role-Playing Game About Girlfriends and All Their Petty Hatreds

Züca

(Of the above, and based on demo experiences, Hero's Banner is the game I'm most wanting to play. And Best Friends gets my award for most awesome and elegant currency mechanic.)

Paul

Bango Sorbet

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 04:30:00 +0000

Now ten months into owning our ice cream maker I'm transitioning from ice creams to sorbets. And with some serious enthusiasm after last week's success. What I did was search out a couple of recipes from the Internet that best matched ingredients I knew I had on hand. The key among them being a bag of frozen mango pieces we buy regularly from Trader Joe's for making fruit smoothies.

But plunging in after choosing a recipe I realized I didn't have quite enough mango left in the bag. Which put me into experimental territory. But damn, this past year of smoothie experimentation must have seriously polished my culinary instincts, because the end result is probably the second most awesome sorbet I've ever had. (The best being a champagne sorbet we had for dinner at the Montague Inn in Saginaw a couple of years back.) Try this, and see if you don't agree:

BANGO SORBET

1 1/4 cups water
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups sliced peeled pitted mangoes
two-thirds of a ripe, medium-sized banana, cut into five or six pieces
7 tablespoons Bacardi Limon rum

Stir water and sugar in a medium-sized saucepan over medium heat until sugar dissolves. Increase heat and bring to boil. Add mango pieces and banana. Bring to a boil. With fresh fruit you can probably remove the mixture from the heat almost as soon as it boils, because you don't want to turn the fruit pieces into cooked mush. But I let mine boil for a minute or so just to be sure the frozen mango pieces had been cooked through. Transfer mixture to food processor and puree. Pour into bowl and chill until cold, at least 2 hours.

Mix 7 tablespoons Bacardi Limon rum into puree mixture and then process it in your ice cream maker. Transfer to a sealed container and freeze for at least 2 hours. Expect the result to be firm, but still softer than ice cream or other sorbets that don't have alcohol in them. Serve and enjoy.

How to sell Debauchery and Violence

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 21:30:00 +0000

A short while ago I received the gracious offer of an advertisement in Joe J. Prince's forthcoming Lulu Press print edition of Swansong, his tarot-based rpg. Bacchanal isn't much of a revenue stream for me, but I've not previously done an ad for the game and so that's what I proposed to Joe. And he was cool with it. So, using an awesome and previously unseen ink-only version of Ed Heil's cover art, this is how it came together:

Whaddya think?

A Portrait of the Designer as a Young Man (postlude)

nospam@example.com (Paul Czege) — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 21:30:00 +0000

So, what's your take-away from these journal entries I've posted, and the cards? Do you fear my design powers because I was thinking about descriptor based characters more than twenty years ago? (What was the first RPG with descriptor-based characters, anyway?) Or do you look at the writing of my 18-year-old self, my mixed use of past and present tense, my awkward grammar, and at my strange choices for the physical descriptors, and find the whole thing less than remarkable?

Actually I'm hoping to make a non-obvious point by having posted it. What did I do with this game design? I left it in a box. Partially complete. Never playtested. Never published. And because I found it lacking in enduring merit? (Not hardly. I've held on to it for more than twenty years.) Or because I lacked passion? In fact I never did anything with it, or designed anything else for more than fifteen years, because I just had too much gamer baggage holding me back. Every descriptor gives you an additive 5% chance of success...good lord! As a gamer I was arrested at 18 and didn't get beyond it until I was almost 34. And I wouldn't even have managed that if I hadn't found a mentor and a community who helped me overcome my baggage.

So my non-obvious point is an exhortation. I wasn't born from whole cloth as the designer of My Life with Master. I was born into it from my own gaming pain and then delivered from my arrested state by mentorship. This game, with its descriptor-based characters, could have been honed to a blisteringly innovative and fun rpg. Or alternately, I could have done nothing further as a designer my whole life. My non-obvious point is that creative excellence needs mentorship...and there isn't enough of it in our hobby.