The Ashcan Front at Gen Con 2008

[Paul Czege]

Hey all,

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.

Paul

[iago]

Good move on the booth partnership, guys!

[alejandro]

Hello everyone,

I've been developing my game unWritten for some time now. So, I'm seeking playtesters. Here is a little bit about it...

unWritten is a game that attempts to create the types of stories and experience found in film and literature.
Lead Players frame scenes for their own protagonists as Support players create or present complications/conflicts to get resolved. The roles of Lead Player and Support Player revolve. Everyone gets a chance to play their own protagonist.
The setting and the protagonists of the story develop through play, thus a story emerges. So the players end up being the audience as well as the authors of the story.
Finally, it uses a paired down bastardized version of the 5 act structure/play and the hero's journey to facilitate a literary feel and story arrangement. However, it does not needlessly constrain nor force the story to go in any particular direction. Thus, you can create stories like Star Wars, When Harry Met Sally, or Pulp Fiction. I also believe it can do such things as Modernist Literature, but I haven't been able to playtest that, nor am I sufficiently educated in modernist literature such that I could give it justice.

Email alex.duarte@mac.com
blog http://unwrittencontinuum.com/

Thanks a lot Alex!

[Valamir]

I'm interested.  I'll have an Ashcan of my new title Blood Red Sands available for GenCon.

BRS is competitive, in-your-face, roleplaying set in a dark sword and sorcery setting.  Players take on the role of a hero seeking to overthrow one of the five Witch Kings of Abalone, soul stealing sorcerers who slew the gods and founded a thousand year reign of terror. 

Only one hero is played at a time with the other players playing rival factions who are poised at each others throats viewing the hero as enemy or ally to be defeated, recruited, and manipulated.

All players score points through play, and the hero player also earns Legend for their Hero.  One by one the heroes drop out of play, fading into history.  After 9 ordeals (scenarios) the last hero will take on the Witch King played by the player who scored the most points. 

There is a winner, there is a loser, and there are many alliances and betrayals some informed by the ingame fiction, some informed by the metagame position of the players.


Issues still needing to be perfected include:

1) play length.  Currently each ordeal is coming in at 3-4 sessions.  These are short sessions interspersed with alot of rules talk, but still too long.  I'd like each ordeal to be playable in 1 session.

2) As a competitive game getting the balance right and ensuring there aren't any useless strategies or gamebreakers requires more eyes.

3) The scenario generator is designed to be used collaboratively at the table, but this is taking up nearly a full session.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ralph,

I've heard good stuff about Blood Red Sands through the grapevine. Welcome to The Front!

Paul

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Paul,

We talked about this a bit back ... what do you think of offering the old ashcan versions of now-finalized games with them, as part of the purchase?

I think it would be amazing to get the printout of the original, late-2002 My Life With Master along with the finished book; or the original playtest version from of Dust Devils along with the Revenged book. Both of those saw a lot of play and discussion here at the Forge, and that would really showcase the process that the Ashcan Front is all about.

Best, Ron

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ron,

After playing Shadows Over Camelot a while back I blogged about wanting the chance to play the iteration of the game that prompted Days of Wonder's decision to delay publication for more playtesting and development.

So yeah, I agree there's value in the ashcans. I've been toying with the idea of doing a "design odyssey" package when Acts of Evil is done and published. I still have a few copies of the ashcan left, up for sale at halfmeme.com because playtesting and design isn't done yet. But if I still have some left when the game is done the "design odyssey" package would include the final game, the Gen Con ashcan, and a stapled booklet ashcan of the earliest playtest text.

Paul

[Matt-M-McElroy]

Great news on the booth partnership!

Just an FYI that the http://www.ashcanfront.net site still has the '07 FAQ on the front page.

Regards,

Matt

[Paul Czege]

Fixed. Thanks Matt.

Paul

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Paul,

I don't think I was entirely clear. What I'm asking is, have you considered offering exactly such a design odyssey package for My Life with Master? I know that the original playtest document didn't have a nifty hand-crafted design; it was just a printout. I still think it would be cool and valuable, as a co-purchase item when buying the game itself.

Best, Ron

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ron,

Y'know, I don't think there'd be much value in it for My Life with Master. There were basically two stages to the game prior to publishing. The text I used for the 2002 Gen Con playtest, which was maybe six or seven pages long. And then the text that I circulated for independent playtesting in late 2002 and early 2003. And if you follow the development of the game across those documents and through the published text, you don't find any re-designing. All you see is the addition of missing stuff. The 2002 Gen Con playtest document doesn't have rules for Master creation, doesn't have examples of play, doesn't have good explanations for the Intimacy, Desperation, and Sincerity dice, doesn't have GM advice, doesn't have the sixth Epilogue Constraint, and doesn't have the Horror Revealed rule. But the dice mechanics, the formulas, the rules for More Than Human and Less Than Human, and the Endgame rules are all pretty much intact. And then the text that got circulated for independent playtesting includes all that stuff, except for the Horror Revealed rule, the long Sebastian and Carlotta example, the chapter of GM advice, and the sixth Epilogue Constraint. You just don't see the game getting torn down and put back together. Mostly you just see me filling out the text with explanation and examples.

Now Acts of Evil is an entirely different story. My design goals are consistent across all iterations, but early iterations experiment with dramatically different rules for trying to achieve those goals. And across the iterations I get ruthless. "Watch Paul Czege kill his darlings, and cry yourself to sleep." I kill them before the ashcan. And you'll see that I rather brutally kill some survivors before the published version.

Paul

[Justin D. Jacobson]

OK. I got the okay from my IPR masters to use my couple of hours of free time instead hawking wares at the Ashcan Front booth. So, I'm in for Bullseye. The game is 90% finished (though I only have about 20% of it up on the wiki). I'm hoping the ashcan will help me hammer out the few niggling details related to genre-building generally and genre-specific qualities (e.g., magic, superpowers, etc.) in particular. I'm swamped right now with my Tokyo Rain development, but I'm convinced I can get a proper ashcan done in time for GC. Looking forward to it.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Justin,

Welcome to The Front. I really like what you're aiming for presentation-wise with Bullseye.

Paul

[Valamir]

When do we get to send you our money?

[Darcy Burgess]

Hi Gang,

I'm excited to be bringing Black Cadillacs to the 'Front.  I've got some changes that came out of my last round of playtesting that need validation, mostly to do with reward cycles.

I'm also very interested in seeing how others handle historical setting integration into their games.

Cheers,
D