Game Writer's take heed--a bit of a rant.

[Sidhain]

I /have/ Attention Deficit Disorder. My attention span is probably also pretty short. But, I could get a comic book for 2.95 and /it/ have more non advertisement pages.

[iago]

I /have/ Attention Deficit Disorder. My attention span is probably also pretty short. But, I could get a comic book for 2.95 and /it/ have more non advertisement pages.

All the same, the attention span thing is not exactly the main thrust of what I was saying, nor was it really central to any of the other opinions that followed it.

To each his own, eh?

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Tim,

Here's a challenge, because I'll admit your point falls flat with me.

Look at Paladin, or InSpectres, or Trollbabe (my pick - best game I've ever played), or any other indie game. Look at the Pool for a real challenge.

Then, tell me how you'd expand each to 100 pages.

If you can meet the challenge well, you just might change my mind. I'm in the middle of writing an extremely setting-heavy game, and yet it won't go past 64 pages. If you convince me otherwise, I might double that.

[Sidhain]

Iago, I advocate what I refer to as FIFO games--Fast in Fast out, that is easy to pick up and run in a single afternoons reading, but also that also return stasfactory results for an enjoyable play session. You'd think that Paladin is a FIFO.

BUt it isn't. It frankly doesn't provide enough information to allow a GM/Player to get going /and keep them going/ and supporting them the whole time.

I once I think refereed to Inspectres as Beer and Pretzals game, it wasn't to diminish the game, nor is this complaing meant to diminish Paladin--I just /want/ more. They /deserve/ more, but not in bits and peices. The thing is, games this short, just don't provide GM's and players enough to let them run with the ball, outside of very very limited number of gamers.

I /can/ use it, but no one I know who runs games locally could. They need more support. Believe it or not, but there are people out there who /need/ adventures, settings, and the like.


Which is the best way to serve people who play RPG's--to write games that lack information they might need.

Or write games that have information they can drop if they don't need it?

[iago]

Iago, I advocate what I refer to as FIFO games--Fast in Fast out, that is easy to pick up and run in a single afternoons reading, but also that also return stasfactory results for an enjoyable play session. You'd think that Paladin is a FIFO.

BUt it isn't. It frankly doesn't provide enough information to allow a GM/Player to get going /and keep them going/ and supporting them the whole time.

Well, I'd think it's a FIFO, and as I'd run it, it would remain a FIFO.  I can keep going with lighter amounts of material; heavier amounts of material weigh me down rather than lift me up.  For you, I think more material provides "traction" -- for me, it's "encumbrance".

Which again goes to the whole point of a shorter game is just fine for a lot of people, just as a longer game is.  Let's assume another five rounds of such, and leave it there, eh?

I think the real "answer" to this thread, if there is any such thiung, is for you to take up Clinton's recent challenge.  It might make Paladin less of a game for me to play (due to by brevitiphilia), but I'm pretty much fine with that.

[Paganini]

Aha! Tim, I think I see where you're coming from a bit better now. The problem is that not every game is suitable for every player.

You see, Paladin was specifically designed to provide a certain kind of play dealing with a specific set of issues... to be used in whatever setting the GM and players feel like playing in, right at that moment.

A lot of indie games are like that. They have specific play goals. Once they meet those goals, they stop. This is a core idea of GNS. Games that try to service all goals at once end up being bloated and disfunctional.

Complaining that your local gamers would have trouble playing Paladin is sort of like complaining that your off-road vehicle has trouble in the Indy 500. It's designed for a specific experience. Why complain that it doesn't work when doing something it was never intended to be used for?

[Ryan Wynne]

I think what made the rpgs of old (back 20 years ago) fun where how quick and dirty they were.

 As far as the .pdf game I am designing it will be 100 pages, but will not have anything that isn't needed.

[Mark Johnson]

Write /more/.

Paladin is 26 pages long.

Write /more/

Disregarding Paladin, would you be adverse to spending $6 for a fully playable 32 page PDF containing merely system and chargen if there were support PDF products (setting, adventures, etc) available for free download?

Thanks,
Mark

[Bankuei]

Hey Tim,

Can I get a clarification on your issue?  

Here the issue is:

BUt it isn't. It frankly doesn't provide enough information to allow a GM/Player to get going /and keep them going/ and supporting them the whole time.

Except:

I /can/ use it, but no one I know who runs games locally could. They need more support. Believe it or not, but there are people out there who /need/ adventures, settings, and the like

Are you yourself having problems running this game?  If so, what specifically is missing that you need?  Are the other games that have similar issues for you?

Because right now, I'm reading 3 complaints from you, and I'm not sure what the thrust of your argument is:

-Not enough info to play(a valid concern)
-Other people can't play it(could also be said of Guns, Guns, Guns, CORP's Vehicle Design book, and old school D&D...)
-"I don't see that you put X amount of dollars of work into this!, I feel gypped!"


In the first case, specifically letting Clinton know what you need is a big help, especially since, unlike big name companies, he himself is willing to assist and support questions and play issues through his own forum.  Not only that, but he has spoken of putting out a second edition, and I believe its at no additional cost to those who have already bought it.  That's pretty decent support.

If your main issue is the second case, well, what can I say?  I'm pretty upset that most folks don't "get" that there is a way to play without having to railroad, or that "realism" isn't the only thing to strive for.  There's a lot of things that a lot of people can't play, and a good majority of it has to do with the people and not the product, but as long as I can play it, I'm just fine.

In the third case, well, that's your opinion, and its certainly a valid one to have, although I can't say that it means anything else than how you feel.  At least you can say that Paladin is a complete runnable game(for you, if not other folks) and has support, unlike some of the horror stories you hear about pdfs on rpg.net occassionally.

Aside from Paladin, has any other games been too short for you?  Usually there's a pattern of problems to properly earn a rant.

Chris

[iago]

Disregarding Paladin, would you be adverse to spending $6 for a fully playable 32 page PDF containing merely system and chargen if there were support PDF products (setting, adventures, etc) available for free download?

Mark asks a good question.  I want to ask the other half of it though:

How about getting a free 32 page PDF containing system and chargen, and then pay for support PDF products (setting, adventures)?

I ask because, from a money-making perspective (am I allowed to have some minor commercial questions here?), I'm curious which of the two halves would tend to equate to more revenue, among other non-monetary curiosities.

[Mike Holmes]

When Ralph wrote Universalis, it went about 75 pages, IIRC. We then trimmed that down to about half that. Because so much of what was in there was just not pertinent to learning the rules, understanding the basic concepts, and getting into play. Not that it wasn't interesting stuff, just that we thought that the book (now an 86 page sorta paperback sized thing) was better without it.

Yeah, that's right, Ralph wrote twice what's in there now, and we decided not to include half of it. We could have, and I suppose that some people would think it was a better book for doing so, just because the word count was larger. But we made our decision and I think that the product stands for itself.

Anyhow, Ralph did post most of the stuff that was cut to the website. It's available for free to anyone to download. So, isn't that support part of the product? As I've said, it could have gone into the book.

The point is that Clinton supports his games well. And that's worth the price of admission alone. Yes, a comic book only costs $2.95. How many role-playing sessions can you get out of a comic book? For less than the price of admission to a movie, you are getting a complete game that can provide endless hours of fun, along with a lifetime of tech support by the designer himself.

Sounds like a deal to me.

But, hey, if the only way you can judge the quality of a game is by page count, then by all means check the page count first. On the page where you purchase Paladin it says:

Paladin: A 27-page PDF (over 11,000 words) complete game.

Did you think that was a typo? Clinton's not misrepresenting himself here in any way.

Clinton has priced the game at what he thinks the market will bear. And he's sold the game to a lot of people. All I've heard is good things about it from people who've actually played it. Sounds like they're satisfied to me. You think it's overpriced? Well, that's your opinion, and you're welcome to it.

Mike

[clehrich]

Fascinating.  For all the references to "imponderables" and "differences of opinion" and whatnot, the score currently stands at Tim vs. Everyone Else.  Okay, I admit it, I haven't read Paladin, but in the abstract I agree with Tim.  I like long.

Certainly, a really elegant and compressed document can cover a lot of ground in 25 pages, and a really wasteful one can cover exactly the same ground in 200 pages.  What are the chances?  How many RPGs can I think of that are really elegant and compressed, written in a precise and compact style that immediately gets to the point and covers exactly and only what it needs to?  Er... um.... kill puppies is a pretty good example... er... are there actually a lot of others?  My assumption before I buy a game is that it's not particularly dense, not particularly compressed, not particularly well written, and that thus its merits (which may well be many) lie elsewhere.  At any rate, ranking texts purely on number of sheets, for good or ill, strikes me as essentially equivalent to judging a book by its cover -- which works in this industry, I note, but anyway...

So what's not in a 25-page game?  Setting, probably.  Extensive background material.  Sample adventures, sample NPCs, etc.  Okay, so do you consider such things inherently worthless, a waste of money, contributions to deforestation?  Don't they have value, at least potentially?  So how can you know in advance that a 25-page book is better than a 100-page one?

In addition, I'm really deeply surprised to hear that the Forge crew all seem to dislike art and visuals.  Really?  Descriptions thereof seem to crop up regularly in comments about games -- good, bad, indifferent, but a major concern.  Well, art takes space.  And I've heard it said again and again that every game needs a really attractive character sheet.  What happened to that?

It seems to me that the criticisms of Tim's point of view may boil down to the fact that a lot of people like Paladin, and Clinton.  M.J. talks about "bad publicity," in fact.  But (1) no Forge person is apparently going to avoid the game on Tim's sayso, and (2) Clinton's game has just gotten an entire thread to itself.  This is bad publicity?  

The reality, I think, is that Tim's criticism has hit a nerve, because it's something many people are on record as agreeing with: lots of art, cool stuff, and so forth.  He just put it bluntly and turned it around at a local fave.

For the record, I think The Pool makes a great example: it's short, and it's free.  If you want me to pay money for it, I want to know why, and just having a cool mechanic isn't enough for me.  Maybe it is for you, but I want some setting, some background, some stuff to go with the game.  I want to be able to sit down and read it, and I want it to be readable.  Does that take 100 pages?  Perhaps.  Would I read it happily if it were a great read at 1,000?  Yes.

[Jake Norwood]

I'm actually going to come in and sort of agree with Tim. Sort of.

The length of a game book often determines how long I'll play it. Weird, but true. I played Pendragon, D&D, WFRP, TROS, and GURPS all for months and months. I've played Inspectres probably 6 times, Dust Devils once, Little Fears once, Sorcerer 4 times, Octane once. I love all of these games--I don't consider a dime spent on them as wasted. There's something about size that says "professional" or "complete." I would have happily read another 75 pages of Paladin. I would have liked 10 more pages of Inspectres. OctaNe was just right in length as far as text goes.

I think it's partially an issue of legitimacy. 128 pages (more or less) is industry standard for a paperback supplement. Core rule books are twice that, generally. These are expectations of professional products, and most indie games aren't doing that. Do they need to? Well, depends. If we want our games to be taken seriously, they generally need to be longer. That length needs to be useful information--not just filler--but it ought to be there if we're trying to stand next to bigger games. If.

I, too, would have liked more examples from play in Paladin, a bit of fiction that really showed the reader the kind of moral dilemma that makes the game great, and an appendix with all the tables gathered together. That's maybe 10-5 more pages, tops. (I liked it so much I'd keep going for 100, but I don't know what could go in there without changing Clinton's vision). BUT Paladin is, as others have said, not trying to do a lot of the things that we expect from "industry" games.

I wish that Dust Devils had a bunch of research and historical notes from the *real* old west, since all my other game books have is zombies and boot hill...Dust Devils filled my every Wild-West need but what the wild west really was (or at least how to re-create the literature). Setting? I suppose. The game assumes a lot, and most of us that want to run a solid long-term DD game are going to spend a lot of time at the library and in the movie store. The book *could* save us that time...but I'm okay that it didn't. It's still a great game.

Basically, in both cases, I'm afraid to run the game because the brevity of the book left me feeling like it was all very new territory even after reading it all twice. But I was ready to play Pendragon half way through the book, because I'd been with it so long.

To finish my rambling...

I think that indie-games are created with different purposes in mind, but they're also generally less professional (hence "indie?"). I would pay for added art, color text, examples, adventures, and source material (I could care less about "orginal" setting, though). I would pay $20 for an online PDF if it was 128+ pages and featured art and the whole package. I often wish I could. I'll pay $6 for Dust Devils, and know that I got $6 bucks worth. If we want more recognition, we have to recognize the expectations of our customers and especially of our potential customers. If.

Jake

[iago]

So what's not in a 25-page game?  Setting, probably.  Extensive background material.  Sample adventures, sample NPCs, etc.  Okay, so do you consider such things inherently worthless, a waste of money, contributions to deforestation?  Don't they have value, at least potentially?  So how can you know in advance that a 25-page book is better than a 100-page one?

Extensive background material is exactly what I don't want, though. I feel that it impedes my ability to create detail on the fly.

Paladin -- by my read -- has 4 settings in it.  Sure, outside of the first one they each occupy a page, but those are meaty pages for me and give me all I need to get up and go.

I won't say that the longer things you're talking about are worthless, but they aren't worth a lot to me -- I won't read them because of their length.  If you can't say it up front, fast, and clear, as a consumer, it's not worth my time.

I am not saying that Tim's opinion's wrong. It's an opinion. What I am saying is that it's not the "only true" or "right" one, though it came out the gate sounding an awful lot like one that thought it was.

No hard feelings intended either way.

[Sidhain]

Pag: No, it has nothing /at/ all to do with GNS really. I've seen well supported and buff N games and sparse and poor S and G games.

GNS is not the point.



Clinton: I'm not familiar (nor interested in Trollbabe so I've little idea how to fix it), as for the Pool its free. I expect a lot less from a free game, and frankly will never use the Pool because its not in anyway useful to me as a gamer.

On the other hand Otherkind /was/, it's short, and also free.


Now back to Paladin: I'm not talking about mechanism, rules, I'm talking strictly about suporting the style of game that it purports to be--as it stands from my reading of the game, its a Heartbreaker---in the worst sense. You took a D&Dism and applied to a concept, tried to make it "better" isn't that what a Heartbreaker is? One of the most definitive fantasy works dealing with Paladins is Elizabeth Moon's Deeds of Paksenarrion Trilogy--it is very D&D esque itself, so that's not to say you can't begin there. But its where you end.

Paladin for example mentions both Star Wars and Buffy--yet offers little or no handling of Luke (as portrayed in the Dark Empire, Timothy Zahn books--admittedly may be too far off "canon") nor does it provide ways of handling Faith per se--she's got a different code than Buffy yet the same powers--its subtly different because you don't seem to address how to handlte these two important things:

Temptation

and

Corruption


How does one (a player or GM) play out/address challenges to ones code--if your game is only about Hack and slashing then it handles it just fine, but if it really is addressing the challenge of portraying moral absolutism and making it interesting then you need support material--even if its just suggestions on ways to allow players and GM's to portray playing the characters codes as /hard./

Corruption: Both Luke, and Faith fall a bit towards evil but both appearently work towards redemption --so how do you address evil not changing its spots, but changing /from/ evil. Even in an absolute black and white world, redemption should be possible.

How about examples like this: Paladin Jol arrive sin a town, he sense a great and terrible dark animus, and hunt its down, and discovers the towns elder, a well respected leader has murdered and become a "Witch" now the Witch is protective of his town, and in fact that how he became evil--he justified to himself the murders as protecting the town. He is well loved and respected though has become a hermit in the last few months (because of the physical marks), now he has family people who are still good, and friends who are good wo misguidedly protect him--how does a Paladin handle this? Whacking him with a sword? Surely your game is meant for something more than an a flimsy excuse to kill things?

You've got a setting--How does one become a Paladin? How does one be selected to join? What is the training like?

None of that is "rules" but they are details that can impact play--if each Paladin serves as an apprentice for a year you create certian play hooks, ties to a mentor. If they are trained in huge martial arts style classes you create another setting dynamic that gives a GM or player room to explore.

It's not /mechanisms/ as I mentioned but support for the style of play the game posits.



Iago:

Is it hard for you to ignore material that is there? I know many superhero gamers who write their own settings with their games, but they haven't found the fact that settings are included some great hnderence to that. I'm just wondering why you can't ignore it like they. It is much harder for people to create something that isn't there, in my experience, than simply ignoring what is there.