Post 1 of 3

Hello,

Now that the It Was a Mutual Decision books are printed and shipped - yay! - I thought I'd give a little history and outline the decisions that brought me to this point. Or "An RPG from concept to publication in eight months."

PART ONE - inspiration and proto-design

It all started with the Ronnies contest. I'd announced the contest but the starting date, September 6, was still a few days away. It just so happened that I had the first real break in my schedule in a solid year, and that it was my birthday weekend. And of course I was excited about the contest and about the 24-hour RPG concept in general, and about the terms I'd proposed. It's practically inevitable that I'd hurl myself into the contest process myself. (Note - my game was not one of the submitted contestants. This was all done privately.)

Terms: girlfriend + rat. Me, a pen, and a small steno pad of paper. Wife more-or-less not in the house, and me with neither a stack of papers to grade or any particular domestic tasks that couldn't be ignored, plus a couple of days afterwards available, in case aforementioned wife disagreed with me about the aforementioned domestic tasks.

Looking back at the game, it's now clear that I wanted to stretch my design-brain into a type of RPG that hadn't really interested me, previously - the family of Narrativist games that include InSpectres, The Pool, Universalis, My Life with Master, The Mountain Witch, The Shab al-Hiri Roach, and similar. What bumped me into thinking creatively about this sort of game was Breaking the Ice, and to a lesser extent Death's Door and Under the Bed. I was curious to see whether I could bring certain personal sensibilties into that framework of play. To be clear:

Personal sensibilities at the moment: I Will Not Abandon You as opposed to No One Gets Hurt (the latter was more common in the games cited; I prefer the former), rules utilizing real-person gender as a variable (from my book Sex & Sorcery), a meaningful role for specially-colored dice ((Paul's fault!), groups of people communally playing single player-characters (inspired by my Sorcerer demo at GenCon), and a general dislike for the emotions-uber-alles mindset that prevails in a lot of romantic film (prompted by Breaking the Ice, to be praised in that the couple is not required to end up happily ever after).

That Framework of Play: the intimate, potentially confessional procedures required among the participants; short, potentially one-evening play as the default; instant buy-in and activity of play without extended traditional character creation and prep elements; clear and mechanically-defined chapters of play as indicated by dice outcomes; and a strong random element that included solid disappointment or defeat for a fictional character.

Rat + Girlfriend. Were-rats! Romantic breakup! Without further detail, starting at 9 PM and finishing at 3 PM, I had a pretty good summarized outline and procedures (rules) for a playable game. Social contract? Check. SIS, especially Situation? Check. Reward system? Check. Resolution totally combining all three of these into a humming set of turns and rules? Check. Did I like it? Check.

I figured out how to make a PDF after consulting the Forge's Publishing forum, found a couple of suitable images on the internet for a cheap-y cover page, and was all set. I'd done a 24-hour RPG! I instantly bugged Vincent and Paul to distraction about how wonderful I was. Really, it was quite a rush.

Part One is a big deal because, having done this, I knew that anything and everything else to be done was either refinement to make the actual play process better, even best suited to what I was after; or logistics, getting the thing beaten into a marketable object.

Remember: the activity is not the same as the object, even though we use the same word ("game") to describe each. Therefore I had two distinct jobs now: to make the activity work better, as well as to make the product just right to teach the activity. The 24-hour process meant that I was fully situated to get on with these, without futzing around any more with anything fundamental to the whole endeavor.

PART TWO - playtesting and acid-testing (done partly in tandem with Part Three, but always conceptually forefront to drive Part-Three decisions)

I diddled with the rules a little more after the 24-hour process, although I preserved the 24-hour PDF as itself as an artifact. I didn't change much, but some. Then it so happened that our regular gaming group wasn't meeting that week, leaving regular members Maura and me at loose ends, and Tim Koppang and I had been shooting some emails back and forth about "we really ought to hang out again one of these days." Not very many people for what was supposed to be a two-group game, but hey, why not. We got together for an afternoon, and Tim had his own rough draft game for us to try too. That led to a full afternoon and early evening of play.

After that first playtest, the good news was that the fundamental framework, the personal buy-in, and the actual process of who speaks or rolls when, all worked. However, some of the dice results weren't as easy or sensible as they'd seemed, and needed revision, and I didn't like the chapter transitions as much as I thought. Scribble, scribble, and time to schedule a new playtest.

The regular group did meet the next week and wearily agreed to yet another damn "Ron's new game idea" session. Three guys and two gals, so I could assess the group play a little better, too. This time, again, the basic process of play instantly shone forth and the fundamental questions posed by the game were all felt and addressed by everyone there. That's something that had been hard to assess with just me and Tim and Maura; it's a larger-group issue. However, and this is typical for playtesting, I confused myself regarding the revisions so far and actually didn't apply some of the changes I'd made. So the draggy and dissatisfying features of one of the three phases of play was all too clearly revealed as absolutely wrong, providing a negative test of those changes. OK, not the best way to playtest, but live and learn.

I like to think of this step culminating in an acid-test, a new decision whether to publish the game. This has to happen - too many RPGs are powered only by initial vision, and should be scrapped after playtesting or other indicators really let you know that this isn't worth the next round, at this time. I look at what I had and what we'd done, and decided, from scratch, "yes," this could well become a published game.

All of this led to the first major draft of the real rules, in part reorganizing the original version and in part starting to think about this whole thing as a readable object. So as I continued to playtest, revision of the activity became less of an issue and although this overlapped with it, development of the product started to take on a life of its own.

Post 2 of 3

PART THREE - designing the book and organizing the team; budgeting

The most fundamental element of this part is simply having a well-organized, fully-sufficient, and readable text. I'd already found my "voice" for the project, which was one of the other benefits of doing the 24-hour version, because you can't do a good 24-hour RPG project if you put on a fake-y or please-the-imaginary-gamer voice. Once I printed out a pretty thorough draft, I sent it to people like Paul, Emily, and Vincent, and gave hard copies to Julie and Maura. I also started reading it over and over myself, correcting or adding or coming up with new ideas ("Oh! I should say this!") as I went. I decided not to use the term "role-playing" at all and simply to explain exactly what to do in the most basic, linear way possible.

This is basically the donkey-work of writing. Very soon, it becomes less a matter of busting out golden brilliant prose, and more a matter of editing reams of indigestible, gloppy prose into something at least tolerable. I used others' comments either as plain old superior revisions, or as signals that I needed to come with something better. I know this process well and treat it as a routine activity, just something you do with part of the day whenever possible. Read hard copy, mark up, correct on the screen, print, read hard copy, mark up, repeat until you die. Phrasing gets changed, and paragraphs get circled and arrowed to some other section of the text. Sometimes whole sections get crossed out and sometimes the back of a page gets absolutely filled up with a new scribbled section.

A nearly-as-fundamental element of this part is having a vision of the physical product in mind, especially if it is finely tuned to the physical use that you envision for actual play, and for what it looks like lyin' around someone's house. For a parlor-game type activity, - wait -

* Note: "parlor game" is a good description for these short, easy buy-in, group-friendly RPGs; "parlor narration" is a negative term I coined for certain resolution mechanics that I don't think are very functional; they are not the same things and have no relationship with one another.

- OK - for a parlor-game type activity, I wanted the object (a) to be easily picked up and glanced through, so someone at a gathering would say, "Hey! What is this? Is it like a game? Can we try?" It should also be small and portable, so as to be fun reading in public places. And finally, it should be hip and a little edgy, like impulse-buy books based on strong gender humor, which are legion at any bookstore, you know, "How to Close the Toilet-Lid and Other Man-Training Tasks," or "Shoes Aren't That Important, Honey," that sort of thing. I'd not only found my voice, but at this point, by thinking of both text-as-text and book-as-product, I'd found my audience.

I don't know what two neurons finally rubbed together, but I actually had a good idea all of a sudden - a landscape-format paperback book, exactly like you find in humor sections at bookstores. A lot of cartoon collections are this size, and a lot of little manuals for dozens of different activities. I grabbed one of my Dykes to Watch Out For collections (top five comics list member! read it now), which are published in this size, and flipped it as a object, looking at the way it handled. Yes - this was it, this is what this book needed to look and feel like.

That led me to think of two other features I'd been meaning to combine for a while: the visual organization of the Sorcerer texts using graphic tabs, and the relatively large font and judicious, yet liberal use of white space in My Life With Master. They were perfect for this format; I could put the tabs on the side edges rather than the top, and the typical book in this format is expected to pay off the reader in punchy two-page-spread content, rather than in fill-every-inch tiny print. You open it to any page, and you knew where you were (and what the rest of it had in it), and you could read what was right there in ten seconds and go "yeah."

Oh, and one other feature seemed just right - a little pitter-patter graphic of rat footprints, running across a few of the pages, here and there in different directions. Perfect!

So, illustrations ... well, full-page seemed called for. I have been getting more and more into full-page illustrations for a while, and Polaris really clinched it for me. I had also been wanting to work with Veronica Pare for, geez, two years now, and since I'd met her after Sex & Sorcery was published, hadn't really had anything suited to her style until now. And then I realized that Keith Senkowski's style was perfectly suited to hers, and hey! A male artist and a female artist! That's perfect too. I didn't want to break the bank, but I knew this would be the first outlay, in solid $100 chunks. Two of them for Veronica, actually; I wanted to cement a really good economic relationship with her for the future, and at this point, I was thinking of her doing a color piece for the cover as well.

I contacted both artists and smiled gently when each told me that what I'd offered really didn't lease that many pieces. I gave each a list of possible ideas and emphasized the unusual size and layout. I had faith in my material, and sure enough, Keith bitched and moaned that he kept getting inspired and simply had to do "one more" piece. And who would've thought, one of those turned out to be the cover. One of those moments when you see a picture and say, insta-decision, "that's the cover." It wasn't my first plan to have a black-and-white cover illustration, but staying open to these moments is a big part of getting the book out at all. I decided to use hot pink letting and graphics, and that combination seemed even better suited to the design/object sensibility I was after.

It was also time to seed the internet with some advance warning and see whether any buzz might be there, so I posted some threads at the Forge and pointed people to the work being displayed on the artists' sites. Technically, I should have put up a webpage for the game at adept-press.com, but you know, it just didn't happen. It seemed a little less important now that IPR handles my on-line ordering, although that doesn't mean I should have nothing at all.

Armed with the first sketches and the text, which was still being revised here and there but now, around mid-November, was approaching its final form, I could start making mockup pages and thinking about final length. To my surprise, the book broke 100 pages, a lot bigger than I'd thought based on the original, 28-page standard-sized 24-hour RPG. Huh ... given that I wanted full-page chapter titles, a few ads in the back (Breaking the Ice seemed necessary), and so on, I was looking at a nice hefty little book, not just "like" the cartoon or humor books I'd used as a model, but exactly like them.

Now it was time to think about the rough outlines of budgeting. How about a $15 cover price? Same as Elfs, and there's always the "Ron's new game" factor, and it has a novel look and feel. All right, assume I print and sell 100 books over the next year, including GenCon 2006. I'd make about $10 a book after shipping and printing costs, I figured. With $400 for art and layout, there's room for profit there, but not as much as I'd like. Time to check print costs.

And if I wanted to talk to printers, it's also time to talk layout so I could give them real information. Snyder!! I like to push his design sensibilities past his comfort zone; he seems to enjoy the abuse. He said, "What, are you nuts? Rat footprints? All right, I'll do it." OK, there went another $100. H'm, $400 so far, it's time to start thinking about how much to charge for this thing, and who's going to print it.

Hubris kicked in at about this point, too. I said, "Hey! I could get this out for the New Year!" Yeah, right. I always say something like this and then, mercifully, forget I did so.

Post 3 of 3

PART FOUR - the actual book

I have gone through many bidding processes with printers, and after a while, you hit on the one you like the most and stick with them, only looking elsewhere if the job really doesn't suit them. Therefore for Sorcerer books, I use Patterson Printing; for POD books, I use Express Media. I know their strong and weak points, I like their prices, and the books look good. I gave'em a call and got a bid - about $2.70 a book, which with various extras I'd probably want after all, I knew would round up to about $3 eventually. Not bad!!

Let's see, now I could do some actual rough budgeting. Assume I print and sell 100 $15 books over the next year, including GenCon 2006. That's $300 for printing et cetera, $400 for art and layout = $700 total cost. 100 books at $15 apiece, well, let's say I see about $10 per book, given shipping and commission costs (very rough estimate) ... that's $1000, giving me a clear profit of $300.

Not much, not as much as I really like to see, but it's better than breaking even (my personal criterion), and I do have hopes that the book will sell past that point over the following year. After all, Elfs does, which I never expected, and Mutual Decision is pushing into a different sort of market that might yield a longer haul. $300 profit means an easy next print run, and sales on that become pure profit, about $10 a book from then on. I can do that.

I now brushed up the manuscript yet again, aiming for proofreading and anything I was forgetting. I assigned it an ISBN from my list, double-checked with Express Media that they could do the bar code, and contacted Emily and Paul for advertisement files; I told Matt he should put one in too. Matt sent me mockups for layout, and we debated several points and tried different versions until both of us were satisfied.

1. Should the tabs be on both right and left sides, or just the right? Conclusion: just the right.

2. What order should the illustrations be in? Should we try to match content to subject, or should we stick with the remarkable narrative sequence that had emerged from combining Keith's and Veronica's work? After much head-scratching: the latter.

3. Where should the rat footprints go? We doped out an irregular, but not too irregular page count between instances.

4. How about type face, color, and graphic design for the cover? Shadowed or other set-off techniques? Cursive? We tried a bunch, and oddly, one of the versions that was not a starting top pick for either of us turned out the best, when you actually printed it. Hard copy to the rescue, yet again. Matt's first choices of pink didn't provide that whorish, female-humor feel I wanted, so I told him, "chimpanzee in estrus, Matt." He made that face Midwesterners always make when I say such things, but sure enough, the next pink was the right pink.

5. Letter size and line space, as well as specific sorts of bolding and bullet-points ... all this is just more donkey-work, and you print and compare, print and compare until it works the way you want.

Now, who's been paying attention? What do I keep telling you about layout? It takes twice as long as you think. And then it takes a little longer. There's no point in rushing it, and no point in badgering the layout guy. It's his baby now, for a while, and all you'll accomplish by nudging him is waiting longer, or shoddy work, or both. Sure enough, I didn't get it to Express Media until February, which was a minor bummer, because Emily had contacted me about getting it and Breaking the Ice into a Valentine's Day two-pack. Fantastic idea, but just not logistically possible, and that's not a slam on Matt, either. Layout takes a long time. It's work. It has to be done right, and even then, you know there'll be fixes to make for the second printing.

Oh yeah, and to add to layout delays, I had my usual back-cover crisis. I never know what to write for a back cover. And then, at the last minute, it always occurs to me. Same thing happened this time.

I zipped the PDF for the cover and the text to Express Media in early March. No problem. We're set, right?

That "New Year" ambition was long in the past, so it was time for more hubris. I thought, Forge Midwest is in late April, so I'll have it by then. Three nasty things happened, then, in quick succession. Have you published a game, yet? No? Well, learn this now - when everything is going fine, three nasty things will happen in quick succession. I'm not kidding, they just will.

1. Forge Midwest got rescheduled to early April. Whoa! Two weeks lead time, gone. I pretty much wrote off the chance of having the game for it. No big deal.

2. Express Media tells me the cover has some kind of format goof ... what? I'd sent their specs to Matt even before he started to work on the cover. Damn! Email to Matt, and give the Express rep Matt's email too. And unaccountably, Matt's email stops working. Like, for the first time since I've been mailing him with it, way back in 2002. Right at this crucial instant of "we're printing." Days pass before this gets ironed out and Express gets the fixed file, and we still don't really know what was wrong with the first one, or at least Matt's explanation was unintelligible to me, ignorant of layout software as I am.

[At this point, the proofs arrive. They look good! They did two covers for me to compare and I picked the one I liked better. A few typos and minor layout issues make themselves evident, and I decide they are not worth repairing for the cost; none of them are howlers or damage the book's utility. The only thing I'm concerned about is how the grey in Veronica's pieces turned out, but again, it's minor. I fax my approval to Express Media and give'em my credit card info.]

3. Express Media hits a crunch time and back-burners the project for a week or two. Kids - this is how things go. POD printers don't work in bulk, usually, like I have them do, and given the burp in the process in #2 above, they simply had to bump up something big rather than wait around on some kind of email miscommunication on our end. The problem is when they promise a certain delivery date, like right before a con. In this case, I'd specifically not given them a hard deadline, knowing that's not this company's strong point. Never give yourself a con date, or any kind of public-event release, for a hard deadline - ever. Don't blame printers for their on-site scheduling decisions if you do, if they are printers that deliver good physical books.

But still, these were three stressful things, at least as long as I retained the illusion of showing up to Forge Midwest with the new books. That just wasn't going to happen and realizing that was a professional necessity. Therefore I didn't have to enter into what I call my Grope & Kill mode, which I've had to do a couple of times with Sorcerer publishing, but the happy task-oriented ride I'd enjoyed with this game until this point was definitely over. I made calls, made snap decisions, and with any luck made no enemies in getting through this stage.

I was able to bring the proofs to Forge Midwest and also to enjoy a phenomenal fun game with a bunch of great people, as I posted about in Actual Play. After that, it was just a matter of settling down until the books themselves arrived. I asked Express Media to ship 85 to IPR and 15 to me at home.

AND NOW

I have'em! They look great - much better than the proofs did, actually. I'd decided to laminate the covers after all, and the book looks tremendously sharp, with that pink doing its job just as hoped-for.

On second reading, of course, right in the flush of holding the thing, you know what comes next. Sure enough, why look, a typo. Another one. Fuck! Another one. And that sentence is awkward, I could never have written such trash. What is happening here?? Then I settled down and remembered that all books do this, and made a nice list for Snyder and the second round. Once the hyperventilating was over, I looked at it again and said, "Not that many - certainly not as bad as Sorcerer's first print run. So, all right."

Brennan should be putting them up at IPR momentarily, I suppose, so bug him if you want it. I wrote and published a game! Cool!

Questions, comments, anything? I'd really like to help out some folks just moving into book publishing this year, so ask away.

Best, Ron

Thank you for all that. It was both entertaining and educational. Seeing actual costs for art and editing and layout gave me a clue what is standard, even if I've clinched some killer deals with people.

I'm looking ahead to publishing my pervy cyberpunk game Verge in the next year. I probably have a layout guy lined up. If not, I have another contact who will do it. Free and stuff. I've got an editor. It's my first game, so I don't really need it all to be perfect, but I also want people to feel they're getting quality for the money I ask from them.

When is the right time to start thinking about layout? I've heard Clinton say he likes to write directly into the layout software so he can fit content to the pages. I'm finding it hard to wrap my head around how to use Word properly to build sidebars and similar text boxes and not cause a headache for the person who has to move all that into InDesign or whatever. (I am rather good in Word and can do all kinds of layout-y things but I feel I oughtn't be doing it.)

Also, it seems you didn't playtest a whole lot. Am I wrong? How many times did you play the game before sending it to the printer? How many times was it played by groups that didn't include you? Granted, I haven't been doing this as long as you, but every time I playtest, I discover some aspect of the game that is totally broken and go back to the drawing board. It gets better and better with each rewrite, and I'm gonna have to draw a line at some point and call it done, I know, but I know I need a lot more playtesting before I'll be comfortable putting a dollar amount on this.

Again, thanks!

Hi Adam,

I think people differ a lot regarding authoring vs. laying out. For me, layout has a finalizing quality which impedes my ability to edit and revise. As I go, once in a while, I'll use layout to try out different looks and font sizes, experimenting with the vision, fairly early in the process. But I always go back to the plain text page and use that for the writing, editing, and revising. Ultimately, I like to have a text-only, complete manuscript in standard format as "the" archival text copy, which then goes into layout. If layout gets screwed up in some way, we can then step back to the archival text for a re-try.

Maybe that would help you. Always keep a Word file with no layout or formatting beyond the basics, and type all corrections and revisions into that first. Then you can grab a piece of it and play with the layout software all you want; you can always 'port the whole text into that format if you want to, later.

Granted, I didn't playtest this one quite as much as others I've published. I did playtest it very thoroughly, in the sense of mechanics, and got a lot of feedback on the manuscript. I think I left out one playtest too, which included Ralph ... or was that one of the Hyde Park sessions? Aggghh, I know there were at least a couple more sessions in the early stages beyond what I described. My phrase "continued to playtest" was supposed to refer to them.

Also, this is a very simple game in mechanics terms, much more like Breaking the Ice and nothing at all like, even Sorcerer. The scale of resolution is very large, in whole scenes, and all the rules concern big conflicts and shifting some points and numbers around each time. Once I got it to hum nicely, there really wasn't any hidden corner or feature that needed to be attended to ... and hey, in the third phase of play, if you want your character to kill the other character, you just, uh, say so. It's not like any points are involved that need to be balanced or anything.

Best, Ron

Ron wrote:
I now brushed up the manuscript yet again, aiming for proofreading and anything I was forgetting. I assigned it an ISBN from my list, double-checked with Express Media that they could do the bar code, and contacted Emily and Paul for advertisement files;.

Hi Judd,

The Wikipedia entry for ISBN is pretty good.

Ultimately, nothing mandates that I or other publishers must buy and use ISBNs. But stores and other merchants expect to see them, to the extent that you won't move the book through many or nearly any of them without it. And I confess I find it helpful to think of every book as having a universal identifier.

Best, Ron

And naturally, I forgot the most important part of that question, the how do you procure an ISBN?

Paka wrote:
And naturally, I forgot the most important part of that question, the how do you procure an ISBN?

Adam wrote:
When is the right time to start thinking about layout? I've heard Clinton say he likes to write directly into the layout software so he can fit content to the pages.

The only thing I'm concerned about is how the grey in Veronica's pieces turned out, but again, it's minor.

Thanks for the response, Ron. That answers all my questions. Separate content from presentation and let the layout guy worry about it. And I'm sure my game needs a ton of playtesting -- I'm new at this and my game is complicated -- and it's fun to playtest anyway, in that morbid, trainwreck sorta way.

Clinton wrote:
You didn't hear me say that. That's a fucking awful idea. Use a text editor and write with no formatting at all, or at the most, type in Word, using the styles intelligently. That will keep your layout guy from hating you.

Thanks Ron.  I really enjoyed reading it all.

-Eric

Adam wrote: I use Word styles intelligently, but then before I know it, Word has created a billion variant styles like Body Text+12 pt and crap and I get frustrated and kick it. I should stick to emacs.

Clinton wrote: You didn't hear me say that. That's a fucking awful idea. Use a text editor and write with no formatting at all, or at the most, type in Word, using the styles intelligently. That will keep your layout guy from hating you.

Eric wrote: Thanks Ron.  I really enjoyed reading it all.

David wrote:
Opinion: As a professional "layout guy", I can assure you that it is time- and money-wasting to author without some use of style. Otherwise, your layout guy can't determine the metadata behind your content (which is what formatting conveys: relationships between content, author emphasis, distinguishing referential and procedural and anecdotal content, hierarchy/priority of content, inheritance of meaning, etc, etc). And, thus, you go through revisions solely due to confusions of intent, emphasis, and organization. For an obvious example, ask yourself how a layout guy can tell a major (chapter) heading from a minor (section) heading, in plain text? Anyone about say, "With ALLCAPS verses Sentence Case or with hyphens," is going to piss off a layout guy MUCH more--that sort of "pseudo-style" formatting is actually the HARDEST content to typeset, because it must be cleaned up before it can even be assigned a style. At least a Word style leaves the content as basic text that any good layout tool can Paste Special to Unformatted (Unicode) Text. Pseudo-styling (styling with content edits) actually more directly couples the format to the content!

I don't pretend to be an expert, I've just published three books and writing my own now, but I do the write-straight-to-layout thing. I usually do the pure text approach, and when writing for somebody else to lay out, I mark the text with xml tags or similar to give necessary layout instructions. But when writing my current project Eleanor's Dream I've found that what do you know, I write easily and with a good flow straight to layout! And I can gauge the text's rhythm for the reader while doing it, measuring the length to be exactly right. I also lose track less often in my text, can make decisions of necessary illustration while writing, and so on. Overall it's been superior method thus far for this project.

Of course, I don't expect the layout I write in to survive in the actual layout process, especially as I'm currently writing into a web-pdf spread layout, but plan on publishing as a book. And this is definitely not something to do as your first venture into making a book, you have to have the work outlined and planned, and know how to move your text between implementations.

About what to give to layout guys: as both layout guy and writer I prefer to tag the text structurally with xml. It's increasingly well supported, easy to transform to something else, and as flexible as it needs to be. Also allows analyzing your text in new and weird ways, the browser xml tree as the simplest example. I could well do the writing in some word processor and just have it add the xml, if I wanted to. It minimizes the layout work, because the text conforms to expectations without exceptions, removing the need for the typical manual step in moving the text to the layout program. Compare to word processors like Word, which are a nightmare and practically useless as "pre-layout" structuring tools for most layout systems, as you have to copy the structure to your layout program manually. Also compare to non-structured text, which has all those drawbacks David mentions.

About Ron's story, which was both entertaining and educational: If Matt's reading this, could you elaborate on why the cover didn't work for the printer? I do my own layouts and thus have become very, very interested in common layout catastrophes. I have my own list of everything from printers with too low lpis to

Eero wrote: About Ron's story, which was both entertaining and educational: If Matt's reading this, could you elaborate on why the cover didn't work for the printer? I do my own layouts and thus have become very, very interested in common layout catastrophes. I have my own list of everything from printers with too low lpis to

What Clinton said.  Also, because I got paid to write that article (by the magazine, not Clinton).

Seriously, I took his plain-text version of The Shadow of Yesterday and turned it into a PDF with a functioning table of contents in two hours.  It was great for a reference copy, even if it looks exactly like a technical manual.  I used a different set of tools than he did, but the fact that it was plain text made it very easy to transform.  Everything reads text.

Thanks for the details, Matt. Have to watch out for that if I'm ever doing other than CMYK in the covers. I've had my own foibles with grayscale vs. bitmap pictures resently: Finnish digital presses have an annoying habit of assuming that if you're using a digital press, you'll be happy with whatever quality of shit they choose to print for you. It appears that roughly half of the so-called digital presses are unable to produce lines per inch above something like 45, which makes for the interesting effect of totally screwing up grayscales, while leaving everything else looking fine. It took me two books and a year to come to the conclusion that the problem is not my inexperience, but the incompetense of some of those presses.

Matt wrote:
Registration means that all values of CMYK were 100%. But, I was ignorant that the cover was to be done in two color only. Having the black actually set to 4-color 100% meant that Ron would have to pay more and they weren't expecting that to happen. So, happily, I scaled it back to plain ol' Black, which is one color. (I am pretty ignorant of how they make it a two color -- presumably the other color is the pink, but I have no idea how that actually works since the pink itself used Magenta and Yellow values, if I recall rightly.)

Ron, thanks for the thorough description, it's clearly been a great springboard for addressing some specifics about the process.  I'd like to diverge from layout for a moment and ask about:

Printing

Ron wrote:
I have gone through many bidding processes with printers, and after a while, you hit on the one you like the most and stick with them, only looking elsewhere if the job really doesn't suit them. Therefore for Sorcerer books, I use Patterson Printing; for POD books, I use Express Media. I know their strong and weak points, I like their prices, and the books look good.

Ron wrote:
I asked Express Media to ship 85 to IPR and 15 to me at home.

Ron wrote:
Technically, I should have put up a webpage for the game . . . It seemed a little less important now that IPR handles my on-line ordering

David wrote:
Do you have any advice to someone who has never gone through the bidding process?  Any tips on what to look for and look out for with regards to printers, and how best to search for a good one?

Guy, your post is empty of content. Please restrain yourself while I talk to Dave. If you're wondering where a thread is, ask me by private message. Threads are not deleted here.

Dave, here's the basic thread about printers and bidding for you: What are the common mistakes of printing? See also:
POD printer roundup
Printer recommendations
Distributor questions (actually mostly about printing)
POD vs. distributors

Regarding my print run and anticipated sales, you're misunderstanding the situation. Brennan will be bringing the bulk of the print run to GenCon, whatever hasn't sold yet out of the 85 - or, who knows, however many more I've printed if they sell out before then. The 15 I requested are not for convention sales, but as a backup personal stock for archival purposes or extremely local sales, and for sending to artists and so on.

To answer your questions about that, my in-person sales are ... how does one put this ... extremely high at conventions.

Also, you might not be aware that 100 copies for one of my smaller games tends to sell out fairly soon, and I then hit a cycle of "order more" without really thinking about it much. The 100 as a total has nothing to do with anticipated sales, it's merely an affordable chunk and easy-to-store batch.

The chief benefit of using IPR isn't the association with other games, although that's a good thing and I don't discount it. But bluntly, Adept Press' web presence and ordering sites on its homepage are already established (now those buttons lead to IPR). For me, the whole point of using IPR is never, ever having to fulfill a game myself ever, ever again. The very name of this activity, "fulfillment," is an obscene joke. Daily, I praise IPR and Key 20 for being strange and obviously demented enough to do this for me. I wouldn't ever ever do it again, not for love nor money.

Good questions!

Best, Ron

Ron, thanks for linking all those threads.

I did indeed guess completely wrong on my distribution query, I should instead have simply asked:

For a first-time game publisher with a small initial print run (due to, y'know, not knowing if more than a handful of people will buy it), how would you recommend dividing my promotion and sales efforts between in-person and online?

If this is an issue that has already been discussed ad nauseum on these forums, feel free to admonish me for not browsing them more thoroughly before asking...

Ron wrote:
For me, the whole point of using IPR is never, ever having to fulfill a game myself ever, ever again. The very name of this activity, "fulfillment," is an obscene joke.

Hi David,

For a first-time game publisher with a small initial print run (due to, y'know, not knowing if more than a handful of people will buy it), how would you recommend dividing my promotion and sales efforts between in-person and online?

Pure self-serving announcement: the book is now available for purchase at IPR.

Back now to our regularly scheduled discussion.

Ron, would there be any reason to switch your Sorcerer game from traditional printing to a short run method or why have you decided to stick with traditional printing for Sorcerer?

I also echo your fulfillment comments. I sell photographic prints via my website and wholesale to local stores.  There is nothing worse than having to deal with getting the order together, boxing it, and mailing it...and if they want it shipped via UPS it's even worse. Total energy sap of utter boredom.

Hi Bryan,

The fact is that no current POD company can match the current physical quality of the Sorcerer core book. The case-bound, clothbound, hybrid-sewn, leaf-stamped, slip-cover combination is something a traditional printer can organize without any infrastructural maneuvering - but even the most diverse POD company, at this time, would have to scramble to figure out how to arrange any of this, probably with a lot of out-sourcing. To do it for short runs would be incredibly labor-intensive and, in my view, logistically unreliable on their parts.

(Just as Sorcerer's rules-features are still being discovered as innovations by many players, close to 10 years following their first public appearance, the book's physical design still sets one of the highest bars in role-playing. I stress that gaudiness is one thing, but raw physical quality is another.)

For the supplements, which are paperback, I looked into it about a year ago and made a few calls. The general response was that for books of this size (non-traditional dimensions, remember), the per-book cost of any print run size would actually exceed my current cost per book using Patterson Printing. It helps, you see, that my traditional printer already has all the film and all the specs for those books, without any hassle, and I have a good relationship with them which tends to cut me some slack when it comes to unexpected glitches or corrections. So I have to compare, not start-up costs between traditional and POD printing, but established traditional vs. start-up POD costs. And the latter come out as a money-sink in comparison, for the Sorcerer supplements, not least because I'd demand their absolute best quality, and also considering those intangibles with Patterson which have been a real blessing on occasion.

On the other hand, It Was a Mutual Decision was physically designed with current POD capabilities in mind, so it actually is built to optimize their strengths - net effect, sharp and cheap at the same time. I still can't help picking up and handling the book, and everyone I've showed it too instantly grabs it and does the same.

Best, Ron

Ron, thanks for describing the POD, short-run, and traditional modes of printing.  My questions about online vs in-person sales were based in part on my ignorance of the flexibility afforded by some of these systems (as I think you gathered).

I still have some questions about the relative costs of these modes, and which book formats are optimal for each, but I think I'll read those threads you linked before pestering you for any more specifics.  (Though, of course, if you have a concise breakdown at your fingertips, I'd love to see it.)

Thanks again,
-Dave

Ron,

Thanks, this is enlightening and juicy. Even moreso than the "How I published Sorcerer" stuff.

I don't think I saw any mention of whether your short-bound format caused any trouble or extra cost with your publisher. I had wondered about that a while back.

Regarding your nifty insights on the "impulse buy" styling, I'm somewhat curious; Do you think, content-wise, (and assuming you'd deal with the distribution for such) that this game actually could be sold on the counter at a major bookstore? Or is it just an aesthetic choice?

Speaking of which... The cover graphic looks really good, judging by the little thumbnail on IPR. Much less pink that your essay had led me to fear.

Hi Larry,

I don't think I saw any mention of whether your short-bound format caused any trouble or extra cost with your publisher. I had wondered about that a while back.

Regarding your nifty insights on the "impulse buy" styling, I'm somewhat curious; Do you think, content-wise, (and assuming you'd deal with the distribution for such) that this game actually could be sold on the counter at a major bookstore?

Or is it just an aesthetic choice?

Ron wrote:
In my experience, printers do 11" by 8.5" without any trouble, and if I'm not mistaken, they do 9" by 6" without any trouble either (I could be wrong; they might have to trim to it, but if they do, at least they're used to it). I think they can do 17" by 11" and 14" by 8.5" all right too.

How did you handle Editing by "Outside People", as in, people who are not you, of the final manuscript?

This seems to be a somewhat obscure point about Indie RPGs, as far as I've seen.

Adam, good point about the trimming. I always forget that.

Guy, I'm not sure what you mean about "handling" the editing ... when someone edits a manuscript I give them, I typically incorporate all their changes. Either I go right ahead and change what's indicated, or sometimes, I say, "I see why you marked that, but I can think of a better solution" and change it in a different way. I try hard to suppress my authorial worship of my immortal prose when dealing with someone else's edits of it, and to say, "Listen, ego, they're the reader and it's their turn now."

In my experience, no manuscript is rendered 100% pristine via editing; all we can do is try to keep the awful little fucking errors to a minimum. Also, some typos and errors of formatting occur at the layout stage, when the poor layout guy has to mess with the document a little as he's making things fit, and a letter gets clipped off the front or end of a line, for instance.

That brings up another point - the proofs stage. Contrary to the ideal, I have never found it logistically possible to revise proofs and make the printer do it over, except for really serious errors. This is partly a failing of mine, in not heeding my own advice about deadlines (in which case I see the error, wince, and suck it up, growling, "next printing"), but it's also a failing of the printing process, which frankly tends to over-charge at that stage, as I see it.

I'm also not sure whether there's any point to looking for a trend of any kind, about editing issues, across independent games. Asking for editing, responding to editing, etc, are highly individualized. You'd certainly see a trend within one person's set of books, sure. Non-independent games display an equal diversity, for the same reason.

Best, Ron

I meant, how many people do you give your manuscript(final version) for editing, how "professional" are they, do you look for grammar/format editing or also content, etc.

Depends on the game. Sorcerer underwent outside editing from a variety of sources, at a number of different steps in its unusual publishing history from 1996 through 2001. Elfs got a thorough going-over from a publisher who was interested in it, before that relationship went belly-up and I decided to publish it myself. In the case of It Was a Mutual Decision, I had two extremely scholarly friends (academics, library folks) go over it. For future purposes, I'm planning on bothering Thor Olavsrud for editing more often. He's done fantastic work for Burning Wheel and others.

As you can see, in my case, it's not a formalized or standard procedure from game to game, outside of the fact that I think it always needs to get done.

As a related matter, I have occasionally edited for others. My general impression is that response to editing is highly variable, up to and including ignoring most of it, even typos-corrections. My approach of accepting all edits in spirit and nearly all of then in concrete acceptance of the indicated change, seems to be rarer.

Best, Ron

Clinton wrote: You are talking nonsense and I am the one that will tell you so.

Linux wrote: Clinton's choice of tools is slightly unusual for an author. He wrote his text with vi, an editor more traditionally used by programmers than by authors. His choice partially is explained by the fact that Clinton also is a programmer.

Because he's a programmer, it also was a natural choice for him to use Python's DocTools to convert the text source to HTML, the format used to publish the book on the Web. This copy of the book was released under a Creative Commons License.

From the HTML files, Clinton was able to load the book into OpenOffice.org Writer. Writer interpreted the HTML files beautifully, converting HTML tags to OpenOffice.org styles.

Plain text can be manipulated into styled word-processor text with the flick of a hand.

Trying to deal with formatting while writing is damaging to your ability to write.

I thought I could offer advice as a professional typesetter, book designer, and producer who's worked for Fortune 500 companies for a decade. Perhaps readers will find a professional's opinion valuable, even though it was the rudely dismissed by an amateur who makes his living as a programmer. (I tried to report the post... guess who is this forum's Moderator, folks? hehehe)

Christ, I bet I'm like 1-2 posts in before this thread gets closed. :-)

However, this might be worth a new topic:

It always comes off as this smug, smarmy attempt to say, "I am better than you, and here's why."  If your years of intelligence and wisdom have not shined through in your discourse and ramblings, tacking on a resume` ain't exactly making me sit-up-and-say-ah.

Dav wrote: On the subject of rudeness:  I looked this over a few times and must have missed the rudeness (or I am such an egotist that assuming someone would be rude to me is just plain crazy-talk).

On the subject of format and writing....

On the subject of jobs: I really really wish that the Forge would adopt this general stance that telling people what your do for a living is something similar to coming out in a bar in a foreign country... who the fuck cares?
....
Anyway, you aren't making life better.  I figure you may have had a point or purpose or something with that line of "professional vs. amateur," but I don't know what it was.  That just plain made me not enjoy you at all.  Anyway, coming to an indie game design site and railing at professional vs. amateur is not exactly a wise maneuver.  Don't.  Fucking.  Do.  It.

Andy and Dav, I appreciate the spirit of the input.

David, it's obvious you'll continue to read this thread; your little sign-off fools no one. So here's your message: you blew it. You made a good case via PM for me to review the thread and think about moderating it. Then you pulled a little hissy-fit and started stamping about in more posts here, waving the "professional" club in an attempt to save face and strike back at perceived insults. You totally had your chance to kick it up to the social-contract level at the Forge (me), and then you dragged it right down to defending your ego-turf as if you were in a typical forum or blogspace on the internet. 

By the way, everyone who's reading: fuck the typical forum or blogspace on the internet. This is not there. This is here.

It's as if the cop came up to the two guys arguing in the street. The one guy says, "He hit me!" OK, says the cop, settle down, let's get a look at you two. Then whoa! The guy who just spoke, he swings on the other guy, goes crazy, crying and yelling. He takes a swing at the cop too.

You know what happens then.

So too bad. Whatever the merits of your position, whatever my judgment would have been about posts replying to you, you successfully evicted yourself from the real humans trying to interact here, instead of the posturing egos. Don't post in this thread again.

Everyone else, I'm interested in continuing to discuss my girly rat game.

Best, Ron

Just two quick things...

(1) I liked the use of the "for Story Now play" description, rather than "a roleplaying game" or whatever in describing the game. Is this something that you think you'll use to describe future games, or was this just appropriate for this game?

(2) Technical point about colour covers which may be useful for others... Sheridan Press have an excellent white paper on digital art, and it recommends that Total Area Coverage (TAC) for black or dark elements or for black areas within color images should not exceed 300%." Basically, just something that leapt out when I read "Having the black actually set to 4-color 100%..." But, it's always good to talk to your printer as Ron does and keep in contact with them about what you want and what they can provide, etc.

Hi Gregor,

At present, I'm disinclined to write a role-playing game wholly within the context of gamer culture, ever again. Perhaps some of the games I'll write will be procedurally quite standard (roll to hit, roll for damage, whatever). But I'm also certain that I'll be working with topics, procedures, and presentations that have been extracted from what I've learned here, after six years at the Forge. So whatever of "old role-playing" remains, it'll be integrated with and just right for the stuff that I'm doing that is not "old role-playing," whatever it might be for that game.

Now, at the level of analytical abstraction, that's no reason not to call these future products role-playing games. I could. The term has no definition; it is a legacy rather than a definition, as put so brilliantly by another poster, recently. So the question is not whether the activity presented in any of my future books is a role-playing game by principles-based definition, but whether I want to sell the thing in the commercial context of that legacy. At the moment, my long-term interest in doing so is slight, at best.

I see It Was a Mutual Decision as a possible transition. I'm still selling it primarily in gamer culture, but clearly it's not going to appeal to anyone in that culture outside the rather fringe-y circle represented by the Forge, Story Games, et al., and whomever I can rope into buying it at GenCon. Since I personally may be moving on to other things, and since the tastes of the wider culture are tuned sharply and strongly toward things like It Was a Mutual Decision (as opposed to any typical RPG you could name), then perhaps it can be taken with me when that day comes. Calling it Story Now is part of that mental transition, expressed in this case as a commercial label.

Best, Ron

David wrote:
So, sure, layout guys take TXT as source... and chuckle as they increase their hourly estimate and number of drafts/milestones (that's how we "suck it up": we suck up client money).

David wrote:
I'd advise folks to try it both ways: outline, organize, then author; or freeflow author and go back to build up structure. One way or the other will work better for each individual.

Ron wrote:
the question is not whether the activity presented in any of my future books is a role-playing game by principles-based definition, but whether I want to sell the thing in the commercial context of that legacy.

Ron wrote:
the tastes of the wider culture are tuned sharply and strongly toward things like It Was a Mutual Decision (as opposed to any typical RPG you could name)

David wrote: In fact, I find different processes work well for different parts of a project.  In my own case, I free-flow when generating narrative content ("...the world of Ugladesh is dark and foreboding...") and outline when writing up system mechanics or short descriptions.

Well, I don't have those problems writing straight into the layout. I usually write a layout unit (page or sidebar, whatever) at a time and only revise for layout sporadically, when mulling over the text anyway. Can't say I've ever had to stop to trim a paragraph. And I don't flow the text from one page to another; one of the main reasons I chose to write straight to layout was that the book is inherently composed of independent pages or small clusters, so it's pretty important to write an appropriate amount of text for each page. But, it's stupid to say here that this or that way of writing will confuse you or whatever. There's a great number of writing projects and writers, so what one finds blocking his flow might be perfectly natural for another. So there's not much basis for saying that some particular method for writing doesn't work.

As for outlines, I have a difficulty imagining somebody'd have something against them. They're an established, powerful writing tool, one of the few such.

A general related observation and question - it seems like the production cycle for self-published games is shrinking, or is becoming increasingly easy to shrink if that is the designer's goal.  Is this the result of a maturing POD marketplace, better software tools in the hands of designers, a growing body of design and production knowledge, all of these, or something else entirely?

Good call, Raven.

Eero, you're just weird.

Jason, before I answer this question, I want to encourage you to buy this first print run of It Was a Mutual Decision so you can revel in the minor errors, compared to the Roach.

So, shorter cycle? Perhaps - for some authors and for some games. Three things seem implicated: (1) more experience in actually doing the work, so fewer false starts or dead-times are involved for some projects (this applies to writing, revising, layout, print-bidding, etc); (2) much, much faster printing technology and much easier setup for commercial release (just send it to Brennan! beats the shit out of negotiating for pre-orders, etc); and (3) shorter-text games with shorter play-time and minimal to no text matching the standard organization and content of a mid-1990s RPG.

But I emphasize, for some authors, and for some games. Nor is that faster-cycle necessarily a good thing. In my case, the ease of #1-3 above is also a wicked pit of carelessness. So one lesson I learned from this game was where I need to slow down - specifically, late-stage proofing.

Best, Ron

I believe it may also have to do with "Name recognition".

It's actually an answer in a way, "How much more attention and playtesters do you get once you're a published author?".

It's hard to revise with a limited proofing/playtersters pool, and it seems to me once people get "noticed" so do their projects, which in turn lead to more playtesting, more opinions, And in a shorter amount of time.

How do you people see this?

Ron,

Speaking of minor errors, you mentioned there was a cost to fixing typos after the proof. This surprised me a little for POD publishing. It's not like they have to throw out a plate or anything, just twiddle with the computer. Is this just "them's the breaks," or what?

Larry, with RPI at least if you want to amend the proof they generate another proof, which they will either send to you or, for really minor things, review internally if you agree.  With The Roach we had a single line of italicized text laid out oddly in InDesign that was chewed up in the first proof (the result of .pdf versioning incompatibility).  We fixed this (and half a dozen other things) and they ran a second proof, which cost something like $50.  They don't change a single thing and they certainly don't edit your manuscript for you.

It turns out we completely forgot to correct this .pdf error in our second printing, and a second proof was again required - but we let them check it in house this time, since we all knew what the problem was. 

Three things seem implicated: (1) more experience in actually doing the work, so fewer false starts or dead-times are involved for some projects (this applies to writing, revising, layout, print-bidding, etc); (2) much, much faster printing technology and much easier setup for commercial release (just send it to Brennan! beats the shit out of negotiating for pre-orders, etc); and (3) shorter-text games with shorter play-time and minimal to no text matching the standard organization and content of a mid-1990s RPG.

Acts of Evil has already received more playtesting than My Life with Master did before it was published. And when I publish Acts of Evil it will have taken me more work, maybe three times as much work, over a longer, maybe as much as 50% longer timeframe than My Life with Master. I think as a development community we've gotten good at things like preserving character protagonism, apportioning narration, constraining narration and play options in dramatically interesting ways, and rewarding for creative/interesting/on-premise play. And we've developed an expertise at playtesting and giving truly meaningful playtest feedback to designers. I think fast cycle development has become possible as a result, for games within the tradition of this expertise. Yes, Acts of Evil will be a longer game text, and yes I did recently get married, but I think the extended development time is more because my goals are outside the development tradition than anything else. I'm designing for Acts of Evil player characters as static antagonists, and NPCs that emerge from play as protagonists. And I'm trying to provoke creative and interesting antagonism from the players via competition amongst them, rather than through direct reward mechanics. So while I've benefited greatly from our community's playtesting expertise, and in fact would never have come close to where I am on Acts of Evil without it, I've found I must second-guess my own design instincts, and those of experienced playtesters. Because those instincts would guide me to what we're good at, a game of player character protagonism.

Paul

Paul, that's fascinating. (Plus it allows me to console myself, as I labor on the playtest-proven brokeness of the third set of core mechanics for apocalypse girl, that the reason this is so much harder than the two RPGs I designed in college and played with my friends is that I'm trying to do something radically new, even if it is essentially second-generation Capes).

Ron, how would you compare the speed of the inspiration-design-playtest-revise-publish cycle for this game to Sorcerer? (Of course Sorcerer kept evolving after the publication of the initial email version and of each book, so it's a particularly complex example). How about Elfs? Trollbabe? Doctor Chaos and other pending projects?

In particular, I'm interested in whether designing gets progressively faster and faster for you because you've done it so much, even if mechanics and techniques in each game may be radically different, or whether the game you do today may be much, much more laborious than the game you wrote ten years ago because your ambitions and willingness to experiment increase even faster than your experience?

Guys, I think you're totally missing my crucial qualifier, which I said twice: for some designers and for some games. In this case, me, and this particular game. It doesn't apply to other games I'm working on, and it sure doesn't apply necessarily to other designers, although here it there it might - for some games.

Paul, maybe I'm just not understanding. On re-reading, I cannot tell how your post relates to the text I'm quoting. Are you agreeing or disagreeing or what?

Also, bear in mind - all this subtopic is in response to a fairly vaguely-worded, probably intentionally-provocative question of Guy's, which included a dubious imputation ("the publishing process is getting shorter") in order to be asked. It's not surprising that we're kind of flailing at one another now, because the imputation and my attempt to answer the question aren't providing us with a shared intellectual ground. For instance, I only answered relative to myself and this game.

Perhaps it's better to junk this subtopic before more people bring in their guesses, reactions, and probably resentments or whatever into the mix.

Best, Ron

I meant the playtest reports take a shorter time to arrive/happen, not the design process(except for parts relating to Playtesting).

Sure it may have been a bit provocative, but it does refer to published game makers' future games, this being such a game.

Thanks for the clarification, Guy. Again, I can only answer for myself and for this game. I think I gave the reasons for why it seems (or is) a little light on playtesting earlier. I can also add that it played so well after the first round of post-playtest revision that I was astounded. Further playtesting showed that the real hump had been surmounted, and resulted only in minor revisions of clarification.

Best, Ron

Heya,

But I emphasize, for some authors, and for some games. Nor is that faster-cycle necessarily a good thing. In my case, the ease of #1-3 above is also a wicked pit of carelessness. So one lesson I learned from this game was where I need to slow down - specifically, late-stage proofing.