I’ve got to beg out from this week of posting as well. Last week was extra heavy with Dresden Files work leading up to the Alliance press release (among other things), and this week is chock full of similar activities (as well as some light anxiety about possible imminent travel). But there are a few things I want to note quickly.
Evil Hat’s PDFs are 25% Off At DriveThru
The GM’s Day sale starts today and runs for 4 days past it. Stuff which is on sale is 25% off, and that includes all of Evil Hat’s stuff. Well worth checking out the sale — tons of publishers have weighed in. The site’s running a little bit slow, though; I’m wondering if they’re getting hit with huge traffic. Just remember, this “GM’s Day” event is 5 days long, so you’ve got some breathing room.
Origins Game Submissions from Evil Hat Volunteer GMs
Good morningafternoon, Internets! Did you miss me?
If anything cool, fun, or important has happened since Thursday night, please let me know in comments.
Behind the cut, below, I'm going to talk about what I did at Dreamation 2010 this past weekend. LJ usernames will not be used to protect the innocent because I'm too lazy to look them all up. (I apologize in advance for misspellings and flat-out wrong names; mea culpa.)
Onward!
Events
FLIDAY
Drove up to Rob Donoghue's house at ZOMG o'clock.
Got on the road around 5:30 am.
Much great gaming geekery discussion, ranging from design matters to personalities to industry ideas.
Got to the Hyatt in Morristown; half-hour parking lot hell.
Check-in, got ourselves situated; see many people, many handshakes and hugs; lunch with Ryan Macklin and Matt Gandy.
General hanging out, with a particular "gobsmack Chad" moment:
MACKLIN: "I bet you think you deserve a motherfucking medal for just being you, for just being Chad Underkoffler, don't you?"
YOUR HUMBLE: "Abso-friggin'-lutely."
MACKLIN: "Alright, then, bitch!" (fumbles in bag, produces a medal)
YOUR HUMBLE: (pole-axed; gapes like a goldfish; starts laughing hysterically)
MACKLIN: (to puzzled onlookers) "It's the Silver ENnie for S7S I accepted for him at GenCon."
[Well played, sir. Well played.]
Sushi for dinner with Gregory Phillips, Brennan Taylor, and the delightful Lilith Taylor (who we all bored to tears for awhile talking about -- God help me, that I did this -- the economy, CDOs, the Move Your Money concept, yadda yadda. (Sorry, Lilith. The three of us we being old farts.)
Played in a game of 3:16 -- Carnage Amongst the Stars (which I got from the "Haiti Bundle" on RPGNow/DTRPG), GM'd by Matt Weber. Much bug-huntin' and "officers are idiots/douchebags" fun. Think Aliens meets the Starship Troopers movie.
Through the kind introduction of Darren Watts, and the sufferance of Vinny, got into the late-night Texas Hold 'Em game ($20 buy-in). Only had to wait about a half-hour before a seat opened up. I was writing off that $20 as an "entertainment and education expense" -- you see, almost all of my poker playing has been computer/online, so I have very few table skills. I saw this as an opportunity to learn those, and was happy to pay for the privilege, and said as much going in. I made mistakes, I learned, I had fun, and in the end, I made money: when I cashed out at 3 am, I was up $29. (That money helped with some of the Purchases below. Thanks, guys!)
A little under 3.5 hrs sleeps, and then...
SABADAY
When taking my morning shower, one of my greatest fears happened:
I slipped and fell in the extremely slick hotel tub.
I fell completely out of the tub, ripping the shower curtains free.
I narrowly missed cracking my skull open on the toilet, avoiding a porcelain slam to the brainpan that would have resulted in leaking blood and brains onto the lineoleum.
As it was, I landed on my... pride. (And we all know my "pride" is very well-padded.)
Lesson learned? I don't care: I'll wear my fake Crocs into hotel showers from now on.
BONUS: It's also darkly funny, in a way: "WET NAKED FAT MAN FALLS DOWN IN BATHROOM; FILM AT 11."
Paid $20 for coffee and a small plate of scrambled eggs and bacon.
Played Ganakagok in the am, GM'd by Jeff Collyer. Think tribal mythopoetical "Inuit-esque" folks, before the first rising of the Sun. The first Ganakagok game I'm been in NOT run by the author/designer (Bill White), and the most soap-opera-y thus far -- much of the play was all about social ties, relationships, status, and the Village.
Pizza for lunch with Joanna and Connie and others.
Spent first part of the afternoon sitting at a table in the hallway between the hotel lobby and the conference center with Rob Donoghue:
Shootin' the shit with whoever passed by.
Gave an academic interview to Bill White on North American jeepform/freeform play.
Talked with Vinny regarding some of the stuff I'll touch on in the Sunday Indie Roundtable discussion below.
Farted around with Rob and a deck of cards, trying to see if there was a good card-based resolution system for the sort of "give-and-take" in conflicts one sees in fiction and movies.
Played in Dan Solis' Happy Birthday, Robot. It's a fantastic all-ages game, and can RAWK as a "generic" party game with non-gamer geeks. (Any game that can credibly survive the input of an over-caffinated/over-sugared 7 yr old has serious chops.) This one's a winner, folks. (muskrat_john, this is an Out of the Box game just waiting to happen. SRSLY.)
Dinner, with much discussion of semiotics. ROCK ON!
While waiting for the stars to align, Jared Sorensen (that magnificent bastard) tricked a bunch of us into playing several rounds of JUNGLE ADVENTURE, a Parsely game. . . and thus assured I'd buy ACTION CASTLE the next day (see below, Purchases). (Parsely games are PERFECT party games, BUT I do have to note it may be only perfect for those of us at a certain age. I don't really know if the whippersnappers would get into infocom-style text adventures. I welcome insights.)
My attempt to Make Macklin Cry (by running Mythender) more or less fails. Mac's on top of his game, and handles it with aplomb and fun. CURSES!
Awesome lobby socialization.
Sleep the sleep of the Dead.
SUMDAY
$20 bacon and eggs, again.
Looking at the sched, I figured there was a decent chance of getting into a Fiasco game: many tables, early Sunday, rock on.
Have ridiculous amount of fun with Fiasco. (Jason, was it "Besting" or "Breaking" or "Busting" when talking about one's "Jonx"?)
Fantastic, if short, chat with Remi Treuer.
Many hugging goodbyes.
The Indie Roundtable, where:
Vinny laid out some ideas for a separate, Indie publisher/designer-focused mini-con. More deets will be forthcoming -- but I find the idea of a robust practical game design seminar track, a publishable academic "Proceedings" document, the idea that demos could be video'd and YouTube'd, and a central online forum/resource site VERY HOT. (Think of this mini-con idea as "Indie Roundtable, all the time!")
I offered my arrogant opinion on many topics.
Kudos to the Robs (Bohl and Donoghue) for emcee-ing.
Saddlin' up with Rob D. for the drive south.
Much great discussion, ranging from gaming stuff to fiction stuff to genealogical/family history stuff to philosophical explorations.
Get my car from Donoghue land; drive home; magically find an appropriate parking spot. Unpack/do required chores. Crash.
So, it’s Friday, and I don’t have a food post for you. Once I do, it’ll be about The Banana Bread I Grew Up On. Promise.
Today, I’ve taken some painkillers, so I have very little to say that doesn’t dissolve into a suffusion of yellow.
I’ve got some interesting things to say about how a distributor totally backed me up earlier this week — without me being a client (at least not yet). That, maybe Monday.
But it’s Friday, so I’ll just leave you with this:
What it all comes down to is what Russell Crowe as John Nash was on about in A Beautiful Mind. Watch this clip — it’ll only take a few minutes — then come back:
The good news here is that I’m not suggesting that you, the community “organizer”, are obligated to make a personal and direct connection with each and every member of your community. In fact, if your community is active and thriving, you can’t. (Not strictly true — in some circumstances, you could, but it would be a full-time activity and that’s all you’d be doing. So for our discussion’s purposes, we’ll call that close enough to “can’t” for the assertion to stand.)
The trick, inasmuch as there’s a trick, is to engage in behaviors that makes it seem like you’re making that personal connection anyway.
I’ve seen a few people ask me how I build communities. Most of what I do relative to communities that I’ve been in a nominal leadership role with just seems to proceed from natural instinct. I’ve tried to deconstruct this in the more distant past, but it’s a topic worth revisiting, even if I’m not completely convinced that I’m actually doing that much in the way of direct building. A big part of this has been good timing combined with grabbing onto something big and powerful and hanging on (ala Jim Butcher’s career in its earlier stages, or the preexisting Fudge community when we started running our yaps about Fate).
But that doesn’t mean I can’t dig into it at least a little. Today, I’m going to talk about managing your critical mass and using it to power your community.
I want to talk about the notion of a book on a shelf in a game store (and relatedly, in a book store), as well as how that ties into the math of pricepoints in RPG publishing.
This is on my mind because at Evil Hat we’re getting ever closer to the release of the Dresden Files RPG. (Yes, we’re splitting it into two books. No, I don’t want to talk about that here. I’m talking about it enough other places already.) Our press release doesn’t talk about distribution; it says we’ll have it on sale through Indie Press Revolution (and therefore through retailers who get books from IPR), and we’ll have it on sale through our own web store.
Now, that’s not the whole picture, but it’s most of it. (We have a good relationship with UK-based distributor Esdevium, and we’ll likely continue to work that relationship for getting products over to the other side of the Atlantic.) The question, then, is why is that most of the picture? (i.e., why aren’t we diving at distributors aplenty and trying to get signed up?)
My wife got me Invincible: The Ultimate Collection Volume 4 for my birthday, and of course I’ve already read through the whole thing. I love this comic, though I say that as someone who doesn’t really have a regular comic reading habit. (Mainly I read stuff in collections, often gifted or borrowed from a friend. This has the upside of getting lots of story in big coherent swaths, but it also has the effect of mainlining the entire season of a TV show in two days. You’re simultaneously full up of the good stuff, and empty because there isn’t a similar volume waiting for you on day three.)
Invincible has me from the word go. I know a few folks I’ve recommended the series to found it to come off a little flat, though several others have seemed really jazzed by it. I flippantly described it on Twitter the other day as “what Smallville wanted to be before it succumbed to a fatal case of kryptonite poisoning”, though I suppose that does more to tarnish the appeal of Invincible than elucidate it. (Ah, Smallville, what an acid-trip of a show you were before I took my leave of you.) At its core, Invincible is the story of an alt-Superman’s kid, run through a heavy Peter Parker’s Life Sucks filter. And boy, does it make my I-want-to-play-in-some-supers-genre-games itch flare right the hell up.
But I’m also not sure that I would want to play a straight up “adaptation” of Invincible at my gaming table. So I need to deconstruct this thing, figure out what its basic working parts are, and which of those parts speak to me as a gamer. If only so my friends can get a little closer to running the game I want to play in! (That said, the analysis will not go that deep in the interests of keeping things spoiler-free.)
So that’s somewhere around a “get these products for 99% off!” deal.
You should perhaps take all of us publishers up on that. You’ll get Spirit of the Season from Evil Hat, and a bunch of other products too (several of which I did some or all of the layout on, I’m happy to say). It’s one of those “you’re insane NOT to spend $20 on this” sort of things, even if you aren’t in the least bit humanitarian in your mindset.
There are so many products on this thing that the bundle’s attempt to alphabetically list them all craps out somewhere late in the letter C.
That’s C, for crazy.
Since the listing craps out, I thought I’d grab the full list of what I got after I made my purchase for the curious. Holy crap! Beast Hunters! Kerberos Club! Damnation Decade! Three Sixteen! It’s just ridiculous. Buy it.
The GM’s Day sale starts today and runs for 4 days past it. Stuff which is on sale is 25% off, and that includes all of Evil Hat’s stuff. Well worth checking out the sale — tons of publishers have weighed in. The site’s running a little bit slow, though; I’m wondering if they’re getting hit with huge traffic. Just remember, this “GM’s Day” event is 5 days long, so you’ve got some breathing room.![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
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