People who don't play but write creating materials

[tavis]

Aug 6, 2009 7:24:49 GMT -6 Melan said:

the "people who don't play but write creating materials for people who don't play but collect" part of the industry bothers me to no end, but that is a different thread.

I got tired of waiting for that different thread and decided to post it myself!

Mike Mearls nailed part of the problem in a comment on Jeff's Gameblog about Paul Crabaugh: Getting paid to write by the word, which is how it's usually done, gives you a strong incentive to turn out a tome that'll be nice to read on the can but much too bloated to use at the table. (Add in the defense of low production values thread for why that tome might also be better suited for your coffee table than your gaming table.)

A related issue is that if you're trying to make a living writing RPG material, actually playing the game is in direct conflict because it wastes time you could be spending writing, and at three cents a word that's a luxury you can ill afford.

Some of my favorite early D&D writing, like the Ready Ref Sheets, seems to avoid this paradox by being something the author needed to do to to support their own game and then decided other people would pay for as well. But other early stuff displays the limits of this approach - either the assumptions of the author's campaign, like Arduin, are too far removed from mine to make the stuff he found useful valuable to me; or else, as with First Fantasy Campaign, just explaining the assumptions behind what were clearly, but often incomprehensibly, tools for actual play would bloat it toward coffee-table length.

[Finarvyn]

Tavis, you get an EXALT for this.

I get tired of being the playtester for someone else's product. Seems like many of the games and supplements are cranked out so fast that nobody could possibly be playtesting. For example, with 4E (and I don't want this to become a 4E-bashing thread) I look at the total number of add-on books out already, and the system is only a year old. Did they create this monster system from the onset, and only put a small slice of it into the "core" books, or are they generating powers at a phenomenal rate in order to sell extra books on Martial, Arcane, and Divine powers? Is there truly thought being put into game balance, or are the writers just throwing stuff together and hoping that the public buys it?

And do we need or want such quantity in a game system?

I was in a game store yesterday (Games Plus in Mt. Prospect, only the best game store in the Chicagoland area) and I was looking at the rack where they have the Indie games. I've become interested in Indie games in part becasue they tend to be fresh and more of the "common man's game" instead of some of the giant systems with their add-on sourcebooks and so on.

I was stunned to realize just how thick many of these books are becoming. Not at all thin like Sorcerer or Don't Rest Your Head or Og where you can sit and read through most of the thing in a sitting.

Is this a trend in gaming books now, making them so thick? I know that the Indie guys aren't being paid by the word, and I hope they are playtesting their own games since they aren't being backed by a major company or anything, but what happened to the thin little games you can read and play in an afternoon?

When I got home, I dusted off Men & Magic, which still checks in at 36 pages, and it looks so tiny. Sure, all three LBB together make 112 (digest-sized) pages but that's still a lot smaller than Sorcerer, which is around 150.

I guess the world of game publishing is changing....

[tavis]

I think that there's some customer expectation at work. Indie publishers get paid based on sales, not on words, but if you're selling to a gaming public that's become accustomed to fat hardbacks, a bigger book is going to sell better. There are other retail factors too like shelf space - a 3 LBB sized pamphlet is going to tend to get lost in a game store & be hard for customers to find among its bigger neighbors.

I also think that the WotC 4E stuff is pretty thoroughly playtested & a relatively good job of maintaining balance is being done, esp. compared to 3E - the underlying logic of the 4E mechanics are impressively sound & rigorous, so there aren't that many hidden surprises that won't show up except through actual play. WotC has the resources to have a separate development staff, whose entire job it is to take what the designers have written and look at balance and how it fits into the rest of the system. And they have the customer base to get a lot of feedback from public playtests, like the barbarian class.

At issue here, of course, is the concept of balance. It seems to me that in order to attain 4E's greater degree of balancedness compared to 3E, you have to design in a pretty fixed standard of what play will be like so that you can balance around that standard - which is part of the "4E is all about combat" meme - and you also have to eliminate cases where unpredictable interpretations of the rules might lead to "unbalanced" outcomes - which is part of the "4E powers are all the same" meme, since no one can misinterpret a command spell that's limited to damage + push 1 or daze.

And, as I was saying in the other thread, I see a difference between playtesting and actual play. Even if I think that all the new 4E releases in the first year aren't just thrown together, I definitely agree that they're there to fill a consumerist need rather than an actual-play one, because no one group could have possibly exhausted all the stuff that's in the core books. (Yes, the second-generation books are often more innovative & have more interesting possibilities than the original ones, but it's an open question whether that's because we've been paying to be playtesters.)

[Melan]

Good thread. I believe people who are actively gaming can get away with not playtesting something thoroughly on an occasion or two, but if you are at the point where you haven't gamed for a long time, your writing will suffer as you lose perspective from what is actually happening at the table. When I returned to gaming after a three-year hiatus, it tooks some hard work to relearn good practice. As I see it, this problem was incredibly common with wannabe novellists writing RPGs while they were waiting for their lucky break (that's most of TSR late 80s to late 90s), and today, "game designers" paid $0.02 or $0.03 to churn out content.

This problem is encouraged by a demographic of gamers who don't reject these products, in part because they have also lost their connections to actual play, or are simply buying materials to support a buying habit, often with the self-delusion of "mining them for useable material". Well, I think that's a problem. If you have to mine for it, it is not good to start with.

I also agree with tavis WRT 4e materials; they demonstrate a level of playtesting not found in the rest of gaming. The problem is that 4e is only focused on one form of fun, and goes through only one form of playtesting - making the output gearhead- and tactics-friendly, but entirely useless to me. That of course doesn't make it a badly designed module, just one designed for purposes completely antithetical to my preferences.

[tavis]

Aug 10, 2009 0:03:51 GMT -6 Melan said:

Good thread.

Well, you started it! (I just pushed it along a little.)

Aug 10, 2009 0:03:51 GMT -6 Melan said:

if you are at the point where you haven't gamed for a long time, your writing will suffer as you lose perspective from what is actually happening at the table.

We certainly agree that if the product you're being asked to write for doesn't have a strong relationship to actual play, and will sell to consumers that don't demand that, there's no real professional benefit to spending your time on gaming (since you could write setting fluff just as well without it), and in fact a professional detriment (since it's time you could spend writing).

I'm not sure "incredibly common" is accurate, though. I do agree that there are pressures driving freelance writers towards spending less time on paid activities and less on unpaid ones (and that WotC benefits from making paying a developer's attention to balance a paying activity). But since writing for three cents a word is the kind of crazy you'd do only if you really love gaming, the freelancers I know do resist those pressures to a greater or lesser extent.

And I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea that the railroady, flowery-description-laden products of the late-TSR era are related to a confusion between a novelist's job and a DM's. But on the other hand, I heard someone from that era talk about how it seemed like the designers wrote at most one day a week and played in the office on the other four. So it seems to me likely that it wasn't that those guys weren't gaming, but that the kind of gaming they were doing reflected the aspiring-novelist style that was prevalent at the time.

[geoffrey]

Mike Breault (an editor/developer/writer at TSR from 1984 - 1989 and who did freelance work for TSR from 1989 through 1992) recently said this:

"[H]ere's something horrible to admit: The vast majority of modules and systems in hardback books were not playtested, to the very best of my knowledge. The designer would make them up, perhaps playtest them on his own or informally call a buddy or co-worker over to review or briefly playtest them, but as a general rule I saw very little playtesting occur...much of what left our doors received little to no playtesting that I was aware of, due to time and resource factors."

(link: www.knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=5996&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15 )

[tavis]

Interesting, thanks for the data!

[Melan]

Employees of mid-tier RPG companies have also admitted as much on RPGNet. It's far more common than some might believe.

[Pierce Inverarity]

And it's not limited to the novelists. Loren Wiseman of Traveller fame proudly didn't play RPGs. Hey, he just liked wargames better. The stuff he wrote and oversaw as GT line editor is canon/encyclopedic on one hand, ultra-technical/number-crunchy on the other. That was the other 90s trend (really a mid-80s holdover, I guess).

[benoist]

Aug 10, 2009 0:03:51 GMT -6 Melan said:

I believe people who are actively gaming can get away with not playtesting something thoroughly on an occasion or two, but if you are at the point where you haven't gamed for a long time, your writing will suffer as you lose perspective from what is actually happening at the table.

I agree.

It's often not what people might consider matters in an armchair-designer fashion either. What is often discarded in actual RPG design, for instance, is the outlooks on the game and personalities of the gamers involved around a particular gaming table.

A game designer often just discards these specificities of psychological and sociological makeups of gaming groups for an abstract idea of what the "average group" would do, and how the adventure would work if every player played fairly, all had the same intellectual capacities, an equal willingness to work together and so on, so forth.

We all know it doesn't work that way in practice. Some of the best adventures, IMO, point out the specificities of the group in mind when designing the adventure to the would-be DM, so that the DM him/herself can adapt the adventure to his/her own game table and players involved.

If you can convey a clear idea of the optimal party makeup to run the adventure, and manage to make the DM understand how to adapt the material to any particular group composition from there, chances are, you've got a winner module on your hands.