Blogging On The Run... No Surprise There

If you do happen to follow this blog then there's really no point in me telling you where I've been since the end of September as that should be blatantly obvious. Shadow Cities is out on Monday (and as it is, for the most part, a digital entity, the snow will find it hard to stop this) Nano is complete and the brain is therefore in a little pre-Christmas free fall. No bad thing there.

Over this past couple of years I've had ample opportunity to learn some things about the business of writing in the modern world. I'd already learned all the depressing stuff like how sending your manuscript to agents and hoping that it progressed from there to a publishing house to a book store to a career of bestselling blockbusterdom was a recipe for bitterness, anguish and disappointment. Yes, I'd learned all that stuff pretty well.

What I've learned in the following months that is now nearly two years is that becoming a happy self-publisher is maybe not as lucrative as stepping into the world of bestselling blockbuster authors but it a) can be more fun and b) is a hell of a lot more satisfying.

I look back over three years of Nano where I've got some good solid work done, most of a Levercastle novel, all of a Shadow Cities novel and, outside Nano three RP books contributed to and more than that besides and I realise that as a commercial writer these days there's no chance. No possibility in hell that you could produce that much. Even if you wrote it no big house would be in a position to publish it the way they want.

Anyway, I would like to promise more on this topic soon but who knows when I will next have an opportunity to sit at the keyboard like this? Hopefully soon. But that's always the case.

Back In The Saddle

So yes.

Been a while. A good while. Those of you who have been following the continuing saga of No Dice will know that I've been putting all my effort into what I shall now dub "No Dice Phase I". No Dice Phase I consists of: The Core Book, Random Encounters, Levercastle, Shadow Cities and PULP RP and represents a full cycle of work.

If No Dice has any BIG IDEAS trust me most of them are in this Phase I. Sure there are plenty more ideas in Dreamtime Stories and Marauders and so on. But these are all derived from the BIG IDEAS in Phase I.

No ideas are bigger in this phase than the ideas behind PULP RP, the last publication in the series which is what I am getting down to now.

So that's what I've been up to. The other main piece of news is that I have acquired an eBook, which has swiftly become a great boon. I have been able to catch up on my reading as I prefer PDFs to regular published books. It's been great. I shall soon be returning to my duties as a POD book reviewer as I've chewed through so many books in the last fortnight that I shall no longer feel horrendously guilty for not reviewing things people send me in a reasonable amount of time.

Currently submissions are closed. But when they are open, be assured, you will know.

I think that's all for now. I'd better go and see if Sue's Sim 3 is now working as it was having memory issues.

Missing By A Mile

Recovering from a system bork I found this in my unpublished drafts. It's an article by a much more old-skool games designer than anyone I hang out with.

What I found amusing was the referencing of games designers pandering to rules lawyers. It has to be said that hitherto most successful games companies have made money by doing precisely this. It makes me wonder if we're going about this the right way or if we should be producing another 200 page rules supplement every week like some other games companies.

Oh well, guess we'll never be rich and we'll be considered wrong and foolish; at least we're happy not wasting our lives looking for a definitive decision on that rules quibble.

Yikes!

So RoboJoe stole the show... *sigh* worst X Factor winner Evar! (relatively speaking, Leon Jackson was a massive anti-climax but he wasn't up against talent like Olly, Danyl and Stacey, he also wasn't following talent like Alexandra and JLS).

I've been creating a wiki for No Dice. This will replace the soon to be extinct No Dice Forums. Have a look around. There's already a bunch of stuff in System Hacks.

Also Random Encounters is out! The ideal Chrimbo gift! Buy one now! ;)

Have a good Monday!

Gamer Fatigue?

I find myself wondering about the phenomenon known as "Gamer Fatigue". This is where some person in your gaming community announces that they are "taking a break from RP" and withdraws, mysteriously, into seclusion. To me this seems a bit like "taking a break from Movies" or "taking a break from TV". Gaming, to me, is a form of entertainment, not a chore.

I can understand when people say they're going to "take a break from the gym to concentrate on swimming". I guess I just never really regarded gaming as such an intensive pastime. This points the way to a further set of concepts within gaming I hadn't really thought about before. When I find a television drama, a novel or a computer game compelling it's often on the point of it giving me new ideas or insight into the construction of stories for others. Weirdly this means I often don't like playing in games as I can't really just rip off another Host. Gaming is virgin territory for many gimmicks.

This leads to two further notes. One, that I know other people take their gaming very seriously and look upon the opportunity to play a role as an actual creative enterprise. Some people, myself included, look on their character as a way to interact with the story environment, they are contributing a performance within the rules in order to keep the game going. The other note is that role playing games haven't yet progressed to the point where there is a startling bloom of innovation.

To deal with these points in reverse order. It seems that all the RP that has gone on since D&D has been much after the fashion of people taking pictures of moving objects with early movie cameras. Unlike the former activity, however, because it is not enormously expensive and doesn't have much in the way of toys people have largely ignored this innovation in entertainment (did I mention it also has few military applications). RP's not good for much except as a really cool form of entertainment. The problem is that innovation in the field has been restricted to new methods for number-juggling.

I love RP so much that when my partner didn't want to play I changed the hobby to make it suit her more, now I love it even more myself.

But this is weighty stuff. It also leads back to the former point.

I know a lot of people get "RP Burnout" at present. This is like the reverse of "cinema frustration" in which there are too few movies you want to see out when you fancy a visit to the pictures. RP Burnout is where you've role played so much you just can't take it any more. I think I experienced something similar with console games a while back. I'd just played so many of the damnable things I couldn't play any more or it felt like my brain would fall out. Also console games achieve nothing for the player whereas the benefits of socialisation and group interaction at least give RP a social dimension.

I imagine if you did anything enough then it would lead to a similar situation, if they did release enough movies that you could go all day every day for a month you would probably get sick of going to the movies (in fact at film festivals I believe this is what happens to some). However we roleplay once a week and occasional weekends. At the moment we're doing a little more because we're playtesting new adventures. I'd actually like to adopt a slightly less intensive posture after this testing phase.

But what I'm left with after considering these points is even more clarification of what players want out of the RP experience. I know that Mrs Monkey has been finding some of the experiences very hard of late. I think at the point where you feel guilty because you should have done more is precisely the time that you should start to do more.

I think what I need to get across to people that the RP is an entertainment. Levercastle tends to be treated as such. I think what also needs to happen is not only that the players say what they expect out of the experience but the Host needs to say what he can see happening bearing in mind the characters as presented. If people know what's coming up in a vague sense of the word then they can prepare accordingly.

I think that's actually mentioned in the Core Book but the fine tuning of the concept still seems to be a little off. Ho hum. Back to tinkering.

Convenience

Gaming has tradititionally been a double-edged hobby. On the one hand you rarely, if ever, meet a weekend gamer, someone who isn't really into the hobby but just does it a bit. If you and another person share the hobby chances are you'll be able to sit down and have some sort of a basis for conversation.

You want to see an example of a hobby where being into it doesn't guarantee social connection look at music. Even if you manage to get two people who claim to love the same sort of music, or even the same band, you can't guarantee that they'd necessarily have much to say to one another. In the field of music people can like the same thing for entirely separate and even mutually incompatible reasons.

Likewise a lot of the really popular pastimes. I think this could explain why people are so slavishly addicted to watching sports. And what are sports and Monday Morning Quarterbacks but gamers by another stripe?

To return to role playing, it has never occurred to most gamers to ask why gaming isn't more popular, even though it inspires such passion from those involved. It stands to reason that if someone is so deeply into something that it owns a portion of their life there must be something to generally recommend it.

Well, I think that happens to be true. I don't know many people who wouldn't get a kick out of some form of role playing. Maybe you don't like a violent martial arts spectacular but a visit to a fairy-tale seaside town sounds awesome, maybe you're not really into slasher movies but a police procedural game would suit you down to the ground. I don't think there's any doubt that there's a role playing experience out there for everyone.

So where is everyone?

Well. This is the double edged part about it. As we get older we gamers realise that there is more to life than being relegated to a trestle table in the corner of some draughty town hall or community centre. There's more to the hobby than "stop having fun, it's time to role play" (yeah, I actually still hear this from time to time *sigh*).

Time to a working guy with a couple of week's holiday and a forty hour a week contract is precious. If a game's going to be uncomfortable then it's just not worth the time.

The final tweaks are hitting No Dice, I'm hoping to finish off the text typesetting at the weekend I also want to add in a couple of notes on this. Role playing is being held back because it's such an effort to make it convenient. Traditionally players have had to fit round the game. Hopefully with No Dice we can start to make people see that it should be the other way round.