Inspired by a conversation I had with a friend recently, I have some advice for all new writer-publishers[1]:

Friends will offer help when you’re in need. They’ll offer to do some writing for free, or editing for free, or art for free, whatever.

When they do, politely decline or offer to pay. Never take free.[2]

People are well-meaning, but the problem with free work for friends is that is has the lowest priority. Lower that work that keeps you in rent, food & Internet. Lower that paying work that’s interesting. Lower that relaxing after a stressful day. And often lower than sleeping. This causes one of two problems:

• You can’t depend on them for a schedule. Sure, they’ll say you can depend on them, and I hope you can, but expect them to slip.
• Because you’re getting work they’s done whenever they could get around to it, expect it to be sloppy or rougher than what they would otherwise turn it for a paying client.

Sometimes, you get both problems simultaneously.

Now, your friends aren’t bad people. Quite the contrary! But there’s often a vast valley between our intentions and our bandwidth. And people offering tend to not take that into account. But it still leaves you in an awkward place. When you receive said work, you can:

• Accept it begrudgingly, and spend a little time working on it to fit what you’re doing.
• Accept it begrudgingly, and spend a lot of time working with it your vision. Likely as much time as you would have spent writing or whatnot in the first place.
• Send back notes, asking for revision, and expecting the same sort of issues with scheduling & quality.
• Reject it, and cause hurt feelings because this was a favor done for you.

Again, your friends aren’t bad people! But now you’re in a hell of a situation, where you have more trouble than you had before. There’s guilt on their part for offering, guilt on yours for having to deal with this situation, and frustration all around. This is the sort of thing that can strain friendships and break up romantic relationships.[3]

(And yes, you may luck out. But the smart money doesn’t plan for success, but for struggle.)

All that said, there are people you can rely upon if you outline what you need, when you need it, and know that they aren’t critical to the project going live. Like what I did with Finis, and what we did when Jonathan Walton & I proposed Magic Missile[4]. But if people volunteer to do something critical for your project (which happens often when you’re doing a charity project and people can’t volunteer money, so they want to volunteer time), know that you’re walking into a suboptimal situation that, weeks down the road, will cause strife.

(Yes, I realize there are entire sites that run off the “work for free” model. They have more discipline and possibly less financial hardship than I do. I do a little bit of free work, knowing that I’m actually being paid in social capital, and always for something short, quick & interesting.)

- Ryan

P.S. I’ve been spending all my time lately packing up my place to move this coming week to Denver, and spending time with friends who want to see me off. So that’s why I’ve been radio-silent. Expect that more-or-less through the next 10 days.

[1] “Writer-publisher” sounds like this century’s “warrior-poet”.

[2] Caveat of “unless you absolutely know what you’re doing”, as Jess Banks does with Fighting For Gwen.

[3] I speak from personal experience.

[4] Which a few months later, I realize that I was the friend who was going to do shitty, late free work, and turned the project over to Jonathan.

Celecsticon 2011 Panel Recordings

Last year, Kenneth Hite, Steven Savage & I did a couple panels at Celesticon, on creating compelling game worlds and working with licensed properties. The recordings went up a couple months or so ago. We did these back to back, so both are on the “Creating a Compelling Game World” recording. (Audio: 2:43:29/150M)

You can also check out audio recordings of the War College, a staple of Bay Area conventions that’s always interesting, and Ken talking about how to keep Cthulhu scary.

Dot Con Fest 2012 Event Recordings

If you missed any of the awesome things going on at the recent Dot Con Fest, don’t worry! They’re up on YouTube, Ustream, and other video places. Logan Bonner collected a number of us: John Harper, Will Hindmarch, Stan!, Steve Winter and me, for a panel on gaming.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I missed out on the Doubleclicks set at Dot Con Fest, so I’m gonna go watch it.

- Ryan

I’ve been playing Risk Legacy for the past few months, and recently finished Game 9 with my local crew. And I’ve found a weird, somewhat unsatisfying point in the game that I want to talk about, because it’s making me think about long-term stake design.

I should note that there are no spoilers in this post — everything here you’ll see or read is be understood be looking at a virgin board & reading the unaltered rules. And I should also note that it’s freaky cool to be talking about a board game with spoilers.

Risk Legacy takes place over fifteen games, where the winner of each game gets to write his or her name on the board. There are two mechanics this hooks in to: (1) the winner of each game gets to make a huge change to the board that creates a later advantage, and (2) at the end of the fifteen-game campaign, whoever has won the most signs the final “The World Of…” bit, the ultimate victory element of the game.

This is fantastic stakes design. Each game of Risk Legacy is one worth fighting for, because it’s cool in a permanent way, but we’re nine games in and we’re starting to run into a problem. You can see our current board to the right.

Chris Ruggiero, one of the owners of the fine establishment known as EndGame, is in our Risk Legacy group. (If you follow me on Twitter, you may occasionally see references to “Risk Club”.) And thanks largely to die luck[1], he’s won 6 of the 9 games so far.

Because he’s won so much, he essentially has home fields advantage. Four of the six continents are his, he has six missiles now, and things are…placed to his advantage.[2] So he’s a juggernaut. And it’s interesting to play against a juggernaut when the game changes, but now we’re at a point where we only have one rules packet to open left, so the game’s not going to change so dramatically.

Now, there are ways to deal with this that really make it our copy of Risk Legacy, to where we’re playing a slightly different game of Risk Legacy that everyone else. That’s interesting. But Chris has this huge advantage now, which brings me to my second and larger point: the end-campaign win.

The end-campaign win happens when, at the end of fifteen games, someone has a plurality of wins. The thing about plurality mechanics is that unless you can change the situation, there’s a point where you know who will win before the game’s done. And we’re almost at that point. Right now, Chris has won six games, I’ve won one, and our cohorts Laurel & Jesse have each won one.

• The moment Chris wins another, he has plurality. No one else can then get seven wins to match him.
• If Jesse, Laurel or I can win all of the next six, one of us will have seven total, beating Chris.
• If Jesse, Laurel or I can win five of the next six, one of us will have six total, and a third party wins one, then one of us will tie Chris.
• If one person who hasn’t won a game yet, as with our cohort Eric, wins all six, then he ties Chris.
• Even if Chris doesn’t win one, the moment two different people win a game, we know the best we can do is tie.

I’ve praised Risk Legacy for being a board game with concrete, lasting stakes. It makes every game feel more worthwhile than games of Risk normally do. But that only lasts so long as the stakes are uncertain; once they seem known, then the games we play go back to being ephemeral. And that’s the point we’re at with our Risk Legacy game.

This was the one Risk Legacy rule I was dubious about when I read the rulebook initially, because I could see that situation happening. And now that I am in that situation, I’m pretty damned dissatisfied with this design decision.[3] I’ve thought of some other ways to handle it that might be better for my own sensibilities, including:

• Weighting different wins and using a point system
• Having a deck of cards you open once all games are done to randomly draw the winner from the lot of them, turning the wins into a lottery mechanic

But the rules are as they are. And the lesson they’ve brought home is this: if you’re going to make a plurality mechanic, understand that the mechanic will declare the winner before the game’s over. That’s the reason than when you play “best three out of five” and someone wins three, you stop rather than play out the other two.

- Ryan

Note: while this is a criticism of Risk Legacy, don’t take it as a reason to not grab it & play it. Do it. You’ll learn interesting things about board game design that aren’t done elsewhere.

[1] This isn’t to crap on his skill. Just, there’s not a lot of skill in Risk. In at least three games, he won after someone else was one — just one — good die roll from winning the game. Not one round of good die rolls, just kept back by one single roll.

[2] Saying how would be a spoiler.

[3] And I would be equally dissatisfied if I was the frontrunner as well, because all the interesting tension in the long-term campaign is deflated.

Some tweets from Fred Hicks & Rob Donoghue regarding the Marvel RPG, the X-Men character Storm, and powers sparked this thought in my mind. Take note: I’m gonna ramble a bit.

What is the purpose of the superpower we all know and love as “Flight”?

Since it tends to be a fast-moving power, at least at car speeds, it’s a power of mobility. And that, in comic book stories, is really about either the tale of the race (can you stop Lex Luthor in time!) or a way to go from one set piece to a radically different one.

And since often flight-enabled supers have flight-enabled foes, it allows for badass aerial fights, which is yet another great set piece.

So, if flight’s really about the ability for a comic writer & artist to vary set pieces, let’s look at who tends to have flight. Superman, of course. Wonder Woman in various forms. Green Lantern. Storm. So on and so forth.

These are high-status characters. To have flight is to say “I am free of gravity when others aren’t”, and puts you in an arena of physical conflict that few can reach. And it’s majestic & awe-inspiring; by being literally above mankind, you are figuratively above them. These characters are capital-H Heros, superbeings that do not hide from the world.

That leads me to think of the golden age-old question: Would you pick Flight or Invisibility?

Heads up, I always pick invisibility. I have practical thoughts about that. And of course, there are the “what about clothes?” or “how much can you carry when flying?” sub-questions, but I now realize those are irrelevant.

Invisibility is a much more street-level power. It’s a power to alter a situation in the moment, and in an underhanded way. Thus, invisibility is a low-status power. It’s the effect that muggers have in dark alleys, or that horrors have in other fiction. Unlike those with flight, these are superbeings whose very power is that of hiding.

So, the question really is: “If you were a superhero, would you be a high-status or low-status one?” Or “Would you be global or local?”, which is maybe how one would define high & low status in a comic world. And another way: “Would you be a source of inspiration & majesty or fear & dread?” (Note: the question isn’t about supervillains, who when they’re done right always produce fear & dread.)

Suddenly, I’m rethinking other powers in the light of status. There are probably some status-neutral ones, but man, now I’m seriously thinking about what it means to pick a power beyond what effects it has.

Because really, no one *needs* to fly in a comic book story. The writers can just have closer set pieces and make races against time local in scale. And no one *needs* invisibility to solve impossible situations, as the writers can change how that impossible situation is solved with a different power–ones that don’t tap into primal fears of the unseen. Powers don’t enable comic characters, they define them. So those powers really are, from a writing standpoint, about status in the world at large.

- Ryan