Frogmarch

For over a year, I've been trying to get hired to write for computer games professionally. This is one of the harder things I've ever tried to intentionally do. There are many people vying for a very few jobs, and I'm not ideally situated to act on it.

I'm doing it anyway.

I've dithered on whether to include my "game professional" blog link here, because these sorts of new ventures are fragile, and can be killed by premature exposure.

However, my definition of "premature" is often equivalent to someone else's "adolescent." I don't like revealing things until they're basically done. The elephantine problem with that schema is that I seldom have the resources to do something completely by myself. So the half-baked thing is either revealed as half-baked, or worse, never revealed. So I'm kicking this one out while it's still young. It's rough, but I'll try polishing in public and see how that works out.

To further my streak of mixed metaphors, let me add: My good, old friend Tom Briscoe used to say, "If you don't execute your ideas, they die." Most of my best ideas expire before they make it to the executioner's stand.

This is one more halting attempt to get one up to the guillotine.

At your leisure, peruse Dire Curious, my "breaking into the game biz -- again" blog. DC serves several purposes for me.

1. Professional development: You don't have to have a gaming blog to get hired on gaming, but I'm not knowledgeable or well-connected enough (yet) to skip it.
2. Personal marketing: I'm terrible at this, and I need the practice.
3. Experimentation with Wordpress: So far, I prefer Blogger, but everybody says it's great. I need to find out if it is or ain't first-hand.
4. Disciplined writing: I know I'm a more capable writer than I ever show anyone. I can be better. I have to do it more to make it real.
5. Another try: This attempt to "do something" may get left by the curb in a few weeks like so many other projects in my life, and I'll feel the same sort of sickly shame I always feel if that happens. But I'm pretty sure I believe the truism that you have to try a bunch of things and see which one sticks. So this is the next one of the bunch.

I'll keep a link to DC in the Ventures sidebar, but I'll probably never link back. On this blog, I give myself permission to appear neurotic and lazy and unhireable. Those traits don't belong where I'm trying to behave industriously and professionally.

Interesting times for D und D

Last week, Goodman Games announced that they will start selling 3rd edition D&D stuff again. I am so far out of the loop these days I need binoculars to make out that there even is a loop anymore. But even from here I can see the sparks this thing is throwing off.

Goodman Games basically exists because of the Open Gaming License (OGL), which let outside publishers freely make D&D-compatible game products. It started with their weirdest product, Broncosaurus Rex, combining dinosaurs, science-fiction, the wild west, and the Civil War into one wonderful mashup that screamed, "Now I can publish my secret home campaign for reals!"

Things quickly got more commercial, and Mr. Goodman has made a nice little company out of the whole deal.

Goodman Games was maybe the first and definitely the loudest independent publisher to jump on the official 4e bandwagon. They proclaimed they were all in before the paperwork was done explaining exactly what "all in" meant.

But when the paperwork did come down, it said that official 4e publishers had to not produce any 3e stuff, and couldn't use the official "3e compatible" logo anymore (seen at right). Which meant that anything with the logo printed on it either had to get sold quick, junked, or covered with a sticker.

For most publishers, this meant, "sold quick, and junk the leftovers."

I don't know anybody's sales numbers for 4th edition-compatible products, although Mr. Goodman himself flashed around some comments earlier this year pronouncing the sales were good enough considering the market (my words, not his). However, I humbly submit that if 4e sales were all that great, Goodman Games wouldn't be reprinting old material.

If you thought sales of recent product were sufficient, if you thought they were going to be strong, you wouldn't go back to offering old product. You would invest in more new stuff. Yet one of the most successful independent publishers, who was ready to burn his boats a couple years ago, just refitted and relaunched the fleet. A fleet that potentially competes with his latest offerings.

From a symbolic standpoint, this is kind of a slap for 4e. From a reading-between-the-lines standpoint, this means that nobody except Wizards is making good money on it. And I wouldn't bet on Wizards, frankly. In fact, professionally speaking, I haven't.

Today was a great day

Today was so full, I'm technically writing this on Sunday.

The important thing is that we went to some friends' house tonight, M and I had dinner with Jason and Kim (and Kim's brother, and their kids), and then a bunch of people came over for board games. I am blessed and happy to have such giving friends* and a loving wife.

Also, I kicked ass at Dominion and Power Grid, and Meredith won her game of Pandemic. High fives all around!



*And not just in Philadelphia. I have great friends all over. If you're my friend, then thanks, man (or lady)! You've probably been a better friend to me than I've been back, particularly if you're Monte and I haven't called you back even though you've called me twice now, and what is my problem anyway? Anyway, thanks, friend.

Self-check

Been reading a biography of Warren Buffet, and man, does that guy think differently from me.

On reflection, I decided today that writers get hired because of the specific, different, and useful ways they think. Writing is not the hard part. The act of writing is actually so easy, you get fat from inaction. Thinking is the hard part.

So I thought about my thinking, and I think I'm an undisciplined thinker for purposes of making a profit. I've never bent my brain in one direction long enough to have a unique, salable topicality.

Thanks to almost 4 years of blog-keeping, I've now got a record of the kinds of things I think about hard enough to put into non-paying words. Extrapolating from tag counts I see that I write about:

• Dungeons and Dragons
• games in general
• religion (American Christianity, mainly)
• writing
• creativity
• media

And in a meta sense:

• introspection
• vague ideas about making money

I'm not sure why I care so much about making money. I've always liked to think of myself as a person who didn't, but evidence refutes this fancy. I apparently want to be rich.

I just don't want to be a callous douchebag in the process. I don't want my life to get absorbed into a business. (Unless I love it. Then it's fine.)

So many small business owners talk about being exhausted from some marathon thing they just finished or some associate who just screwed them or something. Something stressful and draining. And man, I just want to be a hobbit, you know?

But I must not want it too bad, or I wouldn't keep wondering what's in Bree.

The repopularization of RPGs pt 2

Fourth edition D&D has been correctly identified as inspired by MMOs. This is a good idea on paper, but that inspiration was a doomed choice by Wizards' game designers. It would be better to capitalize on what tabletop is good at (i.e., interaction), and minimize what it is bad at (fiddly mechanics). Instead, they chose to create a game that largely removes judgment calls, yet apes a complex game form, while reducing the complexity.

Thus you get neither the full human involvement of tabletop games, nor the full complexity of MMOs. The worst of both worlds.

The only way this makes sense is if 4th edition is preparation for a 5th edition, a game where people sit around face to face with computers doing the complex mechanical parts. This mythical 5th edition D&D would play to the strengths of both forms of games simultaneously, and could herald a resurgence of tabletop RPGs.

This is not a new idea, but the technology has never been so tantalizingly real. Before, it's just been imaginable as a good idea. Now, we can do it.

Laptops seemed to embody this promise, but in practice the form factor has been too clunky.

The Surface would be excellent for this, except:
1) It's not even available to the public.
2) It's wildly expensive.
3) The surface of a Surface is small. It's like trying to play D&D on one of those sit-down cocktail Ms. Pac Man machines.

Those are all surmountable in 10 years or so. Problem number 4 is not:

4) A single character sheet contains far too much information to display on the play surface itself.

For most tabletop RPGs, the character sheet is the most-used, and I'll go so far as to say, most important reference tool in the game. This concept has come over pretty much unchanged to computer RPGs, where the game takes you to a separate screen/tab/what-have-you to present your character's capabilities.

The amount and detail of information is so dense, there's no way to put that on the same computer interface everyone else is trying to use. You need a dedicated "screen" for every player.

This is what the Apple tablet is for, and what the iPhone can do right now. It's theoretically inexpensive enough that every player could have one. Someone will write an app that keeps track of fiddly things for you. (Character sheet apps are available now.) All the tablets/iPhones logged into the same session could talk to each other. And human interaction returns to its proper role as arbiter of information.

This will require another revision of the rules, however, because 4th edition rules will be naively simple for all that processing power. And with the useful complexity shuffled behind the technological curtain, it will be more open for new and younger players.

Roleplaying games are coming back. It will never be a popular fad again like in Gygaxian times of yore, but only because it will never be a fad again.

The repopularization of RPGs pt 1

This video has been making the rounds of geekdom lately. It's a rough demo of D&D playable on the Microsoft Surface. It's popular with good reason, because it is the nascent future of tabletop RPGs.

D&D is nowhere near as cool as it was 20 years ago (much less 30 years ago), but it still has millions of players worldwide. World of Warcraft touts their 11 million subscribers. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many people also play D&D once a month.

Eleven million people is a decent customer base, and professional hobbyists have programmed extremely complex programs (Campaign Cartographer and Fantasy Grounds to name two) which cater to them.

People talk about the wonderful social aspects of MMOs, but building and maintaining a friendship in an MMO is like building a ship in a bottle -- a lot of delicate work done through a desperately small opening.

The very best social platform is F2F. In games, you can only do this with a LAN party, a LARP, or around a table. LAN parties and LARPs are very resource intensive. They go away after a certain stage in life. Tabletop games remain viable regardless of age, station, or income.

The part of games that MMOs do best is automating tedious, precise mechanics. Players have complained about the difficulty of running 3rd edition D&D, but even that is checkers compared to the multiple thousandths-of-a-percentage mechanics a single home computer adjudicates running WoW.

More on this tomorrow.

Monopoly City

I give Monopoly a lot of crap, but that's only because it deserves it. Hasbro is a game company that, on a corporate level, decided to make quality in games a second-tier consideration. To use an analogy, they built hotels on St. James Place and Tennessee Avenue -- not the "best" properties in the game, but the ones you land on most often.

Hasbro has milked Monopoly like the prize cow it is. Everybody with an IP has licensed the game (which is really just lawyer insurance because you can't copyright or patent a game mechanic). And every few years, they produce a new clutch of games with the word "Monopoly" on the front, and I assume those sell well enough to make it worth doing.

This year Hasbro produced Monopoly City. On boardgamegeek.com the reviews boil down to "It's not that different. If you didn't like Monopoly already, you won't like this one either."

BUT! There's a free Web game to promote it, Monopolycitystreets.com. Great idea Hasbro! It's got a good gimmick, in that you're buying real-world city streets courtesy of Google Maps. It's fun to look at your neighborhood and buy your street and build tall buildings on it.

It's still a crappy game though. There's a little strategy, but not a ton. Like board-game Monopoly, it's a game about wheeling and dealing, because the cheap stuff you start with won't get you to the top. You'll need to save up money and buy other players' more profitable streets, because the best stuff is already taken. Except why would a player sell their best stuff?

The only reason I can think of is that the player got bored or distracted and dropped out. Player interaction is extremely limited, so you can't negotiate well. The nominal endgame (Be the richest real estate magnate in the world!) is sort of boring. Only the highly motivated will work on it. Find a half dozen of those people (who I'm pretty sure they're already playing) and the top of the game will stagnate.

The good thing though, is that you can see on the blog that the people running the game are taking this seriously. There's room for improvement too. Right now, it's a really nice skeleton of a game, and they could make it more. If tended properly, this could become the Hasbro's own social networking platform. That's worth keeping an eye on.

Regardless of my callous criticisms, it's fun for a while. In case you want to get into it, you can read tips and FAQs at the fan site: monopolycitystreetshq.org.

Also, if you're related to me in Philadelphia, I already own your street. OH IT'S ON.

It's official: Monopoly might last forever

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the numbers have been crunched, and a game of Monopoly has a 12% chance of never ending:

Anybody who has ever played Monopoly knows the feeling. The game can be interminable, with no victor ever seeming to emerge.

That's a real mathematical possibility, Cornell University researchers said in a new study. They calculate that there's a 12 percent probability of a simple, two-player game of Monopoly never concluding.

Does this make Monopoly an even more quintessentially American game?

Thanks to Purple Pawn for the tip-off.

Name your poison

Another quick story from D&D last week
When the first encounter started and everyone rolled initiative, I went around the table asking for characters' names so I could write them next to their initiative results. Since it was the first night, not everyone was totally ready. Jason hadn't named his character yet.

Flashback: About 10 years ago when we started playing our first 3e campaign in Seattle, we had that same moment. Stan! hadn't named his gnome character, and was futzing around for one at the last minute. Dave, former editor of Dungeon and Dragon magazines, said, "The punishment is that we call you something like Blobbo. If you don't come up with a name soon, that name will stick, and then we'll all call you that for the rest of the campaign."

Realizing this horrible truth, Stan! quickly devised Herumann, who went on to become a beloved curmudgeon and coward, hopelessly attempting to interject common sense into a rotating cast of D&D adventurers for the next several years.

Sadly, Blobbo stuck anyway. The name followed Herumann at a respectful distance for the rest of his career.

Jason's character was briefly named Blobbo last Thursday, because he wanted to take the time to come up with a campaign-appropriate elf name. (+50 experience points!) I didn't even try to make Blobbo stick. The name has enough stickiness all by itself.

Bonus Story: After the Blobbo incident, I moved onto Dave (a different Dave), who hadn't named his character yet either. Fearing the worst, Dave blurted out "Paul Oakenfold!"

Sure, technically, that name is already taken, but if you complain about D&D players stealing names, you have outed yourself as a solid n00b.

D&D: New campaign kickoff

Started my brand new D&D campaign tonight. If you've been following my blog spoor for the last year, you might have noticed I've been screwing around with a wiki for this thing. Now, open for business!

I've spent a hella lot of time laying groundwork and spelling out rules, and it's still not done.

Important Lesson: You're never really done.

But it was surprisingly thorough. I'm methodical as a tornado when I write. I blow through town and look back once I'm done. Sometimes I've hit everything, and other times I've left whole blocks mysteriously untouched. I don't have a system. I just make up stuff until some outside constraint makes me stop.

So going in, I didn't know whether I'd written enough to make tonight work. But then I said, "Well, in the wiki..." about a dozen times in answer to questions. So I think I got all the vital stuff in.

Important Lesson: Don't worry about getting it all right. It's a game you're playing with friends.

Important Lesson: Just because it's in the text doesn't mean anyone else knows it's there.

I made the experience point totals for level gain a little higher, using a conglomeration of different Pathfinder experience gain rates. Then I told them that I'd award extra XP for people who enable group enjoyment by doing out-of-game things to make things more fun. The player who takes notes or handles mapping or draws a group shot or takes pics of minis gets an XP bonus. I hoped to encourage players to be creative and contribute on their own terms instead of doing all the work solo. This idea was poo-pooed, so it might not last.

Instead, I might use a variation on Sean Reynolds's Alternative Level Advancement System. I like Sean's idea, but changing your character every single session is too much paperwork in an already paperwork-heavy game.

Important Lesson: Adults with kids don't necessarily have the giveadamn to write character journals. In the long run, a bennie meant to encourage participation could begin to feel like a penalty on people who don't want to participate.

I thought having the rules online would be a good way to get everything out to the players so I wouldn't have to be the sole source of information. Also I hoped it would require me to lug fewer books to the game.

But the concept is a little ahead of the group's hardware capacity. Nobody brought a laptop or usable wireless device to let them look up stuff. We wound up using books anyway, which don't quite mesh with the fifty-'leben ways I've tweaked the d20/Pathfinder rules sets.

Important Lesson: Oops.

After a lot of shuffling papers and answering questions, characters were done, except for the niggling details that no one ever firms up until the third game anyway. I thought that'd be it. Good work everybody, see you in two weeks.

No! They demanded we play tonight! Begin tonight! Begin fighting! Tonight!

Since one of our regulars was absent, I didn't want to get too deep into the first adventure. So I used the time-tested, beloved pacing device DMs and comic book writers have used for decades. I threw in a combat. It wasn't meaningless, but it was off the cuff.

Important Lesson: Come more prepared than you think you'll need. And come prepared to improvise.

Red Hand of Done

This past week, my players finished the Red Hand of Doom, slaying High Wyrmlord Azzar Kul, vanquishing his summoned Aspect of Tiamat, and saving the human lands of Elsir Vale from diabolical infestation. Only two characters died in the process!

The amazing thing is how well their plans worked.

How a normal D&D plan works
At the beginning of any major set piece, the players develop a loose plan of action.
Round 1: Deploy plan.
Round 2: Something unforeseen manifests, and the plan is left swinging on one hinge.
Rounds 3-10: Everyone runs around relying on their best tricks until somebody's out of hit points.

That is how pretty much every D&D fight goes that I've ever run or played in. The interesting parts are coming up with the plan, and then coping during the plan's lumbering demise.

How this one was different
The plan more or less worked like they meant for it to. The hitters flew up a 100 foot shaft invisibly, wailed on the bad guy in a surprise round, and finished him before he ever got a chance to respond. The rest of the group clambered up just in time to see Tiamat manifest. Judicious application of resources made the fight hard, but winnable.

Several times in their adventuring careers, the party has been in worse shape, and far less certain of outcome. At first, I wondered if I did them a disservice by making it too easy. But today I decided I didn't. I mean, it was no half-speed move action among cakes. They took their lumps. Two PCs died (conveniently, the two whose players had dropped out of the game), and everyone else took serious damage (except for the monk whom Tiamat quickly surmised as a minor threat).

The feeling of mastery and completion though, made it seem like, for once, the players leveled up. They put together a plan, hit their marks, and used gumption to solve the problem. Yay players! Yay D&D!

Some weeks, the game is totally 20 minutes of fun packed into 4 hours. But it never seems like it's not worth it.

A Philadelphia overture

Seattle is experiencing 100+ degree heat (That's 38 to you metric weirdos). Meanwhile, Philly's having a cool-ish, wet summer.

We were seriously looking at moving to Seattle for a couple of months this year, but things (as they do) changed, and barring freak circumstance, Philly has become our point of medium-range residency.

I've been here almost 5 years. That was never in the plan. Yet, as I review my reasons for moving to Philadelphia, I realize nothing was in the plan. I never had a plan.

Vaguer than a plan, my expectation was to be somewhere else by now. California. Seattle. New York City. Dallas. Austin.

However, not only am I not somewhere else, I am more here than ever. I guess it's time to start liking Philadelphia.

My ambivalence re Philadelphia is on record. The place has good points, but oh so many bad ones.

But since it seems I'll be here a while longer, it's time to start liking the burg. I've already spent too long on the fence; I won't compound the mistake. Philly, I've kept you at arm's length, and that's only hurt us both. You're shockingly violent, too ethnic for my immediate comfort, your roads frankly suck, and you're nearer New Jersey than I'd ever hoped to be. But you have kick-ass museums, and a decent film festival. The gaming here is robust, and the cry for Jesus is almost too loud for my weak ears. You're not perfect, but Lord knows neither am I. There's plenty for us to do and become. Let's love like brothers.

Good company

A game project I worked on has just had the full author list revealed. Check it out at Paizo.com: Guide to the River Kingdoms.

Here's the author list:

Eric Bailey, Kevin Carter, Elaine Cunningham, Adam Daigle, Mike Ferguson, Joshua J. Frost, James Jacobs, Steve Kenson, Rob Manning, Colin McComb, Alison McKenzie, China Miéville, Brock Mitchel-Slentz, Jason Nelson, Richard Pett, Chris Pramas, Jeff Quick, Sean K Reynolds, F. Wesley Schneider, Neil Spicer, Lisa Stevens, Matthew Stinson, and John Wick.

A plurality of writers is usually a bad sign, but it makes sense for the fractious River Kingdoms, land of the politically improbable. Once again, I'm fairly happy with my work on this book.

Also, please note that I've now worked on a project with China Mieville. That's one for the weaselly self-promotional bio!

Organizing game books is for suckas

Reading an interview with David "Zeb" Cook over at Grognardia tonight reminded me of another great value of wikis for RPG presentation, which also applies to any technical document.

Role-playing game manuals must do two, often contradictory things. They have to present information sensibly for the new user, and they must serve as reference manuals for the experienced user.

So when you organize, you usually lean toward making them reference books, because they'll only be introductory material once, but reference material dozens of times (you hope).

Along comes hypertext, and your linear need to organize like a reference manual is dead as a dot matrix printer. Now, feel free to organize the whole manuscript for the noob. A decent site map will make your hypertexted wiki rule book completely accessible for in-game reference purposes.

Hijinx: I didn't know I thought that fast

I'm going to a game convention next month. Yesterday the organizer asked me to run Hijinx, the d20 mini-game of cartoon bands I wrote approximately one thousand years ago for Polyhedron magazine.

When the game came out in 2003, it met an audience brimming with indifference. A few people loved the humor and the gall of the idea. A few people hated it, and called it wasted space. But mostly nada.

It was my favorite thing I wrote that year though. I'm still grateful to the editor, Erik, who took the big goofy gamble with me, and Kyle, the art director, who made it look pretty good.

But when Kevin asked me to run it yesterday, I froze for a few minutes. Could I even do that? My embarrassing (but in retrospect, obvious) confession is that I never even playtested the damn thing. I wrote 20,000 words on inspiration and deep rules knowledge. Is it... is it even playable? Do I know what to do with Quickenstein's monster? Would I get stagefright? Sometimes I get stagefright!

A few hours later, without any conscious effort, I had a setup, a villain, a plot outline, and a crazy topicality which, I daresay, would make a fantastic new millennium episode of Josie and the Pussycats. Just like that. Inspiration and rules knowledge just showed up again.

So I said yes. Now I have to reread the rules and figure out if this thing is playable in the next two weeks. Loving my goofy ideas helps a lot though.

WotC pres speaks on PDFs

Greg Leeds, president of WotC, started doing some PR work, giving an interview at EnWorld.org over the the PDF brouhaha. According to bios I found on the Web, he's worked at Hasbro since 2001 in a couple of capacities -- as General Manager of the boys toys group, and some time later head of Hasbro's international marketing -- and was general manager at Samsonite before that. Look it up if you care.

Leeds took over at Wizards a smidge over a year ago, and started by killing WotC's vaunted, but woefully-implemented social networking site, Gleemax. Then he laid a bunch of people off. As I understand, some of them had it coming, and some were simply expensive expendables. Cleaning house is not the worst way for a new, corporate-appointed CEO to start, especially when the house was in such disarray. But it tends not to endear one.

His background is in neither publishing, nor games. True, Hasbro and Wizards both produce "games", but think of that in the same sense that humans and lamprey eels are both in the same Phylum. It doesn't mean we have anything to say to each other at parties.

So Mr. Leeds appears to be an experienced, not-incompetent marketing manger, cast into an entirely new industry. He's been on the job for a year, which, in my experience, is enough time to understand what it is that you don't know about what you're doing now. So that's who we're dealing with.

The interview is a by-the-numbers kind of thing. "Piracy is a substantial concern... We need to have a strong retail base...." Very little here that you couldn't have said if you knew who you needed to protect and who you needed to placate.

Couple of points of interest:

We do not have any plans to resume the sale of PDFs, but are actively exploring other options for the digital distribution of our content....
Along with the rest of the publishing industry, Wizards is also looking into new means of digital distribution. For our novels, we have recently introduced titles to Kindle and to Sony’s E-Reader and will continue to add titles to those offerings over the coming months.

PDFs are effed, but Kindle is in. If I'm reading him right, Leeds seems to think that other peoples' bandwagons will prevent piracy the iTunes way. By locking books into certain partner hardware, maybe they can slow piracy. Of course, they're already offering their books through their own system.

Its EULA says:

You understand that Wizards or its representatives may monitor all communications made by or received by you while using the Feature. You consent to the extraction of hardware system profile data and any data related to operation of the Feature.

Which means they will try to trace piracy of users through their Feature. I dunno... I call snoopware a Bug.

Exerting control like this seems likely to reduce piracy. Somewhat. It will definitely reduce sales. The installed base of people who can read is much larger than the base of people who own Kindles. Is the market not niche enough for WotC yet? Did they need a way to cut it finer?

If this does work, Wizards is in for an ugly 3 to 5 years while their hoped-for customer base follows them through the necessary hoops to make piracy somewhat more difficult. Seems like that's asking a lot, though.

Another quote:

...we conservatively estimate the ratio of illicit downloads to legally purchased copies was 10:1.

Listen, I can unconservatively estimate that by halting PDF sales, you have moved that ratio to 10:0. Great work, fellas. It's Miller time.

This doesn't sound like anything that will kill D&D, which has way more hit points than anyone would have estimated in 1980. But it does sound like a hindrance to WotC's customers -- not a deal-breaker, just one more discouragement that Wizards can ill afford right now. I suppose they could make the argument that not doing this could kill the company just as fast. I doubt it, but since we're all making it up as we go, no one's got the data to prove it. It's just a matter of who's most convincing at the top of the organization.

I have wanted to avoid comparing the current ownership to TSR in the mid '90s. I still believe they're more professional and more competent. They might have their heads in the same sand though.

WotC probably doesn't care what you think about PDF sales

I got an email the other night that basically every card-carrying D&D geek got, that said "Wizards of the Coast is out of the PDF-selling business in t-minus 12 hours." There has been predictable and understandable Internet furor over that.

A WotC rep showed up at enworld.org and left a post of which I will quote the relevant bits for you so you don't have to follow the link:

...due to recent findings of illegal copying and online distribution (piracy) of our products, Wizards of the Coast has decided to cease the sales of online PDFs. We are exploring other options for digitial distribution of our content and as soon as we have any more information I'll get it to you.

Other on-the-ball PDF retailers have taken clever advantage of the free publicity to point out that they're still happy to sell you their PDFs, and now offering special ha-ha-WotC sale prices good for the next few days. (They don't call them that. I called them that.)

This all reminds me of a post I tried to write about six months ago, which got long and recursive, and I never finished thinking through. Now, it seems inevitable that Wizards would give me another opportunity to unlimber these ideas.

The applicable one here being that someone at Wizards of the Coast -- not the whole company by any means, but someone -- is working furiously to rebottle the Internet genie. Furiously. This person has no idea how to behave when the business of selling electrons turns out to have different, and largely uncharted difficulties compared to selling atoms. And no idea what to do when the customer becomes a participant in the product.

No one does. No corporation has a clear idea of how to make money shifting electrons if they are not fortunate enough to have a near-monopoly. Individuals can do it, but large companies, even large companies full of Internet-savvy employees like Amazon and Google, don't know how to do this.

Clever people like Cory Doctorow and Kevin Kelly have come up with some interesting ideas about it. But they're making best guesses. (Although I highly recommend Kelly's list of Eight Generatives Better Than Free, especially if you are a publisher considering ceasing PDF sales.)

I would like to be indignant, and come to a trenchant conclusion, but I don't have one. (At least not a good one.) I'm guessing that what Wizards is doing makes sense from a certain legally-defensible standpoint. It's hard to know which of the many, many threats a business faces will strike a crippling blow. You try to make your list, and prepare for the biggest ones, and get to as many as you can while you can.

And so, seemingly, lower on the list than they've gotten to is the threat of falling out of touch with customers.

Here's maybe the one original idea I've got on this topic: They believe they're in touch with the customers they want to be in touch with. And they believe those customers are not that into PDFs. And they might be right.

Hasbro, owner of Wizards of the Coast, is a toymaker. They are used to thinking that their entire customer base turns over every few years. Maintaining an audience is never on their radar, because by the time you are 5 years old, you do not care about Mr. Potato Head any more. They have to sell Mr. Potato Head to a brand new crop of 2-year-olds.

Therefore, I might need to conclude that the people in charge are not interested in selling games to me any more. They want to sell Dungeons & Dragons to 12-year-olds. This does not mean that D&D is not suitable for 37-year-olds. It is just that the company is more interested in 12-year-old dollars.

Even if I'm right, since I don't have a look at their numbers, I can't tell whether that's a good business strategy. I think selling D&D is a different beast than selling Mr. Potato Head, and therefore, the process and goals must be different. But I can't tell. I can tell that lately, they're not creating game products I'm very interested in, which anecdotally at least, supports my theory.

If I'm right though, the card-carrying D&D geeks on Slashdot and enworld complaining about WotC's behavior is the equivalent of the dog complaining that the cat food tastes bad.

You can eat it if you want, but it's not for you, silly dog.

Kids these days: any other quests?

Ran an intro game of D&D for a couple of boys tonight, ages 12 and 10. I enjoy presenting D&D to brand new players, because they haven't been trained in roleplaying game-think yet.

When you've played enough of these demanding, complex games, you learn to see the game system first, and think in its framework. It's like learning art on a computer. Fantastically versatile programs exist to help you, but you wind up imagining inside the program's technical limitations.

So the D&D naif brings a jarringly unexpected set of assumptions to the table. (One woman I played with, who had a perfectly competent character, spent an entire session hiding in a cabinet. Because holy crap, people are shooting guns and fire blasts outside! Better to just stay safe.)

This has been my standard thinking for a long time about new players. But tonight, these kids tricked me by bringing a different jarringly unexpected set of assumptions to the table. Having already played the crap out of Final Fantasy and half a dozen other console RPGs, these kids were not D&D naifs. They were tabletop naifs. Drawing on unmediated experience to inform their behavior was strange territory.

Excerpts:

Me: If you run out of hit points you fall unconscious.
Kid: What's that?
Me: You fall unconscious every day. What's it like then?

Kid: How much does a backpack hold?
Me: You've got a backpack at home, right? It holds that much.

The standout of the evening came after presenting entirely unsubtle clues that the Mad Alchemist's cave awaited exploration, and that there might be treasure. The boys then decided to ask around town to see if there were "any other quests." Thanks to computer games, they (quite reasonably) assumed there would be a handful of townsfolk loitering, with various problems to be solved. They would get to pick the most appealing one.

Also in a paean to overcaution:

• Long minutes were spent on Hide skill practice, followed by confirming Spot checks to see how well hidden they were.
• Rabbinical attention was paid to the number of arrows carried, and recovered, after combat.
• The sorcerer brought 20 torches, and the dwarf purchased flint and tinder for firestarting, despite the fact that he can see in the dark.
• They purchased a 10-foot pole and a mirror, and used them frequently, in ways that would make Gary Gygax proud.
  

I enjoy attempting this sort of thing, but every time, I am humbled. Improvisation is a hard skill, and understanding your own expectations is at least half the experience.

Con-flicted

It burrs my historical loyalties to think it, but PAX sure does look like more fun than Gen Con.

There's definitely more money floating around PAX, but from here it also seems as though it has a sense of mystery and unexpectedness and, dare I say, fun, that GC lacks.

Maybe I'll go some day and compare.

Pathfinder Campaign Setting

A MOMENT OF SELF-PROMOTION

Paizo is a game company operated by several people I like and respect. One of those people asked me to contribute to the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting a while ago, and I metaphorically leapt at the opportunity.

I have come to find most fantasy pastiche settings tedious these-a-days, but Pathfinder sparks. In addition, I'm part of an all-star cast of writers on this thing, and for once, I'm pleased with my work on an RPG product, instead of slightly sickened.

It goes on sale in a couple of weeks, so if you're of a gamer persuasion, look into it. It's going to be pretty great.