The 20' By 20' Room

White Wolf Wikifies

Posted by Bryant on March 28, 2006 at 01:57 PM

I'd say "wikis go mainstream," but it seems odd to say that about a gaming company not owned by Hasbro. Regardless: White Wolf has a wiki. This is a tad more significant than The Toothpaste Disaster -- while Mongoose and White Wolf are both around the same level importance in the hobby/industry, the Toothpaste Disaster was somewhat tangential. White Wolf is putting their wiki front and center.

It'll be interesting to see a) if it gets traction, and b) how White Wolf deals with (say) speculative pages.

The Black Road '06 -- Indie Track

Posted by Bryant on December 13, 2005 at 08:15 PM

The Black Road, an Amber gaming con, just announced that there'll be an indie game track at the 2006 con. Vericon always has a bunch of indie sorts, just cause there are a bunch of indie game creators in the Boston area. What other cons have significant indie gaming presence as a matter of policy?

Diana Jones Shortlist Announced

Posted by Bryant on August 4, 2005 at 10:48 AM

The Diana Jones Award Committee has announced its shortlist of nominees for this year's Diana Jones Award. The award goes to whatever they think has best demonstrated "excellence in gaming" in the previous year. This year's shortlist:

Code of Unaris
Dogs in the Vineyard
Ticket to Ride

I don't know anything about the board game. I adore Dogs. Code of Unaris -- well, I'll admit I haven't tried it. The examples of play drive me up the wall, because I don't abbreviate in online chat. So when I read "[12:02:17 PM:] Grode: you begin ur adventure in the Fourth Age" I have some trouble getting past the "ur." Possibly I'm too much of a snob. I also kind of boggled at Ron Edwards claiming this was a new frontier in RP, since I've been doing immersive text-based online RP for... over a decade now. But again, snobbishness. Would anyone who's played Code like to point out the errors of my ways?

Note that PDF copies of the game are now available free.

Origins Awards Winners

Posted by Bryant on July 3, 2005 at 07:14 AM

The 2005 Origins Award Winners have been announced. Kind of an odd year, to say the least.

Ars Magica Fifth Edition won Best RPG; good choice from the nominees, all of which were essentially new editions. Eberron as Best Supplement? Sure! And... huh. You know, not very many categories I can honestly say I care about. Congrats to my pals over at Z-Man for their Origins, however; Shadowfist deserves one.

Guardians of Order Amber Diceless Forum 2005

Posted by The Ghoul on April 5, 2005 at 04:13 PM

As last year, Mark MacKinnon of Guardians of Order held an open forum at AmberCon to discuss the developing plans for the ADRP. In the interest of keeping interested parties informed, I kept some notes and pass them on here. This forum was held starting at 9:30 on Sunday, April 3rd, 2005.

Errors in these notes are mine, as are many of the interpretations of general response to ideas. None of this should be taken as anything even slightly like "official announcements" from Guardians of Order. Those will come through more official channels.

Continue reading "Guardians of Order Amber Diceless Forum 2005"

FATE Goes OGL

Posted by Bryant on April 4, 2005 at 07:10 PM

FATE has just been released as an OGL system reference document. Cool news, because it provides a simple yet powerful base for system development. (As does FUDGE; however FATE is somewhat more baked.) I still wish FUDGE had gone with a Creative Commons license, but that's water under the bridge.

By the by, the FUDGE OGL page is here, if anyone happens to be looking. It doesn't appear to be linked from the home page.

A Consumer's View on DRMed PDFs

Posted by Ginger Stampley on March 23, 2005 at 01:00 PM

Here's a data point for those of you who are doing or considering PDF sales.

I just moved to a new laptop; my old one suffered one malfunction too many after four years of faithful service. I had seen something about the free PDF version of the main Exalted book at DriveThruRPG, and I had assumed it would be protected by DRM. When my friend Rick mentioned that the PDF was watermarked rather than encumbered, though, I logged in and downloaded it immediately.

I haven't bothered to download and set up the DRM in Adobe Reader. I haven't even downloaded Reader; I'm on a Mac and Preview, which comes with OS X, suffices for most applications. I have realized that I would rather not get a free game system, not even one I'm interested in playing sometime, if I have to install and use DRM.

I'll do it for my (iTunes) music, because all I had to do was deauthorize one computer and authorize another. The iTunes application came on the machine and as it happens, I didn't even have to move the files: they were on an external hard drive. But I won't do what I'll do for my music for a free game system PDF, and I'm pretty sure based on this incident that I wouldn't do it for a game I paid for.

I may not be typical; my $0.02; YMMV; etc.

Award Season

Posted by Bryant on March 16, 2005 at 12:42 AM

The Origins Award Nominees for 2005 have been announced. You can find a list of submitted products here. I think it's pretty sad that we wound up with five nominated RPGs which, while they're all good, are also all retreads of one flavor or another.

The voting for the third annual Pen and Paper Fan Awards is now open.

The Ennies haven't started taking submissions for nominations yet.

The Indie RPG Awards have started taking submissions for nominations, so get cracking!

The secret masters behind the Diana Jones Award are no doubt doing secretive things.

Did I miss anything?

Saving Orphaned RPGs

Posted by Bryant on January 26, 2005 at 05:19 PM

Rodger Thorm spots a Boing Boing post about copyright and points out the implications for RPGs. The US Copyright Office is looking into the need for a system to clear the rights for orphaned copyrighted works with no visible rightsholder. They want public comment, since they're trying to figure out what the pros and cons are of various potential courses of action with regard to orphaned works.

As Rodger points out, there's a ton of this kind of thing in the RPG field. If you're a creator or a fan of an orphaned RPG -- not one that the rightsholders won't publish, but one for which the rightsholders are unknown -- it might be worth your while to submit a comment according to the process outlined.

A (too-ranty-for-its-own-good) essay about "Pimp".

Posted by Patrick O'Duffy on January 21, 2005 at 05:07 AM

Evening all. And a big hello from one of the longtime lurkers at 20x20.

Just as Bryant was (quite rightly) about to kick me down to non-poster status, Ginger asked if I would reprint an essay-thinkpiece-diatribe I wrote on my LiveJournal a few days ago about White Wolf's Pimp: the Backhanding card game. And since the piece seems to have spurred conversation in other places, I figured I'd go along.

If interested, it's behind the link (I would have put it behind a cut, but couldn't figure out the HTML). And I apologize up front; with hindsight the piece gets too much of an emotive diatribe at the end, and I lose the battle to tackle this on a primarily intellectual front. It's always the way with me. Probably the booze, y'know.

 

Forge Thread of the Week: Writing for People

Posted by Ginger Stampley on September 22, 2004 at 04:02 PM

It's a little odd that I, who am a casual lurker over at the Forge, keep posting these things, but this time I have stumbled on something near and dear to my heart: the quality of writing in (indie, in this case) RPGs. This thread wanders off into production values and gets derailed, but the first post is really worth reading. An excerpt:

Continue reading "Forge Thread of the Week: Writing for People"

Freebies and Shareware

Posted by Emily Dresner-Thornber on June 29, 2004 at 10:46 AM

This is a question where I honestly have no answer, so I'm looking for some honest discussion on the topic.

Chad Underkoffler was kind enough to post his numbers for Monkeys, Ninjas, Pirates and Robots: the Roleplaying Game on his livejournal. This spurred some interesting discussion about what he could do to increase his brand and his visibility. One of the topics placed on the table (by Heliograph Inc.) was the concept of freeware and shareware gaming.

Part of the argument is that the game industry mostly runs on word of mouth. It did not always run on word of mouth -- it used to run on "whatever was cool and appeared in the stores." But with the Net and blogs and discussion boards and the incredible explosion of small press games, the only way to rise to the top of the small press niche with everyone fighting for dominance is to get people talking about your game. Talk leads to sales, sales lead to play, which, in turn, leads to more sales. One argument (well, mine) is that the pay to play model for someone just sticking their foot in is a barrier to getting people exposed to your product, your name, your brand, and your style. You are not WotC or White Wolf, you're The Guy in the Garage, so you need to have some way to get exposure.

I know the freeware and shareware business models for software. I understand the concept of giving it away for free or for tip-jar until it becomes popular and then offering support/professional editions/upgrades for the for-pay version. However, I do not know how well this would work for small press games.

What do people think? Any experience?

Costikyan on Origins

Posted by Bryant on June 29, 2004 at 08:39 AM

Greg Costikyan went to Origins and all he got was cynical. The rather horrifying thing for me: names of creators were not announced at the Origins Awards ceremony.

Diana and Origins

Posted by Bryant on June 26, 2004 at 08:45 AM

Into every award season a few actual awards must fall -- so here're the Origins Award winners. But first! The Diana Jones Award nominees were also announced.

• HeroQuest
• Savage Worlds
• My Life With Master
• True Dungeon
• Scandinavian Gaming Scene (Odd but True)

Continue reading "Diana and Origins"

GenCon 2004 Releases

Posted by Bryant on May 27, 2004 at 05:27 PM

Some things that I know are scheduled for GenCon 2004:

• World of Darkness 2.0
• Vampire: the Requiem
• GURPS 4th Edition
• Blue Rose
• Red Star Campaign Setting
• D20 Future
• Dark Champions
• Fireborn
• Welcome to Sunnydale (maybe)
• Army of Darkness (maybe)
• No Press Anthology
• Iron Game Chef Fantasy Compilation
• Paranoia XP

I've got my eye on Dark Champions, World of Darkness, and the Forge-related offerings. Maybe Paranoia XP, too. What else is coming out? What are you hot for? What should I not miss?

Origins Awards, Revised

Posted by Bryant on May 21, 2004 at 07:54 PM

Wizards of the Coast has voluntarily withdrawn Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 from consideration, because they don't think it qualifies. It has been replaced by Cartoon Action Hour. Gaming Report has the news.

I still like My Life With Master, but I liked Cartoon Action Hour a lot too. Particularly with regard to campaign structure and deliberately moving away from the usual roleplaying conventions, it's rather innovative. I wouldn't expect it to win but I wouldn't be horrified if it did.