The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Gaming.

I am occasionally reminded that hobby gamers, like everybody else, can include some of humanity’s best traits and some of humanity’s worst traits. Super Bowl weekend often seems to bring out the latter in droves, perhaps in a misguided effort to give all the sports fans who think it’s acceptable to mock people not interested in sports a proverbial taste of their own medicine. If, at any point in the last couple weeks, you’ve seen a comment somewhere about “sportsball,” you’ve seen one example of this phenomenon.

Unfortunately, “sportsball” posts are a mild example. A couple weeks ago, this came across my radar. (CAUTION: Long thread with some pretty toxic remarks.)  A summary for those who are smart enough to not follow the link: It’s a post where somebody describes a remark heard while in the return line at his local Target. The woman ahead of him was returning several hobby games she’d bought at Christmas for her family, and complaining about them being too difficult. Exhibiting one of the more reprehensible traits of humanity, the readers began to pile in to make fun of the woman, with only a very few wondering whether she might be selling her family short or otherwise trying to do something positive.

Cue the better parts of gamer culture: Rob Donoghue began trying to come up with a list of which 5 games might make up “Boardgaming 101.” His requirements were that the games should be able to be gifts that the recipient could open up the box, not get scared by apparent complexity, and learn to play just be reading through the rules. I was pleased to note that many of the columns I’ve already written here feature on the list generated through the comments on Rob’s post, and I’m probably going to use that list to guide some of my future selections, at least for the ones I’ve played. If you read my columns for reasons other than being related to me, the post I linked is a good one to look at, including its comments, both because of people trying to do something good in the face of others being jerks, and because some comments are from a non-gamer who gives her perspective on some of the particular titles mentioned.

The other person who tried to create a positive response is graphic designer and game designer Daniel Solis. His work actually might be a the usual audience here, because the list he started begins from “mainstream” games that you’ve probably heard of. It could probably stand a clean-up, and the drive seems to have left it, but it’s a good place to start.

I’ll close by giving Mr. Solis credit for something else: he consistently works to make hobby gaming a more inclusive hobby. He’s designed some great games with kids in mind, helped found a project to increase the inclusion of women and people of color in gaming artwork, and frequently offers general advice to people who ask. The same is true of Mr. Donoghue and all of his business partners at Evil Hat productions - although I have never had the pleasure of meeting any of them in person, I’ve followed them online through the better part of a decade, and have to describe them as genuinely Good People. I’ve never seen them say abything bad about anybody, and I hope that I never will.

Freelancer Aspirations: Sentinel Druids of Winter

More gamer-speak ahead (which is mostly what tends to show up there, especially in this series).

When I sat down to write my own drafts of the missing seasons for Sentinel Druids, Winter was easy. I grew up in the Midwest, and have listened to a fair amount of Garrison Keillor talking about how winter builds character as part of his assorted Lake Wobegon monologues. More than that, there's a remark of Nietsche's: "That which does not kill me makes me stronger." I wanted the basic point to be that winter Sentinels were survivors.

Taking that as a starting point, the chosen weapons were easy: what things could you use to get the food & shelter you would need in the middle of a winter? Spears, axes, slings. For an animal companion, I chose a wolverine as something that is commonly associated with winter or cold-weather environments. Since wolverines have a reputation as being bloodthirsty, the wolverine powers became high-damage powers (although not as powerful as the bear's). The benefits to the druid itself took the form of things to help the druid and his companions survive, either by avoiding damage or by shrugging off effects that were already affecting them.

As before, I got some feedback from people who read the drafts which I took into account. The big change that resulted from this feedback was an additional boost to the damage dice in chosen weapons, and in allowing the sling to be used as an implement. I'm not positive I got the latter part right, and it would probably need some playtesting to determine whether it needs further refining.

The new and revised version, formatted nicely to print, is available here.

Freelancer aspirations: the Cryomancer

Preface: Those who don't have any interest in gaming generally, and role-playing games in particular, will probably want to ignore this post since it talks about my recent experiences in a freelance project submitted to Wizards of the Coast for the Dungeons & Dragons game. I'll do my best to keep jargon out of the article as much as possible if you decide to keep reading, but you've been warned.

This project has only just reached a point where I can openly discuss it, thanks to some bad news received about it yesterday afternoon. Some background:

Wizards of the Coast currently runs two open submission periods every year for those who aspire to write freelance projects for Dungeons & Dragons Insider, the online version of what used to be Dragon and Dungeon magazines. Over the last year (two cycles), I've submitted roughly 20 pitches (two with co-authors attached) and had three projects commissioned to the state of a first draft. I got more-or-less final verdicts on two of those three projects yesterday, one of which will result in a paycheck and one of which was a rejection without request for further revision. I'm not at liberty to discuss the former project until it comes out, but I figure I'll put some lessons here on the other project.

For those who aren't gamers or otherwise into fantasy genre fiction, a cryomancer is a kind of magician whose abilities are all focused on cold. Here's the original pitch:

Class Acts: Wizard: The Cryomancer

Fire mages are flamboyant and hard to avoid noticing; wizards who specialize in cold magic are rarer. Calculating, implacable, and unforgiving, those who command the glacial ices are rare and worthy of attention. Their comparative rarity is attested by the lack of a singular figure associated with cold magic, although many famous archmages have included magical cold within their eponymous spells (including both Bigby’s Freezing Grasp and Otiluke’s Freezing Sphere).

 The pitch I sent included a little bit more, like some details on estimated word count and particular mechanical elements. In the initial response, I was given two directives to consider: first, that elemental specialists needed to have some way to deal with creatures that were resistant or immune to their element of choice. For example here, a cryomancer needs a way to cope with meeting a frost giant or a white dragon. the other directive I got was to focus more on the story side of the article than the mechanics. This PDF represents the draft I submitted, minus some internal notes to the produced & development teams on certain elements of story, credits, and the art order.

One challenge for me was that the lore of D&D doesn't really have any famous wizards who are known primarily for their use of cold magic. There are a number of D&D wizards who have used cold in some of their famous spells (Bigby's Icy Grasp made it into the 4th Edition Player's Handbook; Otiluke's Freezing Sphere was present in all of the first 3 editions of the game), but I didn't have a single wizard around whom I could build the story. I ended up dividing it up among three wizards, two of whom have lore that goes way back in the game and one of whom was my first 4th Edition character.

The discussion of "naturalist" vs. "elementalist" varieties of cryomancy came about rather late in the writing process as I wrestled with balancing not creating large quantities of new story elements out of  whole cloth
with the directive to focus more on the story elements of the article. I was also trying very hard not to make the whole thing "pyromancers are like X, cryomancers are like Y," although a little bit of that still slips through.

I heard back yesterday with the article's rejection, and I'm actually not surprised. The mechanics were OK, but not inspiring, and I did got a bit too far with the story elements. It's been said by Wizards of the Coast staff in previous public places that, if a draft has promise but just isn't quite there, they'll work with you to make the work the best it can be. (From the project that will result in a paycheck, I can say that's true. I can't elaborate more right now, but will probably try to write something like this about that project when it becomes public.) Overall, this article just didn't have anything they could point to as being fixable.

I'm still very new at the RPG-freelancer thing, but I agree that the article definitely didn't deserve to get bought as-is. I think I was hoping that there would be a little more guidance on ways to help the story become more cohesive, perhaps because I think the idea of a winter wizard still has lots of potential. I just wasn't the person to get it there -- at least, not with my current degree of skill. Maybe I'll come back and revisit this idea someday, after I've got some more design experience. If I do, I'll be sure to let people know.

Preview: Race to Adventure!

Last weekend was the monthly board game event at my local library, and the Grasshopper & I got to go for the first time in several months. I've been pretty excited about the forthcoming game Race to Adventure! from Evil Hat Productions. It's a pulp fiction-themed scavenger hunt that spans the globe of the late 1920s, including a stops in Antarctica, Atlantis, Brazil, Mexico, the United States, Nepal, and the United Kingdom. I haven't been in a position to back the game on Kickstarter, but I did get a hold of the guys at the Hat, and they sent me a print-and-play kit in exchange for writing up my experiences afterward.

Background, for those who don't want to watch the intro videos at the Kickstarter page: The target audience is ages 8+; the game should take 20-30 minutes to play once everybody knows what they're doing, and involves moving your piece to the various locations around the globe and carrying out certain tasks to collect stamps on their passport. The board is modular (for the non-gamers, this means that you can rearrange the board from one game to another), and in the full game all of the locations will have two sides, so that the replayability increases even more. The Grasshopper is 6-almost-7 and a budding gamer, so I figured playing Race to Adventure! might be a good test of how well the game could scale down.

I got to play 2 games during the time we were there -- a 4-player game that had two adults, the Grasshopper, and one other kid who looked to be about nine (I didn't ask), and later a 2-player game that was 2 adults. For the 4-player game, we made one modification suggested in the rules, and made rescuing the prisoner from Atlantis "show up with the lightning gun and get the stamp," removing the timed aspect of the mission.

I enjoyed the game a lot, and I think the Grasshopper did, too. (There's a possibility that he might have a couple friends over later today, and we might end up playing then if it happens. If more plays get in before the Kickstarter campaign ends, I'll try to update the post accordingly.) Both games finished with the second-place player having 7 of 9 stamps, and I think that in the 4-player game the farthest person behind had 5. (That was one of the two kids, although I don't recall which.) The game did move quickly both times, taking maybe 40 minutes for the first game and about 20 for the 2-player one.

This is definitely on my long-term acquisition list, either funding the campaign if something changes in the next week, or as a strong request for a Christmas present. Besides, how can you not love a game that has an intelligent gorilla flying a jet pack on its cover?