There are a bunch of different awards in the game industry and naturally they are regularly compared to various movie awards. The Origins Awards try to be like the Oscars, with voting done by industry peers. The ENnies try to be the People’s Choice Awards, with the public voting on a list nominees. The Diana Jones nominees were announced this year. It seems they strive to be like the Directors Guild Awards but I finally figured out what they reminded me of today: the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence. Perhaps that was James Wallis’s intention all along.

I talk a lot about the game industry but not so much about the hobby of gaming. Here’s what I’ve been playing for fun recently.

Flames of War: I have played this game a lot over the past six months. It plays pretty well, but I have become a bit frustrated with the way armor and infantry interact. I am looking forward to the new edition this summer and I’ll be curious to see how they revise the rules in light of years of feedback.

Descent: This is Fantasy Flight’s super deluxe dungeon bash board game. It may cost $80, but it is packed with stuff. Hundreds of counters, sturdy dungeon tiles, special dice, and a pile of nicely sculpted plastic heroes and monsters. The rules seem a bit intimidating at first, particularly because there are so many different types of counters, but once you start to play the essence of it is pretty simple. A very good game.

Memoir ’44: This is Days of Wonder’s World War II boardgame based on Richard Borg’s “Commands and Colors” system. Man, I love this game. It has become a real standard for me and is great for those nights when you don’t have time to set up a full minis game or the like. I’ve enjoyed the Eastern Front expansion, as the Soviets really do play differently due to the Commissar rule (basically, you have to chose your order a turn in advance, a limitation your opponents don’t have). The Pacific expansion is out this summer and again I am looking forward to it.

Commands and Colors Ancients: As its name indicates, this game uses the same basic system as Memoir ’44 but tailors it to the ancients era. It is definitely more complicated than Memoir ’44, which you’d expect since it’s published by GMT. Still, it does do a good job of simulating the way ancient battles were fought. Missile fire is good for harassing the enemy but you’ll never win a battle with it. The cards encourage you to do things like set up battle lines with your heavy infantry. Even with the expanded rules, you can still play out big battles in less than two hours.

Mutants & Masterminds: Yes, we finally got a second edition game going around here. I haven’t actually gotten to play M&M; in many years and so far we are having a blast. It’s also nice to take a break from GMing all the time.

D&D;: I’m also playing in Tim’s D&D; game twice a month. Our group has had some trouble with players moving to other cities to take new jobs, but things seem like they’ve stabilized. Since GR still publishes d20 material, it’s good to keep up with the joneses.

Warlord: Reaper has at last gotten serious about doing its own miniatures game. The game is in between a skirmish game and a mass battles game. You don’t have formations, but you do have small units. The game itself plays pretty well. It’s attached to Reaper’s fantasy world but it’s generic enough that you could use these for most fantasy settings.

Drunter & Druber: Everyone showed up for game night this week…except the GM. I busted out Drunter & Druber, a German tile laying game I hadn’t played in 5 years or so. Fun little game and it plays quickly. Basically, you are building roads, rivers, and town walls and demolishing buildings as you go. You are trying to protect your own buildings while leveling those of other players. You can destroy any building with impunity except an outhouse. Those you have to call a vote to level. A card counts for as many votes as it has vowels. So “Ja” is worth one vote but “Jaa!” is worth three. Those wacky Germans.

Attack Sub: This is a late period Avalon Hill game pitting NATO naval forces against Soviet subs. It uses a card-based system similar to the excellent Up Front game, but it’s not nearly as good. I played the Soviets and found that I had a hell of a time even getting a lock on a ship, never mind firing a torpedo at one. It seemed like it would be cool, but was a bit frustrating in the end.

Battlestar Galactica TCG: I played through a scripted demo of this game, which isn’t exactly like playing. Basically, you sit there while someone tells you what cards to play. This does give a nice overview of the system, but it’s not like actually playing the game. Anyway, the game looks interesting. Rather than do the obvious thing and have one person play the cylons and the other the human fleet, the game has each player as a faction inside the fleet. As you play cards the cylon threat level builds and eventually there’s a cylon attack. You then flip up a card from your deck and whoever shows up turns out to be a cylon. I thought that was a nice way to recreate an important element of the show. I will try a full game when this is released.

Having already gone on far longer than I expected when I started writing this up, I’m going to wrap up the True Story of True20 at last. When I last left off, it was the fall of 2005 and we were getting in entries for the Setting Search. I’m not going to get into the decision making involved in the Setting Search, as that was a public contest and it wouldn’t be appropriate to comment on it in this venue. Suffice to say we got enough good entries to fill out both the core book and the True20 Worlds of Adventure book we planned for summer ’06. The rest of the process was expanding the rules, editing the book, getting the art, laying it out, and sending it print. Nothing really out of the ordinary there.

Moving into 2006 then, it was just a question of maximizing the impact of the game’s launch. Of course, we would do our usual rounds of PDF previews and online hype. We also had Dragon’s announcement of the Setting Search winners in January, which was a nice bit of PR for True20. As we considered what else we could do, we also had another outstanding issue that needed resolution. Namely, what were we going to do for people who had bought the previous PDF?

Our standard operating procedure is to provide people who buy our PDFs with free updates when a product gets revised. That’s usually when we fix bits of errata though or make other small changes. In this instance we were taking a no frills 96 page PDF and blowing it out into a fully illustrated 224 page core rulebook. If we provided the new core book for free, that’d be giving away an awful lot of content.

We batted around several ideas. We could simply give everyone a discount coupon and let them upgrade at their option. We also considered splitting the book into rules and settings, then giving away the rules as a free update and charging for the settings. We didn’t feel like that’d be fair to the Setting Search winners though and the whole point of having the settings was to provide examples of how you can use the True20 rules to model very different genres. A final option was to simply treat this as a new product and not give any special deals at all.

In the end I kept coming back to the free update. That would be a great way to thank the early adopters of True20. It would surely cost us some money in the short term, but the long-term benefits seemed to outweigh that. We had sold an awful lot of that PDF, so providing a free update to all those purchasers would be great, targeted marketing. We hoped that when those folks saw the full core book in PDF form, they’d happily go to their local game stores and pick up a hard copy.

With that in mind, we stopped selling the old PDF in January. Anyone buying it a month or two before the game’s full release would not be an early adopter by any definition. Then we waited until just a few weeks before the print version was going to release and sent out update links to all previous purchasers. The idea was to get them pumped up about True20 just in time to talk it up at their local stores. We hoped this would help create a consumer demand that’d “pull” sales through the three-tier system when the core book launched.

We also launched a dedicated website, www.true20.com, and did a bunch of previews in this period. Hal, Rob, and I attended GAMA Trade Show in Las Vegas in March and promoted the hell out of True20. Shortly after all that, the book finally came out. At Green Ronin HQ there was much rejoicing.

We had hoped that True20 would be like Mutants & Masterminds, but the instant hits are few and far between. Initial sales were good but not through the roof. And that’s what brings us to the current phase of True20’s lifespan: the push. Now the game is out and retailers have had a chance to check it out and see the demand. It’s up to us to keep pushing and make it clear this is a release with weight behind it. The dedicate website is a good indication of that, but just a start. We released a fast play a few weeks ago so people would get a taste of the game. Along with that we released a free True20 version of my Death in Freeport adventure to give new purchasers something they can do with the game right away. Meanwhile, work proceeds on the supplements and the True20 Bestiary goes to print very soon. Damnation Decade, our 1970s scifi freakout setting, is also coming out soon and includes a True20 appendix. True20 Worlds of Adventure is on track for a July release. All this product and activity is meant to show distributors and retailers that True20 is a major line and should be treated as such.

Will it work? Well, that’s the unwritten next chapter of the True Story of True20.

Fin.

I got a bunch of work done over the weekend, but I also found time to go out and have some fun. Friday night Nik and I went to the Epoxies show at El Corazon. She wrote a review of that on her blog, so I won’t go through the whole show. I’ll just add that the Epoxies were great fun and the only downer was that the sound man had Roxy’s vocals down too low for the entire show. It wasn’t until the encore that he finally turned her levels up. That made the last two songs (“Toys” and “Robot Man”) sound terrific; too bad he didn’t figure it out earlier.

Saturday night we met up with Ray and went out to the Bookstore, a downtown bar we dig. Later we went to the Can Can, a new place right at Pike’s Place Market that has attracted an eclectic crowd of hipsters, punks, and lipstick lesbians. It’s modeled after classic French cabarets and has a cool atmosphere. The waitresses periodically converge on the stage to do Can Can routines, which is pretty amusing. The house band plays old style jazz with an accordion in full effect and it really works.

That night there was a music event as well. Christine and Bill joined us just in time to catch the first act, Moonpenny Opera. They are apparently a foursome but that night it was just two guys, a bass player with a stand-up and an accordion player/singer. They had a great carnival meets vaudeville thing going on and we really enjoyed them. The song about the guy who kills himself so he can finally be happy with his necrophiliac girlfriend was priceless.

Next up was Baby Gramps, a fixture on the Seattle music scene for over thirty years. He’s a demented old coot with a big white beard who brought the house down with his one of the kind performance. To quote one review: “Baby Gramps finger picks an old steel national guitar and sings in a wild, extemporaneous gravel vocal style with phenomenal vocal rhythmic improves and a guitar technique that borders on early ragtime. He combines early jazz, blues, ragtime, and good-time novelty music.” I’ll also add that he’s a riot. By the end of the first song he had the whole audience clapping along and shouting out “Fuck-a-doodle-doo”. After a few songs, he said he got gotten the feel of the crowd and then launched into a song all about the scrotum, “the hairy scary voodoo bag.” The whole thing was so eccentric it’s hard to describe but we enjoyed the hell out of it.

The headlining act was Reverend Glasseye from my hometown, Boston, MA. Their music has been described as “Delta blues, ’60s burlesque, and the carnival, after dark,” so you’d think they’d fit in perfectly with the openers. That wasn’t really the case though. Moonpenny Opera and Baby Gramps both had warped senses of humor that served them well. Reverend Glasseye were very serious and they seemed put out by the cabaret nature of the venue. The singer admitted that this was their second month on tour and this was their hardest show. Their songs were interesting but so somber that it was a bit of a let down after the fun of the opening bands. Still and all, it was a good show and I’m glad we discovered a new downtown spot for music and nightlife.

I found out this week that Mission of Burma released an I-tunes exclusive live EP. Live material isn’t usually that exciting, but the cool thing about it is that it includes their cover of “Youth of America” by the Wipers. You may recall me talking about how much ass this kicked the last time I saw Burma, so needless to say I bought a copy. It also got me thinking of other great cover songs, so I decided to list out a few of my favorites.

The Clash, “Police on my Back”: Many people don’t realize it’s a cover but this song was originally done by a band call the Equals in the late 60s. While the Sandinista triple album has some spotty stuff on it, this song is a pitch perfect punk rock anthem.

New Bomb Turks, “Mr. Suit”: The first New Bomb Turks album is full of catchy and speedy songs, so you’d expect their cover of Wire’s “Mr. Suit” would be at least as fast as the original. But no, the Turks sucker punch your expectations and slow it down and the results are glorious.

The Avengers, “Paint It Black”: Penelope Houston’s vocal urgency makes this Stones’ tune a winner.

firehose, “Slack Motherfucker”: I like this version much better than the Superchunk original.

Penetration, “Free Money”: It took guts to cover this Patti Smith song only a couple of years after its release. Penetration easily could have embarrassed itself, but Pauline Murray has a great voice and she more than pulled it off.

Dropkick Murphys, “You’re a Rebel”: I don’t know if they ever recorded this, but when I saw them a few years ago they did a spirited cover of this Iron Cross classic.

Newtown Neurotics, “Blitzkrieg Bop”: There have been countless covers of this Ramones’ song. What I like about this one is that the Neurotics turned it into a protest song about nuclear weapons. Now that’s 80s punk rock for you.

Naked Raygun, “Suspect Device”: Naked Raygun always had a bit of Stiff Little Fingers in their sound, so this nod to them makes perfect sense. Great on record and live.

The Saints, “River Deep, Mountain High”: You wouldn’t expect an Ike and Tina Turner song to make a great punk tune, but the Saints version of it is amazing. It makes me want to jump and pogo every time I hear it.

The summer of 2005 was a time of highs and lows. On the upside, we made deals with Alliance and Diamond that took care of our hobby and book market penetration respectively, we had excellent summer convention sales (including sell-outs of Blue Rose at both Origins and GenCon), Mutants & Masterminds 2nd edition blew the roof off GenCon, we sold over 100 of a con special POD of the original True20 PDF, and GR came home with a pile of ENnie Awards, including Best Game for WFRP and our second year in a row as Best Publisher. Blue Rose picked up three silver awards, for Best d20 Game, Best Rules, and Best Cover Art. On the downside, the owner of Osseum fled Seattle and any hopes of getting money from him receded into the distance, we were carrying a lot of debt thanks to that situation, and as we released new d20 product that summer we discovered that the market for it was even worse than we suspected.

What to do about d20 became a big topic for the summer. We still had a lot of projects underway, ranging from drafts to completed and edited manuscripts. We also had the Thieves’ World books all either done or nearing completion and the first two books debuted at GenCon. We figured the license would carry those books but our other d20 stuff didn’t have a 20-year literary tradition to fall back on. Was this simply a marketing problem that could be overcome with a clever PR campaign or was this a permanent market shift?

Naturally, we had to start thinking about D&D; 4th edition too. When it might come out, how it might impact the marketplace, and whether 3rd party companies would be able to support it. In addition to talking to my staff about such things, I also had conversations with other of the surviving d20 publishers that summer. I was talking to the owner of one such company at GenCon and I said, “You know, what’s to stop us from designing our own 4th edition? What if the remaining good d20 companies teamed up and put together a new iteration of the rules together? We could split the profits of the core books and then each of us would support the game with supplements. We’d then have a solid core to build on that was ours to control and the combination of all our fanbases would hopefully allow us to strongly establish the new game in the marketplace.” It was intriguing idea and before the end of the show several other publishers came to talk to me about it. Ultimately, the idea never moved forward for three reasons. First, division of labor and profits on the core book would be a bear, never mind what vision would lead the design. Second, for this to really be attractive, we’d need to get Monte Cook involved. Since Monte is the exception to about every rule in d20 publishing and he already has a variant game in the form of Arcana Evolved, I just didn’t see it happening. Third, we already had plans for True20 moving ahead and there was a good possibility that True20 could follow in the footsteps of Mutants & Mastermind and break out. Were that to happen, we wouldn’t want to undercut our own success by taking part in a venture to bring out yet another OGL variant.

In the fall we began getting Setting Search entries. The overall standard was pretty high, so much so we decided to do a follow-up book to feature more of the entrants. That would put the four winners in the core book and four runners-up in a book we dubbed True20 Worlds of Adventure. We also decided to add one new setting, “Razor in the Apple” by Rob Schwalb, to the book as well. Soon we were planning True20 support books for the rest of 2006. If True20 was going to establish itself, it would need several good support books to follow up the game’s release. We wanted both retailers and fans to understand this was going to be a game with legs.

In this same period we began marketing the game in earnest. True20 Adventure Roleplaying was promoted at both of the Alliance Open Houses that fall. We also made arrangements to do a preview in Alliance’s Game Trade Magazine. The best news on the marketing front came from Dragon though. When I told Dragon about the True20 Setting Search, they asked if they could reveal the winners exclusively in the magazine’s pages. While it would mean delaying our announcement by about a month, the marketing value was too high to pass up so I happily agreed. Everything was now falling into place for the game’s debut.

End, Part 5.

I picked up the first graphic novel (“Gifted”) of the Astonishing X-men a couple of weeks back. I hadn’t read the X-men in many years, but I was curious to see how Joss Whedon was as a comic writer so I gave it a shot. “Gifted” did a lot of set-up but was pretty good overall. Whedon is clearly a huge X-men goober, which is both good and bad. There are some funny parts where he references old stories but he also seems to assume you’re fully versed in the entire X-men mythology so he doesn’t go out of his way to explain some things a neophyte wouldn’t get. Or say, someone who stopped reading the series in the early 90s. Anyway, I liked Gifted enough that I went out and bought the second graphic novel (“Dangerous”) yesterday while I was downtown. I had assumed it would pick up some of the plot threads from Gifted, but instead it veered off in a completely different direction.

(SPOILERS FOLLOW)

So can someone explain to me why (o God why?) writers seem so drawn to fucking Holodecks? Everytime Star Trek would do a stupid holodeck episode, I groaned. “Oh no, we’re somehow trapped in the holodeck and this time we could die!” That was bad enough. Now I find the frickin’ Danger Room has turned into Holodeck 2. This is strike 1 against Dangerous. Strike 2 is the Danger Room achieving sentience. Gee, incredibly dangerous computer achieves sentience. That was fresh…in 1968. Then the Danger Room takes on humanoid form for no particular reason and tries to kill Daddy (Prof. X). Strike 3! While I do like the characters’ banter, overall I am less than astonished.

More on True20 later.

Having decided to do a True20 core rulebook, we now had to answer several more questions. When should the game come out? How big should the book be? What else should go in it? What could we do raise its profile?

Looking over the schedule, I did not think it was practical to add True20 to our planned 2005 releases. In the summer and fall we not only had the Thieves’ World line to release, but we were also launching Mutants & Masterminds 2nd edition. We didn’t have the resources to do another major launch in that same time period. If we were going to do True20, we were going to do the book right. I therefore decided to schedule the full True20 core rulebook for Q1 of 2006.

The rules as they were took up a little less than 100 pages sans art. I thought True20 would do best as a hardback and that argued for a bigger book. Certainly expanding out the rules to cover modern and scifi would take some room and of course we’d add art. We still had a good amount of potential space so I thought one or more sample settings would flesh out the game nicely. Giving people rules is great; giving them concrete examples of how to use them would be even better.

Our initial discussions revolved around existing Green Ronin settings. We had been doing Mythic Vistas, a whole line of campaign settings, for several years, so we had a lot to choose from. While adapting some of those settings would have been easy enough, I was worried that doing so might send the wrong message. I did not want gamers to think that True20 was just an excuse to rehash a bunch of stuff we had published already. Providing new settings seemed a much better idea.

At this point my thoughts turned to the other publishers that asked about licensing True20. We had been running a program for Mutants & Masterminds called M&M; Superlink for several years. This allowed third parties to publish material compatible with M&M.; While the program had been and continues to be quite successful, it also sucks up a fair amount of GR staff time with approvals. If we did a similar program for True20, we’d be looking at potentially doubling the number of approvals and that was not attractive. On the other hand, having other publishers supporting the game would be a plus, so I didn’t want to forget the idea entirely.

It was this train of thought that led me to conceive of the True20 Setting Search. The idea was pretty simple. We’d put out a call to other publishers, asking them to submit 15,000 word True20 campaign settings. The winners would get their settings in the core book and a free license to do their own support material for that setting. This would give us new settings for the game and a small group of quality publishers to help us support it. The Setting Search was also a great marketing tool that would help keep True20 in people’s minds as we worked towards getting the core book out.

To make this work, we could, of course, need to make the True20 rules available to other publishers in some form. This contributed to our decision to release a no frills PDF of the True20 rules in June, 2005. This would be just the rules from Blue Rose with a new modern appendix. No art, no fancy layout. The bonus of this plan was that it’d get the True20 rules out there in some form in the short term. We figured people would greet the news that the full book wouldn’t come out until 2006 a lot more positively if we announced the interim PDF at the same time.

This then was the plan conceived in May, 2005. We would create a no frills PDF for release the following month. We would debut it on the same day we announced plans for the full core book and the Setting Search. The rulebook itself would be a 224-page hardback with a targeted release window of Q1, 2006. It would feature the best entries from the Setting Search. Publishers would be encouraged to come up with entries that would show off “the elegance and flexibility of the True20 system.” June 16, 2005 the core rulebook and Setting Search were announced and the interim PDF was released. True20 was officially on.

If you’ve been wondering what the hell this True20 thing that I’ve been talking about is, some downloads went live today that can help you out. If you go to http://www.true20.com/support, you can download free Quick Start Rules for the game and an adventure to go with them. These two files are enough to let you try the game out and the scenario includes pre-generated characters. The adventure is Death in Freeport, something I wrote just about six years ago that has had a much longer life than I could have imagined at the time.

The True20 History of True20 will continue in a day or two. I’ve been quite busy banging away at Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay and for obvious reasons that has to take precedence over noodling on my blog.

In the same way that voters want to feel that the government listens to their concerns, gamers want publishers to pay attention to their feedback. Companies that don’t, or at least give the impression that they don’t, can earn a negative reputation that can dog them for years. You’ll still see D&D; fans, for example, criticize the TSR of the 2nd edition era for not listening to what they really wanted. Since game companies are in the business of selling product, this fan reaction is fair enough. Of course publishers want to make products that fans want to buy. That’s how they stay in business.

The trick, of course, is actually figuring out what they want. Gamers are a disparate lot and in any given conversation you’ll see a dozen contrary opinions expressed. Learning to tune out the noise so you can hear what’s really going on is a skill you can develop after some time in the game business. The internet has made this easier in some ways but more difficult in others. On the upside, message boards and e-mail make it simple for fans to give companies direct feedback, sometimes within hours of a product being released. The downsides are all the typical internet problems. People that can hide behind a screen name will say things to you online they’d never say to your face, small groups of vocal critics can pretend they represent a majority when really they are just isolated cranks with big mouths, misinformation that gets out there early can continue to be repeated long after it’s been disproved (TSR trademark the term Nazi is a classic here), etc.

So how do you know what to listen to and what to ignore? For starters give special attention to fans you meet at conventions. I find it’s always better to talk to people face to face rather than via the internet. It’s just hard to beat a real conversation and people will tell you things in person they might not bother to write about. Second, look for trends in e-mail and snail mail sent to your company. I find this feedback tends to be more honest than what you see on message boards. Oftentimes people on message boards just want to draw attention to themselves or grind their personal axes. People who take the time to write privately—be it positive or negative—tend to be more interested in communicating than grandstanding. Third, pay attention to how people are actually using your products. This may not be immediately obvious, but it’s important. RPGs are designed to be played so if you can see what is making it into people’s home games you can better plan to make future products even more useful. Lastly, watch what fans do because it’s sometimes different than what they say. For example, over the years umpteen gamers have said they are sick of settings like the Forgotten Realms and they want to see something different. And yet, even at the height of d20, settings that really were different rarely sold well. The very same people who clamored for something new would dismiss such settings as too niche or weird.

I bring all this up because this is the sort of analysis we were doing in the months after Blue Rose’s release. We had heard from people almost immediately who were interested in seeing a separate True20 rulebook. The question we had to answer was whether or not there was enough real demand for this to put it on our schedule and devote resources to making it happen. There were people who seemed to expect that we’d drop everything we were doing, abandon Blue Rose, and immediately implement this plan. Well, it’s really easy to spend other people’s money but it’s a whole different experience when your decisions affect the livelihoods of a half-dozen people. I had always tried to plan Green Ronin’s schedule and direction carefully and this was doubly true in light of the Osseum situation I discussed in the previous installment.

So the Green Ronin staff spent several months discussing the matter internally as we watched and listened as Blue Rose continued to sell and provoke discussion (and some amount of controversy). In that time we discovered that people were running a variety of different campaigns using the rules, particularly Star Wars games. We got a lot of private e-mail praising Blue Rose and many also expressed a desire to see a True20 core rulebook. We also got a bunch of inquiries from smaller publishers who really liked the rules and wanted to know if they could do compatible material. These were all positive signs. Of course, nothing can be done fast enough to please angry gamers with a sense of entitlement, particularly those with a hate-on for the Blue Rose setting that was beyond irrational (seriously, it was like they feared that the Blue Rose book would slip beneath their Princess Leia sheets to emasculate them in the dark of night). So we also had to listen to increasingly shrill and abusive demands from a small group of “fans” who seemed to believe that insulting us, belittling various staff members, and attacking Blue Rose fans was the best way to get what they wanted. While there was a certain comedy to these antics, their efficacy was nil. We simply don’t make important business decisions based on the screeching of a few internet trolls.

Now our own discussions started with the Black Thorn project and we spent some time kicking that idea around. We soon decided that doing another fantasy setting would be too limited in scope though. By May (that’s three months after Blue Rose’s release, for those keeping track) we had decided that there was indeed enough actual demand to do a proper True20 core rulebook. We spent that month coming up with a new plan and deciding on how we would execute on it. The important point here is that we listened to the people that mattered, the critical mass of real fans. Just as important was the analysis that this would be a good business move for the company, since at that point in time there was no room for missteps. Divining what gamers really want is more art than science, but as summer approached we felt confident that doing a True20 core rulebook was the right decision and we were making it for the right reasons.

In the next installment I’ll talk about the plan we developed for the release of True20 Adventure Roleplaying and some of the considerations that went into it.

End, Part 3.