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lumpley games
Apocalypse World (buy!)
Dogs in the Vineyard (buy!)
Murderous Ghosts (buy!)
Poison'd (buy!)
Poison'd character sheet
kill puppies for satan (buy!)
Mechaton (buy!)
In a Wicked Age (buy!)
Matchmaker
the Abductinators
local
A Penny for Your Thoughts
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Two Monster IndieGoGo Campaigns
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2011 here at anyway
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2010-08-15
: Apocalypse World
If you're here looking for Apocalypse World, I can set you up. Go to:
- apocalypse-world.com for free downloads;
- the un-store to buy;
- barf forth apocalyptica for discussions & hacks.
2012-01-26
: Two Monster IndieGoGo Campaigns
Two very different modern-day monster games powered by the Apocalypse. Monster of the Week, by Michael Sands, is about hunting monsters - think of Hellboy, Supernatural, or early Buffy. Monsterhearts, by Joe McDaldno, is about being monsters - think of True Blood, Being Human, or later Buffy.
I've been thinking about making a monster hunting game myself, so I'm positively delighted that Michael is making one. If you want in on the prelaunch, jump! You've only got a couple of days left.
Monster of the Week:
Monsterhearts:
2012-01-23
: ARG Thoughts
Down here, Marhault says:
Hey, Vincent. I'm not sure if there's a post in this or not, but I'd still love to hear your thoughts on ARGS.Back at PAX Dev I attended a presentation about ARGs - hold on, I bet I can find the description from the con schedule.
Yep, here it is:
The World's Largest ARGI went into it not even knowing what an ARG is, and spent the first half of it not really caring. It seemed very large, far beyond my own endeavor's possible reach. But then he said the thing that made it interesting, and it's the surprising thing the listing mentions. Forgive me any mistakes in the telling, I'm going from memory:
In December 2010, Valve brought 9 indie studios together to participate in what became the largest ARG ever created for the launch of Portal 2. Their goal was to do what had never been done to this scale before - community involvement in the launch time of a AAA title, in-game interactive puzzles, and a story that spanned 14 games, facebook, blogs, twitter, and the real world. In this lecture, Michael Austin, lead designer of Defense Grid and CTO of Hidden Path, will cover what happened from an insiders view - how it was planned, how it all came together, and what the challenges were along the way. In addition, he'll go over the metrics used to track the ARG and the surprising results of what brought the community together far better than anyone expected.
They had a bunch of puzzles that were really hard. They had a million players or something, though, so eventually even the hardest ones - and they were stupidly hard, full of logical leaps that one person in a million would make - had that one person who made the leaps and solved it. He told us about one where you had to interpret these weird graphics as lego instructions, then notice that the constructions you'd built fit on a particular given map, then realize that since the fictional character's online dating profile said that he hates the color yellow, you should remove all the yellow bricks, and if you THEN shine a flashlight through them they cast a password in shadow on the wall.
They were tracking player involvement with the puzzles and he showed us graphs. These one-in-a-million puzzles had a sharp spike at the front as people encountered the puzzle and then a sharp fall-off as they discovered how stupidly hard it was, with only a tiny blipping wiggle of a tail. People encountered it, got discouraged, then quickly gave up and stopped caring.
But then they made some puzzles where, instead of needing that one person in a million to solve them, they needed a thousand people to contribute a sliver of the solution. They had a fictional recruitment drive, for instance, where your login name or something hashed to a specialty and a district, so maybe I'd be a xenobotanist from N-district and you'd be an anthrophysicist from Y-district, and they'd send me a message saying "dear lumpley, we urgently need an anthrophysicist from Y-district, and you happen to know one," so I'd scramble to figure out which of my friends fit the bill. Something like that.
And these puzzles, with a thousand mini-heroes instead of a single one-in-a-million hero, and community-based instead of lonely, sustained player involvement over a longer term at a much higher level. Which makes sense in retrospect but had surprised Austin and his colleagues, and opened my eyes sitting there in the audience.
OH! I said to myself. It's game design. How neat!
Soon thereafter I proposed a notional panel discussion of my own (here edited to reflect my current thinking):
The 4 Problems with Tabletop RPGsSee "closed-door performance"? An online game with a thousand mini-heroes and community involvement could blow that thing away.
The way I see it, there are 4 serious problems holding tabletop roleplaying back: opaque content, oppressive social footprint, counterproductive procedures of play, and closed-door performance. Come find out how ambitious rpg designers are tackling these problems.
Then we have our 4 well-informed and excited ambassadors talk about how Jeep and Nordic larp, for instance, are taking on trite content; how the Cel*Style publishers, for instance, are taking on the oppressive social footprint; how the Forge diaspora and the OSR, for instance, are taking on counterproductive procedures of play; and how Failbetter and Elizabeth's company, for instance, are taking on the problem of the microaudience.
There's not one cutting edge, there are four.
So there are my thoughts about ARGs. Questions and comments welcome, as always.
2012-01-09
: 2011 here at anyway
2009: Compiling
2010: The Basics of RPG Design
In 2011 I tried to talk about rpg design instead of rpg theory, and it was tough going!
Social Context Begins At Home
2011-01-10 : Social Context and Design
Designing for a social context means design, long before it means publication and marketing.
2011-01-20 : RPG Design, Craft and Discipline
My kids are growing up thinking that publishing a book is appropriate and reasonable behavior.
2011-01-25 : Social Context and Design Scales
If you hope to reach a certain target audience with your game, and your game works great in internal playtesting, but your target audience isn't seizing upon your game the way you hoped, then...
Design Scales
2011-02-07 : Design scales: to the text!
I've gone to my game shelf and brought down a likely assortment of games. I'm going to pull passages from them for us to compare: first a passage that says what we do in the game overall, then a couple of passages that give examples of what we might be doing at any moment of play. Ready?
2011-02-14 : Tablut
The player who captures more and loses less benefits, yes, and so does the king's player. This means that the king's player can go more blithely into danger, despite having fewer pieces, more freely making bold and aggressive moves. The enemy player has to weigh constantly whether to engage in kind or to hold discipline.
2011-02-21 : Into the Unknown?
[As player, you] solve weird problems...
vs
[As GM, you should make] the new utility ... be an option to solve the scenario's Problem.
One of these is a lie! Do the players solve the problems, or does the GM?
2011-03-17 : My First-time Publishing Advice
If people are going blank during your pitch, change your pitch; if people are excited by your pitch but go blank when they look at your game, there's nothing to do but go back to design. If you publish it as-is you'll just get the same response.
Freeform
2011-04-08 : Freeform
You can change people's normal social system with content... You can change people's normal social system with principles... You can change people's normal social system with procedural cues... You can change people's normal social system with mediating cues (popularly, mechanics).
2011-04-12 : A background in Principled Freeform
Meg, Emily and I played a pretty intense and long-running principled freeform game from let's say 1998 to 2005. We wrote approximately one million billion words about it, back in the early days...
2011-04-25 : We are creative equals
If you want to play this way, grab some friends to be your creative equals and go for it. Nothing's stopping you, and there's no sense waiting for a game text - it wouldn't help you anyway.
2011-05-11 : The Un-frickin-welcome
When we want to let our characters off the hook, we need rules to threaten them; when we want to kill our characters, we need rules to protect them.
Design vs Mere Instructions
2011-05-17 : Game Design vs Mere Instructions
Telling someone that they have permission to do a thing isn't the same as changing the group's social system so that they really do have permission to do it.
Concentric Game Design (or: GM Agenda, cont.)
2011-06-07 : Concentric Game Design
Okay! Here's a cool thing about Apocalypse World's design in particular, if I may say it myself: Apocalypse World is designed to collapse gracefully downward... The whole game is built so that if you mess up a rule in play, you mostly just naturally fall back on the level below it, and you're missing out a little but it works fine.
2011-06-13 : A roleplaying game has two centers
Oh, of course it does! It has the center of what we're here to do with this game, which is the core of its reward system, and it has the center of what we're doing right this minute, which is the core of the creative relationship it creates between the players.
Some Handy References
2011-03-10 : Hungry Desperate and Alone
2011-03-16 : Toward One
2011-06-27 : The Dice & Clouds series from 2009
2011-08-01 : The Unreliable Currency series from 2010
Guest Posts by Ben Lehman
The much-misread 2011-02-17 : Ben Lehman: Playtesting: Stop
Playtesting is fucking dangerous, and you need to stop doing it, stop talking about it, and stop using it as a substitute for the hard work of game design.
2011-05-18 : Ben Lehman: Rules and their Functions
There is a tendency among role-players, particularly those who identify with freeform play as a thing, to classify immediate rules as "rules" and continuous rules as "not rules." Someone who says "we didn't use the rules once in the entire session!" is only referring to immediate rules: the only way to avoid use of continuous rules is to not play the game at all. There is also a tendency among rules-focused game designers like, say, me, to consider all of these things just "rules" and not to distinguish between them. To someone like me, "we didn't use the rules once in the entire session" doesn't make any damn sense at all: of course you were using the rules! You divided responsibility, decided what happened in the fiction, and so on.
In Sum...
Yep. Tough going. Social context and game design are the crux of what we're doing and what's its future, but I didn't make much headway here.
Please don't reopen those old threads. Please comment in this thread instead!
2012-01-06
: Jan-Feb Countdowns
Psi*Run to the printer in 1.
Murderous Ghosts back to the printer in 5.
MFzero to J in 10.
Then what?
Code name CROSSOVER in 30?
Code name LLAMA FLAMES II in 30?
Code name PLATEAU in 30?
Code name ANTHOLOGY in 30?
Maybe something else?
Hard to predict.
Oh, friends! While I have your attention, an unrelated matter. The Walking Eye could use your help. If you're of a mind and have the means, give 'em a hand: The Walking Eye Con Donation Drive.
2012-01-02
: 2011 at lumpley games
These show my games' direct online sales only. They don't include face to face sales at cons or any sales into retail at all. They include both print and pdf sales.
If you'd like to compare backward: 2011-02-18: 2010 at lumpley games
I'm always delighted to answer questions, if anybody's got any. Not a bad year!
2012-01-01
: Happy New Year
from lumpley games and Night Sky Games
2011-12-25
: PSI*RUN
Psi*Run is up for preorder over at Night Sky Games.
So that's good.
2011-12-21
: This Epimas, give the gift of murder
Epiclaus, that wicked old elf, has arranged for a holiday of (select all that apply):
Dread
Fancy
Hope
Intrigue
Magic
x Murder
Romance
Time Travel Shenanigans
Hark Hear the Bells!
Quote:
Send someone special the gift of gaming this Epimas, and get a little something for yourself in return.
Each PDF listed below costs only two dollars and twenty-two cents!
What's more, if you buy a PDF for a friend (to be delivered on Dec. 24th, the traditional Epimas), you get your very own copy of that PDF for free (and before they do, so you can read up and teach them how to play on Epimas).
And normally that would be enough . . . for mere mortals. But we're not dealing with mere mortals here. We're dealing with Father Epimas and the Solstice Fairy. And the Solstice Fairy says there should be more!
So, thanks to the Solstice Fairy's insistence, each and every order comes with a free PDF copy of Nathan D. Paoletta's short form game Witness the Murder of Your Father and Be Ashamed, Young Prince.
So rejoice and sing out! There will be an Epimas after all!
2011-11-23
: Celebrating the Apocalypse
It was a good year for Apocalypse World!
The Indie RPG Awards: Indie Game of the Year, Best Support, and Most Innovative Game.
The Lucca Games Best of Show (for Il Mondo dell'Apocalisse).
The Golden Geeks Game of the Year.
To celebrate and to say thanks, I'm marking the Apocalypse World PDF down to $10 until the end of the year, and including all 6 of my limited ed playbooks: the Maestro D', the Faceless, the Quarantine, the Hoarder, the Touchstone, and the Marmot.
Thank you! I'm blown away.
2011-11-14
: Nutso Many Games
Italy 10-26-2011 - 11-2-2011
Friday: Apocalypse World.
Saturday: Dogs in the Vineyard, Apocalypse World.
Sunday: Apocalypse World, Dogs in the Vineyard.
Monday: Apocalypse World.
Tuesday: 1/2 Dogs in the Vineyard.
Home 11-3-2011 - 11-10-2011
Monday: Lamentations of the Flame Princess.
Burning Apocalypse 11-11-2011 - 11-13-2011
Saturday: Blasters For Hire, Mouse Guard, Burning Reservoir Dogs.
Sunday: Apocalypse World.
11 1/2 games in 18 days. Basically 2 games per 3 days for almost 3 weeks running.
I think I gotta lie down.