#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 10: Favourite RPG Publisher

Yeah, I'm gonna get a lot of stick for this one. And I know a lot of people on my friends list are game writers and publishers so they don't want to sound biased or show favouritism, so it's understandable if you skip this day...

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 9: Favourite Media You Wish Was an RPG

It's almost like I put this question in there as an excuse to talk about Harry Potter again isn't it?

If you want to check out the blog posts with the extensive look at the designs for an officially licensed Harry Potter RPG that never came to be, just follow the links below...

You can read the first post, "Adventures in a World of Magic" here:

http://autocratik.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/adventures-in-world-of-magic.html

The second week I looked at the product itself in more detail, looking at how the game would look like a Hogwarts textbook, and immerse the players into Harry's world by keeping the feel of Rowling's brilliantly envisioned setting.

You can read the second post, "Of course it's happening inside your head, Harry..." here:

http://autocratik.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/of-course-its-happening-inside-your.html

The third post really got down to the details of the game system and how it works, looking at the character sheets, stats, how the dice are used, and how simple mechanics can maintain the feel of the wizarding world, and suspend the belief of the players.

You can read "It's our choices, Harry..." here:

http://autocratik.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/it-is-our-choices-harry.html

The fourth and final post looked at the supplements that could be produced for the game, expanding the potential to provide players with endless possibilities that will keep players of all ages playing for months and years to come.

You can find the last post, "The mind is not a book..." here:

http://autocratik.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/the-mind-is-not-book.html

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 8: Favourite RPG in the Media

Sorry, long day / week at work, then distracted by catching up on Person of Interest on TV (seriously, UK TV, you really need to sort this out... we're a whole season behind!)

On the subject of TV, and the media in general, today's question for #RPGaDAY2015 is all about how our favourite hobby is portrayed on TV, in movies, books, comics, and even online or in the press.

It's a tough one. Community did a great job of capturing the feel of D&D without ridiculing it. But my answer is going to have to stick this side of the pond...

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 7: Favourite Free RPG

Right down to the wire again today! With just under an hour to post on the 7th, I'm uploading the next video while frantically posting about today's.

Hopefully I'll have more time to post about topics as the month progresses, which is a shame because I really like today's video. It's great to get people talking about the cool free RPGs that are out there - some of them are only a handful of pages, but contain some of the most revolutionary, and most innovative games out there.

Luckily, I had help with today's video in the form of the awesome Anita Murray, from the London Indie RPG Meetup group.

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 6: Most Recent RPG Played

Ah, the wonders of the day-job... it's getting close to deadline, uploading the video for Day 7, while I hurriedly write a blog-post for Day 6.

So, Day 6 - Most Recent RPG Played. 

That one's pretty easy, as I'm only really playing one game at the moment which is a medieval fantasy style setting using cinematic Unisystem. Yes, this is the very game I was levelling up my character when I blog-posted on Tuesday! (Hopefully she won't keep failing her rolls now).

As always, share and enjoy!

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 5: Most Recent RPG Purchase

Yeah, I know... it's another "what have you bought" topic. Last year's one was criticised for being very purchase heavy - but then I thought it was interesting to find out how people started in RPGs... what was the first game they bought, etc.

Maybe it's just criticism from people who don't actually buy RPGs..? That'd be weird.

Maybe it's just that not only do I play and write RPGs, I'm a bit of a bibliophile too. I love the feel of a new book, that print smell, the layout and design of the page...

Sorry... getting a little distracted. Where was I?

Oh yes. Day Five is "Most Recent RPG Purchase".

As I mentioned before, I haven't really bought an awful lot recently. Times are tough, and I just don't have the cash to spend, or the time to play the games. However, when I was told about Of Dreams and Magic, I thought I'd better check it out.

Of Dreams and Magic certainly has a really cool feel, almost like the original Mage game, with characters who can manipulate reality through the power of their dreams. And it's very pretty too...

You can find out about Of Dreams and Magic at ODAM Publishing's site, here.

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 4: Most Surprising Game

It's Day Four, and a rare thing is happening - RIGHT NOW!! I'm supposed to be gaming. I'm actually supposed to be levelling up my character right at this moment, so I'm just going to post the video...

...and thank Becky Annison from Black Armada Games for helping out with the vid (and for picking a particularly excellent game!)

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 3: Favourite New Game of the Last 12 Months

Again, I'm cheating a little with this one. I haven't really bought a lot over the last year, so my choice for this day's answer is actually a supplement for a second edition of an older game...

I posted the video early this morning, which features a guest spot by the ever awesome Paco Garcia from GMS Magazine.

My choice is the Blessed are the Children supplement for the excellent Little Fears RPG. I loved the first edition of the game, and hadn't picked up the second. So when the 3rd supplement for the game was Kickstarted, and there was a backer level to get all three of the books to date, I leapt at the chance.

You really should check out Little Fears if you can.

Right, I've a manuscript to format, and I have the strange urge to rewatch Buckaroo Banzai...

Until tomorrow...

"No matter where you go, there you are!"

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 2: Kickstarter you're most pleased you backed...

I went through a really dangerous period when I got a bit carried away backing Kickstarters. I backed the Veronica Mars movie, Tabletop Season 3, and when it came to RPGs I looked at those shiny books (and I love shiny books) and clicked "back" on a lot of them...

I've had a couple of bad experiences which have put me off a little - that and having to be a little more financially savvy these days - but I love the opportunities that Kickstarter has given the hobby.

Unfortunately, being in the UK a lot of the really cool Kickstarter games are expensive to back, purely because of the nightmare of shipping costs, and the roulette of being charged by customs for importing cool games.

However, some companies with connections have found ways of distributing locally, and often these are the Kickstarters I leap at. Otherwise, it's showing my support backing at PDF level and hoping that the "in print" version will make it to the regular shop distribution.

So what game leaps out as being the one I'm most pleased I backed?

Numenera is very high on the list, as is Little Fears, and the Fate Core.

But for sheer production values, it's going to have to be a more recent one...

In today's video I've been joined by James Holloway, from Gonzo History Gaming

As always, share and enjoy!

#RPGaDAY2015 - Day 1: Forthcoming Game You're Most Looking Forward To

Hi everyone!

It's that time again. A whole month of me going on about tabletop roleplaying games again.

I'm sure there will be a few days around the end of week one when things will get a bit tight on the schedule and days may be a little late, but I'm hoping my organisation skills will save me, and my preparations will pay off.

Each day I'm hoping to post a video detailing my response, and a short-ish (depending upon how busy things get with the day-job) blog post that'll embed it.

Last year, #RPGaDAY was great, a huge success that spread further around the globe than I could have ever hoped. This year, I'm just happy to have you take part again. Thanks everyone.

So, lets get this show on the road...

Day 1 - Forthcoming Game You're Most Looking Forward To

Today's video I'm helped out by the ever cool Dominic McDowall-Thomas, who sent me his video from the incredibly warm GenCon 2015 dealer hall during set-up day this week. Thanks Dom!

Definitely, the game I'm most looking forward to is the new edition of Kult. I loved Kult, and I'm eager to see what it's like with a new game system.

--

Above all, I hope you enjoy #RPGaDAY2015. I know a lot of people enjoyed last year and found it motivating with the writing and videoblogging, and inspirational.

Standby For Rejection!

...anything can happen in the next 31 days...

August is a crazy month. There's all the excitement of Gen Con Indy happening at the beginning of the month, when the new games are announced, and just about every game designer (except me) on the planet descends upon Indianapolis.

There's also #RPGaDAY2015, where I've tried to get the internet talking in a positive way about roleplaying... this blog, and my Youtube channel, will be filled with my daily posts corresponding with the questions from the image...

On top of all that, the boss from my dayjob is on holiday, so I'll be pulling extra hours and long shifts to cover.

And finally, because I'm completely insane, I'm going to submit my novel to a publisher...

Never done it before, so it'll be a new experience for me, and I'm prepared for rejection. While I've written loads of RPG books, and worked on many RPG titles, I've never had any fiction published, nor really attempted any long form fiction. I am expecting the "please, never send this to us again" response, and the "please, never write fiction".

The novel is based on the background for the WILD RPG, something I NaNoWriMo'd a few years ago, and I've been rewriting, reworking and editing since. We'll see... I'm not really expecting a positive response.

Meanwhile, it's just a couple of days before #RPGaDAY2015 starts... so I'll post again then.

Until then, stay multiclassy!!

#RPGaDAY2015 This August - It is Happening Again!

Last year I had this bizarre idea. Inspired by taking part in one of those "Hashtag-a-thons" about books, I wanted to do something for tabletop roleplaying games, to spread the love of our hobby and what we enjoy about it. And, maybe, find some new friends online who share our interests.

So, with the help of the awesome Will Brooks who provided the design for the question image, I set about launching #RPGaDAY. I figured a couple of people I knew through roleplaying design would take part, and I was blown away by how many people actually joined in. RPGaDAY spread far and wide, throughout Europe, the US, Australia and Brazil. I was stunned!

When it was all over, the only question that remained would be - shall we do it again next year?

That time has come, and so why not? Let's give it another try!

The new questions can be found above, and every day in August we'll take the corresponding question and post our responses online using the tag: #RPGaDAY2015

I made a little video to explain it all...

This year, it'll not just be me talking at you for a month - I've managed to recruit some far more interesting and awesome people to help out and join in. Please subscribe and keep up with the news!

So please, spread the word, and join in celebrating all that is cool about RPGs.

Like the Facebook page:
www.facebook.com/RPGaDAY

Until next time,
Stay Multi-Classy!

"Dream a little bigger, darling..."

I've been spoiled.

Something amazing happened to me in the past - we did the impossible and came out shiny, but it has spoiled me and set my expectations way too high.

The amazing thing was Doctor Who.

It was impossible. A crazy, impossible dream that started as a chat over the internet between like-minded individuals, that escalated into just saying "let's go for it"... never expecting it would get anywhere.

It started with a quick chat with Chris Birch, possibly one of the nicest people you could meet in the RPG scene, and now the man with his own company - Modiphius. He'd just bought Conspiracy X 2.0, and got in touch. We chatted about the RPG world in general, and about trying to get new gamers into the hobby, and chatted about licenses that would get kids playing.

Cover of the original pitch to the BBC for the game

Within weeks we'd been talking to Angus Abranson, and Dominic McDowall-Thomas at the recently formed Cubicle 7 Entertainment, who Chris and I knew from past dealings, and we talked, and brought in Fred Hicks - the legend over at Evil Hat - to do some layout design for us, and we put together a proposal to the BBC for a roleplaying game based upon Doctor Who. All of them legends in the RPG world, I was way out of my league.

Never thought anything would come of it.

Even when we all went to BBC Worldwide Licensing in London, to talk about our idea, did we ever think we'd get anywhere. But the BBC liked what they saw, and we'd done the impossible.

(L-R) Me, Dominic Mc-Dowall Thomas, Chris Birch, Angus
Abranson, and Fred Hicks at the official announcement for the
Doctor Who RPG at Dragonmeet 2007

But I'm not posting about Doctor Who. I'm posting about doing impossible things before breakfast. To me, and to everyone around me, getting to write the Doctor Who RPG was an impossible task. I mean, we knew people had tried before to do the game (not just the ones that got published like the FASA one, and Virgin's "Time Lord").

In my head this set a new standard.

To dream a little bigger.

This week I went to see Ruby Wax live. She was doing part of her "Sane New World" tour where she did a live thing on stage that was part recap of her new book and part stand-up. I must admit, I had this moment a few years ago at a Dylan Moran gig where I had a moment of clarity and realised that I didn't like stand-up comedy. Luckily, Ruby Wax's tour wasn't really comedy, so to speak. More a presentation about how our brains work, and how we're screwing ourselves over. Done in an amusing way.

A couple of parts of the show really rang true. The first was how stress can affect your memory, and one of the earliest signs of being stressed is forgetting things. This was a bit of a wake up call, having noticed recently that I'm having difficulty remembering names...

The other is about how we're driven by that dopamine hit, that constant drive for more. You eat the donut, and you're already looking for the next one. It's not the actual donut that's giving you pleasure, it's the thrill of the chase, of the capture of the donut, and midway through eating the donut the brain is already preparing you to look and hunt for the next donut out there in the wilds of the donut plains...

And my writing has been like that.

But I was part of something impossible. And while I kinda burned out on Doctor Who (there was a period when my dayjob and my writing were pretty much non-stop Doctor Who for about a year or two), that dopamine hit is calling and I've spent months, if not longer, desiring the next one.

Part of my brain is screaming at me, saying...

"You did Doctor Who! You can do anything! Why don't we do Star Trek next? Or James Bond? Or Harry Potter!"

And another part of me is shouting...

"You were lucky to get that one, just give it up and know it'll never happen again..."

I know it's impossible. I'm just a little freelancer. I don't have the clout of a massive publishers, or a track record of my own publications. Hell, I've been working on WILD for nearly three years now and it doesn't seem to be getting any bigger.

But I have to dream.

I had the same problem just this morning, thinking about #RPGaDAY2015. I'm going to film a video for it in the next week or two, and the image for the questions for August's RPG-love-fest is coming, but part of me... that annoying "dream too big" part of my brain kicked in again today and started suggesting stupid things like...

"What if I did the video, and I could get loads of game designers and people like that to submit a little video of themselves saying RPGaDAY2015..."

"What if I could get people like Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton to do it? To take part in the month of talking in a positive way about tabletop RPGs?"

Stupid brain.

Anyway, next post will be about #RPGaDAY2015. I don't know if the video will be ready, but I'll try. In the meantime, I'll be over in the corner, dreaming too big for my own good, and eating donuts.

Until next time, dream bigger darlings, and stay multi-classy.

Make It So...

FASA's Star Trek RPG

In addition to Harry Potter, another major franchise that constantly circles my brain on a regular basis is Star Trek. Why isn't there a Star Trek RPG at the moment? With the anniversary only a year away, it just seems strange that there isn't a Trek RPG currently in production. I know there have been a couple of Trek RPGs in the past, the FASA one in the 1980s, and Last Unicorn Games' version in the 90s... but like Trek TV series, it seems like a very long time since the last one.

Maybe it's something about Star Trek's main themes that keeps drawing me to it. I backed out of writing Eden's Extinction RPG despite having worked for nearly three years on its predecessor Conspiracy X 2.0. Not because I didn't like the game, but because the task arrived just after my mother had died and I wanted to get away from games that were all about war, violence and killing.

Maybe it was because I worked for so long on Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, which encourages interaction, and using your brains and diplomacy when encountering a threat, rather than diving straight into a gun-fight.

And there has always been something about Star Trek that's been like that. Sure, there are fights. Sure there is constant danger and threat, and even death. But, the dominant themes are adventure, exploration and discovery. Races and sexes are equal, working in harmony (mostly) and finding new and exciting things. And, above all, it's fun.

I remember watching a few episodes as a kid of the original series, but I think I was too young to really appreciate it. Then, of course, Star Wars happened, and everything in my head was cool spaceships and science fiction. I have a distinct memory of my father taking me to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture at the cinema when it came out. And I have a more distinct memory of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - and being absolutely blown away by that one.

By the time Star Trek: The Next Generation started on TV, I was already a fan. So much so that I even attended the local (despite it being 15 miles away) official fan-gathering, the local "chapter" - the USS Kingston-Upon-Hull, where they fuelled my appreciation of the original series, and showed TNG episodes that hadn't aired in the UK yet - specially recorded and posted by fans in the US on videotape (this was before the wonders of the interwebs).

Of course, Trek stopped being on TV, but when JJ Abrams' revival movie hit in 2009, I was lucky enough to see a secret advanced screening and I was filled with excitement and wonder again. The classic characters were back, and it looked fantastic. Loved it. It's still one of those movies where I watch it over again if it happens to be on TV.

That was when I started thinking about a Trek RPG again. It's always been ticking away in the back of my head.

The mock up versions of the Star Trek RPG books I made for the following video, around the size of a Traveller LBB

Earlier this year, I posted a little about the size of books, even making a video about them and how the first RPG I played was also one of the cheapest, and one of the most economically easy to get into playing - Traveller. (Maybe skip to around the 4:00 mark)...

The Traveller "Little Black Books" (as they were called) used to retail for between $4-$6 each (usually about the same in UK £'s) which meant they were a good pocket-money price for those without a massive disposable income on gaming.

Cadet Book (mock cover)
for Character Generation

Which got me thinking about how a Star Trek game could work in a similar way - smaller books, cheaper price, maybe a boxed set to start you off if you want.

A Cadet Book would cover all of the aspects of character creation, defining who your character is before going to Star Fleet Academy, going through their training and assignment.

Then you can have books for the Sciences (which cover research, medical, and the scientific element of adventures) and Operations (detailing combat - both on a personnel level as well as basic ship combat). A Command book would round off the "core set", providing help for Command crew as well as Gamemastering.


Taking its design style initially from the Abrams movies, you could expand into more detail in further supplements. Supplements for races, planets, and advanced rules for ships could follow.

How about keeping the supplements small? You could do individual books for ships - featuring all the deck plans and specifications for a particular ship, or class of ship. A space station like DS-9 where you can set a whole campaign.

 What about retelling the episodes? You could have small books for each of the classic episodes, allowing GMs to run them as games. And, like the James Bond RPG, and the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG, the episodes can be presented with alternate options to change the story or the outcome slightly for those who are familiar with the episode, and present spin-offs and continuations for follow up episode ideas.

This wouldn't necessarily need to stick to classic Trek, it could continue through The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, and the movies.

Of course, the other thing to consider is accessibility. Keeping the game simple, quick and fast, to emphasise the story rather than the rules. Remember the rules I discussed for the Harry Potter RPG I'd been posting about? Using a similar approach, instead of a mass of skills and numbers to concentrate on, everything could initially be boiled down to five Skills -

Command, Science, Medical, Operations, and Security

And like the Potter game, reducing the number of Attributes to a minimum is key as well... probably ones that tie in with key themes of the series, like Logic, Empathy, Bravery... that sort of thing...

Maybe one day...

We can dream can't we?

Until next post, stay multi-classy, and Live Long, and Prosper...