Small Press, Big Game
These are not easy decisions. As a friend of Paul and one who has worked alongside him at the Ashcan Front booth, I’ll reserve judgment on his contributions and his legacy. Instead, I’ll do my best to report on the man’s work and let each reader decide for themselves what impact he has made on role playing games.
Paul began role playing like so many gamers did: by playing old school Dungeons and Dragons. While he played D&D a lot, he decided that he would like to design his own game, first creating an espionage game (called Espionage) and a fantasy heartbreaker with lots of formulas and charts in high school. Still, he would not consider either activity true game design.
In fact, it wasn’t until 2003 that he published the first game he was truly proud of: The World, the Flesh and the Devil, which kicked off a creative burst that saw him release nine games in six years including The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, Nicotine Girls, My Life with Master, The Valedictorian’s Death, Bacchanal, Specimen for the Resurrection, Acts of Evil (as an ashcan), The Niche Engine, Honeydew, and Thy Vernal Chieftains.
Of these games, by far his most popular is My Life with Master, which was released at Gen Con 2003. In My Life with Master, all players take on the role of servants of a not-so-nice master. The first part of the game involves the players defining the master by determining several attributes for the villain. After the master has been created, they go about serving him (or her), observing the consequences of the master’s deeds, and seeing if they can escape or accept a life of servitude.
Is the game dark? It can be, but it can also be comic or melodramatic or some combination thereof, depending on the nature of the master. No matter how the master is played, though, it’s a well written game in which Paul was able to convey how to get consistent results so the game delivers every time.
Of course, it’s a game that is only as good as the input the players are willing to put into it, which may well be why it has endured for the past six years. While it was far from the first game to enable play authoring and collaborative creating of a game world, it carries the banner for the genre and has directly influenced designers who came after it trying to do similar things.
And it’s fun. That’s not me editorializing. That’s my hearing others talk about their experiences with the game.
The part that makes Paul’s body of work hard to peg is that not only is My Life with Master his best-known game, it’s really the only one to be “published” in the traditional sense. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil was made free on the web, as was Nicotine Girls and The Valedictorian’s Death. Bacchanal was a 2005 Game Chef entry (the same contest that produced Shab-al-Hiri Roach) which may yet see publication, but is mired in some interesting production issues which Paul may share if asked.
Specimen for the Resurrection, a fantastic game about time travelers who have the fate of the human race in their hands, and Honeydew were entries in a design contest. Acts of Evil has been published, but only as an ashcan. The Niche Engine has seen play testing, but has not been released as a final published work. Lastly, Thy Vernal Chieftains was published as part of Jared Sorensen’s Indie Game Company Game Design Challenge in January 2009 and was sold for one dollar as a PDF.
Where does that leave Paul’s body of work? Obviously not all of those games are finished, polished works, but should that detract from the effort he has put in them? It’s a question each person should tackle, though perhaps not without downloading a few of his games post-My Life with Master and giving them a try. Paul would admit they may not be one-hundred percent complete, but at the same time, he would not put them out there if they were unable to produce an enjoyable play experience.
At the very least, Paul is widely approachable, ready for a good debate on gaming and always looking for feedback on his games. Besides, who knows, it may be that your comments might be the thing that gets him to push the game into full production.
Still, Paul’s willingness to think about role playing games and discuss game design brings us to another facet of Paul Czege. Paul is deeply analytical and quite concerned with what makes the entire role playing experience a good one. This ranges from understanding why people play the way they do to why certain games lead to role playing (as opposed to roll playing) to why certain behavior is emergent in play (bring aspirin to that chat, trust me.)
With Paul, you get a man who has a design principle named after him (the Czege Principle which is best summarized on Gnomestew as “When one person is the author of both the Character’s adversity and its resolution, play isn’t fun.”) His principle has guided the design of numerous player-author games.
He’s also one of the two founders of the Ashcan Front, a booth at Gen Con which features games that are ninety-five percent done and just need the proper audience. The goal of the booth is to provide matchmaking between game designers and play testers who will really dig into a game so that the game designer can get useful feedback and create the best game possible.
The booth came from his own experiences where he was plodding along with a game until someone play tested it. That play tester really took a liking to the game and managed to have the perfect feedback which elevated Paul’s game to the next level. He wanted to share the experience with other designers, so he started the booth with Matt Snyder and helped several game designers take their game from “almost there” to published work.
The Ashcan Front has had its share of proponents and opposition, each with valid arguments, but the booth and his body of thought on role playing and the art of role playing design are another part of the legacy of Paul Czege. This part may or may not rival the impact of his games.
Still, at this point, Paul is a man whose legacy is still being built. Like other indie designers, he still has games ahead of him and eventually both Acts of Evil and The Niche Engine should see publication in a formal sense. On the other hand, Paul’s blog posts and his comments on community forums form a body of thought about the hobby that bear study for those who want to see beyond mechanics into the meta part of role playing.
What you think of the legacy is up to you. Either way, Paul has left his mark on small press game design that can be debated, but cannot be ignored.
