Sandy's Soapbox
[pause]. Still here? Good! Let's begin a 'dialog' about games, said dialog being entirely one-sided.
[pause]. Wow, some people stayed. Great crowd! Love ya! Here we go.
I'll posit that there are 3 types of stand-alone RPG rules sets:
1) for newcomers, too 'simplistic' for existing players
2) for existing players, building on preexisting knowledge of rpg geneology
3) tangential, defines a new direction that does not alienate or bore veteran gamers while being graspable for newcomers
D&D, the most famous of RPG progenitors, had the advantage that there were no 'existing players', and as such it largely defined the field. But now, RPG design is crowded and has its own culture and its own preconceptions.
I've talked about conventional publishing and about PDF work in earlier columns. So now we're going to take a look at one of the edges of design. Over at the most excellent site 1KM1KT, they cover both the 24 Hour RPG Challenge as well as its the annual GameChef competition.
A 24-Hour RPG is, simply, an RPG that took 24 hours to write from start to finish. Much like the 'novel in a month' and other writing challenges, the focus here is, well, 'focus'. Game Chef adds a wrinkle the this by releasing a set of 'ingredients' and then requiring the writers to create their new game using said items.
As a side effect, these two are one of the best sources for innovative game design. They neatly combine "insane motivated people" with "totally creative immersion". Contests in general ensure focus during that period--and ensure works get published. As Steve Jobs points out, 'real artists ship'.
RPG publishing has always been a rare niche in that, ultimately, it's a low-barrier meritocracy. Anyone can publish. It was this way in the 70s with home presses, and it's this way now with PDFs and PODs. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. Thus one lament about RPG publishing has often been that not just "anyone can publish", but it seems "everyone does publish". And, sheer bloody-minded stubborness can make bad products persist despite the reaction of the marketplace.
But, most publisher's goal is 'to sell', whereas the 24 Hour RPG contest simply has 'to create'. My guess is that leads to more primal and more risky stuff-- and likely higher highs and lower lows.
It's the fact that anyone can enter a 24 Hour RPG that originally attracted me to the project. Such openness provides more hope for truly interesting works that a market-driven or editorially controlled outlet. I believe that market or editorial control is essential to create consistently good product, but I love open channels for finding absolute brilliance.
In fact, one motive I had for doing my own 24 Hour RPG last year was that I did not feel I had much standing to discuss the creative process without first trying it. (Another motive was "it's way cool!", but that's my juvenile heart speaking).
A lot is always said about whether a given idea is 'innovative'. In computer game circles, theories range from 'everything is derivative of Pong' up to 'any modification can be an innovation'. None of which gets us anywhere.
This reminds me of one of my pet peeves, when any time-loop movie or TV episode is compared to 'Groundhog Day', when the predecessor of that was really the short film '12:01', and some say there are earlier precedents.
Or put another way, a derivative work is completely valid if it's good. Goethe's criteria for evaluating a work is: What did it want to do, did it do it well, and was it worth doing. Whether it is derivative is rarely a concern.
That said, even highly derivative fields like jazz do distinguish between 'derivative yet puts a new spin' versus simply being derivative. There are derivative stances such as 'riffing' or 'homages' (the first being taking the identifying mark of something and incorporating it into a new work, the latter being embedding the flavor of something into a new work)
And there's "new, but it's crap", "new, but inaccessible", and "oh my lord, this is incredible". Being "not derivative" has its own risks, and 'new for the sake of new' is always the bane of good creation.
Because RPGs are social games, they are less like books than not, and I think analogies to jazz (or music, or opera, or perhaps poetry) are more apt than looking at the book trade. We don't just sell paper.
In a musical work, construction and performance are both important. A book's "performance" is extremely rigid in form: facing pages left to right using a standard alphabet. An RPG isn't just read, it is played. Whether it plays well or not for the majority of groups 'performing' it will determine its success.
If you subscribe to post-modernism, the entire artistic process can often be seen as deconstructing past works, then reconstructing the pieces into something new (and thus 'nothing new under the sun' is both true and false). Of course, many postmodern creators forget the reconstruction part...
I do think RPG creation uses deconstruction + reconstruction very heavily, in that there is a clear 'lineage' of games rule development that runs parallel to the 'pure' act of setting creation. Which itself may or may not be influenced by other works, whereas it's very hard to argue that any RPG rules are _not_ influenced by other RPG works at some level.
All of which leads us to giant sharks. D&D and its successors are often criticized by the elite, the fringe, the intelligensia, and the vast ungaming masses. Yet D&D persists, like some giant prehistoric shark, eating and consuming all competition in its ocean.
In publishing, most new game items have a 3-month lifespan, then something new comes along. Publishers long to make 'evergreens', able to sell consistently over long periods of time. I don't think 24 Hour RPGs are evergreens, nor do they have a good likelihood of being a shark, or competing with a shark on its own terms. But they do find their own niches, and try out new space.
Evolution (and business) isn't "survival of the fittest" as folks often misquote, it's simply "survival of the fit". Anything fit can settle into an ecological niche. I defined three niches at the start of this column, and only one has a shark.
There's a lot of good game design out there. Not to focus too much on me, but I recently joined a publisher (Technomancer Press). Given that I think there's a wealth of good game design out there, and that RPGs have not yet explored all their options, I hope to find the good designs out there, and try to publish them.
I think RPGing has several irreconcilable stances. The idea of a mass market RPG that isn't "watered down". Publishing games for the existing market that are innovative, yet don't alienate that market. Creating a bold and innovative new game that is still comprehensible by, and desirable to, people with money. Reconciling creator's rights and the mad process of indie game design with the need to have targeted games intended for a specific market segment.
In a shark-dominated (post-modern?) RPG publishing world, we conclude with these four stages.
- Deconstruction is the art of understanding this industry and raising these questions.
- Reconstruction is the processing of unifying them with a single answer.
- Publishing is the act of commiting to that answer.
- The market is the determiner of success.
Until next month,
Sandy
sandy@rpg.net
