A new post over at the Empires of Steel developer’s diary offers some interesting thoughts about incorporating religion into strategy games.
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Religious strategy
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by by Remembering the Silver Princess
Here’s a fun bit of gaming history: the story of Palace of the Silver Princess, an old Dungeons and Dragons module that was recalled by the publisher on the very day of its release. (You can download the module in PDF format at the above link.) The module was recalled due to objectionable artwork. As the article above notes, the artwork sounds rather tame by today’s standards, but was considered inappropriate for a children’s game.
The module was revised rather heavily and re-released later in a much-altered form. But interestingly, the recall and revision of Palace of the Silver Princess may have saved the gaming community from more than just questionable artwork. Here’s a glimpse at some of the module’s actual content:
By revising the adventure, Moldvay spared us from some really, really lame monsters getting into the canon. There might be some adventurers who want to fight six-legged duckbill rats (“barics”) or go toe-to-toe with bubbles (they’re . . . bubbles), but the prize for true weirdness has to go to the ubues — three-headed, three-armed, oddly gendered creatures who feel as if they’ve somehow wandered out of Gamma World into D&D. Ironically only the decapus, the source of the illustration that caused all the trouble, survived (perhaps because it was featured on the color cover art!).
Duckbill rats? Bubbles? Maybe there’s a place for “oddly gendered” monsters in a roleplaying game somewhere, but I don’t think that place is in an old-school D&D dungeon-crawl.
by The journey or the destination?
Interesting post over at Kotaku about the restrictions that video games put on players. Do video games focus too much on enforcing “rules of gameplay” and fail to give players the freedom they enjoy in other “real life” activities? And if so, is that unhealthy for the players?
What should we expect to get out of our video games? Should it just be about enjoying the moment, entertaining oneself? Or should you be able to come away with lessons. The experience of playing real baseball in a real dirt and weed-filled hole wasn’t about accomplishing the inevitable it was about the communal experience of being there and playing.
Video games, I think, are too often about the destination and not nearly enough about the trip. We churn through games to beat them, not to experience them.
Are video games too restrictive by design, too focused on simply completing them for its own sake? Should we expect that the journey to beating a video game be more fulfilling and meaningful than it currently is? Or is the appeal of video games precisely that they don’t generally aspire to be more than an entertaining diversion?
by The ultimate GM screen?
Now this is a real GM screen!
I spotted it while browsing a thread on the Call of Cthulhu forums at Yog-Sothoth.com. I’d love to get ahold of an evocative screen like that for use in CoC games–I don’t currently have a CoC-specific GM screen, and this would be perfect. Unfortunately, the designer’s website seems to be down and the hopeful email I sent to them bounced back.
Seeing a beautiful screen like this does make me wish that RPG publishers would put just a bit more effort into their GM screens. Most GM screens published today are functional, but not much else–and more than a few suffer from being too flimsy (or lacking important tables and information). That said, I am quite fond of the GM screens published for White Wolf’s latest World of Darkness games; I wish all screens were as sturdy.
Maybe the next CoC GM screen will be as sturdy and evocative as the one linked above. A GM can hope, right?
by Is something wrong with the ESRB?
1UP has an interesting and balanced piece on the current debate over the ESRB (the organization that assigns ratings to video games). As you’re probably aware, the rather spectacular “Hot Coffee” incident, which involved the discovery of inappropriate (and inaccessible without a special hack) hidden content in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, kicked off an all-new wave of criticism aimed at the ESRB and the game industry. (Way to go, GTA developers.)
Personally, I tend to side with the ESRB on these issues–much of the rhetoric coming from critics betrays a certain level of ignorance about how game content and rating systems work–but I’m certainly open to earnest suggestions for making the current rating system more useful and effective. And I would wholeheartedly support efforts to instill a greater sense of social responsibility in the game industry. Preferably without government intervention, but we’ll see what happens…
by Lots and lots of feats
Need a feat for your d20 game? Try the Netbook of Feats, a collection of feats from a wide variety of published OGL games. (Hat tip: RPG Blog.)
I love seeing people using the internet to collect and organize the truly vast amount of OGL gaming material out there. Mike Mearls’ proposed Open RPG Content Wiki generated a lot of controversy when it came up, particularly from PDF game publishers who worried that their business model would suffer. I can sympathize with those concerns, and don’t know the best way to address them… but I still think that the internet and the OGL make much too good a combination to not embrace.
by Laying down the Laws
How will the next D&D compete with Warcraft?
Interesting musings at OgreCave about the future of D&D. As games like World of Warcraft begin to compete successfully for the attention of tabletop gamers, what can D&D do better than an online roleplaying game?
A few years ago, nobody would’ve been taking this question seriously, as computer RPGs were still relatively crude and offered little of the social experience that’s so integral to a tabletop RPG. But that’s changing rapidly, and it may fall to the next edition of D&D to demonstrate what a traditional tabletop RPG can do better than a beautiful-looking, highly interactive online RPG can. Then and now, most people would cite face-to-face interaction as tabletop RPG’s trump card. From the OgreCave post:
So here’s the question: if having other real live in-the-flesh people at the table with you is a competitive advantage over WoW – and I think it is – how can the next version of the D&D rules take advantage of it instead of just falling back on it as granted? How can tabletop RPG rules actually make the fact of tabletop-ness part of the game itself?
That’s a great question with which to begin!
(As an aside: I’m glad somebody else is talking about it, because I too have been getting the exciting-yet-ominous sense that a new edition of D&D is out on the horizon… distant, to be sure, but getting closer.)
by Nemesis held for ransom
I note with great joy that Nemesis, an all-purpose horror RPG by Dennis Detwiller and Greg Stolze, is up for ransom at Fundable.org. The way it works is simple: if enough people pledge money to the project by the deadline at the end of February, the game gets released in lavish PDF format. (Read more about this new-fangled “ransom model” of publishing.)
Who could possibly resist a horror game drawing on the mechanics of Godlike and the fevered genius behind Delta Green? Do the Right Thing and help make Nemesis a reality.
by TSR, we hardly knew ye
Whatever happened to TSR? The company that was almost synonymous with Dungeons and Dragons, the company that sat atop the RPG industry for decades?
I’ve read lots of different online explanations over the years trying to pinpoint what exactly went wrong. Most of the rumors sound a bit too melodramatic to be entirely true, even if they have some basis in fact–there are reports that the company’s CEO actually hated gamers; that draconian copyright enforcement alienated its core customers; that nepotism and corruption were rampant.
Today I stumbled across an essay by Ryan Dancey (himself a bit of a controversial character) which gives as good an explanation for TSR’s failure as any. The bottom line: TSR had almost no understanding of their audience and put very little effort into maintaining a workable business model:
I walked again the long threads of decisions made by managers long gone; there are few roadmarks to tell us what was done and why in the years TSR did things like buy a needlepoint distributorship, or establish a west coast office at King Vedor’s mansion. Why had a moderate success in collectable dice triggered a million unit order? Why did I still have stacks and stacks of 1st edition rulebooks in the warehouse? Why did TSR create not once, not twice, but nearly a dozen times a variation on the same, Tolkien inspired, eurocentric fantasy theme? Why had it constantly tried to create different games, poured money into marketing those games, only to realize that nobody was buying those games?
And what was at the heart of that failed business plan? The real kiss of death for TSR was an absence of any real understanding of what their customers even wanted:
In all my research into TSR’s business, across all the ledgers, notebooks, computer files, and other sources of data, there was one thing I never found – one gaping hole in the mass of data we had available.
No customer profiling information. No feedback. No surveys. No “voice of the customer”. TSR, it seems, knew nothing about the people who kept it alive. The management of the company made decisions based on instinct and gut feelings; not data. They didn’t know how to listen – as an institution, listening to customers was considered something that other companies had to do – TSR lead, everyone else followed.
In other words, TSR was full of people who loved their work and were passionate about the games they created–but who had little or no sense of running a serious business. I suspect this weakness isn’t limited to RPG publishers alone; several game and hobby stores in my area have gone out of business in recent years, and I’ve often wondered if the owners’ enthusiasm for gaming blinded them to the need to learn the basics of business and marketing.
TSR is gone, but the current top-tier RPG publishers seem to have learned the lesson of its failure–Wizards of the Coast, White Wolf, and others are steaming along with no signs of faltering. Let’s hope that TSR’s demise will at least remind would-be RPG publishers today that business savvy and customer awareness are no less important than creative passion when it comes to success.
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