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Episode 14: jim hates Star Wars
82 Plays1 year ago
Host Alan Bahr is joined by jim pinto (yes, all lower case) of post world games, where they discuss game design, the highs and lows of the industry, mistakes made, and finding an audience.
Also, we learn jim hates Star Wars.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Alan Barr and this is Radio Free RPG. Hello, I'm Alan Barr and welcome to Radio Free RPG.
00:00:32
Speaker
Today, I'm joined by my guest colleague and friend, Jim Pinto of Post World Games. Welcome, Jim. That intro is so NPR. I cannot get past it. That is hilarious. I warned you. Yeah, no, it was very NPR. I like it. I think the NPR joke they did on Saturday Night Live, that was one of the best sketches for years. Every time they had somebody on and they were talking real low key.
00:01:01
Speaker
And then, of course, it was always sexual, but. Well, nothing's perfect. But it was always so funny. They nailed it.
Jim Pinto's Industry Journey
00:01:10
Speaker
So, Jim, you've been around the RPG industry a long time, not to mention tabletop gaming in general. Yeah, yeah, I've been gaming over 40 years. And you've been working in the industry for close to 30 now at this point, I would think. Yeah, yeah, close to 30.
00:01:29
Speaker
And you've done everything. Oh, go ahead. No, go ahead. I was going to say you've done everything from RPGs to board games to trading card games and a lot of stuff in between. What a miniatures game. Oh, you've even done that. You hit all four of the pillars there. Yeah, I've got an EGOT. Yes, the industry EGOT. You just need to do video games. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can retire safely. That's the holy grail, isn't it?
00:01:56
Speaker
Yeah. So walk me through sort of your, how you started working in gaming and what led to that and what you've done. Um, I never intended to be in the hobby. It was never a goal of mine. I didn't, I was just working as a tech writer for a small technology firm and Shatus magazine was hiring. I heard through the grapevine that they're hiring. And as a joke,
00:02:22
Speaker
I sent my resume, back in the day of the faxes, I faxed my resume. And Maureen Yates was the woman in charge at the time, right under Zinser. And she knew me from a job interview a year before at another company. She saw my name, she said, oh, we gotta hire this guy. And that's how I got in the hobby and I stayed,
00:02:49
Speaker
I stayed there for, I mean, longer than I should have. But I think once you're in, you're getting paid nothing. You can't really afford to leave without a safety net somewhere.
Challenges in the Gaming Industry
00:03:00
Speaker
And I'm not a computer programmer. I'm not a coder. I don't have those sets of skills. I've always had sort of a generalist skill set. And so I couldn't leave even after it was abusive and I should have gone. I stuck around and here I am.
00:03:18
Speaker
still doing it because I don't know how to do anything else. I think I think a lot of us who, you know, in my case, I left project management and software to the game industry. And it that particular sector moved so quickly that if I were to go back even three or four years later now, I would be woefully out of date. Yeah. And that that can make it hard to feel like you have a healthy backup plan. Yeah, I think if I left now and I went
00:03:47
Speaker
go work somewhere, I'd have to work in a warehouse somewhere because it's work than anybody can get is warehouse work. But I don't know how fulfilling it would be, right? Obviously, it would pay the bills better than this does, but I don't know. I don't know. That's a really complicated topic and I don't know how deep we want to get into that. I don't know if there's a lot of easy answers either.
00:04:14
Speaker
Without sounding maudlin or cynical, we're at a stage in capitalism where nobody can solve any
Generational Communication Styles
00:04:21
Speaker
problems. So everybody's just trying to become as rich as they can to avoid the problems. And so when you're at this tier, changing my income by 50, 60, 70% from what I'm doing to work in a warehouse, is that really going to make a difference in what my future is, how I retire? Probably not.
00:04:42
Speaker
Or even retire. Yeah, yeah. No, our generation is certainly going to work till we die. Yeah. Yes. I had to point out to somebody that I am, in fact, a millennial. And I'm closer to 40 than anything else at this point. And I need to stop assuming I get to retire. Yeah. And I'll let it go. Let it slide this time that you're a millennial. I always forget that you are because you don't come across that way. I think when we talk about things, you have a different sensibility.
00:05:13
Speaker
I hope that's a good thing.
Exploring Post World Games Systems
00:05:14
Speaker
Well, yeah, I don't like to generation bash, right? I don't think there's anything valuable there, but there is a difference between the generations, the ability to communicate about things using specific language. I find myself getting into trouble simply because there's so many missteps you can make when talking with younger people. And when you're talking with my generation, we're not offended by anything. To your benefit and detriment.
00:05:40
Speaker
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I'm not saying it's it's great that we're that way. But I mean, when all of your friends are your age, and then you have to start communicating with younger people, I'm not a teacher, I don't hang around with one younger. So my interaction with millennials is only online. And
00:06:00
Speaker
online is never an effective discourse forum. Yeah, exactly. One out of three interactions, I'm saying something wrong. So I don't think I've ever had a problem where you've taken something I meant, said or meant in a wrong way. Not that I'm aware of. And I would tell you, relatively straightforward that way. So
00:06:22
Speaker
Let's talk about post world games. So you've been doing post world games as long as I've known you and we've known each other for over a half a decade at this point. Yeah. And your two big I'm going to call them house rule sets are praxis and protocol. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I have other systems, but those are the big ones. So and now I have quite a selection of post world games on my shelf, if not everything near or close to everything. And
00:06:52
Speaker
I find in particular the Black Monk series, which if I'm recalling correctly is based on Praxis. Yes. Some of the most engaging work you've done. Thank you. You're welcome. Walk us through what Praxis is and then let's talk about the Black Monk because I think it's something that stands out uniquely in the RPG industry.
00:07:20
Speaker
I came up with just, I want to talk about protocol, but just a second. I came up with protocol, I want to say about eight years ago, nine years ago. And I was reading through life on Mars by Ross Kalman. And I thought, Oh my God, there's a simplicity here to how he's presented the rules. I want to do this. Uh, and I made a game. I made home. I made it in the afternoon, play tested it that night with friends. We,
00:07:47
Speaker
We worked so well. We played it again. I immediately published it. And right after I published it, I started thinking about a way to do Apocalypse World without a Game Master. And that's how Praxis came about. It was sort of a blend between Apocalypse World and Protocol. And so I sat down. I said, well, how will it work? There has to be a finite endpoint because it's
00:08:14
Speaker
It's gmless and you can't just keep going forever because it's just going to get the problem with gmless games is it will get gonzo because people are going to get tired or uncreative or they're gonna run out of ideas and once you reach gonzo you can't come back from it and so that's the thing i'm always paying attention to i'm always looking at and i said well i've got to build everything on the character sheet i've got to make everything self-encapsulating and
00:08:40
Speaker
It just happened, right? I just wrote, I just started writing and I made a character sheet for Praxis. And in a day, I think I was done with the design, not the writing, obviously, because it's a 100 page book. But Praxis just became this space in between protocol and powered by the apocalypse because I wanted characters to have powers, which you don't have in protocol. And I wanted you to have
00:09:07
Speaker
things that you had to do, the scene framing, that was in my mind, God, maybe 15 years ago, this you have to accomplish this thing to finish the scene. But I never knew how I wanted to write or how I was going to do it. And so once Praxis was in the works, I just took that idea, slapped it on the page. And like I said, I was done, done in a day. Right. That's I find Praxis to be one of the
00:09:36
Speaker
One of my my favorite GM list game is to play. And I played quite a few and it's primarily because of the hand holding structure of the scene set up that you created there. So why don't you give us an example of how this GM list scene would work?
00:09:57
Speaker
Um, so a lot of what I did with the scene framing is I was trying to solve all the stuff that I hated about fiasco and, uh, durance and a lot of the, the, what I call almost passive aggressive scene framing rules that were out there. Uh, and I wanted to say, you're the director, you're in charge, what you say goes in your scene. So that in and of itself solves 90% of the problems you're going to have with.
00:10:27
Speaker
a quiet year, right? I'm not a fan of quiet year either. I've played it a lot, but I'm at the point where it's not really a game, it's just a rainy day activity. And I sat down and I said
00:10:41
Speaker
OK, what does each type of scene do? I've written scripts. I've actually written several screenplays. I've won an award for one of them. And so I know how to structure a movie. I know how to structure a book. How do I make that system so that the players can do it without them knowing that they're doing it? Got it. And so I want to be hands on and hands off at the same time. And the scene framing rules. Let's say you're the director. You've got a set of scene types that you can direct.
00:11:10
Speaker
And they all have a different name and there's maybe 11 different ones. I think in practice maybe 13 different types I Want to do a flashback vignette. Well, there's rules for a flashback vignette what it can be about who can be in it whether or not anybody can talk how long it can go that sort of thing and Then in the case since it's a flashback. Nobody can get any milestones, which is what you need to finish the game So if you're directing a flashback vignette, you're doing it to fill in a gap
00:11:37
Speaker
in the story of how you got here or why the thing you just saw two scenes ago didn't make sense or whatever. You have these tools in front of you to bridge these gaps or bridge these transitions. And those are two very different things that happen in gaming. And I don't talk about them in the book, but you understand them intuitively. And I guess that's one of the strengths of practice is you understand all of this intuitively whether or not you understand it inherently.
Inspirations Beyond Gaming
00:12:08
Speaker
Right. Guess that's what I'm trying to say. No. And I think that's an excellent encapsulation of what you're talking about, which is as members of the pop culture audience, all gamers are to a degree. And we consume a lot of TV and movies and books and comic books and media in general.
00:12:29
Speaker
And that instills a sort of innate awareness, maybe on a subconscious level, of how storytelling unfolds. And so you are leveraging that innate education we've already received to accentuate the gameplay that you've designed by being able to add or remove the parts you think need shoring up.
00:12:52
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And that's a really great point. I think the thing that makes my design ethic different is that I don't consume pop culture the same way other people do. Jim Pavlick said something really intelligent a long time ago. He said, people ask me where I get my ideas from. And he says, I'm constantly consuming art. I'm constantly reading Heavy Metal magazine. I'm constantly looking at French impressionists
00:13:21
Speaker
I'm constantly looking at monsters from other worlds. I'm filling myself with ideas that other people have created instead of ideas that other people are regurgitating and doing derivative work of in the postmodern world. So when you look at, say, D&D as a canonical
00:13:42
Speaker
contributor to the gaming pathion, you say the same regurgitated ideas for the past 45, 50 years. D&D is a superhero game now. It's not a fantasy game, but it's still rooted in the same storytelling structure, the same ideas. Oh, there's dragons. Oh, there's unicorns. Oh, there's fairies and there's nothing
The Unique Design of Black Monk
00:14:07
Speaker
new. So you get to something like black monk.
00:14:11
Speaker
We'll get back to my game, Black Monk. My idea didn't come from anybody in the fantasy pantheon. It came from Anton Chekov. I read his short story, Black Monk, as I was designing Praxis. And I said, holy shit, there's something here. And then it was Tim Hidalgo who I turned to him and I said, I just need some ideas for fantasy character classes. I just give me something. And he threw out five ideas and those names just stuck and they're in the first book.
00:14:41
Speaker
Um, and, uh, you know, I added a few more and took away some of those ideas over time, but that group, that has nothing to do with D and D. D and D had nothing to do with how and why Black Monk works. And it is because I fill myself with ideas outside of pop culture. So what are the, what are some of those places you draw those ideas from? Uh, literature, uh, movie titles. I'll see a movie title on Netflix.
00:15:11
Speaker
I won't even watch the movie. I'll just see the title and I'll think, oh, is that a good name for a game? What would that be about? And I just start brainstorming that outside of the context of Dungeons and Dragons. None of my games start in a tavern. None of my games start with somebody handing you a map because 99% of the hobby is already that. Why would I want to, one, compete with that and two, repeat it?
00:15:41
Speaker
OK, so with that in mind, what sets Black Monk apart in terms of its canonical setting? Because when I read it, I find it very refreshing, very innovative, very focused on providing an experience I don't get from a lot of other RPGs. How would you how would you describe that experience? That that's a great question.
00:16:10
Speaker
I think I wanted it to feel like you were reading an issue of Sandman. And I think Sandman for all of its pluses and minuses really changed how a comic book story was told. I'm remembering the story where he goes into hell and he has to get his mask. I'm remembering the story where he's just walking around that Ren fair talking to that guy he's known for 500 years.
00:16:40
Speaker
And they're just reminiscing. And I thought to myself, if I combine those two issues, I combined these other issues here, what does that feel like as a story? These people trapped somewhere, these people that have been alive for so long, they don't even know how long they've been here. Why are they still pushing on? And it was that question of why are they still pushing on that? Once I asked it, and there's a secret to it, right? I'll never tell anybody. There's this big secret behind Black Monk.
00:17:10
Speaker
Once I asked and answered that question for myself, it then just became a matter of keeping everybody, what I call story glue, keeping everybody on the same side of the story with story glue.
00:17:23
Speaker
And I don't know that anybody else uses that term, but you have conceits, C-O-N-C-E-I-T. So a literary term describes why a story is taking place. You have a conceit that defines what a game is. So in the case of Dungeons and Dragons, it's golden glory and we want to go kill monsters. That's it. It's a simple conceit. It's the reason so many sci-fi games suck, so many superhero games suck. They don't have that simple of a conceit.
00:17:50
Speaker
Shadowrun works for certain kinds of players because it has that same exact conceit. And so long as your conceit is that simple, the story glue is that you guys all want the same thing. Well, what's the story glue in Black Monk? You're all trapped in this place, you're immortal, so to speak. And you're trying to figure out why you keep going. That's your story glue. And that is so very different.
00:18:17
Speaker
than what you're experiencing when you sit down to play D&D because you start drawing a dungeon map when you're planning a game as a dungeon master. You're not doing that here. You're trying to figure out who am I and who are these other people and why are we so miserable? I would I would liken the Black Monk in terms of genre probably closest to a sort of full core aesthetic with a strong kind of fantasy overlay on top of it.
00:18:45
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, certainly. And the fantasy is razor thin, right? It's a very thin layer of fantasy, yes. But I think that's why it works, is the visual aesthetic is very fantastic in a classical fantasy sense, as well as being visually fantastic in terms of the quality of the art. Yeah, no doubt the art is wow.
00:19:12
Speaker
Yeah, and those strengths keep you in the book, even as you're trying to process a new, as you call it, conceit, which I think is where a lot of role-playing games struggle to onboard their new readers is clearly explaining the conceit. Right. I think the conceit doesn't become clear until you start playing. That's the flaw of all of my game designs is that
00:19:42
Speaker
When you read the book, you go, there's nothing here. This is weak. And you don't get the full experience until you've sat down, made a character, and you've played a couple rounds. And then you go, holy crap. That's what this does. This is how this works. But you've attempted to mitigate that. The hiding the conceit, you've attempted to mitigate it by presenting art and writing and visuals that keep somebody engaged until they can learn.
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's the hope, right? But you always get those people. I get this response all the time. There's a guy in our group that would never play this. It is the number one reason why my games don't sell. Because I'm that one guy. Yeah. We would love this, but there's a guy in the group that would never play this. And that guy, whoever he is in all of these groups, he's holding back a lot of people from
00:20:34
Speaker
going outside the boundaries. It's that one guy at Doug that goes to all these tables. Doug, if you're listening, we don't mean you. We mean the other Doug. We mean the other Doug. Obviously. If listeners, if you can't tell, I do love Black
The Fate of Blood Warrens
00:20:53
Speaker
Monk and practice quite dearly. Now, I'm also a big fan of protocol, but one of my favorite things
00:20:59
Speaker
that Jim and post-world games are doing is the Blood Warrens, which is a sort of ongoing dungeon crawl being every week. Oh, the Blood Warren. Right, right, right. Yeah, I dropped that actually, but go ahead. Oh, oh no. Well, I love it. It wasn't selling. It wasn't selling. It was taking me a long time to write those. I bought them all. Yeah.
00:21:29
Speaker
Uh, but it's an ongoing dungeon that you were, you were doing over various parts every week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's five more that should have been coming, um, at the very least, but, um, do you mean the bloodhound caves or do you mean the blood horns? Uh, the blood horns, you were doing the dungeon 23, I believe with them. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was doing. Yeah. I just want to make sure, cause I, I did this, I did something else like that where it was every week, something was coming out. Um,
00:21:59
Speaker
with the Bloodhound games were with Alyssa Faden, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She did all these maps and I was filling them up and it started out very, very simple. And then of course I overdid it with the other ones. Um, I do want to do part six for the blood warrants.
King for a Day - A Deep Dive
00:22:15
Speaker
And, uh, at the very least I want to do part six and I would love to over time, if I could find a way to make it successful, finish the 50 part story that I wanted to write because it was going to get
00:22:29
Speaker
Involved I just think I started out so strong with you're already meeting the Queen kind of thing that I see it felt too high level to begin with but The the prompts you get the knit the words you get you had nobility or royalty as the very first week if I recall Or ancient or something. I don't remember what they were in what order but It felt as though the the themes could have been
00:22:59
Speaker
they could have been a little lower key at the beginning and then ramped up. So whoever made that chart curse you, I'm shaking my fist. So another one of the games you've done, and this is I think this is my definitive favorite work of yours, because I've ran it multiple times, is King for a Day. Oh, OK. I I adore the sandbox campaign King for a Day. Yeah.
00:23:28
Speaker
It's a very strong proto Dark Ages, sort of rural English folklore. Again, we're back to folklore style setting. That is a dramatic amount of NPCs story setting. I mean, it's what, 400 pages? Almost, yeah, almost 400 pages. Yeah. What?
00:23:57
Speaker
What prompts a king for a day? Like what made you sit down and go, I'm going to make this. Um, reading other people's bad ideas or imperfect ideas or just great ideas that aren't executed properly. Seeing that over and over and over again. It's one of the things that led to a blood wraith, right? That was because somebody did that rat RPG. And I just said, this is so bad. This is so empty.
00:24:26
Speaker
How can this be a thing? How can this sell this well? And so I set out to write that. So in the case of Kingford A, I was playing other people's second edition D&D stuff. And I just thought, I have so many questions. And the names of these characters are so dumb. And why am I going to this next place? You haven't given me an impetus to do that. You're just telling me the players are going there now.
00:24:55
Speaker
And I said, this needs to be a sandbox. These sorts of things need to be a sandbox. And I had run it about four or five times before I actually sat down and played it. But it was one of my favorite campaigns to run. And it just sort of happened. I was sitting around. I was out of work at the time. It was 2011. And I ran a Kickstarter. And Kickstarter was nothing back then.
00:25:25
Speaker
I didn't know where it was going to go. I didn't make very much money, but the impetus was there. And once I got into the groove of writing those extra stories, a lot of those extra stories just came out of me because I had all these NPCs. I had all these, all these locations. What else could happen in the Shire? Right. Well, it is, uh, my favorite thing that you have written.
00:25:52
Speaker
I appreciate that and I will say without sounding arrogant that I think it's the best thing I've ever written simply because of the presentation and the fact that I was just so full of fresh ideas after coming out of working for horrible companies. I said, let me do something the way I would do it. And I didn't really worry about what the consumer would have wanted. I was more worried about would I want this product.
00:26:19
Speaker
And so I think that's why it came out as well as it did. I can't say the same for stuff I've been doing since. Right. So they are. It's a wonderful sandbox campaign, and because it's system neutral, it's easily adapted to a lot of different rule sets. You could really run it with anything as long as there's a certain amount of lethality in it, I think. What are some of the rule sets you run it with?
00:26:50
Speaker
Uh, I actually used, um, dogs in the vineyard one time with it. Oh, that sounds fantastic. Yeah. I changed it to fantasy. So I changed guns to magic. Um, and that was, and that was it. All right. We had the same kinds of stats that you would have in dogs in the vineyard, but it worked just so well for what I was trying to do as a perfect system. Um, I ran it once with Pathfinder. I hated it.
00:27:16
Speaker
I've run it with second edition before I don't think I ever ran it with third Okay, but I mean the idea and the story has been in my head forever and I'm highly influenced by John Carpenter and movies like Alien the original and not not the sequel and so those sorts of things Get into my subconscious and so the horror just seeps into a lot of what I make and then having an anthropology degree
00:27:46
Speaker
I draw upon Ghana. I studied Ghana a lot in college. So I draw upon the dark folklore of Ghana and West Africa a lot when I'm writing these kinds of things. So it's almost inevitable that some dark horror is going to seep in, some folk horror, as you say. Yes. So I don't know if you know this, but I ran it with harm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I tried once with harm. Go ahead. It was hard. Yeah.
00:28:16
Speaker
No, it's a difficult system, but it is so crunchy and real and unforgiving and low-tech. It was a wonderful experience, but in the future, I would run it with something much less rules heavy. Yeah, I think if you use Knave or Cairn or any of these low-fi, low-tech
00:28:45
Speaker
systems, I think it'd probably be easier because a lot of your time is spent interacting and learning mysteries and then finding out, oh, the thing I knew is wrong. Yes, but it's an excellent adventure. And I highly recommend it to anybody looking for something kind of different and fresh that will kind of get their group hopefully excited and ignite that for them.
00:29:12
Speaker
Let me ask you a question without giving away the ending. Were you surprised at where the story went when you were reading the book? Yes, I was surprised. I will caveat that with
00:29:30
Speaker
The the twist and the ending, I won't call it a twist. It's not necessarily a twist, but the ending was not unexpected in that it came out of left field, but it was not the direction I thought it would go. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was surprised, but I also was there was this part of me that was aware that that was a possibility. I just didn't think it was the possibility. That was one of my fears when I was doing Fairview is that people were going to see the the ending coming, the twist coming.
00:29:58
Speaker
because I had done King for a day. And so there's always this fear. It's a reason I don't tell what the secret is behind Black Monk because if I tell it, then people go, oh yeah, that makes sense. Rather than being impressed or surprised with, oh crap, that's a good twist.
00:30:16
Speaker
So I don't usually put those into games anymore because I fear. But anyway, I'm not trying to bloviate here. I know I was honestly curious what you thought when you got. I thought it was. Yeah, like I said, it got me off guard, but it was not a surprise per se. Yeah, I wasn't cheating when I. Right. Sometimes these surprises are cheating. Right. They you're like, oh, and now there's a Cthulhu monster. Yeah. But sometimes it's.
00:30:45
Speaker
Uh, sometimes it makes sense and you just didn't think that was the direction. And that's what I got from this.
Simplifying Game Design for Fun
00:30:50
Speaker
Yeah. And I enjoyed that a lot. I will say one of my players in a joking manner called it earlier, like very early in the campaign, just like as a joke. Oh, like I bet XYZ and I was like so afraid they were going to run with it, but they dropped it and moved on. I don't think they remembered by the time we got done.
00:31:08
Speaker
Nice, nice. So I was because there was that moment like, well, we're only three sessions in until like 50 sessions. This is going to what? No, they can't ruin it. Yeah. Yeah. I think people trying to meta their way into stories. I tried running a Vecna game at a convention and one guy just sat there the entire time pissing on the story and metagaming his way through it and making jokes. And so when he gets to the end, he wasn't having fun.
00:31:37
Speaker
He ruined the fun for himself. I didn't do anything to him. Yeah, those can be frustrating experiences. So with your history in the industry and with, you know, post-world games moving forward, what are some of the things you're trying to do over the next couple of years? What do you have plans or thoughts or kind of designs to make a brief pun on?
00:32:07
Speaker
I have, I believe it or not, I have about 40 games in the works. It's not an exaggeration. Um, and I've been just dragging assets because I'm so pulled, I'm pulled in so many directions. I'm, I'm not making any headway. I think a lot of what I'm doing is actually going backwards. I'm looking at things like D and D and I'm saying, how would I make it? How would I make it better? It's not in a heartbreaker sense. It's how do I solve these problems that I think keep people away from the fun.
00:32:35
Speaker
We know that D&D isn't fun until you get to levels five through 10. That's the real meat of the game. And then it gets to be too much, and you don't want to play anymore. And at the beginning levels, you're just afraid of stepping on a nail because it'll kill your wizard. So how do we get to the fun without the five footsteps, without the attacks of opportunity, without all the rules that Pathfinder has so that a wizard can cast two spells in one turn?
00:33:03
Speaker
Why not just let that wizard do that instead of creating 17 pages of here's all these caveats. And if you follow this caveat circle, you'll get to two spells and around. That's just nonsense. That's getting in the way. And I actually learned this by playing a lot of that. What's that guy's name? The board game guy that made code names.
00:33:30
Speaker
Oh, yes. I know who you're speaking of. I forget his name. I always forget his name. I don't like any of his games, so it doesn't matter. I'm using it as an example because everything he designs when I sit down to play it, he's keeping me from the fun. The fun thing is going to be when I grab that artifact card and that's when the game starts ramping into high gear. Why did it have to take two hours to get to that card? Now I'm having fun, but I don't want to play anymore because I'm tired and
00:33:57
Speaker
There's a lot of designers that do this. I'm just using him as an example because it's off top of my head, but there's plenty of designers who do this where the fun part of the game where the rules start breaking or the dynamic vectors start to appear out of the design. They keep it away from you for too long. And it's not a video game where you want to ramp up the dread for four hours before they get to the real creepy thing. You could do that alone at home at your own pace.
00:34:25
Speaker
But you're at a board game session with your friends. You've only got an hour before everybody's going to start losing energy. That fun better be on turn two. So what in a lot of your games, you've taken that concept of.
00:34:44
Speaker
trying to pull the fun to the very forefront or to fix what you view as issues, which I think we should say is a viewpoint based on your particular play style and how you like to tell stories. Absolutely. Because, you know, even though you and I are friends, we do differ on some of these and we've had these conversations where I've explained I like my fun this way. And then you tell me I'm wrong and I say, okay, Jim, that's fine. Well, I am Emperor. Yes, Emperor Jim.
00:35:14
Speaker
Uh, the worst named Roman emperor emperor Jimmy, who I think would be even worse. Fair enough. Uh, so what are the, what are the problems that you face as a designer in trying to accomplish this? Because everybody and their, and their pet hamster has a plan to fix D and D. Right.
00:35:40
Speaker
Um, I think anybody who is a game designer has not only had that thought, but attempted at least once. Uh, Oh, go ahead. No, I was gonna say, what are some of the things that you find, uh, you struggle with in that regard? I think that there are two kinds of players that ruined fun for everybody at the table. And, uh, those are people who are meta min maxers, right? The ones that are playing the game outside the game.
00:36:07
Speaker
So they're not really playing the same game everyone else is. And people with analysis paralysis. And I want to make games that either they can't break or ruin, or that they just don't want to play at all.
Personal Influences and Philosophy
00:36:23
Speaker
Right? Keep the min-maxers away from this thing. It only has one stat. They're never going to have fun with it. Can leaders and feelings is not for min-maxers? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And if you have analysis paralysis, something like Praxis fixes that because
00:36:37
Speaker
here are your only options. This is the scene type you have left to direct. Here are the milestones that you're trying to accomplish. Here are the trepidations you are dealing with. And then everything on the left-hand side of the sheet is all the prompts you have to tell you what you're supposed to be doing anyway. So you still don't know what to do. If you're looking at your character sheet for five minutes trying to figure out what to do for a scene,
00:37:05
Speaker
This isn't the game for you. And I can't solve that level of problem. But announce browse happens because games just have too many choices. And that's great if you're playing. Let's say we're playing first edition D&D, right? And I say, don't worry about the rules, guys. We're just going to do what we want. And we're going to have fun. That guy is still going to be crippled by, well, what's the right decision to make instead of what's the fun decision to make? Right.
00:37:33
Speaker
Chad Walker just ran us through his game I Drawing a blank on the game. I'm not even supposed to talk about what the game is, but it's a fantasy D&D ripoff. He made his own system very dark lots of undead that kind of thing and I'm playing a character that can see the past and future but I'm ineffectual in combat and For my action my I'm surrounded by undead and I don't know what to do and I just fell into a fetal position
00:38:02
Speaker
That is not a decision a min max or an AP player would have made in that instance. And I think if, if you were, if you're designing games to capture that audience, you're only going to capture that audience and you're going to get rid of the other kinds of players who want, and you're, you're aware of the seven different types of players, right? You've seen that chart. Yeah. So it's important for us as designers to know that the chart exists, but it's not important for us to go.
00:38:30
Speaker
OK, how do I make this guy happy? Because you can't. You have to make yourself happy as a designer. I think if you're Owen Stevens, you're going to try to make all those guys happy because you're making those kind of games for that milieu. But if you're me or you're any kind of other indie gamer, game designer, you want to make what you want to play because you've got to demo this thing. You've got to go to conventions and teach people. You've got to go online and have sessions. So why would you make something you don't want to play?
00:39:01
Speaker
OK, so with that in mind, what are the what are the three role playing games that have influenced you the most role playing games? Oh, interesting. I thought we were three. I'm sorry. I thought we were going to talk about designers, but that's fine. You can talk about designers if you have that as either any of it's fine. What are the three biggest influences on you in gaming?
00:39:30
Speaker
Twilight 2000, obviously James Bond, um, the victory games, James Bond victory game, James Bond and a little French game. Of course I'm a pretentious twat. So I've got to say a little French game from 1988. It's called trauma. And it came out, it didn't come out in America until I want to say 91, but it was in France in 88 and it came into the game store. I was working at, I bought it and it blew my mind.
00:40:00
Speaker
It broke me. I didn't realize role playing games could do that. And, uh, you know, up until then I was your traditional D and D player. What kind of character am I going to make? How is he, what's he going to be good at in combat, et cetera, et cetera. And trauma came out and I was never the same. And I never went back to that kind of, even as young as 22, right? I didn't go back and.
00:40:25
Speaker
Uh, play those kinds of games, those traditional hack and slash kinds of games anymore. And if I did, we always did it differently. So what is trauma? Is it trauma or trauma? Okay. Uh, it is really hard to find. If you go to RPG geek.
00:40:45
Speaker
you might be able to find it. The designers are Dominique Garnier and Fred Rieck. How do you pronounce his last name? Le Gonique. I think that's it. So if you go and you look for those two guys, I think there's a republishing of trauma, but the new version on Drive through RPG is about hyper-violence. And this original one is about regular people just dealing with problems.
00:41:12
Speaker
OK, I'm pulling up director RPG now because I want to see. The new cover is really pretty, by the way. I am. There's a lot of things with trauma in the name that's hard to search. I'll have to I'll have to hunt it down. That's I mean, I've I have not read that, so I'm excited to find out
00:41:43
Speaker
And if I could add a fourth game, I would probably add Cult or Vampire Dark Ages, right? Oh, Vampire Dark Ages is high on my list as well. When Cult came out, that also had a big effect on me. You could feel the Clyde Barker in it. You could feel that these were horrible people, that they were the only defense against the horror that's coming through, the veil kind of thing. And I want to say that's brave, but at the time, it was certainly surprising. Right.
00:42:12
Speaker
Um, yeah, so I've always liked cult and I, uh, somebody said something very funny about vampire. They said the empire would be a great game if it wasn't for the players. Because there's, there's
Passion for Game Design
00:42:24
Speaker
two different kinds of people that want to play it, right? There are people that actually want to play the politics and there's people that just want to show up and, and mope, so to speak. They just sit around drinking wine or whatever they're doing and they're just feeling the aesthetic. And those two groups should not be playing together. Interesting.
00:42:43
Speaker
Well, Jim, I have a question for you. I've warned you in advance about my question of asking you what you would like to be asked. So what is one question that you would like to be asked in an interview? I think everybody should be asked this question, which is why do you continue to do it? Why do you continue to publish?
00:43:06
Speaker
in the face of an audience that doesn't appreciate what you're doing, in the face of poor payment, or now we're dealing with AI trying to strip away artists' ability to make money. We're looking at an environment where everybody was mad at Watsy at the beginning of the year, and now they're flooding to see the movie. And it doesn't make any sense. And there's so much hypocrisy and hyper criticism going on in this hobby. Why do you do it?
00:43:35
Speaker
I think that's a question we should all ask ourselves. Why do we continue to do it? What would I do if I wasn't doing this? I love this hobby so much. I just said all these cynical things about it, but I still love this hobby. I love showing out to play the con, seeing my old friends sitting down for... We played four parts of Black Monk down in Portland at one convention on the same day.
00:44:00
Speaker
And I wanted to play the fifth one, but they were all exhausted. The ability to do that, right? To have these kinds of friends, people that honestly share the same kind of sentiments for gaming. I can take 55 kicks in the junk by fans if I get to game on the weekend with guys like Jerry and
00:44:23
Speaker
We have gamed in a long time together, but even with you and some of my best friends, my buddy, Aaron Kutzman, I got to give a shout out to my buddy, Eric Kutzman. He is the best role player I've ever met in my life. And I haven't gotten to game with him in years. And we shared the best game session I've ever had years ago down in Long Beach. And I still write about it in books for gaming advice.
00:44:50
Speaker
So that's why I keep doing it. Cause there are people out there that do appreciate it. Okay. Well, I mean, that's as good an answer as I think we can give considering everything. Why do you continue to do it? I a little bit. I'm too stupid to stop. Yeah. There you go. There you go. Um, I think for me, a part of it is I,
00:45:16
Speaker
And to to avoid, it's hard to answer that sometimes without sounding like you have an ego. Sure. But I think I'm very good at it. And I want to keep doing that. And I will also say part of it is that I feel as though. I can make a difference, at least for people I work with.
00:45:41
Speaker
And so I'm always trying to argue for better pay, to argue for items like that, where I want people to get something out of it. And, you know, for me, that has been this, working with people and being able to pay them more, being able to help them
00:46:11
Speaker
get more out of the industry and a platform like this where they get to talk about what they feel is good and bad and all of these various pieces. Well, you know what I'm like on Facebook. I'm very much a curmudgeon. I hate everything. But you and I sitting down like this, I could talk to you for six hours, right? We could talk about gaming nonstop because we actually do really love this. And there's so many pieces to it that we want to see flourish. And I agree with you, by the way, on the
00:46:41
Speaker
helping people pay their bills, right? I have sent people money, artists money, so that they won't get evicted, right? And it feels, and then of course they do art in return. I'm not just giving money away, but knowing that you're the guy at the right place at the right time and you can make a difference that way by making up these stupid, silly worlds, that's gotta feel good at some point. I don't think that's arrogant.
00:47:09
Speaker
Yeah. And so this is where, you know, that that's my direction. That's my. I just love doing it. I love seeing the smiles on faces. We had some posts in our Gallant Night Games group about a father playing with his kids. Yeah. And posting the characters they were drawing and how his daughter
00:47:30
Speaker
They had had some family stuff and so I had sent them a care package because they've been fans and in the group for a long time and we've interacted a lot and he's always been really good about promoting our games for people. And so I sent them a care package and I included some games for his children, including their own copies of Tiny Supers. I didn't know this, but his daughter is a massive superhero fan. And when she did not know there was a superhero book and now she has roped her family and she's going to be running this game.
00:47:59
Speaker
with Tiny Supers. Right. And she's eight or nine and she's so excited and he's been posting pictures of her drawing all the characters in the villain. And it's hard not to want to keep doing it when that's happening. No, definitely. Yeah. So for me, that's the big thing.
Conclusion and Humorous Goodbye
00:48:21
Speaker
Jim, it has been a genuine pleasure having you on.
00:48:26
Speaker
Yeah. I think we should, I think in the future we'll do a repeat because there are some more things I want to talk about with you that we didn't get a chance to touch on too much. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. There are other topics and this is a blast, Alan. Good. I'm glad. Um, do you have any other questions for me? You're welcome to ask me anything you want. No, no, no. You know what? This running forever. Are you drinking liquid death? I am. Yeah. I'm, it's my solution. I'm trying to cut out sugar. Yeah. Yeah.
00:48:56
Speaker
So it hits the note that makes me not want to get a monster or a soda or something. So I got to tell a story about liquid death really quick. In my fridge is a can of liquid death and a can of Irish death. Irish death is a stout beer and liquid death is sparkling water, as you know, but it's very light, barely any sparkling to it. Both the cans look identical, except Irish death is
00:49:25
Speaker
more of a gold color to the logo and liquid death is silvery. And I went in there in the middle of the night thinking I'm getting water and I popped the Irish down and I, you know, I wanted, I just wanted to go right back to sleep. I was just getting some water and it was just the funniest thing to happen to myself. I sabotaged myself. That sounds like your career in a nutshell, Jim. Yeah. All right. All joking aside, Jim, it's a pleasure. Where can folks find you if they want to support you or purchase your stuff that we've talked
00:49:55
Speaker
Um, I mean, I'm on drive through RPG. That's the only place I sell my games. Um, you can find their post world games. Yeah. And you could talk to me on Facebook or Twitter. I'm really approachable. I have an Instagram, but I've never posted on it and I don't even know how to log back in. So don't find me there. Dear listeners, when Jim says he's approachable, I keep in mind, he called himself a curmudgeon earlier in the show. So just weigh those two things. Yeah. But if you really want to talk gaming with me and not.
00:50:23
Speaker
make a stupid Star Wars meme. Absolutely. May the 4th is the worst day of the year for those of us that hate Star Wars. And folks, on that note, we are going to hang up the show and I'm going to let Jim go. Folks, I'm Alan Barr and this has been Radio Free RPG. How long did we go?