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Episode 15: Will Phillips and Indie RPG Design
135 Plays1 year ago
Will Phillips and host Alan Bahr chat about getting into roleplaying games, how a corporate environment can prepare you for game design and publishing, and many more topics!
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:11
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, Will Phillips. Hello, Will. Alan. Hey, good afternoon. Good afternoon, indeed. Will makes RPGs under the name Will Phillips. Getting super creative here. What can I say? It could be worse. So Will reached out to me on Twitter. Will is the first interview on this podcast that I have not known for some time.
00:01:01
Speaker
So this is an exciting new step in radio-free RPG. Thanks for coming along, Will. Happy to be here, Alan. Thanks so much for letting me tag along. We'll both figure out the conversation on thin ice here as we go along. That is my normal operating procedure here. So we'll be fine. Love it. All right. So, Will, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Will Phillips' RPG Journey
00:01:26
Speaker
How did you get into role-playing games? What have you made? Where can folks find you?
00:01:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. So to go along with the creativity of my brand name in the RPG space, you can find me on Twitter as, get ready everybody, get your notes out, at Will Phillips, super creative. Likewise, you can find my games on itch as,
00:01:48
Speaker
willphilips.itch.io. So I am the very epitome of solo designer right now. And so my background in a very, very short snapshot is as an elder millennial, I got started with AD&D second edition as a kid.
00:02:04
Speaker
One of my dear friends, childhood friends, his older brother had the whole pile of first edition, second edition books and he pilfered it from them and have been playing ever since really. And got started as a designer in the summer between seventh and eighth grade where me and my childhood best friend Chris Leonard made a Mega Man RPG because that is what we did with our summer.
00:02:32
Speaker
And it's the great regret of my life now, like 30 years plus now, that I have no idea where the Mega Man RPG binder went. And that's a real loss. But from there, I've been kind of dabbling around as a player, you know, ever since, but in the last really four years or so have kind of started to dip my toes into the indie design scene and get to know some folks and put some work out there and kind of make some friendships along the way.
00:03:02
Speaker
Right on. So what prompted a Mega Man as your starting point? I think we all sort of start adapting something we like to RPGs for many of us. What was it about Mega Man that made that the thing?
00:03:17
Speaker
That's a great question. I think we had gotten super into Final Fantasies and I had finally gotten to Super Nintendo and I don't remember if this was Final Fantasy 2 slash 4 in the wake of that or in the wake of 3 slash 6.
00:03:34
Speaker
But those were very seminal kind of gaming experiences for me. And that was also the time that the Mega Man Super Nintendo, like Mega Man X, I think it was, came out. And both me and Chris were super nerding out on both Mega Man. And there was also, oh, I should have done my due diligence to remember the name of this niche, obscure Super Nintendo RPG.
00:03:58
Speaker
Robotech, I think, but where you would make different little robot guys as part of the RPG. And I think all those three influences combined with us making a mess of second edition D&D in the way that only junior hires can kind of coalesce into this, you know what? We should make our own RPG. Let's make a Mega Man RPG with the serial numbers filed off, of course. Of course.
00:04:29
Speaker
That's an interesting interesting path. I think a lot of us take some sort of media we like and that's where we start. We want to see it gameable and we kind of roll from there. So let's talk about your recent design efforts. What is the most recent thing you've released?
Devil's Brand: A Minimalist Western RPG
00:04:47
Speaker
Yeah, so the most recent thing I've released is a very rules light minimalist homage to OSR style gaming wrapped up in cinematic Wild West genre tropes called the Devil's Brand. And it came out of a lull in a larger project, a larger play testing effort for a homage to Hellboy and World of Darkness game. I've got still in public play testing called Hexing Tide,
00:05:15
Speaker
where I had just kind of hit the new year and have been grinding it out for the better part of 2022 and I just needed to break both in my personal gaming life and then in just the hustle and bustle of trying to kind of like make connections as an indie designer. And so this kind of creative torrent unleashed from, you know, not having to focus on quote unquote, quite as serious a project as the monster stuff. And I was like, well, you know,
00:05:42
Speaker
some OSR kind of old school traditional, just we're just going to do de facto dungeon delves in different kind of genre tropes and something that's much less lightweight, much more lightweight rather, much less consequential to both my effort as a GM to try and spin something up cool and special and magical for my players and then also for my players to not have to stress out about bringing that level of investment
00:06:12
Speaker
every time we meet up to game and it can just be kind of a very much a phrase I hear from the war gaming circles of beer and pretzels approach to gaming. And so I've had a chance to kind of put that out and I've been testing it with my own guinea pigs at home for the past several months and got to a point where everything felt like it was clicking pretty well to kind of share it with the world and kind of
00:06:35
Speaker
kind of enjoying the lack of personal investment in this thing compared to my, quote unquote, more important projects that I have on the back burner. So the Devils brand is roughly eight pages, correct?
00:06:50
Speaker
Yeah, eight and a half by 11 kind of American sized paper pages. Really, I think you can call it seven or even six and a half with some of the layout choices in there. But it's very much kind of of the micro RPG zeitgeist where it is deliberately not trying to do everything.
00:07:10
Speaker
And something I call out even on the cover page for GMs is like, this is not a game about hirelings. This is not faction gameplay. There's not even horse and wagon and stagecoach stuff in this. It's just getting to the adventure on foot and going from there.
00:07:30
Speaker
So a difficult question to follow that I think is, if you are attempting to emulate the cinematic western tropes, jettisoning in things like the classic stagecoach robbery or the train heist feels like picking and choosing what part of the cinematic experience you're rolling with.
00:07:50
Speaker
It is very much a Goldilocks problem to solve for. My asterisk, of course, is that just last Thursday, from when we're recording this, I ran my players through a train heist. So there is the ability to do that treating the train as a five-room dungeon sort of approach.
00:08:11
Speaker
But it is. It's not trying to have my cake and eat it too. It's knowing the gameplay experience I'm aiming for. Okay, just pretty lightweight, low prep for a GM, low complexity for my players, kind of classic OSR inspired gaming experiences.
00:08:32
Speaker
And then how do I transport that to kind of a cinematic Wild West sort of thing? And what are the aspects of the Wild West genre, the Western genre that I can kind of put into and frame some of the kind of classic quote unquote dungeon delving experiences? Put that into. Interesting.
00:08:53
Speaker
At two, it's interesting that you took that tack because for me, I would consider horse chases and stagecoaches such an integral part of the genre that I could not conceivably consider the product finished in my case, because to me, growing up on those movies, they are. I mean, stagecoach was a movie we had on regularly in my house for a reason, right? It's in the name. I could not make a Western RPG. They didn't involve stagecoaches in at least as something you could use effectively.
00:09:21
Speaker
So I find it interesting that you felt that was a part of the genre, you could safely jettison. What makes you think, and I'm gonna rephrase that, because that sounds like what makes you think you can, which is not what
Design Philosophy in Light RPGs
00:09:36
Speaker
it is. How dare you? How dare you do this? What led you to believe that was a portion you could afford to excise from sort of the narrative canon body of that genre? Yeah, or at least I would also even like reframe that to say,
00:09:50
Speaker
how can I approach the genre, approach the tropes without having explicit mechanical support for stagecoaches and horse races and whatnot? But would you say you have implicit mechanical support for that?
00:10:05
Speaker
I would say there's implicit support in so much as a lot of these light, super light games can have basic mechanics to do risky actions. You have a basic resolution. Yeah. So there's a basic resolution mechanic. And if my players, you know, one of them mentioned wanted to do cattle rustling as we were hanging out last week in the wake of the game.
00:10:29
Speaker
And I was like, oh, okay, that's interesting. Let's see how we can kind of support that with, you know, six and a half pages of rules. But for me, what I feel translates well from plucky down on their luck desperate murder hobo adventurers and kind of the classic fantasy style to
00:10:48
Speaker
Gunslinging murder hobo outlaws with the devil's brand or things like tiny done gunslingers on your end or the you know, the other approaches is the out and out motivation for gold and filthy lucre and greenbacks and silver dollars right and putting that motivation in play as well as
00:11:13
Speaker
why these characters have that as a motivation. And my rules we have here are these characters have vices, they have former lives and something's happened usually related to those vices to put them on this path of being an outlaw in the West. And those are really kind of the narrative hooks that drive the game. And if you get outside of kind of the core OSR dungeon delving kind of re,
00:11:42
Speaker
in new clothing approach that I'm trying to take here, then, yeah, you lean on kind of the universal mechanics to make that happen. Interesting. And it's interesting that I'm going to bring this up as I primarily come from a rules like background, but I tend to feel as though my rules like work is comprehensive if rules light.
00:12:04
Speaker
Do you consider implicit support in the form of a basic resolution mechanic to be sufficient to claim a game supports something? That's a great question, and I think it can. Yeah, and it sounds accusatory and I assure you it's not. No, no, no, certainly it's not because you've got. It's something I've wrestled with with the Tiny D6 system is at what point am I just putting the work off on someone else versus saying this isn't the goal, right?
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, and it's a approach to your design philosophy, right? Like, am I trying to stretch a genre, a setting, a theme, kind of whatever approach I'm trying to design around? Am I trying to stretch that as far as I can across the different ways that genre and setting can manifest itself? Or am I
00:12:59
Speaker
quote unquote, deep diving as deep as you can get in a minimalist set of rules. But comparatively, am I going to focus on a couple of experiences and flush it out a little bit and say, hey, this is kind of what this game's about. And I think both of those are valid, right? I'm not in the camp that has
00:13:16
Speaker
deep, deep held willing to pick Twitter fight opinions on game design philosophies in that way, right? Where if your game doesn't cover all these aspects of a specific genre, then it's invalid. So yeah, I think that's a great question.
00:13:34
Speaker
And the big proponent of trusting the GMs and trusting players to figure it out where it fits. I think sometimes, you know, ruling not rules, rulings over rules can kind of get thrown around really flippantly to your point of saying, well, it offloads this all onto players to figure out.
00:13:50
Speaker
But it's also kind of like if they're picking up my game, for example, they know they're getting eight pages. I'll be dropping some GM tools in the weeks to come. And in fact, later this week, there are a couple of things I'll be dropping onto itch for folks to kind of get into and use. But if they're saying, hey, I'm going to pick up an eight page game, then I know I'm going to have to figure out ways to represent mechanically something they might run into. Even with the one pagers out there, Grant Howitt stuff or
00:14:17
Speaker
Down we go right as a super fun example of a single page RPG like doesn't have it right but you can kind of Get your way through a lot of stuff with some some buy-in from your players interesting I it's definitely something I have struggled with as I have spent 75% of my career in what you could easily call rules late and
00:14:41
Speaker
There's definitely a push and pull between what is enough versus too much versus not enough. At what point have you stopped being rules light and you're incomplete? Because I think it's a very fine gray area. For your decision making process, granted, I would imagine a lot of it is looking at the existing framework of what you've built out with Tiny D6 and figuring out where things might fit, but is it a...
00:15:10
Speaker
you're approaching the framework of what you have mechanically with Tiny D6 built out and seeing where it can kind of go from there, or are you approaching it agnostically from a schematic or gameplay experience of if I want the Wild West, then I need to have stagecoach robberies and horse chases built into that, and I need to make sure my horses and mounts and wagons have stats to support that. That's an interesting question. So when it comes to Tiny D6 explicitly,
00:15:39
Speaker
I operate from a position of genre first. So what is the genre I'm trying to emulate? What does TinyD6 have that I don't need to recreate versus what do I need to create? In the case of Tiny Gunslingers, I need rules for shootouts, right? At the time, and Tiny Gunslingers was released almost seven years ago at this point, so.
00:16:00
Speaker
At the time, I did not think I needed rules for horse chases and stuff. Going back, I would include those. I would probably leverage the ones I have in tiny spies now because I have car chases, so I would just take those and, you know, making the necessary adjustments. But I definitely at the time believed.
00:16:22
Speaker
I was I would say I was incorrect in my belief in how I approached that. Not because I put the genre first, because that wasn't the right movement. That's still the way I do it. But my assessment of what I considered genre complete was probably fallacious. And led to a game that was not as robust as it could have been for the amount of pages it is.
00:16:44
Speaker
On that robustness, I think it's even a consideration of what does completeness mean for the context of the project I'm working on. Because there's some stuff you're like, I want to build out something that is real heavy duty and meets all of the genre tropes or thematic kind of beats that I'm trying to reach for that people can take and play and isn't going to have gaps that they're having to figure out.
00:17:09
Speaker
And then there are smaller projects where I think going in, you say, hey, this isn't going to explicitly cover every conceivable. Sure. Right. So to me, I think part of that consideration is how well the game communicates what the tools are to fill in the gaps. For example, Tiny D6, the tools you have with the dice pull mechanics and how hit points and damage and everything work are so clear that if you have to reverse engineer something as the GM, you're well equipped to.
00:17:39
Speaker
It doesn't require you to figure out the underlying math because we tried to present it as clearly on the surface as possible. Which is what I think makes me feel like it is robust but not incomplete. Whereas something like Tomb Punk, I explicitly said, I am not going to figure all this out because I don't feel it's essential. And so you will have to do that work.
00:17:58
Speaker
And while I've communicated the core mechanical aspect, I did not prioritize putting how the rules work so far to the forefront that anybody can innately understand them in reverse engine.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah. And that's a similar decision-making process that I was even explicit with the devil's brand, right? Just saying upfront, like, listen, this is at its core really kind of an old school dungeon delving thing put into canyons and thick forests and abandoned army forts and the like of the Wild West and those tropes. And if you want to run a stagecoach robbery,
00:18:34
Speaker
while on horseback, you're going to have to figure that out or apply other rules or just make do with the kind of universal resolution mechanics in here. Right. Similarly, if you're trying to manage a range war between rival ranchers in the Wild West, well, you know, you're not going to find faction gameplay here. Right. You know, it's it is a product of of being minimal and tight in focus.
00:19:02
Speaker
Right, and so with this project, you know, being minimal and tidy, APages might not seem like a lot to develop or write, but for anybody who's made an RPG, APages can be a daunting amount of work at times. What is some of your project management strategies for getting something this small from start to finish? What tools do you use? How do you approach that? Yeah, that's a great question. I start out pretty analog, even with
00:19:30
Speaker
quote unquote, larger projects. And that is very much kind of a week and not answer because my larger projects, uh, hexing tide, the aforementioned monster game, like it's sitting at a kind of traditional eight and a half folded zine size of 40 pages or so. Um, I've got a historical project that is on the furthest back of backburners. That's I think sitting at 60 or 70 pages, full size eight and a half by 11. Um,
00:19:58
Speaker
So not the heavy crunches of the Pathfinder 2Es of the world, right? But even with that said, I'm starting pretty analog. I've got a series of blank, no-lined notebooks where I'm compiling ideas and jotting that stuff down. And then as that starts to coalesce into some rough concepts,
00:20:22
Speaker
is when I start to take things to Microsoft Word. This is giving away the super dark secret of my design life is that I have purchased a key to Affinity Publisher, I have it installed, and I have not used it at all. Once I start to go into project management itself, it's largely being fleshed out from a pair of Microsoft Word docs where
00:20:49
Speaker
I've got a general notepad where I'm fleshing out ideas or I'm testing copy, playing maybe a little bit with layout, but I jump into layout really, really fast in another Word doc. All my stuff so far has been pushing Microsoft Word to its limit. I'm both developing content and playing with mechanics as much as I am immediately starting to jump into layout in Word and playing around with things there.
00:21:18
Speaker
The project management piece kind of stays within those Word docs for my purposes.
Tools and Techniques in RPG Design
00:21:24
Speaker
As a solo designer, the only time that really kind of goes outside of that for the core work itself is when I'm commissioning art. And then that kind of takes on having a separate art brief and communicating with artists at that point. But the product itself is being done in Microsoft Word,
00:21:45
Speaker
And secondary documents, your character sheets, for Devil's Brand, I've got a combat tracker kind of OS-E inspired, BX inspired kind of rounds within combat. I've got a combat tracker, things like that. I'm jumping into Photoshop. So again, I play make believe designer in a lot of ways, in the same way that I don't have
00:22:09
Speaker
applications of using InDesign or Affinity Publisher when I'm doing layouts of the rules themselves. Am I working with any real heavy-duty vector tools, Adobe Illustrator, stuff like that? Nope. I'm pushing it all in a really amateur effort within Photoshop, but for my purposes and for my budget or lack thereof, that is working okay for right now. Interesting.
00:22:37
Speaker
When you segment and decide on the design goals for this RPG, how do you approach creating it? If you say your goals are I want to keep it under 10 pages, I want it to be minimalist, OSR like, I want to focus on these elements of the genre. How do you ensure you achieve those and how do you ensure you stay aware of them as you go?
00:22:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great question because it's one of the things I've learned unsuccessfully over the past couple of years of getting into tabletop design efforts, both kind of RPG stuff and have dabbled in some miniature gaming things as well.
00:23:13
Speaker
And it's been, the lesson I've learned has been don't jump right in just because you've thought of a mechanic. As a professional, I'm a user experience strategist and researcher and information architect. And so like systems and thinking about organization is a real part of my nine to five. And I think that's in some ways an itch that also gets scratched with tabletop gaming design.
00:23:39
Speaker
And a lesson I've had to learn and has been one on the monsters game that I'm actively revising and thinking through has been, okay, I've got a mechanic that works okay. And I just jumped in and started to flesh out and build out of a core mechanical structure without answering the questions upfront of what is the theme? What is the gameplay experience? What does that look like? And so with the Devil's Brand,
00:24:05
Speaker
it came out of burnout. And so the original organizational effort for it was just a trash heap, a burning, awful, poorly organized trash heap that after subjecting my very patient and lovely in-person kind of home players who go along with me on the ride for my zany design adventures,
00:24:27
Speaker
started to realize, okay, well, this basic idea is working. How can I take a step back and really think about the design goals I'm going for here? Because the mechanics themselves came out of a now shuttered kind of retro punk old school sci-fi chassis with green Martians and robots and ray guns and that whole thing. Again, because I was trying to reach for kind of that classic old school OSR inspired dungeon delving experience.
00:24:56
Speaker
in a different setting. And where I felt like I might have an advantage with the Western context in a non-acid Western, non-deadland supernatural thing of just playing it fairly straight was I don't have to worry about magic. I don't have to worry about a lot of the more complex subsystems that come into play with game design pretty frequently.
00:25:22
Speaker
Or can be very complex is you know we're shooting we're stealing we're you know con artists and murderers and how do I build that and so helping that theme the eight pages kind of. Was a distillation of early initial gameplay tests.
00:25:41
Speaker
of saying, hey, does the basic idea work? Is there something here that is fun both at the table and is sustainable for me personally as a busy, quickly careening into midlife professional adult? Is this something I can maintain in ways that heavy prep with lots of extra items, whether that's subsystems or just painting minis and printing out art and handouts and stuff like that that I can
00:26:09
Speaker
I can sustain pretty easily. And so that's kind of where it came from was initial explorations, vetting it quickly at the table with players that I play with regularly and then from there refining and distilling it as I go along. Sure. So related to that, you've mentioned your career as a UX designer.
00:26:35
Speaker
Now for those who don't know UX stands for user experience primarily and it relates to software, generally explicitly inside the space of how usable an app is, where things are located, the various features, like it kind of is tactile and tugs when you pull down to refresh it, et cetera, things like that. And so as a UX designer, well, how does that influence how you approach RPG visibility?
00:27:05
Speaker
So when you say visibility, riff on that for a sec for me so I understand the question a little bit better. Sure. So oftentimes when one picks up a role playing game, the first impression you get is how the interior of the book is laid out, which in essence is the RPG equivalent of UX would be layout, followed swiftly and just as importantly by the character sheet. Probably the most player facing version of UX, right?
00:27:33
Speaker
So when you approach a role-playing game, do you consider UX from the start in terms of how people are going to engage visually and tactilely with the product and project you're putting forward?
00:27:48
Speaker
Yeah, there are questions of layout, visual hierarchy, organization. I'm not so much a designer anymore in so much as I'm personally making decisions about colors and font choices, right? But in my capacity as a user experience researcher, I'm the guy that's often running a lot of tests to say, hey, we'd like to see how you go through XYZ and how that goes, right?
00:28:16
Speaker
And so carrying that professional experience over to tabletop gaming design, where that manifests itself for me, like I said, is questions of organization and visual hierarchy, which I think are especially important in your character sheet. And then figuring out how you're going to organize chapter to chapter content, subject to content, subject within your rules.
00:28:41
Speaker
visually, how prominent you make headlines, how you handle call out texts, subheadings, things like that. I'm not saying I'm the best at it. I'm not even saying I'm necessarily great at print layout and print design. But I find myself spending way more time than sometimes I feel like I should, especially when it comes to character design, right? Like there's
00:29:05
Speaker
Hours of sketching and playing with designs in photoshop thinking about grid systems thinking about layouts where does this need to go visual prominence how big does a certain section on a character sheet need to be.
00:29:20
Speaker
where and how things are being batched and grouped together on a character sheet. So if a person is looking for item Y, are they going to think to look to item Z in that area or item B? And all of those I think have a factor in
00:29:40
Speaker
how the final product, how a final kind of character sheet, an effective one shows up on your table or how easy to scan rules end up in a rule book that you're working through, whether that's a physical print thing or a PDF or another kind of purely digital product, quote unquote product that you're looking at. And especially I think as rules get larger, longer, more dense,
00:30:08
Speaker
and or if you are designing from the ground up. So I can get away with less for the Devil's Brand because there's enough of that kind of like D20 OSR DNA still in there to make sense to other GMs who are picking up the game.
00:30:23
Speaker
But Hexentide, the monster game, like it is, it's net new entirely. And so I have to make sure that I'm being clearer in what I'm defining. It's one of the things that's going to be going into the play tests that'll drop later this summer is, you know, upfront definitions of terms, possibly an index.
00:30:42
Speaker
Because having having content that you can find in cross reference is really important. And that's a lesson I've very much learned from the information architecture side of my professional life of making things organized and understandable. What are some tips you would give
00:31:01
Speaker
those in the indie RPG space as they approach things like UX and hierarchy information from best practices that you might ask them to consider that maybe you don't see considered a lot or you think could be pushed more to the forefront. Sure.
00:31:17
Speaker
I'm gonna have a caveat up front and it is know when you're making choices, right? If you're going to walk down the road that the guys with Mortburg have pioneered of I'm making a very heavy art book with RPG mechanics in it, realize that you're making a sacrifice and go have fun. Make something that looks visually cool,
00:31:44
Speaker
and enjoy yourself. If, however, you are approaching your layout decisions from more of a traditionalist or even technical writing standpoint, then some of the things that come to mind to me are, one, as I said, visual hierarchy. If you can make your book easy to scan
00:32:04
Speaker
and orient users, your readers. Oftentimes I'll still say users because I've got my professional hat on still, but orient your readers or the people who will be playing and running your game to where you can scan a page and know where you're at and pull out the important bits of information because that's how people process content they scan and then they'll read if they need to.
00:32:27
Speaker
Uh, and it's one of the things that makes me really impressed with the work. Oh goodness, I cannot remember his, his name right now to save me. Uh, but the author of the white hack, if you've had a chance to look at his stuff.
00:32:42
Speaker
It's impressive for the extreme dedication to his visual style, visual language that he's taken of. Not ostentatious, not ornate. Very limited choices in how he treats his fonts and his ornaments and his layouts. And he does a pretty good job, but he sacrifices some scanability and
00:33:05
Speaker
is to cross-reference his content in those choices, right? He's kind of like the opposite end from the Mortborg spectrum. But so I'd say look at that hierarchy, make sure your headlines, your subheadings, if you have call-out text, if you're bolding text to call attention to things, and blocks of paragraphs.
00:33:26
Speaker
make sure that that's consistent, make sure that you've got clear distinctions and sizes of fonts, of weights of fonts, how you're styling things, if you're working in color, be consistent there. And the question of color also comes to mind from an accessibility standpoint even, and this is both if you're printing out your document or expecting people to print them out at home or just on the screen is,
00:33:53
Speaker
I think there's a temptation amongst a lot of us to kind of go the classic
00:33:58
Speaker
90s early 2000s approach of having you know parchment paper texture as a background and then you know putting fonts You know possibly kind of lightweight fonts on that and that's a lot of fun, but you can get into real Struggles to read stuff pretty easily and I mean I have that problem right now with the devil's brand. So this is my moral high ground evaporating right as I've chosen a Sarah font that
00:34:26
Speaker
prints real light, and when it's white on black, it's real hard to read, and so here I am not following my own advice. How dare you attack me in such a manner? I will keep my parchment back to layout, please, and thank you, Will.
00:34:42
Speaker
They're cool if you do them right, right? But I think there's a temptation to say, I'm going to put this like really rad parchment background because it feels old timey and magical and the fantasy genre comes alive with my heavy, heavy parchment background. And then you just got kind of this real rough muddled gray on gray thing, right? So you can do it. You just have to be smart about how you're able to do it. Interesting. I will have to send you some of the stuff I've done that I'm curious for your feedback. We'll have to chat about that offline.
00:35:10
Speaker
interested to see what you think. So as you move forward with this and your career in game design, what are some of your goals you've set for yourself? Boy, Alan, that is the $64 question right there of
00:35:26
Speaker
I'm at a space right now where this is not a professional ambition for me. I am happy to remain an amateur hobbyist in so much as I don't look at attempting to take this to a 40, 50, 60, 70 hour a week commitment. So I think a lot of my benchmarks are rather than a financial ROI is
00:35:53
Speaker
building enough of a marketing effort and a community effort around this stuff to have other people enjoy the games. That I think is a benchmark. But even there, there's questions of return on investment of time.
00:36:10
Speaker
how much time does it take to kind of build out that community, to build word of mouth, to build professional relationships in the industry, to become friends with other designers who you can feature their stuff, they can feature yours, figuring out platforms of where and how to kind of put your work out there.
Personal Reflections on RPG Design
00:36:31
Speaker
I spent pre-pandemic a couple of years building out a Facebook history page and just know the grind that comes along with social media calendars and content creation. And so that I think is an active conversation that I've been having over the course of 2023 so far of, well, okay, what are my goals? What are the benchmarks there?
00:36:57
Speaker
And is the forecasted effort to reach those goals really providing a meaningful ROI? Personally, what does that look like? And what have you decided?
00:37:11
Speaker
I've decided that I'm still a roiling tempest in my heart and mind about what that means. Because I think there are some days where I'm like, this is dumb, Twitter is dumb, why am I bothering? I'm just going to hang out with my friends every two Thursday nights a month and I'm just going to do my thing.
00:37:30
Speaker
And then there are other times where you get a random comment from somebody and you find out somebody's played your game and you had no idea. And it provides that level of fulfillment, right? That like, okay, I had an idea for a gameplay experience and a kind of combined thematic storytelling.
00:37:48
Speaker
piece with interesting, engaging mechanics, regardless of if it's super crunchy or super rules light in it. It grokked for somebody else. And that is that's really, I think, where the fulfillment of this comes and pass that as a hobbyist who's not trying to, you know, make a living or just earn, you know, fun time money really off of this. It's OK. Well, what's what's the most effective, effective, efficacy use of time?
00:38:19
Speaker
to have those payoffs personally that doesn't turn me into a guy who's glued to Twitter and trying to build a sub-stack and or other pages or platforms. And I have a second full-time job that is purely feeding the marketing promotional machine. And I don't have an answer for that yet, man. I really...
00:38:40
Speaker
really trying to figure that out. And that might be another conversation for us to have that'd be interesting to get your POV on as a guy who's pursued this with Gallant Knight or as Gallant Knight. Gallant's been my full-time job for almost three years now. And three of the almost 10 years I've been doing it. So for the other seven, I had a full-time gig in software where I worked.
00:39:05
Speaker
I definitely have some opinions. And the biggest one I have is delete your Twitter and move on. I have why. And this is not advice everybody should take. Everybody's Twitter is different. But when it came to mine and the GKG Twitter, which we still have a corporate Twitter account, just partially to prevent people from, you know, making one that's us. And partially because it's useful for announcements, but deleting my personal Twitter
00:39:35
Speaker
was very valuable. We saw very little community building or fiscal traction there that we haven't been able to retain on our main company, Twitter, and it reduced my stress and anxiety dramatically. I've been without it for almost two years now and I don't miss it. I don't find myself wishing I still had it. If anything, our sales have gone up because I'm not on Twitter.
00:39:59
Speaker
Definitely being stressed and then dodging the latest storm in the teacup. I'm curious how your answer might change if you looked at the earlier years of your time with building out Gallant Knight as a name in the tiny D6 range.
00:40:19
Speaker
Under that, I know you've expanded and had some cool relationships built out with Osprey recently with your, how do you call it, neo-noir, is how you were describing? Neon. Neon noir. Yep. Neon noir, crescendo violence, and then heirs to heresy, which is the new expansion.
00:40:37
Speaker
Drops in October for that and I just reviewed that today in PDF and it looks amazing. So I'm BT dubs super pumped as a history nerd for that. So just
00:40:50
Speaker
Yeah, for the record. But as someone earlier on, because I'm reminded of in the wake of one of the persistent, you know, dramas that broil Twitter or TTRPG lands that Jason Cordova of the gauntlet trophy dark and gold publishing that bird would be like your listeners probably know him. Super genius guy like I've I don't know. Very smart, very talented. Super enjoyed his work.
00:41:18
Speaker
He was talking about like I'm so glad that I don't know anybody, you know When all this drama breaks out on Twitter TTRPG spaces, which seems to be you know on a monthly basis. There's something getting people roiled and It was an interesting POV to have
00:41:36
Speaker
To me, as a new designer, as someone who's only been in the space publicly a couple of years and not 24-7 online diligently trying to rush as fast as I can to a Kickstarter, for example, or connecting with a publisher, right? Have been happy to kind of, tortoise versus the hare, be the tortoise in this. Sure. So to me, like the networking side of it is,
00:42:05
Speaker
very important for people in my boat, rather than designers, maybe like yourself or Jason or other folks that have.
00:42:14
Speaker
built a community and had a track record of products that they've got out there that they can then leverage to continue to grow and cultivate mature. Speaking for myself only, and only Gallant Night Games projects, because other people have different opinions and different experiences.
Impact of Social Media and Project Management Tools
00:42:31
Speaker
Absolutely. Certainly, I'm not speaking for anybody I've worked with who is more successful at using Twitter than I was.
00:42:37
Speaker
I will say Facebook and building a Facebook community played a greater part in our long term ability to build that success by an order of 10 to one than Twitter did. Like if I count on my account on my hand, the number of people who moved from Twitter into our space and upstate, whereas I can think of several hundred who I interact with regularly in our Facebook communities and our discourse.
00:43:05
Speaker
It's interesting. Looking at my analytics, both the ones that itch provides, and then I've made the jump over to fathom analytics rather than think we're cool. I don't know if that's anything you've seen, but just I'm not a tech guy. I'm not a data scientist. Well, I am a tech industry guy, but I'm not a developer. I'm not a data scientist. I'm not a statistician, I guess is what I'm trying to say, even though I make believe in those roles sometimes professionally.
00:43:31
Speaker
fathom from just a complexity level has been really nice. But looking at my analytics there, right? Like when I post something randomly to Facebook or even randomly to one of the RPG subreddits, right? Like the traffic I get off of that is in order of magnitude, it feels like more than Twitter. But the conversations, there's more conversations I ended up having on Twitter versus
00:43:56
Speaker
Absolutely. And my and for me, I've always had the goal of making this my job. And as such, I the conversations are nice, but I care about the traction because I can't put food on the table if people don't buy the game. Right. Right. Yeah. And so they can talk about it all they want. But if they don't click purchase, it doesn't do me a lot of good. And a lot of my decisions are based around that paradigm of I've got to eat today. So what do I need to do to sell 100 copies of my game?
00:44:23
Speaker
Not that I need to sell 100 to eat, but my point would be. Yeah, but the point, yeah. I'd be eating very well if I sold 100 copies of my game for a day. But yeah, so I think part of it is everybody's experience and goals are different. I think for me, the way Twitter, in my opinion, moves, and I did used to be a data scientist for several years for tech companies.
00:44:47
Speaker
And so I've looked at the Twitter analytics and the Facebook analytics, and Facebook ads make me a margin of money more than Twitter ads ever did. And the only thing close to Facebook ads is Google ads. Those are instrumental, both of those, in our ongoing success. Whereas Twitter, we deleted our Twitter and we post on our GKG Twitter once a week, maybe once every two weeks, and our sales have only gone up.
00:45:17
Speaker
I just I've not found any benefit from being on Twitter. And part of that is probably my personality. Part of that is probably my style. I don't like waiting in the conversations.
00:45:30
Speaker
And Twitter was really quick and I prefer to do my research before I comment on things. So usually the conversation has passed me by by the time I formed an opinion. Right. Or like like me, I'm I'm just anti the drama. Right. Like I just have no interest in courting hot takes, especially contrived artificial hot takes to drive controversy, to drive engagement. Right. That's just, you know, not not my scene too much. Yeah.
00:46:00
Speaker
I have found that any tool that allows me to build a direct personal connection with the people in my community has been more useful than anything else. And so Facebook, where I can interact, or Discord, where I can interact, Twitter is hard to interact on. It's hard to interact on effectively. So I've been very happy having mine gone. And I feel like it has made a significant difference in both my productivity as well as the quality of my work.
00:46:26
Speaker
Yep. I appreciate the example you're able to provide there. It gives me some stuff to noodle on for sure. I'd like to pivot back to... Yes. Oh, go ahead. I want to pivot back. You were like tools and platforms I had to kind of build a connection with the people who are excited, who are interested in the products we're putting out.
00:46:48
Speaker
And you totally volleyball served me up the question with with product management tools that I instead decided to just be like, oh, Microsoft Office, our products as a make believe designer. So one of the things that I have absolutely drunken the Kool-Aid on from a product management standpoint, I would love to hear what you are.
00:47:09
Speaker
using as well. There's a tool out there. It's a SaaS tool, software as a service, online tools for people who are not tech industry nerds like Alan and I called Airtable. And Airtable started as this interesting little hybrid of
00:47:27
Speaker
relational databases and Excel spreadsheet functionality. And it's grown like really, I think in the last year and a half to take on a lot of additional product functionality that is, you know, removing my need to look at tools like If This Then That or Zapier. I've never figured out how they actually like to pronounce that. But integrations that would hook up Airtable to an email service or whatever.
00:47:56
Speaker
and they're just starting to gobble up that functionality, which has been really cool. That's been a really helpful tool for me that all of my rando project management needs, whether that is tracking other bloggers, podcasters, streamers to reach out to and say, hey, we might have something in common to talk about or reviews or customer lists or play tester signups and reviews, all that stuff.
00:48:23
Speaker
has all been getting dumped into Airtable for me. So it's that plus Google workspaces, which I pay for, for Google Drive and using up so much of my Google Drive storage, like you wouldn't believe. But those have really become the tools I use and more and more, all my stuff's getting dumped into Airtable and that's just really where I go to manage my gaming projects.
00:48:46
Speaker
So I'm curious, what stuff you've been using as an ex tech guy, ex data scientist, you've got plans. Yeah, for context folks, my previous career history is I spent a long time in software as a project manager and then data scientist, most at the same time. So numbers and how to get a project from start to finish was where I spent about a decade inside the software industry. And I like to think I was decent at it.
00:49:17
Speaker
Some of my late kickstarters might disagree, which is fair. So I've never used our table. I'll say that up front. It was getting traction by the time I was moving into RPGs full time and I never quite sure I was happy to move off of a bunch of the tools I was using and just stare at a couple of Excel sheets and stuff and call it a day. Right. One tool I use extensively is I have I pay for the Google workspace like you do. That's how we do our GKG emails and everything.
00:49:46
Speaker
And the Google sites functionality is very useful. I have built an internal wiki for myself of all the projects, contacts, continuity stuff. So like if I were to die tomorrow in a car accident, my wife would have contact information and pay rates and contracts and schedules and all that stuff there assigned by project and by person with people designated who can help get things over the finish line.
00:50:12
Speaker
I have like an SRD for all my games internally there so I can track development. I've hyperlinked what rules go into what book. And then I have a sort of a calendar that tracks the workflow in the various stages and I make notes and I update and change it every project to like, okay, I learned a new step. I need to make sure I'm double checking. And so I built this expansive internal wiki basically that using the Google Sites functionality that allows me to
00:50:40
Speaker
have a cross-check regularly. Now, a lot of this I don't need to check on a daily basis, but it's something I go through about once a month and make sure I update and check on. And it right-sizes the approach as versus to trying to get in at the lowest pay tier or something like Jira by Atlassian or building out a media wiki install and all that goes into that. I love the
00:51:10
Speaker
putting it together, this is how I approach the work, this is how I manage it, and I have a central kind of brain where all this information is, and it's accessible to who it needs to go to. I have personally benefited from that, being very right-brained, ENFP kind of, oh, I got big ideas, and here I go. I've got to get stuff written down, because if I don't, it just kind of disappears into the ether.
00:51:36
Speaker
Right. It's definitely something I've I've learned the hard way when I've had mentors and colleagues pass on and I've had to pick up their projects. I definitely have said I don't want to leave somebody else holding the bag in that sense. Not that they did, obviously, but yeah, well, I'm aware the impact it has now. And so I've worked to mitigate that. And now that you've gone full time with gallon night, like.
00:52:02
Speaker
there's a lot more writing on that than just when it was Alabar freelancing part-time on Tiny D6 stuff. And then just kind of doing your thing, right? Yeah, so it's definitely been a thing I've been working on improving over the last couple of years as I've gone full-time and been more involved on the day-to-day side.
00:52:27
Speaker
Um, before it often would get dropped on the, you know, forgetting the creative work or the production work done. And now I try to dedicate, you know, a couple hours every month to keeping this sort of infrastructure built up. Um, but honestly, the simplest tools for the best Excel, you know, Google sheets, something like that with a project workflow, you know, figure out what works for you. Read some, there's plenty of articles about how to project manage and you can kind of get some best practices and roll from there.
00:52:53
Speaker
Um, I've done it so much now that I can like build macros into Excel and stuff. And so my Excel tables can get kind of funky if I really want to, but honestly, a good VLOOKUP covers 90% of the work I need to do a lot of the time. Right. Yeah. I just turned in a solo RPG I wrote for another publisher that has 512 potential endings. Um, cause you use a solo RPG, but you find clues and then you can piece the clues together. And so every combination of these clues creates a potential ending.
00:53:22
Speaker
Oh, that is cool. And that's a lot to manage, though. Well, I wrote it. I wrote all the endings in a day in Excel because of a VLOOKUP and some basic Excel knowledge. I like it. I like it. And so, you know, and that's a skill set I benefit from from having come into RPGs from my project manager data scientist background.
00:53:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's a funny, I think our experiences in the tech industry inform how we approach designing the games and then managing everything that goes on in the periphery of that kind of like core design work. And I think there would be some really interesting conversations to have with other designers.
00:54:11
Speaker
to to learn from where their influences professionally or just kind of life history have paid unexpected dividends to their approach to to designing games and sharing them with the world. Right. Because there's got to be a lot of fascinating, fascinating stories out there. Yeah. And one of the things I always try to help people understand and stress is that looking at what you know how to do and how you can
00:54:42
Speaker
leverage that in a sort of the daily day-to-day operational basis is really valuable. If you come from a job where customer support is what you do 90% of the time and you're good at it, well, you're going to be really great at community building.
00:54:59
Speaker
take that skill set and turn it into that. If you come from a legal background, you're probably gonna be really great at contracts and obviously all that stuff, but also understanding how to communicate, how to analyze what people are saying and turn it into actionable items, right? There's a lot of the skill sets transferred to various parts of RPGs and learning what you can really be great at is essential to being successful, I think.
00:55:28
Speaker
Yeah, and to me that lands in a funny way because if I had to look at my strengths and my weaknesses or what I would self-assess there, like one of my giant weaknesses is I'm not a great GM.
00:55:42
Speaker
Like, and that's one of the things that I desperately need to get out from a publishing standpoint is I've got to get some adventure adventure pass done for both the monster game and then this Western thing, right? The Western one is obviously a lot more straightforward and easy because it's
00:56:00
Speaker
spiritually built on, you know, the OSR traditions and Wild West stuff. There's a lot of stuff you can do. And because it's so rules light, it's going to be easier to start to put some adventures out there. But yeah, I can I can build systems. I can build systems that make sense. Can I still tell stories with those systems that that is where my players have to suffer? Yeah, it's definitely a balancing act. And, you know, I encourage people who are interested in making RPGs to
00:56:29
Speaker
analyze what you think you'd be great at and be honest with your assessment of what you might need help with and then find freelancers or creatives who can help you and go from there. It's a big strength. So Will, we are running near the end of time on our wide ranging chat and I appreciate that. I have two questions for you that I always like to ask.
00:56:51
Speaker
Lay it on me. In a bullet point list, real briefly, if people want to understand Will Phillips design ethos and approach to RPGs, what are three games you would point them at? And they can't be three games that have influenced you. Sure. Three games. I might take this 20,000 footed a little bit to say designers who I appreciate.
00:57:15
Speaker
As a kid who grew up playing AD&D 2nd edition and then Pathfinder and was just apart from my aforementioned at the very top, super rad, microman, seventh grade RPG, microman, megaman RPG.
00:57:29
Speaker
My kind of designer brain started approaching and looking at tabletop RPGs really in the era of stumbling into Dresden Files, Spirit of the Century. So the work guys like Fred Hicks and Ryan Macklin were doing that kind of culminated in fake core and that kind of period of time. I kind of missed the forge and the story game stuff, right? And so
00:57:57
Speaker
Fate and then kind of right on the heels right in the mists of that things like freeform universal and rices So this kind of very open-ended narrative approach and having the mechanics support a wide range of what the characters are Just absolutely was a seminal influence on me similarly to
00:58:21
Speaker
Take a term to re-invoke Jason Cordova's name here. He termed it the writer's room approach. And I know a lot of people have taken the collaborative storytelling ethos in their games before, but he was the first guy I heard, and this was relatively recently, comparatively last couple of years, frame it as the writer's room approach. It's not the role of the GM, the DM, the whatever you want to call that person.
00:58:47
Speaker
to antagonistically frame an environment, frame a situation, and have the players move into that. And that's fair and that's valid. And you can even argue that's what I'm doing with the Devil's Brand in a very classic, traditional way. But we're all together trying to collaboratively tell a story was a very powerful influence. And there's a whole host of RPGs in the indie and kind of story gaming lineage that do that.
00:59:13
Speaker
And thirdly, to provide the callback to my D&D roots, I think I'm one of the minority that actually really enjoyed 4th edition D&D and loved what Rob Hennessy and
00:59:31
Speaker
his team did in empowering equity amongst your choices so that I could play a fighter and have just as much complexity and satisfaction in my options of play as someone who took the wizard route. And that I think from a philosophical game design standpoint is something that really sticks with me even though I have
00:59:55
Speaker
run screaming and shrieking away from crunch in my personal gaming experience is I want to make sure that in so much as there are crunchy options or options at all in the choices I present to players that there's not going to be a suboptimal from a creative option standpoint choice for my players. And I think because
01:00:21
Speaker
especially Hexentide, the monster game, because it very much has that kind of fate, free-form universal, racist, open-ended DNA to it, that I think that's one of the reasons why I've gone that route, is to provide everybody equal opportunities to have choices, which has been really cool.
01:00:41
Speaker
I throw a quick fourth bullet point on there as kind of the the anti archetype uh and that's you know uh luke crane who i love the idea and how he approaches systems and creates really fascinating systems uh for various parts of the gameplay experience that i think
01:01:00
Speaker
is hitting on some of the conversation we had earlier about providing breadth of play and if something's complete or incomplete. But my user experience design brain kicks in hard. And I think he kind of weaponizes the complex jargon and use of jargon in his designs in ways that I want to try and stay away from while still mining his approach to dedicated and engaging subsystems.
01:01:27
Speaker
Can we create those and present them in ways that are easy to understand? And so I think all four of those are aspects that percolate around in my brain a lot. Wonderful. All right, second to last question. What have you always wanted to be asked in an interview that you've never been asked? Ooh.
01:01:47
Speaker
So I think I would say that since the beginning of the hobby, since the guys started messing around with adding narrative flavor to their war games in the 70s, there have been guys home brewing and creating their own rules and doing their own thing.
01:02:03
Speaker
ever since the beginning. I mean, you look at how many different tweaks on the original D&D rules there were in the first decade or so, and to see that, right? And that's continued. And so I think it'd be an interesting conversation for designers and myself, you know, like, well, why? Like, what is the payoff? What's interesting to you in that? Okay. Well, that question to you.
01:02:27
Speaker
Why? The big question, why? It's two things, I think, for me. One is that, to go back, I think I mentioned earlier, like, oh, I can design systems, and I'm more comfortable designing systems than necessarily super engaging narrative beats in my adventures as a writer. And so I think the puzzle solving of the mechanics has some appeal there of building the rules and how rules interact with one another. And I think,
01:02:55
Speaker
seeing that puzzle solving effort of the mechanics come to life at the table and sharing fulfilling surprising gameplay experiences in an emergent fashion at the table with friends or on a screen with friends who are far away.
01:03:15
Speaker
I think that is a really fulfilling creative exercise. It's both creative and it's problem solving all at the same time. And I think that's a pretty fun holistic experience to have as a designer to be able to be responsible for facilitating that for people. Sure. I think that's a great answer. Well, Will, do you have any questions for me?
01:03:38
Speaker
Ooh, Alan, I got a whole boatload of super nerd PM questions for you. And so- Well, ask me one. I'm gonna narrow it down to one. Yes. I'm gonna narrow it down to one for you. To circle back to our conversation briefly about platforms marketing and community building. For your money, if you had to recommend to me as a solo newer designer,
01:04:03
Speaker
one platform to focus on to build a community, would you put your money in with Facebook and Facebook groups or with the Discord server? Oh, that is very complicated. And I'm not sure there is a good answer. I will say that I would tell you for my money, the best thing you can do is get an effective mailing list.
01:04:30
Speaker
And the reason I'm picking that is in the end, you don't control what Discord or Facebook do with their platforms. They can make decisions you hate or disagree with or you find unethical and you lose what you built. Whereas a mailing list, you tend to control it more cohesively.
01:04:48
Speaker
from start to finish, and so it's a little bit of a safer alternative. Now, obviously, mailing list companies can have a problem or something, but it's going to be something you can export to a new mailing list company and keep all that information. I've done that myself. You don't lose people that way. But if you have a Discord and you're like, we need to leave Discord, we're moving to some new platform, well, a lot of people aren't going to click sign up before you delete or whatever.
01:05:14
Speaker
and you're gonna lose that. And so learning where to control your community in terms of how much control you have not control your community. But where you can leverage your control of how your community is presented and your brand is managed is more important than the actual location, I think. Facebook works for me, Discord really works for me, but my mailing list is key to Gallant success. We have an extensive mailing list, we've worked hard to build it, and it's been part of what got us going. We see a lot of great returns from it.
01:05:44
Speaker
So I would say that build a mailing list and make sure it's something you control the output of. That's that's wisdom in that experience, man. I appreciate that. Yeah, no problem. So just to refresh, your name is Will Phillips. You make RPGs under the name Will Phillips. You can be found on Twitter at WillPhillips and your games are on WillPhillips.itch.io.
01:06:08
Speaker
That's right. And if you want to take a look at the blog, which may or may not need some fresh content, but you can find that also creatively titled tabletop.willphillips.org, O-R-G. I don't even know.
01:06:26
Speaker
Don't even know Mr. Phillips. It's been a pleasure to have you on the show. Alan, this has been a blast. I'm glad to hear it. I appreciate the time. Thank you, sir. All right, folks, I am Alan Barr, and this has been Radio Free RPG.