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Episode 22: Fred Wan Wrestles with Questions
44 Plays11 months ago
Host Alan Bahr is joined by Fred Wan, game writer and legal professional to talk about the art of writing games, what goes into community centric game environments and more!
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Transcript
Introduction to Radio Free RPG
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.
Meet Fred Wan: RPG Designer and Writer
00:00:32
Speaker
Today, I'm joined by my guest, Fred Wan. Fred is a writer, RPG designer, developer, and fiction author. How are you doing today? I can't complain, yourself? Pretty good. It's finally melting the snow here in North Dakota, so I can see my driveway for the first time in months. I can't imagine snow in late March. My sympathies. Well, we'll get some more in April. Oh, jeez. Yeah.
Fred's Role with Legend of the Five Rings
00:01:01
Speaker
So Fred, for those who aren't familiar with your body of work, what defines Fred inside the gaming space? Sure.
00:01:11
Speaker
Best known work would be a stint of about 15 years working on the Legend of the Five Rings brand back when AEG owned it. Since then, I've done a number of things related to Doomtown and 7th Sea and some freelance work in the video game industry. But if anyone knows my name at all, it'll either be from some recorded stuff on YouTube or L5R. OK.
00:01:40
Speaker
So if you were working on L5R during the we'll call it the heyday of AEG 15 years, they had the game for 20 years. So that's quite a 75 percent of the time they were publishing it. You probably touched something somebody from with L5R is familiar with. Probably. What was your role working on it?
00:02:04
Speaker
Sure. My best known title, it's confusing, was Continuity Editor, which a lot of people who aren't in the game industry think of as editor or continuity, but rarely the two words together. My main role functionally was to work with the story team and the design team to make sure that to the extent we could, we had one kind of unified vision of what the universe and the characters were like.
00:02:33
Speaker
So a lot of it was just, hey, can you tweak this just a little bit because this person is supposed to be the best dualist in the empire at this point in time, but mechanically, their stats don't reflect it. Or, hey, we want to push this theme for this clan. What can you do to tweak that? Or talking to an author who would have, say, a very powerful scene, whereas the individual character
00:03:02
Speaker
let's say, as a scorpion, does something extremely honorable, but we're like, this arc isn't about the scorpion being honorable. But this is a great story. What can we do to tweak that with the overall narrative objective? So a lot of the time, my role was saying, yeah, but? Sure. Or hey, let's fiddle with this a little bit. OK.
Creative Collaboration and Fiction Writing
00:03:31
Speaker
So with that in mind, did you also do some fiction writing for the line as well? I did. What we found over the years was in terms of comparative advantage, I'm better placed editing, revising, working with people rather than doing original fiction. It's not necessarily that mine is bad. It's just how rapidly I can produce versus how rapidly I can work with someone else to tweak theirs. Sure.
00:03:56
Speaker
And so I've done a little more fiction work in the years since. Okay. But I find it really fulfilling working with someone to get their creative vision out there within a framework. And I don't really feel to the same need as many people who are really driven to be authors to get my stories out there.
00:04:15
Speaker
OK, yeah, but I've done certainly I've done fiction work, but my the work I'm usually proudest of is working with people to get our story out there or their story out there. OK, now I came to know you through some mutual friends who I've worked with in the game industry who also happened to be involved with the Elvivar AEG team back in the time. People like Sean Carmen, Robert Denton, Maddy Murdock,
00:04:46
Speaker
Some of them I know from L5R, Robert, I met after AEG sold L5R and he was looking for layout work and I was just starting my game design career and he did a layout guy. Madi, I met locally because a mutual friend told her to come meet me after they moved to Utah. So I have a lot of these connections with the L5R creative team that I quite enjoy because I was a fan of, played the card game for 18 years.
00:05:14
Speaker
So very actively involved went to many events, many tournaments, repping my beloved crane clan at every step of the way. Nothing else. Yeah. One of the things that makes L5R sort of unique inside the gaming pantheon or akin to a game like Vampire or something is the intense devotion and loyalty to a fictional faction, we'll
Player Influence in L5R
00:05:41
Speaker
say.
00:05:41
Speaker
L5R had clans of samurai, each with a kind of a theme or an ethos that was different from the others that all formed this cohesive empire of Rokugan. Vampire has their bloodline, you know, the clans and then the factions. Battle tech has their houses of MX. You know that and these are to a degree a rarity in the RPG gaming space.
00:06:10
Speaker
Because, excuse me, because players are used to crafting their own narratives, most factions remain in the background or not the core focus of the game. So what made L5R and by extension, these other games like this unique or work the way it did to inspire that devoted factional loyalty? I really think one thing, so I'll divide this into a few parts, right?
00:06:37
Speaker
Part of it was each of the clans, and I think every game that has had factions that really resonate with players has done this, each of the clans is intended to try to cater to a certain aspirational archetype or escapist archetype. The Bruja and Vampire appeal to someone who is looking for a certain gaming experience. The Crane and L5R
00:07:02
Speaker
just by being the clan of arts, culture, and defining what society is, automatically will draw someone who is looking for either a certain form of self-expression or a certain, I want to play someone who's going to tell this kind of story into a campaign, right?
00:07:23
Speaker
I think some of the more successful D&D campaigns play with that too, where a paladin naturally draws you to a certain kind of narrative experience. I think the paladins probably is a best example within D&D. And so by having a bunch of clans where you could pick a clan and a family within the clan that would automatically give you some narrative hooks.
00:07:48
Speaker
creates accessibility and makes it easier for other players, even ones who aren't necessarily already friends of yours, just other people who are looking for a game experience. They know if they're meeting a Katsuki investigator broadly what some of the things that are going to be on their radar will be. That was a phrase I've not heard in some time.
00:08:11
Speaker
The other thing about L5R, and this is less true of the RPG, but it was still true there, was
00:08:21
Speaker
not only were we giving players an active investment into how the universe and metapod evolved, the players knew it. And there was constant reinforcement and emphasis and look at this, this week's fiction has this thing, this thing happened because these players did this. So there was an automatic feeling of
00:08:46
Speaker
This is mine, as opposed to this is Fred's or the story teams or AEGs that at its height, L5R really not only fulfilled that promise, but let you know what was fulfilling that promise. And those two are separate and interrelated, but you actually need both because during times where you are giving them investment, but they don't realize it.
Challenges and Impact of L5R
00:09:14
Speaker
then in terms of user experience, it's not there. Or if you're just making players feel like they have a say and you don't really and are just doing what you were planning on doing anyways, period, eventually it rings hollow. And there were certainly times where for reasons I may or may not agree with, but were legitimately not my call, we were more cards close to the chest than I thought we needed to be.
00:09:43
Speaker
And there were times where I'm like, no, we should say we're doing this because, and we should let them know what the because is. But there were other concerns too, right? Like I was looking at it specifically through that narrative engagement lens separately aside from business concerns. Sure. It's complex to meld those two elements together. Yeah. So working on L5R,
00:10:12
Speaker
with this long-term 15-year continuity where the story was continuous and player-driven. One of the many things people acclaim about L5R during AEG's run was the player-driven narrative and how influential it could be, which also is the other side of the coin where the biggest complaints and laments were the player-driven narrative and how nonsensical sometimes it could be.
00:10:40
Speaker
And what was that like to sort of be in this position where you couldn't be 100% transparent about how the sausage got made, but the sausage was partially being made by people who were complaining about how the sausage was coming out, right? Yeah. It was one of the finest dances I've ever had to do.
00:11:05
Speaker
The real challenge is it's not acceptable to say, this is only messed up because this player chose this. It's just not. The execution is on our shoulders. But there were certainly times where you might foreshadow something, hint towards certain things, or even say, this will be a bad outcome if. And then some players will intentionally choose the bad outcome. Right.
00:11:33
Speaker
One of the biggest challenges was everything that's happened is now canon. You're bound by it. You're stuck with it. And no amount of the current player base saying, I don't like it, please retcon it. It can be taken lightly because part of the underlying value proposition of the setting was what you do matters.
00:11:55
Speaker
And if I ever took the stance of, well, I don't like it or the impact on long-term storytelling, I'm going to undo it. I've undercut that, that unspoken underlying principle that can't be broken. But certainly over the years, there were times where even decisions I made, I was like, I wouldn't make that decision now. Or I think it was an error in judgment, or we could have executed better on this and we just didn't.
00:12:21
Speaker
Um, or, or I wish a different clan had won that event or even, you know, I wish the design team had chosen a different mechanical theme for this clan for this two year period. Like all of those are true.
00:12:36
Speaker
And all you can do is respect everyone's stake and respect everyone's desire to have an influence and have a say and respect their passion, even if the work product for a given arc was not good at the time or even not good in retrospect. But it's certainly a challenge because all you can do sometimes is de-emphasize by not constantly going back to it.
00:13:04
Speaker
But there was no magic to it. And one of the things I kind of divorced from my thinking was, can you fix it all? No. What you can do is you can manage it. Sure. Yeah. That's probably a healthy outlook to have. Well, it didn't prevent me from sometimes just agonizing over, can I fix this?
00:13:27
Speaker
Sometimes I if it helps you feel better to this day, I still give poor Sean Carmen much grief about how my beloved Noritoshi died. Yeah, well, I mean, all you can do is hope that the reasons leading up to the death are good and not every death is going to be a pretty one in samurai story.
00:13:52
Speaker
I'm not upset that he's dead. It was the contract. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I get it. But I am wildly biased. I have multiple signed pieces of art. Yeah, I totally get it.
00:14:06
Speaker
I deeply it is. This is an interesting conversation because I when my wife and I met, she called L5R the other woman in my life. Because it was an extensive passion. I traveled to multiple cotes a year. It was if I was not working and I was not doing something with her, I was probably building decks or playing RPG.
00:14:31
Speaker
It was the thing. Yeah. And now LPR hasn't been removed from my life for coming on five years. Yeah. So this conversation is a bit of a nostalgia run for me. Yeah. In some ways. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I've I've I've had players tell me I got engaged over like.
00:14:55
Speaker
Well, one particular player in particular told me that they got engaged while playing our first play by forum RPG event or that they met their fiance in that event. And I'm like, I can't really top that in my career, you know, like, yeah, yeah. That's great. So what is your favorite moment of our sort of history or canon that you were involved in?
00:15:24
Speaker
My favorite L5R related story is actually kind of meta in terms of impact on real life, right? I'm lucky enough to know some really awesome people in various game spaces. Every single one is traced back to either Zem being, oh, I played L5R or someone else who was an L5R fan introducing me to them. Like every single one.
00:15:54
Speaker
And all 5R's creative or industry footprint within the circle of other devs is much bigger than its footprint on players. And it's a level of respect. And oh, you should know about this because. Sure. And being a part of that was
00:16:22
Speaker
It's one of those warm feelings in the cold night when you're like, was all this work worth it? And then you realize, yeah, I was literally on a wrestling chat with a few friends. And one guy has been home brewing his own RPG. And he's like, I need some inspiration for how to do this part of my mechanics. And another guy in the group is like, Fred worked on L5R.
00:16:48
Speaker
And then the guy's like, oh, I used to play all 5R. Can I pick your brain sometimes? Stuff like that happens not all the time, but disproportionately in my fan and gaming experience.
Player-Driven Narratives in Video Games
00:17:00
Speaker
And that is the most vivid memory for me now, just how many people respect what we did.
00:17:06
Speaker
I especially if you were an up and coming gamer during the 90s who also enjoyed card games and RPGs, I think L5R was sort of inescapable. Yeah, in a sense for a lot of us. Because it melded those two things together in a way no other game was currently doing other than vampire. Yeah. Um.
00:17:29
Speaker
So that's great. I'm glad to hear that it's been such a positive, you know, overarching umbrella for you in so many ways. So with this idea of player driven narrative in games, we're going to move on from Magic Samurai for a minute, despite my deep reluctance to leave this topic. I know. I could talk about this for days, but I don't think anybody wants to hear Alan's Elvivar retrospective. Oh, you'd be surprised.
00:18:13
Speaker
So I don't think any game has really tried to do
00:18:18
Speaker
the players are going to have an active say in how the universe evolves, at least nowhere near on the scale since L5R. But there's at least one video game that did something really comparable. And I'm trying to come up with the name while I come up with another example.
00:18:42
Speaker
I've seen a lot of players playing Sea of Thieves, which has an emergent narrative, where your own gaming experience is similar. Like, we did this, this is part of our story. And a lot of players have gotten the same feelings out of Sea of Thieves that we got out of L5R. Okay.
00:19:11
Speaker
But there is one video game whose name is escaping me right now, where the players actually did have a say in how the universe evolved, but the actual storytellers and dev team didn't tell them this upfront. So the players found out as they were going that their input was actually changing the way the game evolved.
00:19:40
Speaker
And the dev team during the various chapters and releases would bring in the same voice actors for the same god characters to deliver new dialogue based on what players had been doing in their runs. And when the game ended, because the game is still for sale, but the devs have moved on to a new project. For the very last session, they brought in the voice actors to just play their characters live.
00:20:10
Speaker
interacting with the players. And that is a really nifty thing, which I don't think enough games have even tried. And I'm blanking on the name, and I don't want to get it wrong.
00:20:27
Speaker
Uh, but well, if you think of it, we can append it to the show. I'll do that afterwards. It'll take, I can actually send a message to the streamer. I know who has been to, who was doing episodes of it. Um, because, but I don't see it done on a big scale and partially it's because logistically it's almost impossible to do something like L5R and can also get negative feelings from players. Yes. But.
00:20:51
Speaker
You do it right on enough stuff, and people remember you for decades. And I don't think enough companies and games are trying to do transformative or truly memorable long-term. They're not riffing on the medium enough. OK.
Community Input in Game Narratives
00:21:10
Speaker
That's interesting. So as a publisher and designer, I have often thought about
00:21:16
Speaker
running some sort of community-involved storyline. But I admit my big fear is when I've sort of, I will say, learned from my friends who worked on L5R in that the negative can very strongly outweigh the positive if bad actors in the community gain a foothold.
00:21:37
Speaker
And that is a difficult fear or ghost to sort of overcome from a publisher standpoint because you are inviting a lot of negative feelings into your workspace and that can be hard to want to do. What would you say are maybe some ways to handle that or to approach it in a way that might help mitigate or remove some of those concerns? I think you start by having upfront
00:22:07
Speaker
Maybe not a contract, but a statement of principles between you and the community and all other stakeholders, including people who work on the game. These are the guideposts of what's going to inform how we interpret and filter and execute. Everyone knows what they are. And they're principles, not rules. And as principles, you can sometimes even break them. If you just find them as rules, players will be like, well, you didn't follow it. You've broken our trust.
00:22:35
Speaker
Whereas with a principle, sometimes they point in different directions and you'll say, player agency says we do this, story consistency says we do this, on this particular choice we are going with this and not that, here's why. So that commitment to principle and transparency upfront. The team internally needs to be dedicated to process and doing good work, but not particular outcome. Okay.
00:23:05
Speaker
And it also means everyone up front, including the players, have to acknowledge that they might not get what they want, including creatively. It's really hard to tell an author, this is the best ending that you've set up, you can't have it. And it's hard. I don't mean that lightly. There have been both in my day job and in this.
00:23:27
Speaker
There are times where I'm like, I want to be able to say that and I can't and I shouldn't and here's why, but you need a bunch of people who are prepared to accept that. And it's no indictment of the individual to say they're temperament wise. They're not suited to having to, um,
00:23:49
Speaker
make their creative expression subservient to another interest. Particularly because some authors are partially doing this for catharsis, it's not cathartic for some of them. So it needs a group of people who are at the various levels of involvement where they can deal with that compromise. And that includes being upfront with players. You don't have a veto. You have input, it's material input, it's
00:24:16
Speaker
going to be taken seriously and with respect. There are going to be times where even if you ask for it, we can't give it to you. And it also requires being willing to be surgical of like, if someone's an actively bad actor as opposed to someone you just don't agree with, are you prepared to take steps? Sure. Yeah, that's the short, short condensed form anyway. This sounds like a healthy blend of creative respect and community management.
00:24:46
Speaker
in a sort of synthesis there. Yeah.
Storytelling in Professional Wrestling
00:24:49
Speaker
All right. And everyone has to, just like at a good RPG table, everyone has to know what everyone else is sitting down for and be prepared to respect that, right? Sure. And if you're not, this isn't the game for you. All right. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a healthy outlook, especially when communicated upfront. Yeah.
00:25:10
Speaker
So a little bit ago, you mentioned another passion that we share that's not magic samurai, but it is professional wrestling. Another form of magical samurai.
00:25:21
Speaker
Yes, I suppose when you get down to it. Yeah. And now you are a long term wrestling fan, whereas I am a relatively new wrestling fan. And we've talked a little bit about this. And one of the things I find very engaging about professional wrestling is the distillation of basic storylines into entertainment product that I think is an interesting way to approach thinking about role playing games. I agree.
00:25:50
Speaker
Um, and so what, what draws you to this entertainment form? Um, I like the fact that it's storytelling through a variety of means in a way where, uh, different wrestlers and different audience members can get what they want out of it. Like.
00:26:11
Speaker
Really good wrestling storylines and matches. You can follow casually. You can follow hardcore. And the really good ones, I think the wrestlers take on a totally different level of appreciation out of than any of the audience, because they can see those inner workings on a level none of us can. I like that a really good wrestling match is a story. And the narrative of the action
00:26:38
Speaker
is itself beginning to end, intended to tell a full standalone story that may have outside context. But really, most of the best matches are sometimes good and evil, sometimes someone trying to surpass their own limitations, sometimes tragedy in real time.
00:27:00
Speaker
They're done through a kinetic physical medium, but they're really just stories. And as a gamer, I can appreciate really good combat encounters aren't just combat encounters. They're also condensations of a story arc. Violence as another form of communication.
00:27:23
Speaker
Yeah, storytelling and and in wrestling, it's often it's violent, but it's not intended to be narratively taken as real violence. It's intended to be taken to sport.
00:27:32
Speaker
Which if you're an anime fan, this should be like a super transfer over. And I think very few combat scenes in most games actually reach the level of storytelling of a good wrestling match. Because normally they're just mechanistic resolutions rather than a full story. And you can crib from that.
00:27:55
Speaker
Even as a GM, you can be like, right, this is how I make something escalate in the course of a combat encounter. Right. Or have the combat encounter have meaning rather than we're going to kill these things and take their loot. And I think part of that is right now a lot of gamers are also video gamers and video games tend not to have boss fights be narrative in the same way.
00:28:26
Speaker
Okay. So there's kind of a, what is your baseline for your norm of storytelling? Which is not to say there aren't boss fights in a lot of games that are narrative. It's just a lot of games that have a lot of fights. They're not really independently narratively significant. Sure.
00:28:45
Speaker
But I think, yeah, wrestling is just storytelling. And some wrestlers are good on the mic, and they can make you believe in what's going on primarily through their talk.
00:28:58
Speaker
Others can make you believe what's going on in the ring matters to the participants. Or even there's entire storylines over multiple matches about which finishing move is going to be used by a wrestler and why did it work in the first match but not the second and why did they abandon the move for their new move in the third match. Or you can just watch it as people doing flips and dives and athletics.
00:29:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's just you can take out what you put in and I appreciate that in any medium. This is an appropriate conversation as I'm wearing my Hangman Adam Page shirt right now. So good. So good. Have you been watching this week's AEW? I do not regularly watch AEW as I am a cord cutter. Right. Watch the clips online because as a Hangman fan, I think you are going to be really happy with what he's doing in the next few weeks.
00:29:56
Speaker
Excellent. Well, I'm thrilled. Yeah. So speaking of that, just for my own edification, who is your current favorite wrestler and what is your current favorite wrestling storyline? So current favorite wrestler is probably Kenny Omega.
00:30:17
Speaker
Okay. More for how he is problem, one of the better current examples of how a match itself should have an internal narrative. Okay. That is the capstone on the story and promo going in. Okay.
00:30:39
Speaker
I think a very good example is in early January, he had a match against Will Ospreay at Wrestle Kingdom. Kenny is not normally seen by the broader audience as being a great promo. But if you listen to the one promo he cut before the match, and it's a press conference promo he cut, and Will Ospreay's responding promo,
00:31:09
Speaker
Those two, with very little investment of mic time, if you're paying attention, you completely get why these two are going at it. And it's a very simple story that's very believable. And then the match itself isn't just a story of two athletes trying to prove who's better. It's can Will Ospreay
00:31:33
Speaker
put the exclamation point on his insistence that he's outgrown Kenny and that Kenny's shadow no longer looms over him. And how does that affect the moves and tactics and personality of the two characters in the match? I agree that Kenny style is not for everyone.
00:31:57
Speaker
I also suspect Kenny Stiles is not for every wrestler because good golly, there's a lot of stuff he does that no one else can do. But I think he doesn't get enough credit from the broader audience for trying to show us the scope of the kind of matches and the tools you can bring to bear narratively. Like I said, two promos,
00:32:24
Speaker
And you completely believe one of the two co-main events at Wrestle Kingdom, right? You didn't need lots of mic time. And then the two of them completely vindicated any emotional investment you had in the quality of the match itself. It was an exceptional performance. Yeah. Right. Um, which is not to say there aren't others, it's just it immediately comes to mind. And I've been thinking about the elite and hangman very recently because of what I've been watching recently. Yeah. Sure.
00:32:50
Speaker
I think for me, I would say the most compelling storyline currently is the Bloodline storyline. Gee, that's controversial or not. It's hard to find something because it's so overshadowing right now. Yeah, completely.
00:33:07
Speaker
But it's also so well done it's not like it doesn't deserve these accolades. I have never seen a room full of adults in the last 12 years of my life stand up and scream at the TV like they did at the Elimination Chamber show.
00:33:24
Speaker
It's a story of family, it's a story of betrayal, it's a story of friendship and brotherhood. It's just all these things that make for good stories unfolding on an ongoing basis. What I find unfortunate, and it's no fault of anyone, is I actually find the most compelling part of this to be the B-plot. Because, and for those who are
00:33:47
Speaker
I'll fill in the context. So there's a subplot now of Sami Zayn, who has been largely the person creatively who's been carrying a lot of the bloodline arc for the last six months. And I think I'm being fair when I say about six months, right? He's part of the B-plot and Cody Rhodes challenging for the title.
00:34:09
Speaker
is important. Cody has certainly held up his embassy bargain, but because Sami's been there every week and his character is the one who's been invested and feels betrayed the most, the most emotionally engaging part. And he was someone who was at the elimination chamber coming in short. That's the one that I'm most keen on.
00:34:32
Speaker
And it's very clearly the B plot. And one thing WWE is very good at is they're very good at signaling which one's the B plot, which one's the A plot. It's obvious that this is the B plot, which is not to say it won't be satisfying, but I want it to be the A plot. And you shouldn't cater to me. That's a bad idea. But his character and his emotions and his story have been very engaging.
00:35:00
Speaker
And yeah, but no, the Bloodline Invisible is the biggest story in wrestling right now. WrestleMania next week is going to... Weirdly, I think everyone knows how most of the main matches are going to end up. And it's going to be entertaining anyways, for sure, right? It's the story of how we get there that we're all really excited for. Yeah.
00:35:21
Speaker
I will say that I definitely can understand that there are movies or books I read where I'm like, I found the subplot way more interesting than the main plot. I wanted more of this. Yeah. Right. And it can be hard to let that go sometimes as somebody who both enjoys doing creative work and consuming it. You can feel the need to fix it or write or like I can address this. I could do this better. Right.
00:35:48
Speaker
And one of the things I like so much about pro wrestling is that while I am a creative person, I cannot do what they are doing better. And I know that because if I got in that ring, I would probably just keel over and die after the first three seconds. I would take my first knockdown bump and I'd be done. That'd be it. Yeah, absolutely. And so it's enjoyable for me in that it allows me to turn off that creative side of my brain while still enjoying something that is creative and exciting.
00:36:18
Speaker
They do things I can't do. They do things I don't want to do. It's unfortunate because there's only so much prep time. I really wanted much more build for Oscar Bianca Belair. There's been build and the two of them are going to carry their end of the match. They will easily indicate what we want to see.
00:36:46
Speaker
in ring, but I want them to have more chance to get the story so that the wider audience buys in more, partially because I really want Asuka to win because I think she's overdue for a big WrestleMania win and I want it to be like definitive. But the fact that I am that invested is a good sign. Right.
00:37:11
Speaker
And one of the other things that I think to bring pro wrestling back towards the RPG industry is understanding the responses we have as consumers to these creative endeavors.
Media Influence on RPG Design
00:37:24
Speaker
Um, to, to the audience, uh, allows us as GMs and publishers and game designers to understand the narratives we are crafting and presenting better. Right. Wow. You know, though, wow, if this made me feel this way, maybe when I do it in an adventure, it'll make them feel this way. But I, but if I felt there wasn't enough story leading up to it, I have to remember that when I am writing my story, right?
00:37:49
Speaker
Yeah, the other thing that I find really useful as a designer is, and this is true of any fandom really, not just wrestling, is to it really brings home that there are different people looking for different things from the same product. Right. And sometimes you can cater to all of them. Sometimes you can't. And recognizing which is which,
00:38:16
Speaker
so that you can focus appropriately is a valuable skill. Right. I definitely agree. And I think this applies to a lot of media. I'm a big proponent at seminars or podcasts or whenever I'm speaking of, consume the thing you want to know about, right? If you want to make RPGs, play a lot of different RPGs. Read a lot of RPGs.
00:38:41
Speaker
Try as many different things as you can. If you wanna write books, write as many books, read as many books as you can, right? Same with movies. Find everything adjacent to it and just vacuum it in because the more you intake, the better your outtake is going to be. I'd also add that you want to consciously step outside of the stuff you enjoy. Yes. And that you wanna spend some time reflecting
00:39:09
Speaker
Because I know people who consume a lot, but they never actually stop and digest. But yeah, I agree with the general proposition. You want to appreciate what's in the medium so that you can riff within it. Or learn what doesn't work for you so you know what you don't want to do. A few weeks ago, I was talking with some people about the design of rogue-like video games. Sure.
00:39:37
Speaker
And the person that we were talking to said they thought they had some revolutionary new insights. And then they told us their idea and we're like, that's Hades. And they'd never played it. And I'm like, but Hades is kind of the current baseline for what a great roguelike is. So we're all happy to talk to you as
00:40:05
Speaker
intermediate or senior-esque people to a junior, but if you haven't done your research, it will rub some people as you are wasting their time. Sure. And yeah, I think for anything you want to create, you don't necessarily need to be formally educated. No, not at all. But you want to know what's out there. Yes, especially with something like RPGs where there is no formal education other than
00:40:33
Speaker
playing RPGs in a lot of ways. Being a consumer is sort of the only education you're going to get outside of some storytelling education or narrative or writing classes, things like that. Yeah. Some of the game design schools have tabletop sections or RPG components to them. Right. But it's others in that and even those, most of them are focused more on
00:41:00
Speaker
uh, tracking you into a career in the video game industry. So it's like electives within, uh, but I don't want to exclude those academic programs because some of them exist and I have some friends who teach narrative. Um, but, uh, it's not like there are a lot of Ivy league schools for, you know, DND 101. Um, I would take that class though. It would be interesting. I don't know if I could afford it. Yeah. That's fair.
00:41:30
Speaker
So Fred, we're coming up to the end of our time here. This has been a really engaging conversation, and I appreciate it. So what's one question you've always wanted to be asked in an interview that you've never been asked? If you could critique L5R over the 25, 30 years it's been around, what would you say?
00:42:00
Speaker
And I think one of the real challenges L5R had over all these years is I don't feel like there were enough times where not only would the people in charge of the brand take a step back and analyze it.
00:42:15
Speaker
but really feel that they had the courage and empowered-ness to be like, this is a problem. We have to change it. Let's go farther, right? I do think when FFG took the brand, they made a lot of medium-sized changes. And many of which I think were necessary because L5R was a product of when it was created originally. And so there's a lot of inclusiveness language and desire not to culturally appropriate that was incorporated when they switched over.
00:42:45
Speaker
But I feel like even there, they could have gone farther or tweaked in a slightly different way, because in some cases, they would take something that was problematic and replace it, but the replacement didn't resonate with the fans. And that's not due to lack of desire or lack of attempt. It was just for whatever reason, the fans didn't like the new thing. And I feel like
00:43:14
Speaker
they needed. And I don't think that was unique to the FFG era. There were times even the AG era where we're like, this is a problem. How are we going to fix it?
00:43:24
Speaker
And I think you need commitment from the brand at the brand level to be like, there are going to be some negative consequences in the short and medium term, but we need to fix it for the long term. And that's something where I think L5R throughout its history would have benefited from maybe not every two years, but every four years that the people in charge of the game
00:43:51
Speaker
on a narrative direction level, have the liberty to say, this is an ongoing universe. We want it to be going forever. What are the things we have to do to make it continue to resonate over that longer scope? And I just don't feel like, and that means both what do we have to change and how do we execute on the change to really make sure
00:44:22
Speaker
we get over that inertia of change. Fans don't like change. Whoever's currently invested is happy with the way things currently are. You have to really nail the landing or the bad faith actors and the disappointed good faith actors are going to dog pile you. And I never, at least in the time I was working on it, never felt like we had that luxury of like, we're going to have to take our lumps in the meantime. Here's what we've got to do.
00:44:51
Speaker
here's how we're gonna execute. And that takes some resources, which weren't always available. That's interesting. And I think there's a lot of insight there to unpack for folks who run community focused events or spaces, especially creatively. Yeah. All right, so last question. Do you have any questions for me? Yeah, I do.
00:45:21
Speaker
What concept or idea or design space that you haven't seen explored, do you think could realistically be executed on with a product
00:45:44
Speaker
that would get enough audience to justify the cost that like what what what pie in the sky thing. That actually could exist, do you think hasn't been made to exist yet? That's difficult to say that you can talk about. Yeah. Well, and a lot of these ideas, you know, the argument of finding an audience is a. Is a bit of a conversation in the indie RPG space on its own, right?
00:46:14
Speaker
You know, I would love to see and this correlates with nothing I've been working on. I think there's room to adapt the idea of first person shooters and MMOs to the RPG space and what we can learn from them. Interesting.
00:46:32
Speaker
and the way those narratives are structured around certain things. One of the things a lot of people like to complain about in D&D is it's too easy to get resurrected. But you don't die permanently in Elder Scrolls if you die. You don't even have to have a resurrection scroll, you just come back.
00:46:52
Speaker
even cost you gold pieces. Or some games do have that, you know, Darkest Dungeon, Diablo had nightmare mode, right? Where you died, you died. But I think there's a lot that video games have taken from RPGs.
00:47:06
Speaker
And I think in a general sense, we don't take enough back of the ideas they've iterated on and use it to improve our products. And that's been a focus of mine for the last year, actually. I normally do not consume video games, mostly because I don't find them engaging. I prefer to hang out with people and play games with people. Sure. But pandemic wise, I was stuck at home a lot without people. And so I was playing more and more video games. Right.
00:47:29
Speaker
And I have come away with a deep appreciation of what I feel are some elegant solutions to design problems that hinder RPG space a little
Fred's Social Media Presence
00:47:39
Speaker
bit. Right. And so I have been spending the last year sort of quietly adapting some of those into my design work or attempting to play test ideas of them, most of which I've scrapped and gone. This doesn't work the way I want it to. Let's iterate, but leverage those lessons and apply them. OK.
00:48:00
Speaker
Interesting. We should stay in touch on that. Sounds good. Yeah. All right. Well, Fred, if folks want to interact with you, find you, or experience your work, what's the best way for them to do so? Well, the easiest way to see my work is just look up Fred Juan and eliminate all the academic results you get, because that's not me. I don't have a very active social media profile. You can find me at Facebook.
00:48:28
Speaker
listed as Fred1. I have a Twitter account, but I don't use it, so it's not useful handing that out. If you want to get in touch with me for work or business, snag me through Facebook. Just say who you are and why, and then I'll give you my email. Otherwise, it's weirdly easy to find who I am if you know who to ask. But in general, the easiest way is Facebook right now. I don't use Twitter often or any of the other social media things.
00:48:57
Speaker
Um, and, but yeah, if you want to see my work, uh, primarily just look up my name and it will pop up. You will get a lot of L5R hits. Sure. All right. Well, Fred, thank you for coming on. It's been a pleasure to talk with you and get to catch up. Thanks for having me. And I'm sure in a week or two, we'll be raving about WrestleMania. I look forward to it. All right. Folks, I am Alan Barr and this has been Radio Free RPG.