Hello my owl friends! We’ve been enjoying and/or enduring a bit of a heat wave here in the Northeast, so I hope you’re keeping cool and enjoying some summer fun. I have been watching the nesting robins under the awning at the back of my house; I first thought I heard hatchling peeping a couple of weeks ago, and the other day, I got to watch one take his first awkward little baby flight of about 6 feet over to the cherry tree we planted this year. 

Before we get into our ongoing updates and topics, it’s a new month and that means there’s a new Dollhouse Drama playset pack available! The theme for June is The Spirit of Competition! It has new playsets for competing in the legally-distinct global sporting event of international goodwill that is definitely not the Olympics, zooming around the racetrack as a motorsports driver in the equally legally distinct Formula racing series, and fighting for honor and glory in a knightly jousting tournament! Get it on itchio or DTRPG!

Project Updates

Expanding the Dollhouse… Again

I really just can’t help myself. I am nearly done with the 36 expansion playsets, the twelve packs of three that were always the plan (or at least, they were once I accepted that it was silly to release them all at once rather than monthly). Then at some point along the way, some months ago, I thought up some fun optional modular rules that I could package as little rules expansions, things that adjust the tone of the game or give some extra crunchy bits for those who might want them. Cool, tack those onto the end as a kind of capstone to the whole product line. 

But now… I can’t help but think, wouldn’t it be great to do some extra playsets to really show off those new rules? To write some special ones that are tailored to those alternate vibes? Of course it would! And in the space of about 15 minutes, I went through my old notes of possible playsets, including ones that I’d decided not to do initially because they’d be a different kind of vibe or require additional rules support, identified a handful that would be really well-suited for showcasing the new rules, and what do you know, the project grows again.

I probably WILL take a break before writing this last batch (six of them, to be specific), because I have other things I need to write sooner. And, honestly, I’m the only one saying this needs to be or should be the last batch. Financially, the game hasn’t really justified the amount of time I’m putting into supplementary material for it, but I’m not in a position where I have to make this a purely financial decision, and the fact that it’s really really fun to write material for this game can be a bigger factor in that choice.

Vestals and Crystals

The rest of my actual design progress this month has been focused on Pax Deorum (my game about the Vestal Virgins and their role as political scapegoats) and Champions of the Crystal Crown (working title)(nostalgic girly sword and sorcery). I created the pre-generated characters for Pax Deorum this month. I think this is another case where simply providing whole characters that players will then tweak and customize a little is the right path for a historical game, just like I did for The Price of Coal. It allows me to build in a lot of historical information without feeling overwhelming, or leaving players hanging with the idea of “well does this type of character make sense for this place and time period”, etc.

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to work out the resolution mechanic and narrative movement for Champions. I’m in a really exciting place where I’m coming up with stuff and then thinking “I don’t know exactly how it’s going to work, but I have a feeling that it will” and this is, by now, a kind of familiar sensation that I AM on the right track. For me, the indicator isn’t a feeling of certainty about anything, but just kind of a gut feeling, or an intuition, that it’s getting closer to where I want it to be. A lot of times in the past where I’ve scrapped a draft of a game, it’s because I DID know how it would work, I DID have a feeling of certainty about the experience it would deliver, but it didn’t FEEL right.

But even on these projects, I don’t feel like I made quite as much progress in June as I would have liked to, because…

Additional Thoughts

What Makes a Good Beginner RPG?

Hey, do you remember last month when I was talking about RPG skills and how I thought there was maybe a model of “good beginner RPGs” that specifically help build those skills for new players? And I said “maybe I’ll write more about this in next month’s newsletter!” Well… I started writing it… and I kept writing it… and I couldn’t stop writing it… and I very quickly realized that it was outgrowing what I could feasibly put in this newsletter, and that maybe a very ephemeral email was not the best place to put it anyway.

So I reformatted it a little into an essay – a very long one – and put it up on itchio for anyone interested in reading it. I’ll summarize a bit here, but I think it’s worth checking out the whole thing if you’re interested in the topic!

In short, I split it into three parts. The first part is ways that a game can reduce friction to make things easier for beginner players, just to help them get their feet wet. This includes things like having simple character creation, a one-shot structure rather than being something that shines in campaign-style play, and a sort of “conventional” narrative structure, rather than something more experimental.

The second part gets into the skills I identified as being common to a wide variety of games and that I think can be built up or encouraged through a game’s mechanics. I grouped these into six groups: character skills, playing together, mechanically-bounded roleplay, not getting what you want, worldbuilding/scene-setting, and narrative structures. In each case, I talked about some games I think do these well and how they do so, mechanically.

The third part puts it all together into what I think is useful to look for when introducing new players, and then a bit of hypothesizing about what good intermediate skills might be, if someone feels that they’ve mastered the beginner skills. I make no promises about continuing with another essay on that topic… but I make no promises not to either.

Mid-Year Goal Check-In

Way back at the start of the year, I outlined my goals for the year, and I thought this would be a good time to take a look and see how we’re doing on them! I’m generally fairly loose about my goals – I’m not opposed to adjusting where it makes sense to do so, and I’m not going to beat myself up if things take longer than I think they will. But I do like to have them, as a kind of guideline for what I want to be working on at any given time.

I had three games in progress at the start of the year that I wanted to have finished and published before the end of the year: Dollhouse Drama, Leaving Avalon, and (my very stupid fan project) Gryphons & Gargoyles. Dollhouse was kind of a gimme, because I had a scheduled release date in January already set for it, and it did indeed come out in January. I released Leaving Avalon last month, so that’s another one done. I still have some writing to do for Gryphons & Gargoyles, but I’ve been poking away at it here and there. Wanting to polish that off is one of the reasons I plan to take a little break from the Dollhouse Drama playsets.

I also said I wanted to put out two public playtest kits before the end of the year, and at the time I committed to one of them being Before the Season Ends, which I did put up in February. I left the second one undefined to leave space for what I might be more or less drawn to work on during the year. At the moment, I think that’s likely to be Blood of the Covenant, though it also requires a lot of writing to get to that point (another reason to take a break from DD playsets). I’m also kind of aiming to have an update to the Before the Season Ends playtest kit before the end of the year, to polish that up a bit more, but we’ll see. 

And then finally, I said I wanted to have two games – undefined in January, to keep it open and loose – ready to playtest before the end of the year, and really, before November so I can actually DO the testing at Metatopia. This is just to get them to the state where I can run them, even if it’s all a jumble that no one ELSE could test, unlike the public playtest kits, that have a decent amount of writing and structure so that someone else could pick them up. At this point, I feel confident about Pax Deorum and Champions of the Crystal Crown for this, although neither of them are actually there yet.

It is funny that it ended up being these two projects specifically – Pax Deorum is nearly my oldest ongoing project (second only to Blood of the Covenant at this point), dating back to 2018, while Champions was not even yet a twinkle in my eye in January, a really recent concept that just totally grabbed me. Sometimes it just works out like that!

Multi-Part Characters

I didn’t actually realize that this is something I was doing until recently, but I seem to have developed a fascination with character creation processes where you cobble your character together out of multiple mix-and-match parts. This isn’t uncommon – I mean, you do it in the current biggest game in the industry, D&D, where you select your race and class, but any combination of the races and classes is possible (and in many of its imitators).

But in a lot of story games, you might be operating off a playbook, which is one part that you make lots of selections on, or you might just have a one-step process of character creation. I don’t KNOW that this is necessarily more common across story games, or if it’s just my anecdotal perception, but I think it is. 

But I’m finding that this is something I really enjoy, because I think when done well, it can simplify character creation and also create some really fun combos for players to explore, a factor for replayability. Like I said in the beginner RPG essay, D&D has really complex character creation, but I don’t think that’s due to the race and class selection, and I think honing in on that could actually really streamline the process if handled differently.

In The Diplomacy of Queens, I split character creation into four quarter-sheets that you assemble into your whole character sheet. In that game, I did it to represent four facets of your character’s life that she has more or less control over: her idea of herself, her family and upbringing, her marriage and home, and her goals and priorities. Each quarter functions a little differently when you’re going through character creation, in terms of what you get to choose and what you have to roll randomly for, so visually and physically separating them also helped make that rule difference feel more natural.

In Pax Deorum, I actually take a cue from one of my all-time favorite games, Montsegur 1244, and split it up into a half-sheet of character information, which you choose, and a half-sheet of your actions/scene seeds, which is dealt to you randomly and is unique, so everyone at the table has a totally different set of scene prompts they’re drawing from on their turn. This again is a way of condensing a lot of historical information into a digestible format, and also ensures the game doesn’t have too much repetition.

In Monaco, I am using a Powered by the Apocalypse format, but I split each playbook into two halves, with one representing how you outwardly present yourself or what your role is (the performer, the thief, the gambler, etc.), and the other representing your goal and what you’re looking for (money, fame, love, respect, etc.). Initially these were all one (the performer wants fame, the thief wants money), but I think there’s something even more tantalizing in letting these be separated and allowing for unexpected combinations – maybe you think it’s obvious that the performer would want fame, but what she really is looking for is love. I am borrowing this from a game that I’ve been looking forward to for ages, Vow of the Knight-Aspirants, which also uses a split PbtA playbook model.

So in three different games, I’ve used this to accomplish different goals, just by doing… basically the same thing, which I think is neat! I don’t think it’s a good fit for everything; I definitely still have projects where I’m doing one consolidated playbook, or a more standard character creation process. But I thought this was a funny realization, given that these are such different projects and have been worked on over such a span of time, that I didn’t realize I had even done it.

Legacy Board Games

One of my regular RPG groups is actually taking a break from our current campaign in order to play the legacy version of Flash Point (“Legacy of Flame”), one of our favorite board games. I love legacy board games, I think they’re such an interesting addition of mechanically-driven storytelling to a normal board game. Years ago, my first experience with it was with Pandemic Legacy, which I played with my boyfriend and which we did TERRIBLY at, but I still thought it was such a fun and engaging experience.

I always want to think that there’s so much potential in terms of product design that we could steal for RPGs – things like special boxes of components that only get unlocked at certain points narratively, stickers to modify rules or the board itself, scratch-off segments to reveal new information on existing cards. I know some RPGs like Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast did some of this, and I think did it to great effect (I have not played Yazeba’s yet, but I have the lovely full box set and it stares at me from the pile of games in my room… waiting… biding its time…). But I also know how expensive things like this are, and how reticent people are to do things like this which make playing the game a one-time experience, where once you’ve modified it, it can’t be reset.

It’s something I can’t see myself ever pulling off, but I will always be rooting for other RPG designers who go for that kind of ambitious component design, and I hope the risk pays off. I have some plans to experiment a bit with an RPG concept where rules shift over time due to player actions (rather than just altering their own character actions, like how leveling up changes the character’s rules in many games), and there’s lots of ways to present that information, but I do love the fancy ones.

Closing Notes

This month, I was looking for something a little different to do – just some kind of novelty, something that would get me out of the house, maybe meet some new people. I’m very much a creature of habit and routine, but even I need that kind of little outing sometimes. So, I looked around at various arts and crafts classes near me, and I ended up taking a two-week book-binding workshop, where we got to make a couple of little hardbound coptic-stitch books for ourselves.

I had a great time! I got to learn something new, make something with my hands, meet new people who are similarly creative and likeminded, and explore a cool new studio space I hadn’t known existed before! Even though it was doing something that ostensibly has little or nothing to do with my main creative outlet, games, it still felt really refreshing and like I could approach my games work with something new up my sleeve, so to speak.

It’s almost a trite bit of creative advice – if you’re feeling stuck, do something totally different! But it’s true and it may be worth reiterating! Even if you’re not feeling stuck, seeking out new experiences and new information is what you draw from when you’re working as an artist, and it’s good to do!

So that’s all we have this month, I think! Thanks for reading, and we’ll catch you again next month!