Hello my owl friends! Remember what I said in my last newsletter about January being my least favorite month of the year? That was foolish of me. I should have remembered February! Although February at least has the saving grace of being short! Maybe it’s better in other years, but this year, I spent a good chunk of the month being sick and the weather was just abysmal (we very nearly reached 50 consecutive days of snow here in Buffalo), so February was not a great time. AND YET, I had some lovely exciting game developments despite that which brightened up the month, so let’s focus on that! Because I’ve got TWO new things out that you can go look at!

Project Updates

Before the Season Ends 

After running another playtest of the game at Running GAGG (a little local con, I’ll talk about it more later), I finished writing up the first version of the beta version of the game, the playtest kit, which is available for free/PWYW on my itch page now (if I earn any money from it, it goes towards art for the final version). I’m really pleased with how the game plays at this point, at least in a single session – one of the things that I have to do before I can even really think about the “final” version is testing it in a campaign play mode, which is different terrain for me.

This was also the first time I tested it with some of the new changes I made after Metatopia, with the feedback I got there, and I was really gratified that those changes all have turned out to be for the better. I also had a bit of a realization that one of the problems I was having had less to do with the SYSTEM and more to do with the SCENARIO I was using to test with, which I feel a little silly I didn’t realize sooner. Scenario design is very real, as anyone who has run a bad D&D adventure will tell you.

To sum it up briefly, one of the issues I was having was an imbalance in how much the players were interacting with each other compared to interacting with NPCs – in the first couple of playtests, there was a LOT of “me as an NPC talking to each player individually” and not as much as I would like of them talking to each other. Except… the scenario I was running was a ball, like a Regency era ball, where each character ends up dancing with a succession of NPCs, only having a little break between sets to catch up with each other. When I throw them into the art gallery or the picnic in the park or anything where the activity of the day doesn’t involve overtly being paired up with NPCs for most of the event, well, that problem is alleviated fairly well.

So, if you’re interested in it, check it out and send me your feedback! People were really helpful with Dollhouse Drama when it was in this playtest release stage, and I’m hoping I can get a similar response for Before the Season Ends! I really appreciate it!

Dollhouse Drama

Speaking of it, the first Dollhouse Drama playset expansion pack is available now! These are add-on packs of playsets, giving you new settings, outfits, accessories, and conflicts to play with, giving you more and more options for your Dollhouse Drama game. There’s going to be a new expansion pack each month for about the next year. This is a different kind of release and a different kind of ongoing game support for me, so I don’t really know what kind of response to expect, but I’m hoping it’s good!

This first playset pack is called Wings, Tails, and Scales, and it adds three new playsets:

• Pixie Valley, which is inspired by Tinkerbell and Winx Club, where the dolls strap on a pair of fairy wings and shrink down to pixie size
• Mermaid Magic, which is very The Little Mermaid or Barbie Mermaidia, and gives the dolls some lovely mermaid tails and lets them explore the undersea world
• Stargirls vs the Void, which is a little Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls meets the Novi Stars dolls, and sees our dolls in outer space having an alien adventure

Other Games

Because of the aforementioned illness (the world’s most annoying cough), I didn’t get too much done on other games this month. I do most of my design and writing outside of the house, at the coffee shop, because I am a stereotype and a cliche, and obviously I could not go there when I was hacking up a lung. I poke away at things at home, but it’s a lot slower and less focused.

What I poked away at was, specifically, a little more preparation for Monaco, the new idea I mentioned last month, and getting myself back into Blood of the Covenant after some time away. It’s looking more and more likely that Blood of the Covenant will be one of the other games I get out as a playtest kit this year, just because I want it OFF my plate for a little while. If I get it set up as a playtest kit and put it out there, that gives me at least a few months where I’m not feeling guilty for not doing anything with it, because I’m waiting for feedback and testing opportunities. I ran a playtest of the previous version of the game last year, and the game itself went in the kind way where it was fine… but I didn’t get any conclusive direction from it, which is frustrating. If I continue down my current path with it, which is the somewhat bolder path I think, at least I can show it to people and get their thoughts, instead of constantly going “oh, well, I think I know what I’m doing but I don’t know” and being wishy-washy about it for another year.

Other Thoughts

How Do You Know When a Game is Done?

Well, this is the million dollar question, isn’t it? I think it goes for every type of creative production, not just games – how do you know when it’s done? How do you know when it’s time to stop tinkering with it and step away? A friend asked me this recently and as much as I hate to say it, I don’t really have a good answer for this.

For one thing, it’s going to differ for everyone with their different goals and creative processes. For me, I have a very wispy artistic answer which is that I just FEEL when it’s done. It’s done when it FEELS done, and not one minute sooner. It’s just in my gut. I certainly can’t give any kind of quantifiable answer, like “it’s done after this number of playtests” or whatever, and I don’t think I’d trust anyone who would claim to be able to do so either.

When I sat down to kind of parse through my feelings, I did add one layer to it, which is that it’s done when I stop feeling nervous about running it for people. I’ve talked before about being a nervous wreck before playtests, just a big horrible ball of anxiety. But as a game gets closer and closer to finished, I get more confident in it, and that goes away. When I know, with a much higher degree of certainty, that the game delivers the table experience I want it to deliver, the nerves pass and it just becomes fun and satisfying to run for people, and that’s a good indicator for me that it’s done or close to it. This might not work for others – I know some of my peers are nervous before every game they ever run, theirs or someone else’s, finished or unfinished, and others are never nervous before running a game, they always go in confident.

One of my friends has mentioned that he considers a game done when he goes a couple playtests in a row without making any major changes. The idea is that if you keep fiddling and tinkering with minor things after that, you’re more likely to end up over-tuning and no longer actually making improvements; you’re just changing things to change them at that point. I know others use the “blind” playtest (there’s a better term for this, isn’t there? I swear there is and I can’t recall it) as a milestone, where you pass the text to someone else to run without you being present, and if they can run it and deliver a good experience based solely on that text, then it’s done. But getting to that point requires a lot of writing that may not actually impact the design itself – the rules and mechanics of a game can be done long before the writing is anywhere close to done.

I’d be interested to hear from people who’ve finished novels or movies or songs about when they knew their project was finished, because I imagine that there’s entirely different markers for other media, and the only universal is that wispy artistic “you just know” feeling.

Designing for My Own GMing Shortcomings

I don’t think it’s tooting my own horn too much to say that I think I’m a pretty good game facilitator. I’ve been doing it for a long time, in a variety of groups and settings, for a variety of different games, and have almost always gotten good feedback. I know there’s people at conventions who look at the schedule and specifically seek out my name, even if they have no idea what I’m running, because they know it’ll be a good experience, either from their past times sitting at my table or from reputation within that convention community alone (which is absolutely going to go to my head one of these days!).

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have my flops. I have run both one-shot games and campaigns that have absolutely flopped. It would be a miracle to do this for as long as I have without having some failures. I am still haunted by a session of Monsterhearts I tried to run at my local con that was maybe the worst I have ever done. There was a truly embarrassing one at Gen Con 2019 where I was running Bluebeard’s Bride for Magpie and it was one of the alternate “mirror” settings and I just completely blew it, even though the three other times I ran that game that weekend went swimmingly.

And this is because we all have our strengths and weaknesses when we’re facilitating games. I’ve half-joked before that a lot of game designers are really designing for ourselves as GMs, trying to make the game that makes it impossible for us personally to have a bad game session. I certainly include myself in that; a lot of parts of my design are compensating for areas that I feel weaker as a GM (if you play my games and you find things over-designed in some areas and under-designed in others, well, congratulations, you have found the areas that I am weak or strong in, respectively).

But it’s always a funny moment when I don’t realize that I’ve done that until it smacks me in the face. Like it’s rarely intentional for me to say “I think I’m bad at this thing, so I’m going to design a game that has really robust support in this area”, you know? It’s typically a bit more subtextual. But I had one of these moments this month, where I realized something I’d added to Before the Season Ends was specifically something that would have prevented, or at least alleviated, one of my previous flops!

Years ago, I was running a Blue Rose campaign for my friends in my Friday night home game, in the AGE system (which I like! The flop here has little to do with the AGE system or with Blue Rose as a setting!). I got the idea into my head to do an arc where they were staying in one city longer term and doing a plot arc that involved building relationships with the key NPCs there and dealing with their respective factions (the gist is that there had been some kind of magical-natural disaster, and the player characters were sent in like magical FEMA to help clean up and rebuild, which is something the residents of the city obviously had a lot of very differing thoughts on).

Except, I never actually felt like I could get a handle on what kind of NPCs they even WANTED to be interacting with, if they wanted more or less of the ones I’d already introduced, which players were interested in which NPCs, why they were clicking with some and not others, and so on. And for my own stupid reasons, I never felt like I could just come out and ask them “hey, which NPCs do you guys actually care about, and why?” I don’t think this was the only reason this campaign flopped, but it was a big one, that I wanted to do this really NPC-heavy thing and then I couldn’t actually manage the NPCs in a way that was engaging to the players.

Well, one of the things about doing a Regency romance game is that you need a lot of NPCs. If you watch or read that genre of stuff, it’s always a big ensemble cast, which is one of the things I love about it! It’s a genre that is mostly about social interactions with a wide variety of people; it doesn’t actually work if you keep it to a small cast (this is why Good Society, as one example, has the connected minor characters linked to each PC, who they will sometimes pick up to play in scenes that the main characters aren’t in). 

If you happen to have already taken a look since reading the second paragraph of this email, you’ll see that one of the things in Before the Season Ends is that each character has goals, and each of those goals has to be tied to an NPC. When the player comes across an NPC that they are interested in achieving that goal with (whether it’s becoming betrothed to them, befriending them, using them as a financial patron, etc.), they have to write that NPC’s name down on their sheet next to that goal, and tell the facilitator that they’re doing so. This is specifically done as an indicator to the facilitator to bring that NPC back in future sessions; it’s saying “I, as a player, am interested in seeing this NPC more”.

I think it works really well, but since I have clearly done so as an effort to correct a past failure, I would think so, wouldn’t I? Anyway, when I made that connection I had a good laugh about it – this particular failed campaign was about 7 or 8 years ago now, and I don’t actually think about it terribly often (the group is still together and we’ve played far too many good games since then to dwell on that!).

At any rate, if you feel like doing game design is sometimes making you more acutely aware of your own weaknesses as a game facilitator, you are certainly not alone in that! 

What I’m Playing

Games at Running GAGG

So, Running GAGG is a little local con hosted by a nearby college and their gaming club, and it’s one of my favorite events of the year. It’s not like a “working” con in the way that many become for game designers; it’s just a chance to see friends I only see once a year at the con and have a nice relaxing con experience. This year I ran a handful of my own games – one session each of Dollhouse Drama and Thief Healer Arcanist Warrior, and one playtest of Before the Season Ends, which I mentioned earlier.

I actually have to partially retract my statement about a game being done when I no longer feel nervous running it, because I did feel it for Dollhouse Drama – specifically because I was running it for my 10 year old niece for the first time. Turns out, even after I reach the point where I don’t care what other adults think of me, I do still need the kids to think I’m cool and fun. Thankfully, she had a great time, and she did great in her first convention RPG.

THAW also went really well; I think that game is just so fun even though it’s not necessarily in my normal wheelhouse. Lots of laughs in this one, and also the fun of trying to explain the MASH oracle game mechanic to a group of adult men who were not girl scouts and did not go to 4th grade sleepovers and thus had no context for it. I don’t run a whole lot of dungeon-crawling games these days, but it felt so good to go through the dungeon-creating process and thinking on my feet to put it all together with no prep. Brought me back to my teen days, when I didn’t have access to any actual real D&D books and was just making up whatever I could come up with (and ripping off Order of the Stick, more often than not).

Good Society: Lady Susan P.I.

In terms of games I played at the con, one of my friends ran a session of the Lady Susan P.I. ruleset for Good Society (it can be found in the Expanded Acquaintance book, for those interested), which uses the same core of the base game to do a little murder mystery story. I was so interested in how they’d tweak the existing game or adjust it to accommodate a very different story structure. For one thing, it’s not really a whodunit, because you decide at the start of the game when you’re setting up the characters who actually did it. I actually volunteered to be the murderer, because when I sat down at the table, something impish overcame me and I said “I want to play someone who sucks,” which I actually want to talk about a bit more next month, if I remember.

In the end I was a little dissatisfied by the conclusion mechanic of the game – you just… vote on what happens (does Lady Susan catch the real culprit, does she think it was natural causes, does she apprehend the wrong person, etc.). I didn’t find that emotionally or mechanically satisfying, as an end to a game session that had otherwise been really fun. I think the core mechanics of Good Society are so tight and smooth for creating the base game experience that the expansion adding a couple little tidbits to try to rewrap an entire different narrative structure was always going to be an uphill battle.

Most of the session was really good, I just struggled with a bit of an anticlimax at the end due to the voting mechanic. It’s very fair, I suppose, I just keep scratching at it in my brain to try to find something better. Of course, mystery mechanics in general are pretty widely-acknowledged to be hard to pull off in RPGs. The closest consensus we have is something like Brindlewood Bay for some parties, or a Gumshoe type deal for others, and those two will cover a lot of bases but can’t satisfy everyone (I like both!). But even I find myself poking away at it sometimes, thinking how I would do a murder mystery game. It’s an interesting challenge!

Closing Notes

One thing that’s been really nice about the last couple years of reading the classics, is revisiting things I hated as a teenager when we had to read them in school, and finding my position has totally reversed. Some things, I think, just hit a bit different when you’ve got a bit more life under your belt. I understand why we assign them in high school, because we can’t actually assign books to adults and say “you need to read this now” and reasonably expect them to do it, but still.

So, one of the books I read this month was John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez. It’s nonfiction, about an actual sea voyage he went on with his marine biologist friend, and that’s part of what induced me to give it a whirl, despite having been a vocal hater of Steinbeck’s fiction in high school. And I loved it. I was completely enraptured. It’s been one of my favorite things I’ve read this year so far.

And my reaction to that gave me a thought. I sat down a couple mornings after finishing it, at my desk, with my coffee, and I thought, “you know, I should really give Moby-Dick another try.” I couldn’t possibly have given it a fair shot in school, when I was 15 and we read excerpts, not even the whole thing. I’ve always heard so many good things about it, it’s still considered possibly THE great American novel, I have friends who swear by it, I should give it another try. And I went out to the bookstore that night and picked up a copy of Moby-Dick. 

It’s split up into a lot of little chapters, which makes it great for bedtime reading (to me, bedtime reading requires lots of small, frequent stopping points, so I don’t do the “just one more chapter, oops it’s 4 am” thing). I’m a few nights into it now, and I have good news: Moby-Dick is incredible. What a great book. I’m so glad to come to it as an adult with a more open mind. 15 was apparently not the right age for it, but 31 is.

So that’s all we have for this month! Don’t forget to check out Wings, Tails, and Scales and the Before the Season Ends playtest kit! Catch you next month!