This post was originally sent to my email subscribers on May 4, 2024. It is being reposted here to create a more easily searchable archive.
| May Newsletter Hello, my lovely owl friends, it’s May and that means spring is really finally springing here, and I hope it is for you too (unless you’re in the southern hemisphere, then I hope fall is… falling?). This is also the first real issue of this newsletter! I had considered starting this off with a big infodump on all my active projects, but the thing is: I have too many of those. At any given time I have at least six games I’m working on and bouncing between as my mood changes, so trying to introduce them all is overwhelming. I think instead, I’ll introduce the ones I consider my top 3 priorities at the moment, the ones I’m trying to focus my efforts on. Then we’ll get into a couple of topics I want to expand on like little mini essays (using predetermined outcomes in games, and a little indulgence on the fear of making similar games), and then some talk on the games I’m playing or looking forward to playing at the moment. Does that sound good as an agenda? Let’s roll! |
| Project Updates Dollhouse Drama I released the initial playtest draft of Dollhouse Drama last summer (the same day the Barbie movie came out, in fact) and since then, my efforts have been focused on refining and finishing this, because the initial response I received was really encouraging. This is a game inspired by playing with Barbies and other fashion dolls as a little girl – the characters in the game are largely blank slates, who gain/lose skills and abilities by changing their clothes. After a handful of playtests, I would say that the rules are finalized, but I’m still ironing out the text presentation of those rules. It’s one thing for the rules to work when I’m at the table to explain them; it’s another for them to work if I hand a rulebook to someone else to understand. I’m also wrapping up the last set of adventure modules that I’m including with the rulebook (I’m calling them playsets, because I love to be on-theme). My desire to provide potential GMs with everything under the sun that might be of use to them is good, and I hope I am making it easier for other GMs, but also: it does mean the playsets take me longer to write than I might like. I have also hired an artist to make a really fun cover for this game! Working with artists is the coolest, and I am especially glad to have been able to hire Jess Kuczynski, whose work you might recognize from Kitchen Knightmares or Skyjacks: Courier’s Call! I recently signed off on a sketch and am eagerly looking forward to being able to share the final version. One Night, Last Chance ONLC is what I’ve decided to call the underlying mechanical system that I’ve been using first for a game called Life of the Party, which is about a group of friends who see their last chance to make big moves on the final night of their favorite nightclub. Ever since I started working on Life of the Party, I was very aware that there was potential to use the mechanics for other settings, and I very much wanted to do so myself AND give others the license to make their own. Since I’ve finalized Life of the Party and started work on the other two versions I want to make (Thrill of the Chase, an Ocean’s 11-esque casino heist, and Heat of the Battle, a group of warriors on the eve of a battle), I realized I ought to come up with an actual name for the system itself, especially if I want others to use it and make their own hacks. I sat down with my notebook and said “okay, what are the key shared aspects of these games that the mechanics convey uniquely?” I wrote two bullet points: “one night” (the games all take place over the course of one night, no extended drawn out timeframes), and “last chance” (it is the characters’ last chance to make something big happen, personally or more externally). And then I decided that sometimes you get it in one try, and the One Night, Last Chance system was born. Blood of the Covenant Blood of the Covenant is my game that has been in development longer than any other. It actually predates The Price of Coal as an idea, going all the way back to 2017 (I remember pitching the concept of Blood of the Covenant to a friend at the convention where we played the game that inspired The Price of Coal). Blood of the Covenant is a game where you play as Angels, representing the conflicting oaths to king and deity that are sworn by a holy knight, as you all jointly guide this one knight on a quest for justice and mercy. It started as a hack of Bluebeard’s Bride, but I don’t think it will be one much longer. At the time the idea was conceived, I had no confidence in my ability as a systems designer, and thought I should stick to only hacking other existing games. That’s changed a lot in the last seven years. I ran the first ever playtest of this game at a small local convention earlier this year, with the aim of finding out if I need to keep this as a strictly Powered by the Apocalypse game (which would be fine if I did!) or if I could change up certain core aspects to better support the idea of the game while keeping some facets I really like. I think at one point I wrote down in my notes “I could Blades this up”, referring to Blades in the Dark, a game that started drawing from PbtA as a point of inspiration, but then diverged into something new and different. It’s not going to become a full Forged in the Dark game either, for what it’s worth, but it is going to change somewhat radically in its next form. I know the shape it’s going to be, it’s just a matter of a LOT of rewriting. Further Thoughts Using Pre-Determined Outcomes A mechanic that I’m finding really fruitful lately is the idea of pre-determined outcomes that players choose between, rather than using a randomizer. Most relevantly, I’m using this in Dollhouse Drama. Players in this game don’t make individual dice rolls. At the start of a session, three pools of d6s are rolled (each corresponding to one of the game’s three stats), and when player characters need to face a challenge relating to one of those stats, they go to the pool of available dice, and choose a failure or a success available to them (there’s more to it than that, but that’s all we need to get into for this discussion). “Why would anyone choose failure?” is a valid question to ask here. In some cases, you might not REALLY have a choice (let’s say if all the successes in the pool have already been used). In some cases, the game incentivizes choosing failure (by rewarding you with some kind of game currency, as Dollhouse Drama does with Drama Points, or other games do with XP). And in plenty of cases, it might just make the story more interesting to fail than it would to succeed. We’re told a lot in game design spaces, especially story-game-oriented spaces, that failure should always produce as interesting an outcome as success does. If it’s not interesting to fail, then don’t bother making the players roll the dice to begin with. And I do agree with that, conceptually! If the result of failure is “try again until someone succeeds”, that’s boring and I don’t want to do it. But that still puts the moment of failure or success on the dice (or other randomizer) rather than in the hands of the players. I think there’s something really potent in giving players the option to choose failure and telling them they will be rewarded for doing so. It’s an extreme form of player agency. It’s one thing for a player to say “I’m going to try and wrestle the laser blaster away from the bad guy”; it’s another thing for them to be able to continue “but I’m going to fail at it, because there’s only one success left here, and I think we want to save that for something more important.” And the GM says “because you failed, the laser blaster goes off in the scuffle and activates the alarm and now you’re completely surrounded by guards” and so on. In playtesting, I found that when groups chose to save limited successes for when they really felt they’d matter, it felt more triumphant to them, like they could see a more tangible connection to the previous failures they’d experienced. There was added tension and satisfaction to planning who could use resources to change the dice pools, or saying “I am going to fail now, because that allows you to succeed later”, or saying “this interaction is one I just want to get out of the way and I am going to choose success so we can move on to the next thing”. Letting players more clearly and vocally designate what was and wasn’t important to them was an unexpected but pleasant result in playtesting (who hasn’t had the experience of rolling a critical success on something useful but not terribly important, and then immediately failing at some crucial moment in a game?). Another unexpected result was seeing players balance how they reacted to things between themselves. In one test, I had a player who was really reluctant to take failures, but another who took them with glee just to see what went wrong. I also saw situations where some players would decline to take a success, feeling that they’d taken enough already, to allow others to do so – an interesting form of quantified spotlight sharing. I’m sure it doesn’t appeal to everyone, and it’s not something I think makes sense to use in my other projects, where the uncertainty of randomization plays a larger role thematically than it would in Dollhouse Drama (key to note, the method I chose de-emphasizes randomness, but it is still random to determine how many successes and failures are available to you to begin with). But right now, I’ve found it really juicy as a different way to interact with challenges, and I think it makes for a really fun unique play state. The Fear of Making Similar Games For years, I said I didn’t have an idea for a Regency romance inspired game (a genre that I adore and am very passionate about), when people asked me if I had made or would make something like that. After all, I would say, we already have Good Society, from the good folks at Storybrewers Roleplaying. That’s a game that really nails the genre, satisfies any itch I have to play a Regency romance game, and has already established a good audience within that space. Until suddenly, a couple years ago, one day I DID have an idea for a Regency romance game. It moves in a somewhat different space than Good Society does – GS covers genteel society of the English countryside broadly, you play men and women and you play characters at different ages, so one might play the aged matron while another plays a wide-eyed new lieutenant in the militia, and so on. But mine, Before the Season Ends (which you will likely hear more about in future newsletters) goes much narrower – it focuses entirely on a group of young women, all debutantes, making their first entry into London society and becoming best friends together while navigating their new life. But all I could think about, for an embarrassingly long time, was “how do I pitch this game to people if Good Society already exists and has already staked such a perfect claim for what I would have to imagine would be a very overlapping audience?” On a logical level, I know this is foolish. How many games are there about vampires? How many games are there about being a superhero? To say nothing of how many games there are about killing monsters and looting treasure in dungeons. So who’s to say that there should or could only be ONE game about Jane-Austen-like Regency society? Especially if they explore that theme in entirely different ways tonally and mechanically. On a purely pragmatic level, it’s also foolish. I have already declined any interest in further crowdfunding, marketing work, or putting in the kind of resources necessary to do this at the level that a group like Storybrewers does. Good Society’s first kickstarter had about 2700 backers; subsequent expansions and reprints had 1000 and 1300 respectively. I typically describe my games’ audience as “up to one dozen of my favorite weirdos” (hi). I’m not competing with them (and I like to think that even if I was, it would be friendly and fun and we could support each other! I like Good Society! Nothing would make me happier than if one of their designers ended up liking my game!). I thought I had worked all this out a WHILE ago. I have proceeded with work on my game (well, I did until October until I refocused on what I mentioned above), without much further care for if people might perceive it as being too similar to another game, because I know it really isn’t. And then recently I found out about another upcoming game, Castles in the Air, crowdfunding soon, that is again very similar to something I’m working on (ironically, it’s ALSO from Storybrewers, I am on their wavelength I guess), although the resemblance is actually maybe the reverse of what it is between Good Society and Before the Season Ends. GS and BTSE take place in the same setting but explore different groups within that setting. Castles in the Air and one of my games, The Diplomacy of Queens, take place in different settings. CITA is in 19th century Gilded Age North America (going by it’s inspirations of Little Women and Anne of Green Gables); TDOQ is set in the High Middle Ages, approximately the 12th century, in the many subordinate kingdoms and principalities and duchies of the Holy Roman Empire. But they explore a very similar group within those very different settings – a group of children who grew up together, but are now adults navigating complex relationships, changing times, and the needs of their families. I have every reason to believe that they will be very different games when all is said and done. After all, I haven’t actually read or played Castles in the Air yet, and The Diplomacy of Queens is still early enough in development that a LOT can be changed if I feel uncomfortable with any similarity that may arise. But I can’t deny that I felt a fresh surge of upset when I saw it. And then guilt for that upset, because why should I have my feelings hurt by the existence of another game that is – ultimately – right up my alley as a player and something I can’t wait to play for myself? But I know I’m not alone among game designers in a general bad feeling when it turns out someone else is making something similar to you (especially someone with a higher profile and more success than you), even if you manage to persuade yourself out of that bad feeling shortly after. I debated on even including this little episode in this newsletter, but I know if I feel this way, others must sometimes too, and I think it helps to be open and talk about it like an adult. Especially when the conclusion I keep coming to is “make my game, play and enjoy the other game, and trust that there is always room for us both”. The Games I’m Into Lumberjills Lumberjills is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter, and I cannot even begin to express how excited I am for this game. It’s less than 50% funded at the time of writing, and I would dearly like to see it fund because it looks like a really thrilling entry on my list of historical games (a subject I’m obviously very into). Lumberjills is about the women of the WWII Women’s Timber Corps, as they find competence, confidence, camaraderie, and joy in the least expected place. Lead designer Moyra Turkington also made the inimitable Rosenstrasse, which was a great inspiration to me while I was working on The Price of Coal, in how to handle difficult historical subjects with grace. One of the phrases from the original Rosenstrasse kickstarter still sticks with me: “Instead of historical expertise, we ask players to bring human expertise to bear.” Lumberjills naturally sounds like it’s a much more joyful experience, and I’m really excited to see how she brings that same delicacy and care to this game too. I joked with a friend when Lumberjills was first announced, “wait, we’re allowed to make happy historical games? No one told me that!” But I truly think there’s something so valuable in finding not just the pains and tragedies of the past, but the pleasures and day-to-day triumphs as well. So I really hope people will back this game and we will see it succeed, because I think it’s doing something that hasn’t really been examined enough and I really really really want to play it. Brindlewood Bay One of my regular game groups just started up a little campaign of Brindlewood Bay, which I knew about but hadn’t had a chance to play before. If you’re not familiar, Brindlewood Bay is about a group of old widows in a small town who form a murder mystery book club and investigate murders together (and the mysteries of the town itself begin to take on a certain… cosmic horror tinge). Very much inspired by Murder She Wrote, etc. I’m really enjoying a few things about this, the first and simplest just being validation that people will play (and will HAPPILY play) a game where you have to play a woman. That’s something I’m always sensitive to in my own games, where that is often the case, even though I’ve rarely seen anyone raise a fuss about it. And an old woman, at that! I’ve found that I like games where I can play a character with a good bit of prior life experience, and BB’s mandate that your characters are all widows – and are often mothers, active in their community, etc. – suits that nicely. I’ve actually found that for me, the hardest part of playing something like Kids on Bikes is… playing a kid, someone for whom the events of the game are the first major things to really happen to them. I also just really liked that all of the special abilities are not only inspired by, but named after fictional detectives; it’s a small touch that I greatly enjoyed. For my character, I chose the Jonathan Hart ability, after one of the titular characters of the 1979 show Hart to Hart (a show I have never watched, on account of being only 30, lol). Closing Notes I make no secret of the fact that most of my games are inspired by books and movies, directly or indirectly, so I’ll close this out with some recommendations. “Sean Connery getting into situations on trains post-Bond” double feature: Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and The First Great Train Robbery (1978). I finally read The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, you know, one of the bestselling books of all time. I don’t know if even half of the people who bought it actually read it, but they SHOULD because it’s fantastic. That’s all for this month, folks – thanks for reading this far! |
Owl Knight Games 