A couple months ago, I had the honor of proofreading Hamlet’s Hit Points, the new work by esteemed game designer Robin D. Laws. In the book, Robin discusses how stories work and codifies the aspects that you find over and over again, the pillars of storytelling. He also dissects three classic stories in very different genres (Dr. No, Casablanca, and the titular Shakespearean work) by putting his code into practice. And all of this is done with an eye toward tabletop gaming.

Gameplaywright, of The Bones and Things We Think About Games fame, released the book at GenCon and it quickly sold out. If you have an interest in stories, games, and especially stories in games, and you missed your chance to get it at GenCon, you can get the book now straight from the publisher.

I’m always looking for solid texts on story and this is a good one. That it’s by a designer I know and respect makes it that much better.

Over at his blog, Daniel M. Perez shares the stomach-twisting playtest premier of his first tabletop design, a reimagining of the popular roleplaying game Vampire.

Daniel’s travails at running his first design reminded me of the terror I felt when running my first game, Little Fears, for folks outside my gaming group. In fact, when Little Fears made its print debut at Origins 2001, I didn’t run a single game of it at the con. I recruited my friend Greg Oliver to do the heavy lifting there. I spent my time at the booth where I was busy learning the ways of convention selling, The Pitch, and answering questions about this strange new game, and fielding a truly humbling industry and retailer response to the game.

Truth is, I’ve only ever been comfortable running one of my own designs, the brilliant-but-canceled Normal, Texas. Even then, the first public game was gut-wrenching (shaking from nerves, sweating a truly uncomfortable amount, laughing a little too long at every funny comment, taking too much time to explain the system) but I eventually found my rhythm demoing that game. I developed a short script that explained the mechanics quickly. I learned to always start the demo in media res. I set up the scenario and got to “Okay, what do you do?” in under a minute. I developed a handful of scenarios and characters I used over and over to the point that I could, throughout play, suggest a variety of actions for players if they were stuck. (Read as: I cribbed from previous sessions featuring that same character played by other people.) That became my demo paradigm. But Normal, Texas is a bit of an anomaly; I’ve never developed that same level of comfort with any other design of mine—no matter how much I’ve played the game.

I get requests to run Little Fears at conventions and I oblige where I can. But I’m not the best person for the job. I think that’s okay. Because designing and demoing are entirely different skill sets. Designing and selling are different skill sets as well. Yes, though closely related, demoing and selling are also different skill sets. Only a three-headed god would be great at all of them. But all are put to the test in the convention environment, moreso than anything else that went into the creation of the game.

In the tabletop world, you learn a lot of different skills, from editing to layout to print buying to conventioneering and only a few people truly excel at all of those. They’re crafts that, if you’re not a natural (and, man, who is), you need to study and nurture to really get good at them. When first starting out, you can only put your focus on so many of those things. If you’re a game maker, you focus on design which is the most important. You want a beautiful product, which will help move your game, so art direction and layout are important as well. If you want your book on shelves, learn your options for wholesale and retail representation.

That’s a lot to learn and that’s only half of it. Once you get a feel for all this, you start to learn your strengths and weaknesses in each field. The bold move is to learn it all. Dive right in; take on every responsibility as your own. It’s bold, yeah. It’s also dumb. That’s what I did and I don’t recommend it. Not at first, certainly, and maybe never. Since I was doing so much, I couldn’t devote the time necessary to truly excel at any one skill. My knowledge was broad, yes, but thin.

There’s no shame in handing off a design to someone else whose willing to demo your game. This goes for playtesting as well. Sure, you want the most direct and pointed feedback at that stage but you may not be the person who is best equipped to get that information.

You haven’t failed because someone else is better at selling your game than you are. There’s a reason the big companies have demo teams and salespeople. There’s a reason your favorite designer may not be running games at Gen Con or handling customers at the booth. It’s not (necessarily) because they’re aloof. They may just not be the best person for the job. Hey, they may be the worst person for the job. (Few things will turn off a potential sale faster than the overly-enthusiastic and tortuous hard sell that I’ve received from a fair number of designers.) You are probably not in a position to hire demo teams or sales reps but you probably have friends who can help out.

Along that same line, there are folks who are brilliant demo or sales people who aren’t great at design. And I’m not holding one above another here. As someone who has been in each position, those who are good at each skill are aces in my book.

I’ve been very fortunate in my career to have worked with top sales folk (calling out T.S. Luikart on this one) and demo people (looking at Caz Granberg here). They both (and others) have made this mid-level designer look good. To all my fellow designers who are also not three-headed gods, I hope you find good people as well (which may be the single best skill of them all).

Last week, publicist, personality, and friend to gaming Matt Staggs put out a call for authors to relay Transformers-related experiences from their childhood. A site he blogs for, publishing giant Random House‘s genre blog Suvudu, was running a week of articles focused on those robots in disguise.

Well, it just so happens I have a Transformers story so I wrote it up and Mr. Staggs was kind enough to include me in the bunch.

You can read my tale of woe and robots (and anecdotes from the other contributors) over at Suvudu.com.

A couple weeks ago, I mapped out the basics of my plan to reprogram myself as a writer. It’s a process I call “Operation: Awesome” because that’s an incredibly uninspired and pretentious title and nothing amuses me more than uninspired and pretentious titles.

I’m bringing it up again because the reprogramming isn’t as simple as following a five step plan. Yes, that plan helps. I’d say the plan has been essential for me even though I’m far from being the A-1 Top Storyteller/Writing Machine that I want to be. This is all a process and I’m in the mix. I’m also fortunate to be in a position where I’m applying what I’m learning and what I’m changing in a real world environment. I’m a working writer in the midst of evolution. I don’t foresee a point where I’ll throw up my arms, declare myself to be fully awesome, drop the mic, and walk off the stage. There isn’t necessarily an end to Operation: Awesome. But there was a beginning.

And it began prior to Step One. It began with conditioning myself. It began with making myself ready to be awesome.
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Last September, I managed to convince the folks at Gameplaywright that I was worthy of being included in their next book. Their previous publication, the well-received Things We Think About Games, was buzzing around the gamer zeitgeist with supersonic speed and I knew I wanted to hop whatever train was leaving their station next.

For those who don’t know, Gameplaywright is the venture of two of tabletop gaming’s brightest stars, Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball. Through my serpentine path through gaming industry, I managed to connect with Jeff years ago. When I heard his outfit was putting together a new thing, I got in touch with him. He put me in touch with Will, who was heading up the next book, a collection of dice stories called The Bones. Will had a pretty full roster, which included smarter and more renowned folks than myself, but was open to hearing my idea.

I pitched him a manifesto, a defense of my favored randomizer: the six-sided die. Will and I hashed out the specifics and I set pen to paper. A couple weeks later, “The Die of the People – A Six-Sided Manifesto” was born.

Will was an amazing editor, cheerleader, and guide. I’d contribute to any book for which he’d have me.

Before you think me hyperbolic in my enthusiasm or insincere in my modesty, check out who I’m sharing page space with: Keith Baker, Greg Costikyan, Ray Fawkes, Matt Forbeck, Pat Harrigan, Jess Hartley, Fred Hicks, Kenneth Hite, John Kovalic, James Lowder, Russ Pitts, Jesse Scoble, Mike Selinker, Jared Sorensen, Paul Tevis, Monica Valentinelli, Chuck Wendig, and Wil Wheaton. Having my name on the list is humbling, to say the least.

Anyway. The Bones. It’s a book about dice. But not about the technical nature of dice. Not math, not chances. It’s about people, traditions, and superstitions. It’s about dice and gamer culture. I have the limited edition hardcover and, though I haven’t read it cover to cover yet, what I have read has been amazing. The standard edition is coming out at the end of this month. I highly recommend you pick it up for yourself, a gamer friend, or anyone who’s interested in games, culture, or the weirder parts of history.

Earlier this year, I kicked off Operation: Awesome, a multi-phase attempt to reprogram myself as a writer. I had spent far too much of my life under this delusion that the traditional rules of writing and story didn’t apply to me. I thought I could just riff and my stories would work. Most often, I didn’t finish the stories. My initial excitement and momentum ran out before I got the car down the road. A lot of the time, before I’d even left the garage. I didn’t understand how stories worked. I didn’t do the pre-production on my ideas to see if they were actually stories or just ideas or hooks with nowhere to go. I would talk a lot about a story I had when I actually had no such thing. I had a premise, maybe, but most often I had a character or a starting point or a scene. And those are not stories.

After a lifetime of saying I was a writer, I decided to actually do the legwork and become a writer.

I needed to push myself. I needed to learn my process and establish good writing habits. I knew I worked well with an outline (another late discovery). I’m a lazy person by nature with a history of feverishly writing down 1000 words then abandoning the story or jumping from one great idea to another without settling on one and doing the work to get it done. A big part of Operation: Awesome is fixing that. Is fixing myself.

You’ve heard this cliche numerous times: Being creative for money is a business. If you’re rolling your eyes at that, go somewhere else. My intent is to make a living from writing. To do that, I needed to be more than just creative. More than just a guy with good ideas. Everyone else you’re competing against, for an agent, an editor, a publisher, for the audience’s time and money, is creative. They all have good ideas. Being creative and having good ideas just isn’t good enough. You need follow-through. You need discipline.

At least I do. And I didn’t have it. But I was going to get it. I came up with Operation: Awesome and immediately started putting it into motion.

Phase One was learning the craft. For a guy who had spent the past ten years in publishing, in writing and game design, I knew frighteningly little about writing stories. I had the mechanics of writing down (spelling, punctuation, paragraphs) and an ear for dialogue (still my strongest suit) but no concrete idea about construction, payoff, character and story arc.

I studied screenwriting, particularly the late Blake Snyder‘s wonderful Save the Cat! series of books. It’s not a book of theory, it’s a book based of codified observations. Blake’s humorous and insightful approach to story construction was an eye-opener. I put Blake’s ideas into practice in late 2008 with a screenplay I’ve recently entered into competition (wish me luck!). I use his ideas in every story I draft. It’s my first step once an idea has taken shape. It’s my test as to whether an idea is actually a story yet.

Phase Two was laying out what type of writer I wanted to be. If I couldn’t define and sell myself, I couldn’t expect anyone else (agent, editor, publisher, reader) to. I needed to be honest about genre and market. I needed to hone my abilities and direct the other phases of Operation: Awesome toward that genre and market.

I know some writers hate defining themselves or, worse yet, think they defy definition. Yet, the successful authors I know, those who produce and sell, can tell you their market. They may branch out (or wish to) and may struggle to accept it but they know it.

I am aware of my interests and strengths and they are not burdens. They help me focus, help me sell myself, help me be a better writer.

Phase Three is research. As a creative, my life is research. Observation and experience is research. But I had a huge gap in my research process: reading. I read a lot as a kid but hadn’t made the time in recent years to get back to it. My life had leaned more towards games, particularly video games, so I spent my time with them. My reading had suffered.

Once I knew what I wanted to write, I needed to read. Lucky for me, what I like to write and what I like to read are the same thing. (Is this true for other creatives? I do not know.) I’ve been on a reading bender, having finished seven books in the past three weeks, with more waiting.

Phase Four is writing. Without this step, the other three are for naught. And by “writing” I’m not just talking about stringing words together. A big part is pre-production: mapping the beats, growing the characters, writing the outline. All of this is necessary for my process. Without them, stories either don’t get done, get done poorly, or need a lot of back and forth (which I could have prevented if I’d done the pre-production). Once that’s done, I do the writing. I don’t miss writing without an outline. It’s not more romantic, the stories and characters still have plenty of surprises, and I can lean on the pre-production when the muse doesn’t show up to work which means I can finish what I start.

Obviously, I go back through Phases Three and Four. They’re not dead ends or one-ways. Reading is an important part of the writing process. (Yet another old chestnut I ignored at my own peril.) Sure, Phase Five is probably selling books and a series or two but I’m not worried about that yet. My goal is to become a better writer. To become the writer I want to be. Once I’m there, I’ll think about getting published.

Yesterday, on my Twitter account, I posted:

I prefer games that are more focused on stuff I can do than on stuff I need to know.

This is something I’ve been turning over in my head for a while. I have shelves full of games, including a lot of big lines, but I keep coming back to the same handful over and over again. While I rarely get buyer’s remorse over a game purchase, I do look at some and wonder what it would take to get me play the game. Or, perhaps more telling, to run the game for friends. For playing, all I’d really need is time and an interested party. But in order for me to run a game, I need it to really speak to me, to compel me to heave the conch shell of game moderator and all that entails.

Now, part of this is the game’s premise. I’m not that into standard fantasy. Of the broad genres, it’s my least favorite by far. I’m more easily drawn into urban fantasy, modern horror, and dark future games.

Some of it is design. I don’t care for systems that bend over backwards to simulate the real world. Back when I was more active in the game publishing scene, first with Key 20 Publishing and then at Human Head Studios, I didn’t go long without being pitched “the most realistic game system ever designed!” I didn’t bother looking at a single one. These types of simulations bore me. I want systems that have something to say or that emulate interesting source material, such as crime fiction or the beats of a television series. If I want a realistic game system, I’ll plagiarize a physics book.

But some of it, I daresay a fair chunk of it, is presentation. Not artwork and font styles, though they don’t hurt, but ratio of useful player material to game fiction and setup.

I have to be very smart about how I spend my free time; I don’t have a lot of it. Frankly, I have zero interest in reading 100,000 words on stuff that will never come into play. I don’t want supplements that expand upon this or advance an in-game timeline. I want premise, ideas, setting, and enough fuel to light my own fire. Some folks thrive on this stuff. They eat it up. They want to exist in a shared world that folks are participating in all over the world. I make no bones that this is a preference. I want to tell my own stories. I want tools to do that, not a bunch of fiction that’s just trivia to memorize.

I prefer games that are more focused on stuff I can do than on stuff I need to know.

This is probably what makes me such a bad freelancer. I want to create or expand game function more than I care to add to a game’s fiction. I don’t mind writing about someone else’s world (I can imagine a few game lines for which I’d like to write stories) but I want it to be whole fiction, not backstory, not continuation of metaplot. If I do add to another game line, I want to build a new facet, explore a new idea, add substance to what’s already there and give players more to do. By this I mean new organizations, new character types, new systems (magic, hacking, stunt driving, whatever fits the game or new idea presented for the game).

That said, I am currently available to novelize any major film or video game releases, thank you.

In my own games, that’s something I struggle with. I want to give players plenty of stuff to claw into without dictating a strict canon which will invalidate their own games as I continue to build on it with supplements. It removes power from the players, and games are nothing if not power tools. The supplements I’m currently designing for Little Fears Nightmare Edition are idea-focused.

I’m currently reading Robin D. Laws’ The Esoterrorists RPG. It’s a slim book, 96 letter-sized pages, with big margins and fair-sized type. It’s a quick read and a light system. It’s also not written for the new gamer so the text can be pretty assuming and doesn’t hold anyone’s hand. As a gamer with nearly two decades of RPG experience under his belt, I can ride its wave. If this were retooled for the newcomer, it’d probably be a signature thicker at 112 pages.

And I’m loving it.

The thing I like best about it: It’s all ideas. It’s stuff to do. There are two sections totaling five pages that I’d consider backstory. I’ll sum it up: “You are a normal person who is part of a secret society. You protect humanity from supernatural bad things.” That’s the hook. And it’s enough.

The rest of the book gives systems which provide the tools you need to go forth and create. The Esoterrorists is heavily biased toward premise. Anyone with exposure to The X-Files, Supernatural, and even straight-up procedurals like CSI can see how to use the premise and these pieces to great effect.

This isn’t to say I don’t like supplements. I do. I like supplements that give me new toys, new systems, and most importantly new ideas for stuff to use in my own games. One of my favorite things about Eden Studios’ All Flesh Must Be Eaten is that it’s a simple idea (“Zombies are on the loose. You have to fight them to survive.”) that is iterated again and again and again. The corebook focuses on the game systems you’ll need, based on the UniSystem (and, in the Revised corebook, d20 as well). The back is all different premises, brief histories behind the zombies, and samples of zombies built specifically for that setting.

Of all Eden’s lines, AFMBE is its most supplemented. And these supplements do what I love for supplements to do: They give me ideas. Character books, new types of undead, new (blissfully brief) backgrounds for zombie invasions, using zombies inside other genre settings (Westerns, pulp, sci-fi, etc). There’s no metaplot, no exhaustive breakdowns of thirteen core zombie infections and the five common mutations, or 3,000 years of history for the mass conspiracies behind the infestations and outbreaks. It’s all meat, no filler. Human meat, sure, but as my Aunt Zombilena once said, “Anything that can no longer press charges counts as food.”

Now, there are some major game lines I like to play. White Wolf/CCP’s World of Darkness line is one. But I don’t read the fiction, memorize the faction histories and current rivalries, keep up with the moving and shaking of the official game organizations. I don’t want to play in their game. I want to use their game rules to create my own game with my own group. I’ve been chastised before by fans of certain games who think I should not play a particular game unless I’m current with official canon.

I don’t mean for that to be indicative of my counter. I don’t think folks either fall into my camp or are slaves to canon. But I do know a fair amount of gamers who love to dig their hands into setting, who anxiously await the book that will tell them the history of their favorite player class or fantasy race. When I look forward to a release focused on a favored class or fantasy race, I’m looking for new bits, new ideas. I usually have to skim through the fluff to get to the parts I’ll use.

I realize mine is a preference, and possibly a minority one within the hobby, but I’m certainly not alone in it. I’m sure I might find my own exceptions—especially if a favored show was ever adapted into a full game line*—but the big book game lines rarely fit the mold. I have great respect for the folks who build those elaborate, incredibly detailed game worlds. Some of the designers are good friends of mine. As a whole, as writ, as law, those big books don’t appeal to me. As toolkits wrapped in six inches of padding, I’m much more comfortable.

Because above all, I’m not looking for something to know about a game world; I’m looking for something to do within a game world.

*For which I am also available, thank you.

I had been anticipating the PS3 title Heavy Rain for years. When Sony released the game on February 23rd, I tore through it, posting reactions to the experience on my Twitter account. These ravings caught Jeff Tidball’s attention and he asked if I’d my impressions up for GamePlayWright, the site that he and Will Hindmarch run.

I agreed without hesitation.

Even if you’ve no interest in video games particularly, if you’re a fan of story and wonder how we can grow it as storytellers and game designers, I urge you check out the article, which just went live:

“Dancing in the Puddles of Heavy Rain”

Enjoy!