I wanted to talk a little bit about how I design games. I don’t know that there’s anything particularly revelatory about my process, but as I’ve noticed an increased interest in genre sim (LOWERCASE S, we’re not talking about GNS here), I thought it might be interesting and/or useful. (And, since I promised full disclosure when it came to Blowback, I thought you might like a peek into how the game came about in the first place.)

I’m heavily inspired by media and pop culture. This should be no real shock to anyone remotely familiar with what I do, play, or talk about. When I start really digging on a book/TV show/movie or genre, it makes me want to play games that run in a similar vein. Which, half the time, means that I have to write a game that runs in a similar vein. So I start reading/watching critically, to figure out the formula.

Especially in television, the word “formulaic” is a derogatory dismissal, but almost everything runs off of some kind of formula. Really successful formulas provide a familiar structure while leaving a lot of room for variables, which makes each episode feel fresh and intriguing. The trick is finding the right balance between formula and variable, and making sure the variables are in the right places. So first thing: I consume a lot of the media in question, and I come up with hypothetical versions of the formula, refining until I’ve gotten it down. If I’m going for something genre-broad, I’ll concentrate on one particular inspiration and then cross-check my formula with another property in the same genre, to make sure that things are basically in the same ballpark; normally you’ll see a lot of, but not total, overlap between properties. In this case, for Blowback, I broke down the formula of Burn Notice and cross-checked it with the Jason Bourne trilogy and Spy Game.

The formula for Burn Notice goes like this: there’s a dude* who needs help. There’s a personal mission the main character has (which is a continuous mission throughout the series, a mystery he needs to solve), and he has to take care of his client while juggling his personal mission and his interpersonal relationships. The client missions tend to bring him closer emotionally to his loved ones, and his personal mission tends to drive them away. There is a strong antagonistic relationship between the main characters and a government agency, who serves as the foil.

Checked against the Bourne trilogy: there’s no dude who needs help, just the personal mission (continuous throughout the trilogy, a mystery he needs to solve), and he needs to take care of his loved one (first movie) while juggling that relationship and his personal mission. The personal mission takes the ultimate toll on his relationship. There is a strong antagonistic relationship between the main characters and a government agency, who serves as the foil.

Checked against Spy Game: there’s a dude who needs help. There’s a personal mission the main character has (to retire without incident), and he has to take care of his client while juggling his personal mission. The mission for the client brings him closer to his loved one (which is also the client), and the personal mission involves a strong antagonistic relationship between the main characters and a government agency, who serves as the foil.

Okay, so the formula works. Now on to a brief digression about serial media, which is in and of itself, a formula.

Serial media works on a triple arc: there’s the short-term arc, which is that of an episode or a chapter or a movie subplot. There’s the mid-term, which is that of a television season or a whole book or a whole movie. Then there’s the long-term arc, which is that of a television series, the entire line of books, or the whole movie trilogy. Ideally, in each small unit, each of the three arcs is advanced in relation to their size.  Meaning that in each small unit, 100% of the small arc is revealed, less of the medium arc is revealed, and a sliver of the large arc is revealed. So when you look at the three-arc formula, you plug the elements of your genre into it.

Going back to Burn Notice. The small arc is about the client job, the medium arc is about the personal mission, and the large arc is about the mystery that needs solving. (You’ll notice I separated the mission from the mystery, even though I conflate the two earlier in this post. Especially with Michael Westen and Jason Bourne, the emotions of the personal mission— getting revenge— is separate and can be moved forward without necessarily moving the mystery forward in any tangible way.) Awesome. So then you just make mechanics that push these things to happen in those chunks. (Blowback does this with the job structure, the Push Pyramid, and the Agency’s options when rolls are failed.)

Now, there’s always a point at which you’ve modeled things too closely, and it stops being fun and starts just being a fanfic generator. So at each stage of the process, I ask myself “Is this all the structure I need?” in this case, it’s a resounding no. The job-push-failure structure gives me the main characters’ conflict arcs in a vacuum, but doesn’t provide any structure or incentives for making the relationships between the characters come alive. So let’s go back to the Burn Notice formula.

He has to take care of his client while juggling his personal mission and his interpersonal relationships. The client missions tend to bring him closer emotionally to his loved ones, and his personal mission tends to drive them away.

Good. Great. But WHY do the client missions bring him closer emotionally to his loved ones, when his personal mission drives them away? Because the client missions are more sympathetic. They’re dudes in distress. Helping a client is unquestionably good and shows your humanity. Getting involved with the Agency again drives away your loved ones because the Agency uses your loved ones against you, turns them into liabilities, and gets them hurt. So the important thing is to make the clients sympathetic, the Agency dangerous, and relationships easily strained. (Blowback does this with the easy job generator, the push pyramid and other Agency tools, and the stress charts).

Is this all the structure I need? Well, no. There’s a feeling of being all alone in this genre, too— the lone vigilante (backed up with friends). How do you express that dichotomy? And how do you avoid the Wolverine issue— having a group of three or four badass loners who never work together? The non-spies in these properties— Jason’s girlfriend, Michael’s mom— are important, but they don’t follow the same rules as the other main characters. That’s what allows them to be supportive of the spy characters while allowing them to still essentially function like lone badasses. So that has to get modeled too. (In Blowback, the difference between the stress chart for Civilian characters and the stress chart for Professional characters takes care of this.)

The really interesting thing here is the stuff that gets left out when you make a game this way. For example: Blowback doesn’t have a combat system, or hit points, or anything of the ilk. A conflict is a conflict, and the GM can injure you if he makes that move from the Push Pyramid, but that doesn’t mean you get a rock-climbing penalty or anything. Because in this genre, physical injury adds tension, but never concretely endangers a character’s ability to succeed at any given task— whether it’s getting your girlfriend to take you back or breaking out of a Turkish prison.

Anyway, that’s the broad-strokes overview. I’ll make another post soon about identifying variables and exploding options.

Filed under: Blowback, Dissolute Games by Elizabeth
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I’ve been working quietly on an expanded, revised edition of It’s Complicated for quite some time now, in anticipation of being a guest at Anime North next month. I’d been thinking I’d debut it there, but in order to help fund the print run, I thought I’d give you guys first crack at it.

What’s different?

It incorporates a lot of the notes and advice given in the Online Play Edition, as well as new insights, tips, and techniques on playing the game. The board is completely redesigned and easier to follow, and the layout is cleaner and simpler. The entire book is beautiful full-color, with great anime-inspired illustrations. Finally, there’s a thorough section at the end of the book listing all kinds of media that inspired It’s Complicated and how each fits with the game itself. (Wanna know how to play Fight Club with It’s Complicated? This is the edition for you!)

What’s the same?

None of the rules have changed, and it’s got the same super-cute 4.25″x7″ form factor (although it’s now perfect-bound instead of saddle-stitched). This edition just makes the rules themselves clearer, and expands the ideas of what you can do with it, using real-world examples.

Cut me a deal, E!

Okay, here’s your deal. Since it’s full-color, expanded, and perfect-bound, it will be sold at the con and after for $20. People pre-ordering through me can buy it for $16, or the PDF for $10. If you already purchased either the original book or the Online Play Edition, I’ll take another $4 off of those prices— making the book $12 and the PDF $6.

Where do I buy it?

Here!  Just choose from the options below.

Book (no previous purchase)

Book (with previous purchase)

PDF (with no previous purchase)

PDF (with previous purchase)

Filed under: Dissolute Games by Elizabeth
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For some reason, comments aren’t working for me– I can’t seem to be able to comment, and I don’t know if this is a just-me thing or if it’s something other people are having issues with. (I think it must be a wider problem, because the spam comments have slowed down a lot.) Someone did manage to comment, however! This is what GBSteve had to say:

Do you have to pay for playtesting? I’m sure there will be volunteers for such an exciting project (like me).

Also, unless you think it supping with the devil, you might consider other sources of venture capital, arts grants or support from publishers/distributers. Some of these guys can be very flexible.

Here’s the thing, Steve. What I “pay for” when it comes to playtesting is, honestly, stuff I’d pay for anyway, 90% of the time. I love making a good meal for people when they come over to play. I like going to cons; I always go to JiffyCon, but I’m on the fence about PAX East because the tickets are $50. (That said, I am more than likely going to suck it up and go; it’s a new con, a break-off of one that’s extremely popular, and I want to get my games in front of new audiences.) So I posted playtesting to kind of acknowledge that it’s one of those invisible costs: I do these things to promote and improve my game, and they cost money– but they are things I’d probably still do for fun if I wasn’t working on a game. That said, I will take up every single playtesting offer I get, and hope to have a rough but mechanically complete playtest document ready soon after JiffyCon, November 14th.

As to other sources of revenue: it’s a fine line. Ultimately, I want people to give me money when the game is finished, because it will be more likely to become profit and not sunk into production costs. Also, this is approximately 20 times my starting budget for any of my previous projects, so I feel a bit silly saying “I need more money than this, guys.” That said, there are a couple of printers, etc. that I’m planning to talk to about cutting me a deal, and explaining the nature of my project to them, etc. It’s interesting, because the consumers of indie games are, I feel, far more likely to need the services of a quality POD printer than most customers that buy things that have been printed on demand, so perhaps there’s a promotional thing I might be able to work out with them. I’m going to go over print quotes in my next post, actually.

Filed under: Blowback, Dissolute Games by Elizabeth
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So, a big part of the challenge was that I have one year to make the game: I’ve got to do everything I said I’m going to do by October 31st, 2010. This is going to be a bit of a challenge, but as I’ve already got part of the game written and the rest tentatively mapped out in my head, hopefully it will not be impossible. But, like with the budget, the most important thing in budgeting time is figuring out major landmarks in your timeline and in your production schedule. It’d be nice if some of the landmarks in production intersected with landmarks in the timeline. So here’s my shot:

Polished playtest document: Dreamation (February 18th, 2010) – The game itself may still have some minor bugs to work out, but all the parts will be there, even if they’re not moving completely smoothly. At this point I plan on having the game thoroughly playtested online, and need to introduce it further to face-to-face tabletop groups, especially testing its one-shot capabilities and how easy it is to explain to new groups.

Written “finished” draft: PAX East (March 26th, 2010) – this includes the entirety of the text. I’m not calling it a playtest document, because the playtest document is constantly written and revised as people play it. I’ll talk more about how I like to playtest once I’ve spat out this whole timeline. This is the first draft of the final rules.

Edited draft: May 30th, 2010 – I want to get this combed over a few times for clarity and consistancy, by my editor, by playtesters, and by one person who’s never seen the game before.

Book back from the printers: DexCon (Sometime in July, 2010) – I want to get some copies of the book into people’s hands before GenCon.

Get married (July 24th, 2010) – This part makes me a bit nervous that I might miss some of the spring/summer deadlines. Hopefully I can get ahead of schedule!

Book goes into wide release: GenCon (August 5th, 2010) – I know, it’s trite but it works. I think honestly I’ll want to go to GenCon more to hang out with people and celebrate getting this sucker done than to shill.

Online support finished: October 31st, 2010 – This is the stuff that makes the most sense to do last, since it requires the game to be completely done first.

This is pretty ambitious, and so it requires a little shift in my plans. I’d originally been planning to give a PDF of the game to everyone who posts an Actual Play report on Story-Games, The Forge, or RPG.net. That is no longer the case. For now on, every playtester who posts an AP report will get an actual physical copy of the book. Hopefully this will lead to more feedback, which will lead to more quickly addressing any problems.

First deadline: 121 days

Filed under: Blowback, Dissolute Games by Elizabeth
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So, my “real job” for the last eight years has been running my own photography business. It’s meant good things for me when it comes to designing games: I’m already really familiar with sticking to a budget, how to make that budget, and dealing with vendors. The approach I take to budgeting for a game is very similar, but not identical, to the approach I take when budgeting for a photo shoot.

There’s the total amount of money you have, and the total number of priorities you have. In this case, the total money on hand is $1000. So what are my priorities?

• Game Text
• Printing
• Art
• Layout and Design
• Editing
• Playtesting
• Promotion
• Online/electronic support

My first question is always the same: what here can I do for free or cheap? I’m doing the writing and layout myself, so that’s not going to cost me. Wait: there are two things I’m having trouble with, design-wise: I want to do something more with the cover I have, and I want the tables to look better than they look. I’ll have to allot some money for those two things. There are always minor playtesting costs; I can take any overly-large playtesting costs from my budget, I guess, but that stuff might be best coming from additional sources (more on those later). The good thing about Two Scooters is that we work as a collective, so I’m going to go ahead and assign Shreyas the editing, since he assigned a lot of the writing in Radiant to me. Finally, I’ve been in talks with someone to help me with the online support in exchange for the use of a SDK for iPhone, so the cost there is reduced. Let’s look at that list now:

• Game Text
• Printing
• Art
• Layout and Design Tables and cover
• Editing (assigned to Shreyas)
• Playtesting (coming from additional funds)
• Promotion
• Online/electronic support (negotiating for cheap)

Now I’ve got to look at what’s left and rank them, considering both what’s most important to me and what I know is going to cost the most money. Print costs are probably the first thing, both in importance and cost. Art next, then promotion, then online/electronic support. I’m putting the tables and cover last, not because they’re the least important, but because they’re what I think I can do for the least amount of money. The next step would be to assign them percentages of my budget, but I don’t have a quote I like from a printer yet. I’ve got three printers who still need to email me quotes, so that will be its own post in the future.

So far, this has been pretty much identical to how I budget for a photo shoot. Here’s where it changes: I mention additional funds. Since the thousand bucks is coming from the first DivNull Lark, I’m in a position where I feel it’d be okay to supplement my budget if necessary, or if there are small things that I don’t think should come from the main funding. Examples: I like to throw playtesting dinner parties, but I don’t see the need to pay for the food with my budget. Likewise my admission to JiffyCon next month, where I plan to playtest the game. PAX East? Possibly. Depends on how done the game is in March, and whether I think reaching a new market that large might be worth 5% of my budget (it might). Irregardless, it’s important to identify these possible additional sources of funds, so that I have a good idea of when these funds may become available, what from my personal life they may cut into, that kind of thing.

• Preorders
• Personal money
• 2009 tax return

So, preorder cash isn’t going to come until the end of the development cycle. Tax return won’t come until February or March at the earliest. Personal money always sort of exists, but in low amounts. That means lots of low-cost, semi-regular stuff is best paid for with personal money: that sounds like playtest costs to me. Since the other two sources have specific timeframes attached to them, I probably shouldn’t direct any of my costs to those financial resources until I have a development timeline worked out.

Which will be in my next post.

Filed under: Blowback, Dissolute Games by Elizabeth
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So Les Ward of DivNull.com ran a very generous contest over on Story Games:

This post started with the following hypothetical:

Posted By: Valamir Imagine said benefactor announced “Pitch me your game ideas and the designer whose idea I like best will get $1000 to bring it to fruition”

Other popular game design forums maintain, however, that debate about hypothetical situations are useless and only “actual play” matters. So, let’s play…

As of now, there actually is a benefactor (i.e. me) saying “Pitch me your ideas for how you would use $1000 to either make a new game or improve an existing one that hasn’t been released, and I’ll donate $1000 to the idea I like best to help make it happen”.

Conditions:

• Only pitches made on this thread, publicly, will be considered.
• No pitch made after 15 October 2009 will be considered.
• Donation will be made on or before 31 October 2009.
• If your pitch is selected, you have until the last minute of 31 October 2010 to make good on the idea. At that point, the world will know if you are person of your word, or a failure.
• This donation in no way affects any rights you have to your work. Nor does the donation create any liabilities from your work for the donator. Succeed or fail, you’re on your own.

As you might imagine, it garnered a lot of interest and 11 great pitches were offered up. In the end, I was surprised to be awarded the $1000 prize for my pitch for Blowback:

And true to my word, I’m going to be blogging about the hard numbers and financial information here. In the next few days, my webmaster’s going to set up separate pages (and feeds) for both the game information I post and the nuts-and-bolts financial information I post: when that happens, I’ll make a post with links to both feeds (and a link to a feed with both). Future posts will go over my quest to find a reasonably-priced printer, how I’ve found inexpensive art, and the way I tend to make budgets. I don’t present this information as a mandate: if anything, it’s the opposite. This is how I do things on a $50 budget, and it’s also the way I’ve decided to do things on a $1,000 budget. I’m certain I will make mistakes.  It’s my hope that what is an invaluable learning experience for me can also be a learning experience for you as well.

So again, big thanks to Wordman: his investment in my game is quite an honor, and I’m looking forward to making it worth his while. Yours too, if you read along.

Filed under: Blowback, Dissolute Games by Elizabeth
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Though initially I was thinking of Blowback as specifically being “The Burn Notice game,” its influences and inspirations are pretty diverse: Grosse Pointe Blank, My Blue Heaven, The Bourne Identity/Supremacy (haven’t seen Ultimatum yet), and more. The thing that surprises me as I get deeper into the game is noticing the commonalities between things like Burn Notice and the Bourne franchise; both have protagonists who are trying to figure out what happened to them and why, and just want their former handlers to give them what they want. There’s another important thread between these franchises, and that I think also holds true for the other sources of inspiration as well.

You’ll notice that I haven’t listed James Bond as one of the source inspirations. You might think that’s crazy and sacrilegious, or you might assume that it’s so obvious an influence for any spy game that I just chose not to list it. I’m a huge, huge fan of the Bond movies– I’ve seen every single one!– but this is not the James Bond game, unless someone hacks it for that reason. The principle difference is this: in the inspirations I list, and in Blowback, killing and dying are big deals. They have serious consequences. Sure, for 007 some people dying is a big deal; Vesper, Bond’s wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, people like that. But it’s still cool to shoot and kill mooks with no repercussions, because he’s Bond and a badass and that’s what he does. But whether you’re John Cusack or Jason Bourne, the people who die matter. If they died because of something you did, or because you couldn’t save them, or because you had to kill them. It’s a huge thing. There are consequences, because every body is another link back to you for the police or the vengeful family or your former handlers and associates trying to get leverage on you. There are consequences because you have to look at your face in the mirror every day.

That’s not to say that there isn’t, or shouldn’t be, killing and dying. But it’s not a frequent thing, and when it happens everything changes. Life isn’t cheap and killing isn’t easy.

Filed under: Blowback, Dissolute Games by Elizabeth
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Analysis scenes happen before the job itself. There can be any number of these scenes, depending on what exactly you need to do in order to prepare yourself for the job at hand. The first Analysis scene in a job usually involves the following:

•    Being approached by the Client
•    Getting a rundown of the job
•    Determining payment, if any

Then the group decides who is running this job. Sometimes, maybe even most  of the time, the person who should run this particular job will be obvious anyway. The person in charge gets to use his or her skills and whatnots for free, of course. Bringing in the other team members costs a favor each. Of course, sometimes the client has a tie to one of the team members who, for whatever reason, isn’t suited to running the job; putting someone else in charge on a job where you brought in the client yourself costs you a favor.
The person in charge of the job brings in the team members who will be involved and delegates tasks. These tasks can involve the following:
•    Doing reconnaissance
•    Laying traps
•    Rallying forces
•    Creating diversions

There are special mechanics for doing these things, which can get you tokens to place or burn during the Mission scenes, or can cost you in the Mission scenes as well. This is the stuff where your skills and whatnots are really useful; the dice mechanic here is probably a simplified version of the pendulum mechanic* used in the Mission scenes, or maybe is an independent mechanic that informs the pendulum mechanic.
Anyway, there are a series of scenes in which individual characters do awesome things in order to set themselves up for success on the mission, and people get together at the end of the Analysis phase to finish planning for the job.

*More on the pendulum mechanic in a following post

Filed under: Blowback, Dissolute Games by Elizabeth
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(Let’s call GMs “The Agency” for a little extra flavor.)

So when you begin a game, you come up with your characters– the stuff I mentioned earlier, you know, your dossier. Everyone plays an Artist or a Lifer, as well as a Civillian who is important to another player’s Professional. Just because you come up with a Civillian doesn’t mean they have to be involved in every job or every session of the game; sometimes it’s nice to have them waiting in the wings for when they’re needed, and some Civillians will turn out to be more important than others. The Agency controls everyone else.

The Professionals are trapped in the same town where the players are playing the game. They’re stuck there after one big job went horribly, terribly wrong, and the Agency blacklisted them as a result. The group can brainstorm the details that the Professionals would already know: where the job took place, what the goal of the job was, what the unexpected issue was that tanked the mission, and how they barely got out alive. Since everything was planned meticulously for a job that big, obviously the job was sabotaged or the team was set up. Throughout the game, the characters will learn bits and pieces of the truth behind that fateful mission, and eventually be confronted with the choice to return to the life of a spy, retire, or something in between.. And then live (or die) with the consequences.

They find out this information in a progression of jobs for folks around town.

When making a job, The Agency rolls a d6 to determine a client:

1. Dirty Gone Clean
2. Innocent Bystander
3. Fall Guy
4. Justice Seeker
5. One of the Professionals
6. One of the Civillians

There’s always a bad guy who’s the entry point into the operation. The team will have to do some recon to figure out who it is and come up with a plan to exploit the person, but for the general template of the Mook, roll another d6:

1. Club Kid
2. Hired Muscle
3. Suit
4. Con Man
5. Zealot
6. Honeypot

And finally, roll a d6 to find out who the Boss will be. Sometimes they know it upfront, and sometimes it’s dramatically revealed later. Which works best for you should be obvious (ie, the Sleeper isn’t known from the beginning), or you can decide it later:

1. Magnificent Bastard
2. Old Friend
3. Agent
4. Sleeper
5. Mastermind
6. Crazy

Once The Agency has got the basic idea of what the job is, play can begin.

Next: a breakdown of the three types of scenes.

Filed under: Dissolute Games by Elizabeth
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(Yes, the game has a new and better title now!)

So the game has a specific premise of sorts, now. You and your friends/crew/whatever were working a job, and for a reason you’re not sure of– sabotage, perhaps, or outside influences– the job went horribly awry. As a result you’ve been completely blown, and you’re stuck in your hometown with your friends until you can win your way back into the agency’s good graces. You start knowing very little about the job, what the goal was, and who was involved, but as things progress in the game you get more and more clues. Right now I’m waffling between creating some kind of mechanized output system that generates clues at appropriate times in the fiction, or just making that one of the GM’s jobs.

The character sheet is a dossier: real name, known aliases, picture. Specializations and calling cards. And then there are two other parts:

Profile: this is what your character thinks they want. The thing that you’re making clear is your objective– you want to get out of the city and get back into the agency, you want to retire peacefully and get everyone to leave you alone, you want to defect, you want to go into witness protection.

Psychological evaluation: this contains all of the stuff your character doesn’t realize they are or they want, but seems obvious to outsiders. This is the stuff your character isn’t self-aware enough to notice, or would deny, or doesn’t realize is as important as it is: “Subject is clearly in love with his demolitionist, has delusions of grandeur and enjoys playing hero. Dangerous thrillseeking tendencies, perhaps due to a broken childhood.” and so on. You can add to or change this stuff as the game goes on.

The game progresses in a series of jobs, and each job has three types of scenes: Analysis, Mission, and Blowback.

Analysis scenes are about carefully prepping for the job at hand. Coming up with contingencies, bugging phones, surveillance, information gathering. During Analysis scenes, your relationships are used as bonuses, and favors can be exchanged.

Mission scenes are about doing the hands-on work. Infiltrating a gang on a job, exchanging money for a hostage, confronting a Boss, showing your true identity/face to the enemy. During Mission scenes, your relationships can be used as penalties, and fallout from favors can be revealed.

Blowback scenes are about what happens after and between missions, relationship issues, and dealing with fallout. During Blowback scenes, relationships can grow, diminish, or break.

More later.

Filed under: Dissolute Games by Elizabeth
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