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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So, as I mentioned before, there are a couple different types of characters you can play, as well as an exciting list of professional abilities (demolition, heavy artillery, surveillance, hand-to-hand, linguistics, hacking, knife-throwing, battlefield medicine, poisons, and whatever else you can think of). The characters also have relationships with the other players. Both the abilities and the relationships exist on a scale of one to five.

• Lifers get four professional skills: one 4-point, two 3-points, and one two-point. They also get one 3-point relationship and one 2-point relationship. Everything else is at 1.
• Artists get three professional skills: one 5-point, one 2-point, and one 1-point. They also get a 4-point relationship and two 2-point relationships. Everything else is at 1. They also get a Workshop.
• Civillians get two choices with professional skills: either one 2-point or two 1-point. They also get a 5-point relationship and 3-point relationships. Everything else is at 2. They also get a Hideout.

The number of points you have in your professional skills denotes how many times you can roll that skill during a job. If you run out of points in a profession and want to roll it anyway, you can sacrifice a point of relationship.

Professional conflict usually involves having to roll a number of successes equal to the relevant professional skill before rolling a number of failures equal to the relevant relationship. When dealing with personal conflict, the opposite is true.

Filed under: Dissolute Games by Elizabeth
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These are just the first thoughts for the game. (This is based on Burn Notice, one of the best shows on television.)

So you’re all a bunch of people who have spent your lives outside the law, right– ex CIA maybe, or ex-FBI, or you’re in Witness Protection, or you’re a gun-smuggler wanted in a bunch of countries and now you’re laying low. Whatever the reason, you’re all stuck in the same town, and you’re making a little extra money by helping people, while trying to fend off the bad dudes who got you stuck in this town in the first place.

The town you-the-characters are stuck in is the town that you-the-players are stuck in. (Why? Mission prep and Important Details. Like, if I know my character’s going to be in a car chase, you can bet your butt that I’m taking him under the one-car bridge on Arch Street. And that Korean restaurant on main street, Manna House? It’s perfect for covert meetings because you can never see who’s in there.)

You’ve got personal skills and professional skills, and if you’ve been this kind of professional for most of your adult life, then your personal skills aren’t gonna be so hot. Likewise, if you’ve never been in this line of work and spent your time, I dunno, going on dates and visiting your family, you’re not going to be much good at improvising a sticky bomb with tile cement and a mop.

There are a couple different kinds of characters you can play.

Lifers are renaissance men and women. They’ve been at this a long time and have the skill sets to keep them alive in a job with high turnover rates. Of course, the skills it takes to be a good operative make for a lousy friend, lover, daughter or dad. (In the world of Burn Notice, Michael and Sam are lifers.)

Artists specialize in one area, and boy, do they shine. Because they haven’t been quite as consumed by their job as the lifers, they’re a little better at having friends and family, but they still have.. issues. (In the world of Burn Notice, Fiona and Barry are Artists.)

Civillians don’t know how to take apart and put back together an AK in the back of a moving vehicle that’s being chased by covert operatives, but they do have people they can ask to borrow a cup of sugar from without having to come up with a cover ID. They’re the friends and family of the Lifers and Artists, or as close to friends and family as those kids can have. As such they might have picked up a few tricks– maybe they’ve helped out with surveillance in the past, or picked up a couple tips on interrogation– but their big assets are their stability, willingness to lend an ear, and being an unexpected place to hide. (In the world of Burn Notice, Michael’s mom and brother are Civillians.)

There are some other characters that the GM makes up, too. First are Clients, the people you’re trying to help. There are a couple different types:

Dirty gone clean: These guys were in it, and now they want out. The trouble they’re in is sort of their own doing, but they’ll tell you man, they never thought it would go down like THIS. Swear.

Innocent bystander: This person saw something they shouldn’t have, or has something someone else wants. They were minding their own business, and now whoops, they’re in trouble.

Fall guy: This dude was totally set up. Probably by his boss, or her boyfriend or something.

Justice seeker: Justice seekers are dangerous. They’re not professionals, but they’re going to try to right a wrong with or without you. It’s just that without you, they’ll die. Quick.

So when you’re trying to serve your Client, you’re probably going to run into some Mooks. They’re the lower-level scumbags you have to trick, beat, or infiltrate into giving up their Boss. They come in a couple different flavors:

Club kids: Mostly drug dealers and the like, they like to pretend to be the boss in order to get free drinks and lots of sex. They talk a big game but they aren’t terribly bright, and some of them are scared of real guns.

Hired Muscle: Bodyguards, mercenaries, and the ilk. Sometimes you can just get away with paying them more than their boss does, but don’t count on it.

Suits: Ops who think they’re covert, government workers, people who are licensed to conceal but would be just as happy to bury you in paperwork or cause trouble with the local police.

And, as I said, the Mooks have Bosses:

Magnificent Bastards: These dudes don’t get their hands dirty, they’ve got people for that. Corrupt politicians, businessmen, white-collar criminals. They’re hard to get to, but once you’re up close and personal, they’re probably not armed. Or if they are, it’s not going to be with much.

Agents: These are the real deal, don’t mistake them for suits. They’ve got the power of an entire country behind them, and it’s usually not one that grants extradition. Interpol files and a band of not-so-merry men. Tread lightly.

Old Friends: In this line of work, you’re likely to piss people off now and then. Problem is, if you’ve done something bad enough to make them mad, then they’re mad enough to not stop until you’re dead or sold to the highest bidder.

Sleepers: Arguably the most dangerous Boss of all, because you don’t see them coming. They masquerade as Mooks or Clients.

Mooks and Clients can turn out to be Sleepers, and Characters can be Clients (especially if the Boss is an Old Friend.)

There’s more coming, but this is already a pretty long post. Tomorrow.

Filed under: Dissolute Games by Elizabeth
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