Question Of The Week #2 - Too many designers?

[Onix]

[catty_big]

[madunkieg]

I love 1km1kt.net for what it is, a small community of designers with which I freely trade ideas because no money will be made off the games anyways. A couple of reasons why we don't have players in this community:

We don't handle the big-name games (D&D, Pathfinder, World of Darkness, and yes, Apocalypse World). Since promotion usually costs a lot of money over a long period of time, creators of free games are not likely to engage in such behavior. Yes, I know there are exceptions to the money thing (Apocalypse World), but it took roughly a decade to build its audience.

People assign value to games based on their price. A professionally produced game is more likely to have gone through several phases of testing and editing. Yes, there are exceptions, but if you don't playtest your game before uploading it, you're part of the problem. People don't want to waste time finding out that their free download isn't playable, and are willing to pay for something that is.

Yes, more players would be nice, but that would likely involve making changes to 1km1kt.net (the free, raw, unplaytested RPGs) that I hope will never happen.

[Rob Lang]

I don't accept the premise. In my opinion...

Everyone is a designer

A player asks a GM if she can terrify the enemy by enchanting their sword with a flaming blade. She just became a designer.

A GM doesn't like keeping track of ammo in her Shadowrun game. She steals a scarcity mechanic and adjusts it for her game. She just became a designer.

A GM takes Warrior Rogue and Mage and builds an entire setting for it. She adds beasts, races, weapons, traits and more. She just became a designer.

You don't have to throw out an entire game system to become a designer. You just have to invent something. Most 24 Hour RPGs are barely an RPG but they don't need to be 200 pages with images, they just need a spark.

We're all players

A GM plays the game too. They don't have a player character, they have hundreds of them. They are a special sort of player but a player nonetheless.

Designers play the game in their head

The joy of design is playing rules through in your head without really knowing how they might go at your table. That's the same if you're running someone else's system or your own. You can't say for sure if it all hangs together by reading it but that's OK, you will have played the game mentally - even if you don't have any players.

Games are for reading as well as playing

How many bought games do you own that you never play? I'll need to check my shelf but I think of the 10 RPGs I physically own, I've played only one of them in the last 10 years. You may still have enjoyed the book, the art, the writing. You will still have enjoyed the inspiration and mind-bubbles you got from it. You don't actually have to play the game to enjoy it.

Growth should be gradual

1km1kt has lasted because OUR GLORIOUS BENEFACTOR commands it so. Also, we have people who just get on, are polite and share their thoughts. We even have some people who have never actually designed a while game and that's OK by me. Competitions tend to net a few extra each year and keep the place a bit fresh and between then we're all hammering away at ideas and projects.



2km2kt
The 2km2kt project is on hold as I have other things I need to acheive first. And my job changed for the better, which means more fatigue in the evenings!

Blogging
I do randomly as I read and feedback more than I blog. 1km1kt is actually built on Wordpress and I think Our Glorious Benefactor would be delighted if people blogged directly to the front page. Anyone who is on the list to do the uploads (which is all the mods except Onix, which reminds me to fix that) can also write blog posts.

I would rather we all had blogs (like some do) and we communicated through them. You generate a community by allowing people to watch us communicate through blog posts. The more of us with blogs the better.

Playing online
I love this idea but I am not sure when I would have the chance to do it. I recommend you guys do it. I can give you YouTube access to the 1km1kt channel I set up so you can share them in one place. People like watching other people play!



I love you guys.

[Abstract Machine]

I’m new here: it has been 264 days since my last roleplaying session.

Both the broad version of this question – who’s transmitting & who’s receiving? - & its correlate – where have all the players gone? – seem to come up quite often on web forums.

It’s pretty hard to put a decent gaming group together - particularly if you’re doing it from scratch. I’ve the impression that a lot of people join forums like this to mitigate that difficulty.

Secondly, players are no less inclined to be narcissists than game-designers. (Nothing wrong with that, you understand; all any of us has to offer is what we have inside us.) They cruise & take the view, shooting through if they haven’t seen a version of themselves reflected back at them.

We’re all pack animals, even when we think we’re not. The gang is out there, even when it seems preoccupied with a different set of rules. The ‘just pretend someone’ll pay attention one day’ approach seems fairly rational to me. Every creative endeavour requires that you imagine your audience.

And the crowd? Well, that’s harder to access. It plays to larger, culture-sized rules, ones to do with money & supply & which seem for now to be passing tabletop RPGs by. No-one’s going to pull you out of the crush: that’s why you have to construct your own reality.

[Rob Lang]

Ah! Abstract! Welcome onboard. I'm glad my random flailing around in the admin area managed to activate your account!