Mysterious Mysteries

Two things: Yes, this means that I have decided that I will be worried about the page count of The Company. And second, yes, I said “value” rather than simply “pages.” I’m not about to cheapen the product by padding it with useless garbage nobody cares about.

Anyway, while I myself am not a very big setting junkie, anybody looking through The Company’s playtest copy will notice that there isn’t anything about the setting at all, except for mentioning this big monolithic company you get to spend all of your game time investigating. Well, while The Company really would not benefit much from pre-written adventures, I feel that the book could seriously benefit from examples of some investigations, some corrupt departments, and just what makes the Company (the company, not the RPG) itself tick.

No, this doesn’t mean I’m going to force page after page of detailed setting material on everybody. This does mean that some page-long stories will likely be written and sprinkled through the book where their example proves useful. Also, more about the Company will be written, allowing the curious a better insight into managerial matters their characters would be fully aware of as a function of their job.

Well, I am now one step closer to being able to honestly claim (with a straight face, even) that I am a roleplaying game designer. That isn’t to say that I haven’t worked on a couple dozen RPGs in the past few years, but this is the first one I have actually decided to finish, and that feels good.

Hopefully I will get a good turnout of playtesters from The Forge, and I’ll be able to move ahead with publishing and have something in print within a few months.

Speaking of getting The Company into print, I am somewhat worried about its short length. The relative simplicity of its mechanics, and the fact that there are only two different mechanics in the first place, combines with my naturally short prose to make something that would likely be only twelve digest-sized (roughly 6″x9″) pages. It would definitely be saddle-stitched if that were the case.

Anyway, once I get a green light from my playtesters I can begin worrying about such matters. I don’t expect there to be many problems on the primary conflict resolution mechanic, as that was a slow metamorphasis over the month of June from a dice-based system to the current diceless system, and I think I managed to catch all of the kinks except for something that I will name the Strain Cycle (a term I just coined to describe when both sides refuse to stop bidding and at least one refuses to bid anything but Strain tokens). That one I’m not too worried about, since it basically gives the other side a “win a conflict of your choosing free” card later on.

Well, I just figured it would be a good idea to get this one out there. This will definitely not be the last anybody who checks this blog out will hear about The Company. I look forward to dealing with the problem of my low page count. Though I have my own ideas on how to deal with that (or whether it is even an issue), I would certainly welcome any well-intended advice.

First posts can be so difficult sometimes. I was actually wondering what there was that I could write about as an introduction to my new blog. While hopping around some of the indie RPG blogs, the perfect topic struck me, and I was immediately surprised that I had overlooked it: the merger between CCP and White Wolf.

I say that it is surprising for me to overlook such a seemingly perfect subject because it’s a mixture of the two subjects I expect to dominate this blog: Eve Online and pen-and-paper roleplaying games (my guides for the first and my own plans to design and publish the second).

You can read his full blog entry here, but Matt is basically worrying that this merger will result in the eventual downfall of White Wolf’s pen-and-paper lines due to concentration on the computer game side of things.

I personally find the news of the merger to be exciting; an Eve tabletop RPG and a World of Darkness MMO? Yes, they’re both in the works (see the press release here), and yes I’m loving the idea of both.

Also, though I cannot argue the lack of there being good money in writing for tabletop RPGs (freelancing anyway, which I am told is always a pain) compared to the high volume of cash that MMO players bring in, I do not believe that in this case any brain drain is going to be experienced. CCP and White Wolf do very different things and have members with technical expertise in their fields; I highly doubt that there will be very many computer programmers moving from America to Iceland because of this merger. White Wolf will keep on going as always, but with a line of Eve products. CCP will carry on with both Eve and make a World of Darkness MMO for us all to enjoy (come on, Eve-level player politics + vampires, it’s perfect).

So eat, drink, and be merry my friends, for tomorrow we shall roll up a dice pool to see if our pilots stay awake while gate camping, and get to see our trenchcoat-wearing katana-packing vampires in full 3D. ^_^