Resolutions

 Another year over and not a lot to show for it.

Not nothing, though. I lost my job a few months ago, so I've definitely been in a downer phase. But it did allow me to develop some material to actually try out Ashes Without Number.

I also learned the value of backstory. While I haven't done campaigns for quite some time, I have kept myself busy with one-shots for the local gaming club. So I've written some adventures and made sure to provide pre-gens. But these have always been purely mechanical constructions, a set of stats to roll against as necessary.

Then someone asked on the gaming club's Discord server: How much backstory is appropriate for a pre-gen? I realized that my answer was "None" and that quickly followed the realization "Am I doing it wrong?"

For a game like D&D, the mechanical setup of a character actually conveys a decent amount. Elven fighter, dwarven rogue. Halfling monk. It tells you enough that you can have an idea of what they are like and what they can do without having to read the character sheet in depth. And even though I don't do D&D anymore, that thinking stayed with me. Especially for one-shots, where the character is only going to get a limited amount of "screen time."

This caused me to go back through my collections of pre-gens and try to assemble a few paragraphs of backstory.

For my D20 Modern pre-gens for my "Tabloid World" scenario, I tried to come up with a basic paragraph explaining the character's deal. While it is a class-based system, the classes are deliberately flexible and bland, so just saying "Smart Hero" tells you a lot less than "elven bard." So I went back over the choices I made and tried to tie them together and turned that into a tight paragraph. I then spent another paragraph describing an encounter with the bizarre that led them to working for the Midnight Star (named after the tabloid themed Weird Al song).

Then I went over my Ashes Without Number pre-gens. For now it's just a paragraph for each one giving a rough explanation of their abilities and a bit about how they learned or used them. A little bit to tie them to the local area and/or what made them pull up roots and become a wanderer in the wastes of Humboldt and Del Norte counties might be nice, but I think there needs to be more detail on the current version of the setting for me to have enough of a handle to make those sorts of additions. Maybe filling in those details for the characters will give me more of a hook into the setting. We'll see.

But my crowning achievement would have to be the backstory work for my All Outta Candy Canes Christmas adventure. The All Outta Bubblegum rules don't do character stats. The only stat you have is how much Bubblegum each character has remaining, but the character's deal doesn't involve the rules at all. My previous solution was a character sheet consisting of a photo of a military action hero and a little form inspired by the GI Joe action figure file cards for the player to fill in as they chose.

This year, I upgraded that approach by filling on the file card myself. In some cases, it was very easy, since they were pulled from the live-action GI Joe films. I just used the GI Joe file card for that character. In other cases, I tried to extract the relevant information regarding popular film characters and populate the cards with that. For example, I couldn't not include Arnold Schwarzenegger in my list of action heroes, so I dug up what information I could about his character Dutch from the movie Predator. Since the premise of my All Outta Candy Canes adventure calls for military action, I tended to favor roles that were military in flavor. So Stallone goes on the list as Rambo.

This resulted in probably one of the best runs of this adventure.

Now that I've gone on about my accomplishments this year, what are my resolutions for next year?

Blog more: I'd like to get back to a weekly schedule. Mostly for my mental health. Like I said, I've been in some doldrums lately (and actually for a while) and one thing I can do is imitate Milo from The Phantom Tollbooth and try to escape the doldrums by keeping my mind active. Whether this means this is a gaming blog, and Oz blog or a descent into madness, who can say?

Run a campaign: This has been on my list for a long time, but only rarely accomplished. My usual standard is 2 sessions in continuity with each other. And I haven't always made it.

Another Year Gone

It's been a while since I've posted, and this seems as good a time as any, so here goes.

 Looking back, it has been a pretty awesome year for Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.

Oz the Great and Powerful started the year off with a fairly strong sales boost, particularly over at Amazon.com. Although it's not an RPG specific site, it's a very good barometer of general interest.

The game was the subject of not one, but two podcasts at the Ruthless Diastema and I wound up doing 2 vidcasts with Pete Figtree (one solo and one as part of a roundtable discussion with some other really cool publishers and designers), the man behind Ruthless Diastema. This also led to a guest spot on the Indie Talks podcast that was also quite fun.

Somewhere in between all of that, I decided to experiment with Pay What You Want pricing. While the initial rush was actually pretty nice, activity rather quickly faded to the looky-loos. It's still nice to see when someone feels kind enough to buy it in print or pay more than a token price.

The biggest news of all came latest in the year. The Bundle of Holding. While Allen Varney had been trying to get Wil Wheaton's attention on the project for a while, he finally succeeded with his Family Friendly Bundle of games, featuring AiO. The Bundle of Holding is currently doing a series of "reruns" of early bundles, before the site had achieved its current audience. For the next day or so, he's offering up the original Bundle of Holding, which is a collection of novels whose authors worked in the gaming industry (including Allen Varney). Once that's done, I'm sure he'll have something else cool for you.

The real down side to everything has been the day job. It's made money tighter, and life more stressful than it really should be. Which is probably the big thing holding up Deadly Desert. Many people have described the original game as "joyful" and "full of love." But it's getting harder to find that "happy place" for that sort of writing.

I wanted to have The Wizard's Magic Bag out by now, but my layout person is having some personal issues that have delayed things.

I've got another project in the works, but it's still in the early stages.

See you next year!

Blog 100!

Not only is this my last post of 2009, it is also my 100th blog posting!

Let's take a quick look back at the blog

Most popular post: The Indie Jones. I guess people like my take on indie RPGs. Not many seem to disagree with me, as that post still has no comments. Which leads me to my next milestone,

Most commented post: This is actually sort of a tie. The most commented post of 2008, my first year of blogging, was The Future Will Be Interactive! with 8 total comments. The most commented post of 2009 was Goodbye and Hello, also with 8 comments.

Now for New Year's Resolutions:

Publish something, for Pete's sake!: This is in progress. Just a few more hurdles await me. Mostly regarding getting art commissioned and paid for. Also, I'm confident enough that I should be able to publish two things this year. I'll be honest and say that I don't know what they are, but one of them will be Adventures in Oz.

I have entered an RPG design contest put on by Simian Circle Games. It will be something of an Iron Chef contest, in that I must design something during the contest that utilizes certain special ingredients. If you're interested in seeing how this game develops, I'll be posting updates here.

Get the word out!: I will be attending DunDraCon this year, and have volunteered to run a new Oz adventure "The Jaded City of Oz." This was written by my friend Kris and will be showing up in the AiO rulebook as a sample adventure. I would love to be able to attend Winkie '10, but at the moment, I don't think I can afford two conventions that close to one another. I do want to try for '11, though.

Podcast!: After Jared's interview and the Christmas podcast, I discovered that podcasting is something else that sounds intimidating, but really isn't that hard to do. My only challenge is coming up with fun things to say. Wish me luck!

Publish or Perish!

That is one of my big New Year's resolutions. The other is to marry this absolutely wonderful woman I've been in love with for the longest time, but that's a separate issue.

Now for a look back at the year that was:

Total amount spent on art: $300. My projected art budget: Around $1,000. If I can dodge unemployment this year, I might be able to make up the difference. I also have a potential investor, but I'm notorious for not counting my chickens before they are hatched.

Total blog hits: 850. This is only from about the beginning of August when I installed the hit counter. I imagine I'll hit 1,000 by February, when I tell you how DunDraCon went this year.

Total website hits: 329. This count begins from August 20, when I started using Google Analytics to track my site visits.

I have received hits from 35 states of the union and 23 foreign countries. Top hit-producing state: California (82 hits). Top foreign country: The UK (15 hits).

The worrying numbers are "Length of Visit" and "Depth of Visit." Nearly half of my visitors spent less than 10 seconds browsing my site and about 40% of visitors browsed only 1 page. Coupled with some other numbers that have been gathered, I'm figuring that the majority of these hits are actually from various "bots" scouting out my little corner of the internet. It will take some doing to tease out an exact number of these, but it's on my list of things to do.

Highest number of hits in 1 day: 10. This was November 6, soon after I posted an Oz thread on RPG.net.

Best hit getter: The YouTube video. The day it was posted, my site received 8 hits. Traffic to the site has stayed rather steady since then, with an average of 5 hits a day for the week immediately after. The RPG.net posting created a bigger spike, but had a much quicker dropoff. Given this success, I think another YouTube video will be forthcoming. Maybe even with music this time.