Category: Gaming

Standing at the Brink

One week from today I will launch my first Kickstarter for my scenario He Who Laughs Last, for which I have written about 20,000 words. Writing the scenario, which I did in three waves, was mostly enjoyable grunt work. Thinking of fun, crazy horror scenarios is the easy part – the challenge is finding the discipline to get on the computer to write 5 days a week. But once I’m in the groove, scenario writing is really just about putting word after word. Hard work, but very straight-forward.

Last August, right before BigBadCon in Oakland, CA, I made the decision that I would launch my Kickstarter around the beginning of February, to time it with my annual attendance of DunDraCon in San Ramon, which I have been attending since 1984 or so. My reasons for this were two-fold:

  1. If I launched right before DDC, then I could run the game at the con and use that to generate interest for my project. Most projects go through a lull in the middle, and while people don’t generally pledge during cons, I figured if I could get those 12 people who played in the game excited enough to pledge right when they came home, it would be worth it.
  2. More importantly, though, I wasn’t actually ready to run a KS project back in August. When I started researching all the things you need to do to build an online presence, I quickly learned that I really had none of them. No blog, no Twitter account, no place to send people to find out about what I’m working on (aside from my personal FB, which doesn’t count). I needed some time to get all these things together and I needed to start ASAP.

So that’s what I did — I started to build my online presence right after BigBadCon, and now that I’m here in February, I wanted to take a look back at all the work I’ve done, to savor the moment before the madness truly begins. I’m not saying I’ve done everything needed, some of which just takes ongoing contributions and writing. But I know that I’ve done the hard work — the real work, not the fake work of just sitting around and writing a scenario — necessary to make my project a success.

Since the beginning of September, I have taken the following actions in preparation for my Kickstarter:

  • Blog – Well, you’re here, right? I needed an online home that could be both a blog and a project page, and with some help from my awesome friend Wade, Weird8 was born. Back to my original point, though, the main work here is writing and more writing. This year I hope to get into a cadence of regular posts, but for now it’s just whenever I can make time in between prepping for the KS. Still, now I have a home.
  • Twitter – Honestly, I didn’t really want to get a Twitter account, but now that I’m here I finally understand what all the fuss is about. I can see why people get all wrapped up in writing their witty and concise 140 character updates, and how it could fundamentally change how people communicate. And again, it just takes some brute effort to continue communicating in this manner, sending out regular updates and chatting with people from around the world. But though many of my 770 followers are just part of the standard Twitter “I follow you, you follow me” process, I have engaged with at least a dozen new people who are genuinely interested in my project and share many similar interests. This has made it worth it.
  • Collaborators – Early on I realized that I couldn’t (and didn’t want to) run this whole KS project by myself, so I found myself some collaborators. First, the book just wouldn’t be the book with0ut the work of Jake Coolidge, who did an amazing job on the layout, cover, maps and overall look and feel. But then I met Gregory Geiger, who has helped me not only with my KS video and managing my marketing/press, but is also full of amazing ideas and is my go-to guy for just about any question. I love collaboration and this project has truly been the fruits of our collective labors.
  • W8 on FB – Whether or not it’s on the way out, Facebook is still the largest social media platform, and I had to create a space on FB for my content — so I created Dave Sokolowski and Weird8 (so you can search for both). Ultimately I will triangulate content between this blog, my Twitter feed, and my FB page, but for right now it’s sputtering along. Building this up will be a goal of the KS project.
  • FB groups – One of the key places for additional learning have been FB groups, particularly Kickstarter Best Practices and Lessons Learned. It’s a great place to ask questions, get quick and thoughtful answers, and engage people in dialog about the overall KS process. I’ve learned tons about KS here and consider this group to be critical for anyone running a KS project.
  • Industry Expertise – Just as important as that FB group are two key people and their respective homes on the internet: Funding the Dream podcast and Stonemaier Games. These are indispensable resources that I cannot recommend enough – you must check out Richard Bliss’ podcast and Jamie Stegmaier’s page on Kickstarter Lessons. If you aren’t well versed in both of these and you want to launch a KS, I’m not sure how serious you really are.
  • Kickstarter Itself – I have learned more about KS in the past six months than all the previous years combined, and I’ve been pledging there for more than two years. I’ve looked at so many KS projects (especially RPGs) that I can pretty much tell whether a project will succeed in the first few days just by looking at it. I also started backing lots of projects just for $1 so I can be involved in projects that I’m interested in and continue to understand how projects succeed or fail (and I was finally part of two projects that failed). Also, staying in the loop like this keeps me engaged with the community and I have even upped my pledges on a few projects, just because I can see the projects are being run very well and that the end results will be so great.
  • Interviews – I like to interview people and plan to do more of that on this site in the future. As I got nearer to my launch date, I wanted to interview someone with a successful RPG KS project already under their belt. Oscar Rios is the president of Golden Goblin Press, who has just launched his already massively successful second KS project, and was more than welcome to spend some time talking with me about what makes a successful RPG project – and with his project funding in about 24 hours, I think it’s fair to say he knows what he’s talking about. I will be editing the interview and getting it up on this site this week so I can share his insights. Again, it’s just important to keep talking to people and learning.
  • Old Yoggie – Finally, and most importantly, is that I already know where the people who will buy my product hang out online, and I am already part of that greater community. Yog-sothoth.com (or YSDC to us) is the online home of the greater Cthulhu gaming community, of which I’ve been a part of for seven years (as DrummerDave). I’ve writing extensive blogs on RPGs that I’ve run, made friends, and been a part of the overall discussion for long enough that people there know my work and me. It’s critical to know your audience when publishing anything, and I’m quite certain where to find the people who will want to back my project. But it’s not something that I just discovered; I’ve been part of the community for years and will continue to for as long as YSDC is around. Makes this whole thing a lot easier, really.
  • Early Bird – One last thing that I’ve been doing differently: going to bed early and getting up early. I’ve been getting up from between 4:30 and 6am every day for the past month, as well as August to October, which also means I go to bed early. Sleep is so critical on an ongoing basis, but I also need to get up early so I can have some alone time before the rest of the house wakes. Unless you’re lucky enough to have your own office, getting up before everyone else in the house may be the key to finding productive time.

Right now, I’m pretty confident that my Kickstarter will be successful – it’s just a matter of how much money and interest I will raise. I’m only interested in the money so much as I want to produce quality materials that everyone is happy with. I’m really interested in meeting people who find my scenario interesting and want to share this gaming experience with me.

But I feel like I’ve done just about everything I can for someone who is kicking off their writing career with a first KS project. When the project ends, we can look back and see how much impact all these items had on my project’s success. And as they say, nothing good comes easy…

 

Clues in the Dark

Last fall I watched a lot of the TV series Marple with my wife, and there are few better inspirations for writing good mystery than Agatha Christie, who spins quite a ball of yarn only to unravel it with perfect logic just when all seemed lost. It gave me a lot of respect for mystery novelists (a genre I have only a passing interest in, which is strange considering my interest in mysteries), especially good ones who can build layer upon layer of dramatic intrigue and obtuse clues.

There is little difference between writing a mystery novel and writing a good investigative story (whether for the Cthulhu Mythos genre or more specifically for a RPG system like Gumshoe), because, ultimately, you’re building a series of clues for the characters (PCs) to uncover, discuss, and follow to the next scene/clue. Investigative RPGs are my favorite to both write and play because of that clue trail – building an interesting and original set of clues for the PCs to follow is hard, but so ultimately satisfying if done right.

For the longest time, Call of Cthulhu (COC) was my favorite investigative game, though not as a system so much as for the atmosphere and breadth of materials available for it. But over the past few years, multiple new takes on the Mythos investigative game have cropped up, highlighting both the breadth of the market as well as the need for a new take on how RPGs investigations are run.

Cthulhu Dark (a rules-light system by Graham Walmsley) is now my favorite Cthulhu RPG for one simple reason – the rules never get in the way of the story. Ever. I never have to stare down a bad roll and try to figure out how to make it work – it’s all positive creativity. In COC, I am always trying to figure out how to make a bad roll fit into making sure the story moves forward. Even Trail of Cthulhu, which is based on Gumshoe and aims to always make core clues available, can get bogged down in some of the illogical bookkeeping that goes into spending points to expand the clues.

When I play Cthulhu Dark (CD), though, I can use the die rolls (including my own house rules for skill rolls) to judge the varying degrees of success the PCs face when finding clues. This, in turn, puts the onus on the scenario writer to develop an intriguing set of clues for the PCs to follow, which then makes it easy to turn a die roll (whether high or low, as success is guaranteed) into figuring out the best manner for the story to play out. You can use the randomness to add flavor to the story, not determine whether or not the PCs actually succeed.

I know there are still plenty of old-school COC players who live and die by what the dice tell you, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that providing your players are having fun, which is the ultimate litmus test for a game’s success. But why make interpreting the dice easy (pass/fail) while making interpreting the clues (where do we go next) the hard part? Nothing good comes for free, and the challenge for how to interpret rolls is what makes playing CD fun. The PCs are going to get the clues regardless – what comes next is the degrees of success that follow the roll.

And there’s no reason to make it binary, saying pass or fail – again, make the die rolls interesting and fun to understand. The die rolls are a spectrum to work from, letting you interpret a high, medium, or low roll however the story best needs it, at that moment. Yes, that’s hard, but, again, that’s what makes it fun.

As part of He Who Laughs Last, I’ve written some house rules for using skills in the game. Funnily enough, the rules and skill list mirror the skills listed by Graham in his other book, Stealing Cthulhu (starting page 52 – go get it from the shelf, I’ll wait). In a nutshell, I’ve found that people like the boundaries of having a limited list of skills to choose from. We then use three dice (color coded green, blue, and red) to represent the three types of rolls: general, skills, and insanity. So there’s still some crunch (rules) to the game, but it never gets bogged down in figuring out rules to keep the game going.

Then, if the rules are easy and transparent to the game, the story becomes the platform to run the game, not the other way around. Your job then, as scenario writer, is to write the most interesting, intriguing, and dangerous set of clues your story demands. The trail of clues and how your players follow that trail then becomes the most critical component of your game. Something I’m sure Miss Marple would appreciate.

No Signal – Limitations in Modern Horror Gaming

One of the most compelling and scary components about Lovecraft’s horror is its remoteness. There’s a reason why he set Whisperer in the Darkness in the remote White Mountains – removing yourself from civilization and all its protections is not easy for most people, and certainly must have been unnerving 100 years ago, when still so much of the United States was unexplored.

But finding that level of isolation to use in a modern horror game is a bit challenging. Sure, you can set your game in some actual remote location (mountains or jungle far away from civilization), but not all horror stories take place far removed from people and power lines. And not every critical moment can be born from the device that your character can’t reach someone else, that they don’t have a signal (one of the worst parts of the entire Mission Impossible movie franchise is in MI:III when Tom Cruise is driving around Shanghai trying to get a signal on his phone to make a call – this does not make for good drama).

In fact, I think the more a GM can give PCs access to their everyday technology, the more normal the scenario will feel, at least at the outset. Verisimilitude is a great place to start for modern horror. So what else, besides isolation, can we use to make things scary in modern horror?

Well, a lot of it comes back to all the crazy stuff Philip K Dick wrote about in some of his later works, especially Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and A Scanner Darkly. Well, and pretty much anything he wrote (which is a lot) about identity. One of Dick’s favorite themes is that our reality is not as it seems, that we are not who we think we are. The idea that (SPOILERS HA!) that Deckard and Rachael don’t know that they’re androids, or that Bob’s drug use creates two separate personalities unaware of each other strike at the heart of what identity means. And with identity theft continually rising, and online privacy becoming a larger concern for everyone, we seek more and more to verify that no one is watching, that we are who we think we are, and that our fundamental understanding of who we are has not been compromised. As that gets harder and harder to do identity “theft” (in whatever broad terms) becomes scarier and scarier.

Good art needs limitations, but a good modern horror scenario needs different limitations than our traditional 1920s-30s Lovecraftian story. In today’s world, it’s very difficult to remove all communications and information from people and how they use technology. So one of the things we can do is play with player characters’ identities, and twist their understanding of their world. If you aren’t sure who you are, then suddenly all of your perceptions and perspectives have limitations. This is good gaming material.

One of the main components in He Who Laughs Last is that a PC is not who he seems to be, which is slowly revealed over the course of the scenario. From my playtesting, this sort of twist of identity really freaks people out, which is pretty much the point. But identity can’t be the only component for good horror gaming. What else is there?

Announcing ‘He Who Laughs Last’

For the past year, I have been focusing on writing and developing ‘He Who Laughs Last,’ a Cthulhu Dark scenario that I plan to release via Kickstarter in early 2014.

I have created a page for the whole project and updates will be forthcoming. I am planning for a Kickstarter in early 2014 and am in the process of recruiting a top-notch list of contributors. I cannot wait to show you what we have in store.

 

Toastmastering and Gamemastering

I have been a Toastmaster since February 2013, and it may very well be the best professional decision I’ve ever made. If you don’t know, Toastmasters International is a world-wide organization dedicated to helping its members develop their speaking and leadership skills. For a relatively cheap price (~$100/year, which most employers will pay for), TM will help you grown your public speaking and leadership skills, yes, but they also develop your ability to think on your feet.

One of the key elements of the weekly TM meeting is Table Topics, in which someone brings a list of questions that you are asked to answer within one to two minutes, without having known the question ahead of time. The first few times can be pretty scary, as you wrack your brain to answer a random question in a thoughtful and organized manner. But then it gets easier, after you do it five or six times, and soon the fear is gone. Yes, it’s always challenging to think on your feet like that, but when you know you can do it without panicking or just saying um over and over again, you become confident in your abilities.

This ability directly applies to Game Mastering RPGs, which is really just a series of answers to other peoples’ random questions based on some loose parameter (the game). When the PCs take your well-planned and strictly-plotted scenario for a ride way the hell outside of where you though it would go (which happens all the time), having confidence in your abilities to go along for the ride without being rattled is a critical skill. And that confidence directly relates to your ability to run the scenario and own the table, allowing the players to thrive in a thoughtful and imaginative environment.

If you are looking for an unconventional way to improve your GM skills, I highly recommend joining a Toastmasters club (there’s bound to be one near you – check the website). For just an hour a week, you’ll be quite surprised.

My First Kickstarter

Early in 2014 (in February if all goes well), I will launch my first Kickstarter to help me publish my Cthulhu Dark scenario He Who Laughs Last. Over the past few months, I have been doing a ton of research on running a successful Kickstarter campaign, and while success is by no means guaranteed, I think I do have a handle on what is needed to help make it as successful as possible.

First has been the research itself. Hoo boy, have I done a bunch of research. It’s tough to find time for writing when I’ve been doing so much research. But so much has already been written on what makes a successful KS campaign, I think it’s better to share some of the resources than reiterate everything they’ve said. So here are the steps I’m taking to build a successful KS campaign. You can check in with me after my campaign is done and see whether it worked:

  • Start with Kickstarter: Look at KS campaigns, lots of them – no, ALL of them. Really, especially in the specific genre. In my case, both Cthulhu and RPG are searches I run on a regular basis, always checking out what other people are doing. Watch the videos, read the funding levels, and begin to see Kickstarter in your sleep. By now, I’ve seen so many KS campaigns, I can kinda tell if someone’s campaign is going to choke or not.
  • Read blogs: Again, my purpose here on the web isn’t to be an expert on Kickstarter, as so many others have done it better. So I’ve been reading and reading and reading, again, so much I don’t seem to be writing as much. Blogs like Stonemaier Games, James Mathe, and Richard Bliss are all must-reads and have given me great ideas and perspective on this journey.
  • Funding the Dream: Speaking of Richard Bliss, if you don’t do anything else to prepare for your KS campaign, you MUST listen to his podcast. All of it. I’ve been catching up on episodes all summer and is by-far the most important resource for Kickstarter I have seen (heard). Start now.
  • Support KS campaigns: How many campaigns have you supported? Right now I’m at 17, but I support another every 2-3 months and will continue to do so. Supporting KS campaigns is important for two reasons: 1, it gives you perspective on how/not to run a campaign and 2, it shows you’re part of the community. Seriously, you need to back some campaigns before you go ask people for money. I’ve decided not to fund what otherwise looks like a good game just because the person has never backed any campaigns.

So those are all resources on running a successful campaign, but then there’s a whole other thing: social media. You need a social media strategy. Actually, *I* need a social media strategy. Or at least did need one. I like Facebook fine, but so much of my effort is taken up in life (work, family, health), with some drumming and gaming with friends thrown in, that there’s no way I could decide on a social media strategy on my own. Know what I did? I found someone to help me.

Gregory Geiger is a friend, yes, but he’s also a nerd and a photographer and web designer and social media knowitall. You need to find someone like Gregory to help you figure this shit out. He has helped me figure out how to manage both a personal and public FB profile (which I’m still working on), as well as how to build a sympathetic relationship between my blog, my public FB persona, and my Twitter feed. Fortunately, I just have to pay Gregory in lunches, which is a super cheap way to get great info from someone who is focused on these sorts of things. If social media ain’t your thing, then go find yourself a Gregory.

Finally, as most importantly, you need to produce. This is the most important lesson that seems lost on most of us when we look at cool internet people like Wil Weaton, Scott Sigler and Chris Hardwick and wonder how we can get there. You know the one thing these guys do really, really well? They produce shit ALL THE TIME. Have you seen their Twitter feeds? Their FB posts? Their podcasts? They are constantly online sharing funny and informative stuff, like just about every day. You have to give the people something. All the time.

Long gone are the days of just sitting at your desk for months and years, typing away at your masterpiece until your editor comes and takes it away and you can start your next book. Today, you need to be out there producing at least five days a week. You need blog posts, Twitter posts, FB posts, updates to your web site or G+ or LinkedIn profile or whatever it takes. You need to be giving the people something all the time. ALL THE TIME.

A good friend of mine is writing his YA masterpiece and he has worked very hard at it, but he doesn’t even know that his real hard has yet to begin. Yes, Stasey has a blog and that’s a good thing. But the climb up to get your social media strategy enabled is long and takes being on your phone ALL THE TIME. How do I know this? Because I’ve used Twitter more in the past month than in the rest of my life.

Speaking of which, the rest of my life is calling, so I must go. But I want to hear your story about your social media strategy, or what steps you’ve taken to get your Kickstarter campaign prepared. Well?