Joe (you know, the guy from Waterthread and uhhh, f13) made an RPG with Shannon Drake. Just in time for election day, I say! Yes, I'm pimping it. Having heard about it years ago (hell, having read some of it years ago), I'm surprised they actually finished it. Everything beyond the link here is from the man of the hour. No, I don't mean Obama. I mean Joe. Who really isn't the man of the hour... he's just a guy who actually finished something he started.
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It took me just around three years to develop a tabletop RPG. That's as long as most AAA videogames. It's not that my game is overly complex or especially novel, and it's not that I didn't have the spare time necessary to develop it fully. No, Shannon Drake, my partner in this particular caper, and I got most of the work done in just two months, including a weekend we ended up burning when we found our way to a hobby shop, bought a bunch of Call of Cthulhu books, and nerded out over horrors unknowable.
The other 34 months, the game, called Amerikkka, laid dormant, waiting for a drunken Sunday and bit of sticktoitiveness that neither Drake nor I typically possess. The game, until today, had gained mythical status among our friends; the people who knew about it did from the beginning, and hardly a month went by when someone didn't rib me about the game that never was. And if this process taught me anything, it taught me that designing games, even stupid tabletop RPGs about a future where Ted Kennedy is the Pope and Ted Turner patrols Atlanta on a giant cybernetic buffalo, is really, really hard.
The fun stuff is easy. We had the premise for the game – Hillary wins the 2020 election, the right wing revolts and secedes, and in the resulting cataclysm every bizarre extremist group carves out a section of America, leaving the players in a world like our own but darker and funnier – set within the first hour. I'd sketched out a map on a legal pad five minutes into the off-color conversation we were having.
It's the boring stuff that's hard. The first 80 percent of the design process occurred in about three weeks. The remaining five were god awful: bug testing, typesetting, searching for typos and overhauling a few systems that were either overcomplicated or broken. No one wants to do this. The fact there are people out there willing to test games for a living, and to do it cheaply, is beyond me. I created my goddamn systems and I couldn't stand testing them. That's not to say it isn't fun trying to beat someone to death with a prosthetic leg you discovered in an abandoned public hospital, but try doing that when you're futzing your way through a combat system that inadvertently made it impossible to kill someone. Or try getting stabbed but forgetting to implement how healing works.
Eventually, you work this shit out, but it's hard and boring and makes you hate what you've created. Which is why it took us another two years to fix typos, typeset the PDF and sprinkle in some little stuff along the way. The fact people can do this 40 hours a week is beyond me; it borders on Herculean, and until today, I didn't know why they did it.
This morning when I began rendering the PDF to toss up on DriveThruRPG, when I created Amerikkka: The Game: The Blog to continue the joke into the intertron, I got why people do this hard thing. Because once you release it into the wild, you know you've accomplished something you can share with other people. Even my crappy tabletop RPG feels like something epic I've achieved; I've attempted to create, and I was successful. I don't care if you like it. I just care that I did it. And now that I've done it, I want to do it again and do it better.
[discuss]
The other 34 months, the game, called Amerikkka, laid dormant, waiting for a drunken Sunday and bit of sticktoitiveness that neither Drake nor I typically possess. The game, until today, had gained mythical status among our friends; the people who knew about it did from the beginning, and hardly a month went by when someone didn't rib me about the game that never was. And if this process taught me anything, it taught me that designing games, even stupid tabletop RPGs about a future where Ted Kennedy is the Pope and Ted Turner patrols Atlanta on a giant cybernetic buffalo, is really, really hard.
The fun stuff is easy. We had the premise for the game – Hillary wins the 2020 election, the right wing revolts and secedes, and in the resulting cataclysm every bizarre extremist group carves out a section of America, leaving the players in a world like our own but darker and funnier – set within the first hour. I'd sketched out a map on a legal pad five minutes into the off-color conversation we were having.
It's the boring stuff that's hard. The first 80 percent of the design process occurred in about three weeks. The remaining five were god awful: bug testing, typesetting, searching for typos and overhauling a few systems that were either overcomplicated or broken. No one wants to do this. The fact there are people out there willing to test games for a living, and to do it cheaply, is beyond me. I created my goddamn systems and I couldn't stand testing them. That's not to say it isn't fun trying to beat someone to death with a prosthetic leg you discovered in an abandoned public hospital, but try doing that when you're futzing your way through a combat system that inadvertently made it impossible to kill someone. Or try getting stabbed but forgetting to implement how healing works.
Eventually, you work this shit out, but it's hard and boring and makes you hate what you've created. Which is why it took us another two years to fix typos, typeset the PDF and sprinkle in some little stuff along the way. The fact people can do this 40 hours a week is beyond me; it borders on Herculean, and until today, I didn't know why they did it.
This morning when I began rendering the PDF to toss up on DriveThruRPG, when I created Amerikkka: The Game: The Blog to continue the joke into the intertron, I got why people do this hard thing. Because once you release it into the wild, you know you've accomplished something you can share with other people. Even my crappy tabletop RPG feels like something epic I've achieved; I've attempted to create, and I was successful. I don't care if you like it. I just care that I did it. And now that I've done it, I want to do it again and do it better.
[discuss]