So I finished my modern supernatural horror RPG called After Sundown. It is similar in overall theme to Nightlife or World of Darkness, so I guess it's my Fanged Heartbreaker. Sooner or later everyone has one. I made it available for free as a torrent, and it can also be purchased from Payloadz for $0.99. Shortly it will be up on other ebook sales sites as well. That is the price I think ebooks should have, and I'm sticking to my guns when it comes to pricing my own products as well. It's 225 pages and has illustrations (such as they are).

But because of the kind of place this is, I think you're most interested in my take on the "What is Roleplaying?" section at the beginning of the book. So here's the beginning intro from before the table of contents:

Quote from: After SundownAfter Sundown is a cooperative storytelling game that tells stories in the realm of horror. Players take on the roles of monsters out of horror movies or the humans who oppose them, while one of the players takes on the role of the MC – a combination referee, narrator, and roleplayer of last resort for antagonists and minor characters in the story.

Cooperative storytelling can be done without any products at all, as with collaborative writing or Cops and Robbers. After Sundown provides structure and conflict resolution in the form of an established world and story, as well as with a set of mechanics to determine the results of actions with the help of six sided dice. In this way, players of After Sundown can bypass many of the hangups of both collaborative fiction and Cops and Robbers: most notably the "I shot you/ No you did not" problem. It is hoped that the backstory and established characters of After Sundown will be sufficiently evocative as to give players of protagonists and MCs ample launching points for stories of their own.

I fully expect to be lambasted as a swine by Pundit for that.

-Frank

How does it compare to your "Alternate World of Darkness" (aWoD) game from a while back?

Quote from: FrankTrollman;460964I fully expect to be lambasted as a swine by Pundit for that.

Easier than you think.

Cheers, and good luck with the new game.

Quote from: The Butcher;460990How does it compare to your "Alternate World of Darkness" (aWoD) game from a while back?

Very similar. As in: it's basically the same game with the IP stripped out, because as long as I was making a "fan product" I couldn't actually release a pdf of it without Justin Achilli being allowed to kick me in the nuts at will. Going back to source material, I could make the game stand on its own and not fear legal challenges.

In the course of doing that of course I added and changed some rules to match playtest reports. I like the way the new Damage Over Time system worked out: you don't need to do division any more, which speeds things up at the table. Also, I had a number of things in there for really no reason except to conform to White Wolf product identity. Once that was no longer a goal, some stuff like "Call the Lamprey" got kicked to the curb right off. Shadow users can now happily use the special invisibility that doesn't hide your shadow from the 1930s pulp adventurer of the same name.

Leaving White Wolf product identity also allowed me to get rid of the name and the concept of the "Storyteller". While I admit that "Storyteller" has got traction that "GM" really doesn't, it sends very much the wrong message for a cooperative storytelling game. If one player is the "Storyteller", doesn't that imply that the other players aren't telling stories? I rather like "MC". It gives the sort of leadership vibe that you're looking for without implying that the other players are servants or passive by necessity.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;460964But because of the kind of place this is, I think you're most interested in my take on the "What is Roleplaying?" section at the beginning of the book.

Indeed. Thanks. Pass.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;460964But because of the kind of place this is, I think you're most interested in my take on the "What is Roleplaying?" section at the beginning of the book. So here's the beginning intro from before the table of contents:

I think I said something similar in the front of Tough Justice and Courtesans. Combine that with the fact that Grim has been advertising Tough Justice as "Adversarial Story Gaming" and I fully expect Pundit to lay into the pair of them.

This is entirely my intention though. Lovely as all these 4 and 5 star reviews are I'd like a ballancing view.

Seems odd to me that they'll kick your fan letter in the nuts whilst we at Postmortem are profiting from mocking them viciously without any trouble :S

I love MC it's a great designation.

I'm tending towards themed variants myself (Courtesans has Landlady, Doxy will have Pimp/Bawd and Coppers In Disguise will have Super)

Quote from: Ian Warner;460997I love MC it's a great designation.

I'm tending towards themed variants myself (Courtesans has Landlady, Doxy will have Pimp/Bawd and Coppers In Disguise will have Super)

Cool. I have had mixed experience with themed variants of DM for specific games. People seem to use "Keeper" fairly often with regards to Call of Cthulhu, but I think I'v heard someone call the DM of a Toon game "Director" maybe once. Part of that is that I think people don't really want to be directed any more than they want to be mastered. Actual comedy names like "Bartender" tend to stop being funny after a few iterations, and then I see them fall out of favor. And then "DM" is right back in there.

-Frank

Stick to your guns, however, the price point is insufficient to support the game itself, and will ensure that it's relegated to just a small niche of players only.

Also...

The message this pricing sends is this:

I have worked hard for months writing my 225 page masterwork. It's a complete game and game setting. It's only worth .99 though.

You have a specific reason for trying to kill the RPG Industry?

Quote from: GameDaddy;461002Stick to your guns, however, the price point is insufficient to support the game itself, and will ensure that it's relegated to just a small niche of players only.

Also...

The message this pricing sends is this:

I have worked hard for months writing my 225 page masterwork. It's a complete game and game setting. It's only worth .99 though.

You have a specific reason for trying to kill the RPG Industry?

Well personally I'm a medic and I've always wanted to kill something. I spend so much time saving people that it seems only fair.

All flippancy aside however, the fact is that the 99 cent price point seems to make a lot more sense for ebooks than higher price points. The people with the most total sales in dollars sell their ebooks for 99 cents. Not just the most sales of total books, but the most sales in overall take-home money. I think that the RPG industry should learn from the mystery fiction industry and lower price points until it drops below the level of a "major purchase" and becomes an "impulse buy".

This isn't idle speculation or anything, there is a genuine discussion among producers of ebooks as to whether 3 dollars is too much to charge for an ebook or not. I've done some reading of the various studies and arguments, and I believe that it is.

I think people will be a lot more willing to pay me a dollar for thanks and encouragement than they would to pay me the fifteen dollars that is the current average price of an ebook in the games category. Furthermore, it is quite likely that the number of willing people in question is in reality more than fifteen times as many. But even if it was simply exactly fifteen times as many, that would still involve me having the same amount of take-home money and my book would have reached more people. And that would mean that there was more interest on hand for possible expansion materials.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;461000Cool. I have had mixed experience with themed variants of DM for specific games. People seem to use "Keeper" fairly often with regards to Call of Cthulhu, but I think I'v heard someone call the DM of a Toon game "Director" maybe once. Part of that is that I think people don't really want to be directed any more than they want to be mastered. Actual comedy names like "Bartender" tend to stop being funny after a few iterations, and then I see them fall out of favor. And then "DM" is right back in there.

-Frank

I came up with the idea when I needed a way of distinguishing between two types of GM in the Tough Justice LARP rules and now all my Non Shadow World games will follow that convention

Quote from: Ian Warner;460997This is entirely my intention though. Lovely as all these 4 and 5 star reviews are I'd like a ballancing view.

My apologies, but I'm not a Storygamer/RPG ideologue...instead, I go with "does it seem fun?" and "is it will written?"..=)

Quote from: FrankTrollman;461006This isn't idle speculation or anything, there is a genuine discussion among producers of ebooks as to whether 3 dollars is too much to charge for an ebook or not. I've done some reading of the various studies and arguments, and I believe that it is.

I think people will be a lot more willing to pay me a dollar for thanks and encouragement than they would to pay me the fifteen dollars that is the current average price of an ebook in the games category.

Indeed, this is so. I would note that the e-book publishers in the article is comparing publishing statistics with print publishing houses. This book you wrote, also happens to be a game, an entirely different beast.

Looking now at Call of Duty: Black Ops. In it's first month alone, worldwide it sold ten million copies at $50 a pop. Gross revenue, just over $500 million in sales. For the game. Alone. Just the game, not additional stuff like coffee mugs, T-shirts and other stuff. In the week it was released, it beat out the top three movie releases combined at every theater in the U.S. taking in over 400 million dollars in sales. The movies combined did two and change in box office ticket sales.

Is Call of Duty: Black Ops replayable? Definitely. Does it have as much content (scenarios and adventures) as After Sundown? Possibly... Does it have a toolkit that allows you to create your own extended maps and scenarios?

Yes... not available from the publisher though, available from a 3rd party...
Call of Duty Mod Tools

and..
COD 4 Mod and MOD Tools

These are free, doubtless because the EULA prohibits the selling of derivative apps, even though its a game. So only one really profits...

My point is... you could probably do everything in After Sundown that Mod Designers do in Call of Duty, and much more... with a much smaller investment in hardware/gaming accessories. So, as an artist, why should COD be worth more than After Sundown?

This presents an interesting koan, worthy of some followup investigation.

A good chunk of it is that Call of Duty is playable single player. After Sundown really isn't, being a cooperative storytelling game. Furthermore, Call of Duty has a huge advertising budget. That means that a lot more people will have it and be able to play it with each other. I know that I would personally pay more for a game that I am more likely to find other players for than for one where I would have to create a local playerbase myself for. Every hour I have to spend convincing people to check the game out is an hour the game should be paying me for.

Secondly, art budget. I can do some vaguely interesting camera tricks, and the pictures that you can find that are creative commons are often pretty amazing, but I can't draw very well and the demons simply don't have pictures for them. It's unfortunate, but there it is. Call of Duty has a huge art budget.

Now all that being said: I play table top RPGs, and I don't play Call of Duty. Clearly, After Sundown is worth more to me than Call of Duty is. But I can see the argument that Call of Duty should cost more than my product does.

-Frank

If you read any message board while the Playstation Network was down, you wouldn't think Call of Duty was playable single player...=P

I've had a skim of my (bought) copy and for the first time since Dudes of Legend I'm determined to actually read a PDF cover to cover.

Good on you Trollman.

Points to consider:

Hire/acquire an editor.  It's easy to let a project like this get out of control, and writer's fatigue is always an issue, but I'm finding awkward phrasings and vague sentences that are much worse than anything I've done on all-nighter research papers.

Also, the language is overly technical in places, even where technical language doesn't add anything to what is being said.  I've heard you are/were in med school, so this might be habit, but it's really better to tone it down, especially if you want to match the language being used with the conversational and sometimes informal tone you drift in and out of.  One minute you're beginning a sentence with "and" or "but" (actually, you do it a lot, more than even a lenient and forward-thinking editor might let you get away with) or otherwise using informal writing, the next you're throwing out technical jargon in long strings with a super-formal tone encapsulating everything.  If you could just isolate the more verbose prose, it could be paired down quite a bit and rewritten to flow better, saving you tons of page space and adding clarity.

Organization is something else that needs to be addressed.  I don't have a background in editing, so I don't even know where to begin, but the content is all over the place, and the formatting of the ToC doesn't help much.  Why are the basic mechanics followed by campaign/character goals, separating the explanation of how edges and such work from the actual rules for creating edges, and then even more fluff separating the basic mechanics from skill use, as well as character generation from backgrounds?  I can't parse the logic behind this.

Oh, and page breaks are your friend.

Not trying to be a jerk or anything, and I understand that this is something you did with your free time, but I just thought I'd throw some food for thought on the table.