I've written a series of posts since starting my game design blog, and while I've had some positive feedback, I've also gotten the feedback that my posts are hard to understand. The basic response that's sticking with me was, to paraphrase; "What is this- I don't even..."
Is there any way some of you with free time could read a few posts from the beginning (it all adds to itself) and tell me what I could do to make things more clear? Feel free to skip the Kabbalah posts- they're not necessary to understand what I'm really trying to get across.
Anyway, thank you. I know it's a lot to ask.
The link is in my sig.
Writing about something new is kind of like making out for the first time with a new love interest. Generally you "ease into it" so to speak.
You jumped right into it with some hardcore new terms and "why my game is awesome" but it's all just hyperbole and nonsense to the CASUAL OBSERVER (<--! key point warning !--). I have no context for what you are saying. I read the first post and felt like we were moving to fast. We shook hands one second and you we're moving in to my place the second after that. I was all like "Whoa there big guy, buy me dinner first!"
Most people poking around the InterTubes reading stuff about RPGs are casual browsers. You have to slow down there.
I would suggest you start with SOMETHING imminently useful. Adventures are fun. Characters. Monsters. NPCs. It's great that your game can change a light bulb, but I'm not really going to believe you until you show me. I need to see it in action! Also, useful things are enticing. Build some interest in the system by showing off the execution.
P.S. You also will want to find a regular groove, keep posting, keep shouting out about it and be patient. Gamers dig consistency. It weeds out the thrill-seekers and near-do-wells. :-)
P.S.S. You are addressing a niche within a niche within a niche. Tabletop Gaming -> RPGs -> RPG Design. The audience is not huge. You will need more patience for this niche. :-)
Good Luck!
Thanks for the advice. How would I go about "Buying you dinner"? I really want this relationship to work out. What's your ring size? :D
I guess I got a bit overzealous. I was trying to set up some common ground for future posts. Since the game is weird, I felt like I needed to provide terminology for the conversation, as it were.
Edit: I do have one post up on building a magic item, but it requires a basic grasp of the previous articles. There's a large buy in for the game.
The sad truth is 95% of broswers don't care about game design ideas.
They mostly care about a couple of games at most and mostly want to hear their own opioning echoes back to them.
So a blog about an Old school D&D campaign might get some positive comments for example a blog about a Marvel Superheroes campaign might get less becuase the base is smaller. etc.
To get real traffic on a game blog you have to do what Pundit did and establish a position. Then drive that position home hard. It's the same thing right wing shock jocks do on American Radio. They are established as larger than life contentious characters that demand a reaction from both sides this generates noise and noise generates traffic.
The alternate is to write something you feel passionate about and just do it for yourself and if a few folks read it great but its really for you.
Just compare a thread here in the game design forum looking for a new way to make armour work in a heartbreaker or make guns varied and interesting in a spy game. They will get 3 - 50 hits tops a thread about how the liberal PC brigade wants to ban orcs or how the right wing facists are using Dwarves as a thinly veiled metaphor for Jews will get 700 even if its the 300th such post.....
The sad truth is 95% of broswers don't care about game design ideas.
They mostly care about a couple of games at most and mostly want to hear their own opinions echoed back to them.
So a blog about an Old school D&D campaign might get some positive comments for example a blog about a Marvel Superheroes campaign might get less becuase the base is smaller. etc.
To get real traffic on a game blog you have to do what Pundit did and establish a position. Then drive that position home hard. It's the same thing right wing shock jocks do on American Radio. They are established as larger than life contentious characters that demand a reaction from both sides this generates noise and noise generates traffic.
The alternate is to write something you feel passionate about and just do it for yourself and if a few folks read it great but its really for you.
Just compare a thread here in the game design forum looking for a new way to make armour work in a heartbreaker or make guns varied and interesting in a spy game. They will get 3 - 50 hits tops a thread about how the liberal PC brigade wants to ban orcs or how the right wing facists are using Dwarves as a thinly veiled metaphor for Jews will get 700 even if its the 300th such post.....
Quote from: Monster Manuel;689491I've written a series of posts since starting my game design blog, and while I've had some positive feedback, I've also gotten the feedback that my posts are hard to understand. The basic response that's sticking with me was, to paraphrase; "What is this- I don't even..."
Is there any way some of you with free time could read a few posts from the beginning (it all adds to itself) and tell me what I could do to make things more clear? Feel free to skip the Kabbalah posts- they're not necessary to understand what I'm really trying to get across.
Anyway, thank you. I know it's a lot to ask.
The link is in my sig.
A lot of blog readers are looking for how others play the games they're interested in. What kind of scenarios, characters, printable maps, etc.
Game design, with lots of theory behind it, is of no interest to casual gamers. They're expecting to download a free game from you. Most of them are file-sucks, just doing their drive-by to see what content they can take from you and then be on their way.
To be honest, all I made it through was the introduction and then my eyes started glazing over at the Shield of Retribution. The introduction left me thinking: I can already do all of that with DnD, Savage Worlds, or whatever. It did not explain why Tribute is particularly good at any of that.
Then the talk about Elements and the Shield example jump straight into jargon and keywords. Without any clue as to what the jargon and keywords mean, it looked like a whole bunch of abstract, meaningless equations. The narrative description of the Shield sounded nifty, but I could easily crank out some rpg stats with any of the games I currently play without a bunch of equations. Left my thinking why go through the trouble? Conveniently, there is a link at the end for that.....which took my back to the Introduction that I had already read.
Tell me what is cool about Tribute rather than generic boilerplate that applies to pretty much every rpg. Do not throw a bunch of jargon and equations without first drawing me into what is cool about Tribute. Do not use jargon without first telling me what that jargon means.
Quote from: Old One Eye;689535To be honest, all I made it through was the introduction and then my eyes started glazing over at the Shield of Retribution. The introduction left me thinking: I can already do all of that with DnD, Savage Worlds, or whatever. It did not explain why Tribute is particularly good at any of that.
Then the talk about Elements and the Shield example jump straight into jargon and keywords. Without any clue as to what the jargon and keywords mean, it looked like a whole bunch of abstract, meaningless equations. The narrative description of the Shield sounded nifty, but I could easily crank out some rpg stats with any of the games I currently play without a bunch of equations. Left my thinking why go through the trouble? Conveniently, there is a link at the end for that.....which took my back to the Introduction that I had already read.
Tell me what is cool about Tribute rather than generic boilerplate that applies to pretty much every rpg. Do not throw a bunch of jargon and equations without first drawing me into what is cool about Tribute. Do not use jargon without first telling me what that jargon means.
My feelings too. I don't think I've ever needed rules for how to make something do something. If I were to make a shield that turned someone into a pig when struck, I would just do it. I see no need for mathematical formulas. I'm just confused and bored by what seems to me to be over-thinking the obvious.
I found myself going down similar paths when I first attempted game design. I read a lot of blogs and posts on RPGnet and The Forge about mechanics and game theory and thought all that was really neat... until I realized that it wasn't fun at all. At least, not for me. I had to look backwards towards what I enjoyed about gaming when I was a teenager, and realized it had absolutely nothing to do with rules and mechanics.
Long story short, game design is vanity, and most people just don't care about the 'hows and whys' they just want to play something and have fun.
I can see what you are trying to do, but it reads to me like Object-Oriented Programming converted to a game, or a game written in OOP.
What is confusing about the blogs is that they don't seem to tell us anything. Sure, they describe what the things are, but they don't give any examples of how to use them. Also, they are split over several different blogs.
When I see a new game, I don't generally care about the designer, or rather I don't care what they have previously done. Split all that into a separate blog that people can read if they want to.
Put the core game elements into a single blog, with example.
Use other blogs to expand on then, maybe one topic at a time.
Quote from: everloss;689558most people just don't care about the 'hows and whys' they just want to play something and have fun.
Quote from: jibbajibba;689518The sad truth is 95% of broswers don't care about game design ideas.
More generally, the same can be said of numerous other niches (both geek/nerd and non-geek/non-nerd niches).
Numerous individuals seem to have very little to no interest in the underlying technical stuff underlying such niches like: video games, movies, science fiction, music, rpg games, board games, card games, etc ...
Highly technical/mathematical discussions on such subjects, seem to be frequently met with deafening silence or indifference.
Thanks for the advice everyone, and I'm glad to see that you actually tried reading the blog.
The game does take a page (or several) from object oriented programming. That may be a bad thing in many people's estimation, and I get it. I just hate rules light games, and wanted something firm.
It's hard to talk about the Elements as individual things except in the vaguest terms, because they are defined in large part by their interactions. It's a bit like quantum fuzziness.
I think I'll post a recap thread about the Elements, to help new readers.
Finally, I am definitely doing this for myself (and others like me), because I want this game and imagine that there might be a few others who feel the same way. I know that as it stands it won't be for everyone.
The scariest thing I learned in business school is how important your one-page executive summary with three to five bullet points is. No matter what the project.
SO, the first thing on your blog should be three to five brief (no more than 25 word) bullet points to entice readers to continue.
Quote from: Old Geezer;689637The scariest thing I learned in business school is how important your one-page executive summary with three to five bullet points is. No matter what the project.
SO, the first thing on your blog should be three to five brief (no more than 25 word) bullet points to entice readers to continue.
So true.... "But how can you condense this 2 year programme to update our Datacentres across East Asia into a simple paragraph for the Seniors...." :)
they are happy to spend 100 million dollars but they don't want to spend more than 5 minutes on why :)
I swear they spend longer picking the wine for dinner ....
For my two nickels, I think first off you're expecting a rapid response from something that tends to happen at a glacial speed. If you're not already an Internet/actual celebrity it takes a long time to build up a following. Sometimes years. You have to be writing for yourself and enjoy that first and foremost to stick it out for the long run, and for a lot of readers longevity is often one of the first indicators that it's worth reading. At this point in online history there have been millions of blogs that, however interesting, died within a matter of months, generally as the writer lost interest or got themselves a life. Most of the time you never know. The online readership has become jaded and discerning with thier time. There's a lot of websites out there to go to and time to play online isn't infinite for most adults. And for every dead blog there are hundreds of dead systems. Designs half-finished (at best) bursts of creativity that faltered the minute they get near the nitty gritty. Heck just peruse the old columns on rpgnet. There were many would be imitators in the wake of one of the first successes, the GMS thread that lead to the rather abysmal rpg Underworld getting published.
Also, the way most people hear about interesting blogs of this hobby tends to be forums in our hobby. That means other people besides yourself posting links to it, recommending it, quoting from it. You do not currently have much info posted that's going to get reposted. Rather than taking the previously suggested route of controversy, I would suggest the longer route to build up readership based on recommendations rather than trying to get people to repost your rants. That said, some genuine ranting can be entertaining. What it should be is interesting even if the reader disagrees with you. But those are pretty rare.
What I'd want to see in your blog as a reader-
Why are you passionate about this system that you're devoting your time to it. What were your inspirations and motivations? What games have you played, what have you thought of those experiences, and how has that shaped your choices in this design. Give me a reason to care about the system before I'm subjected to the rules themselves. I want to know the why? more than the what?, otherwise, why not just wait till the game is finished to read it?
What Id like to see as far as system presentation:
1. Character Sheet.
It's the first page I flip to in any new rpg, as an experienced player/GM/tinkerer/writer it can tell me asuch as 20 pages about the system (or how unlike the game is to any sustem Im familiar with),it's a great potential visual hook to provide an overview of the game's core mood/theme/approach, and it's great as a reference point when first parsing together a new system.
2. Jargon and basic concepts. Got a unified base mechanic? Ok, give it to me in the simplest form possible. Tell me what the games about and what type of characters I'll be playing. Ignore chargen for now. It should be the last thing you design anyways, if this is a work in progress.
3. Step by step go through the different parts of the system . Attributes. Skills. Equipment. Powers and abilities. Initiative. Combat. Etc. each subject I want to know how you approached the design and why? Where did the idea come from? Have you play tested? How does it work in play. And always go from general to specific. Give me an overview, an explanation, and a conclusion. Treat each one like its a story you're telling your grand kid.
All good points. Thanks.
Coincidentally, my own gaming blog's less than a week old. Maybe people other than my players will care. Maybe they won't. It is what it is.
Would I get warm all over if I turned into a gaming celebrity through my dulcet prose? Well, sure. I'd also get warm if Bill Gates showed up at my place with a $10 million check, but I'd better not hold my breath waiting for either.
Considering the vast majority of gamers already have complete games they're playing, I'd say the weakness of your blog isn't so much your writing style as your premise. You state upfront that you've been a chronic procrastinator, and that you blew enough deadlines and flaked on enough projects to sabotage your early promise in the gaming industry. You then state that you've been working on this RPG for several years, and we can therefore infer that it's incomplete.
I admire your candor, but that's about as offputting an intro as you could manage short of insults, strobe lights or Goth poetry. Why would the reader get invested, when right off the bat one can reasonably infer that this is a project you'll never finish?
Quote from: Ravenswing;689685Coincidentally, my own gaming blog's less than a week old. Maybe people other than my players will care. Maybe they won't. It is what it is.
Would I get warm all over if I turned into a gaming celebrity through my dulcet prose? Well, sure. I'd also get warm if Bill Gates showed up at my place with a $10 million check, but I'd better not hold my breath waiting for either.
Considering the vast majority of gamers already have complete games they're playing, I'd say the weakness of your blog isn't so much your writing style as your premise. You state upfront that you've been a chronic procrastinator, and that you blew enough deadlines and flaked on enough projects to sabotage your early promise in the gaming industry. You then state that you've been working on this RPG for several years, and we can therefore infer that it's incomplete.
I admire your candor, but that's about as offputting an intro as you could manage short of insults, strobe lights or Goth poetry. Why would the reader get invested, when right off the bat one can reasonably infer that this is a project you'll never finish?
I hear you. I guess the proof will be the completed game, and continued posts on the blog. I started the blog to help me get my playtest document into working order. It's largely complete, I'm just using feedback in order to come up with a way of getting the game across before I begin plugging in the numbers.
Hopefully my candor in the post should make it clear that I'm not bullshitting when I say that.
Ultimately, though, it will be ready when it's ready, so I fully get your point. I don't have a firm deadline in mind, though I'd like to get to playtesting as soon as I have something that won't piss off my oldest gaming friend and math nazi when we try to play it and it breaks right away. I'll dip my toes in with him, and if it all works, I'll put up a playtest draft for the public. From there, we'll get to fixing any issues that come up and publication. I already have a publisher lined up.
I think the extra time and effort I've taken (and will take) with the system will prove worth it to the people who would want it.
First, I'm assuming you want to get attention for your ideas, not just generic blog hits and the cheap heat that comes from sexism/racism/edition wars/rpg micro-celebrity gossip/hot elf chick posts.
Fellow RPG tinkerers are a .... unique audience because most have a predisposition to like and use their own or favored system,and are not looking to adopt any time soon. The number of players or GMs sans allegiance who read these blogs is vanishingly small, on par with the number of actual women in the "hot lesbian sex chatroom".
The stuff that gets most attention and kudos is stuff that can be grafted and ported to other systems - not whole systems in themselves. It's why stuff based on d20/old school and implicit fantasy settings predominates in the attentions of the blog sphere.
If you care about attention, your main hope (not guarantee) is to do what so few do:
1. Present a cool and interesting setting and have the system grow from that (cf. Numenera)
2. Develop your system through actual play and show us that people actually enjoy it. If you can't find anyone who genuinely has their fun facilitated by your game, you are designing it for your navel.
Thanks, Roger. I'm not looking for abstract attention at this stage, I'm interested in feedback on the expressed concepts and in refining them simply by writing them in a format that the intended audience can understand. I also felt with the first few posts that I should lay out the common terms that will be used in any examples I give.
Later, when I playtest, I plan to do a writeup of part of the session. I can also build a setting and describe everything in Tribute terminology. In fact, that's my main reason for writing the game- I love creating settings and wanted a system to hang my hat on. I've tried with other generic systems but they didn't work out for me.
Even if they had no flavor of their own, they always seemed to have an aftertaste. I wanted to write a game without one.
Also, Ravenswing- I read your blog (http://ravenswing59.blogspot.com/) (except for the character write up) and I liked it quite a bit.
Hey there.
You're trying to get a lot of difficult concepts out to the reader, and their motivation to read is going to be reduced by
- jargon
- big blocks of text
- mechanics that require leaps of comprehension
Don't dumb your content down, find a better way to express it and you may get the engagement you want. May I humbly recommend Jakob Nielsen's usability articles, including my favourite:
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/
I'm a big believer in scannable text. It's less appropriate for prose, but for our hobby which is quite technical scannable is the way to go.
I'm going to read the article, but what do you mean by scannable text? I think I get the gist, but is sounds useful and I'd love to understand it fully. Oh wait, Let Me Google That For Me (http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22Scannable+text%22).
I am trying to work out a way to make the Expressions more easily read without making them too long. I have sort of an idea on how to do so. I just want to make sure I don't lose anything.
I've read the article, which incidentally was the first link on Google. The inverted pyramid was also eye-opening. I come from a prose background, and learning from journalism seems like the way to go for expressing game concepts.
Quote from: Monster Manuel;689692Also, Ravenswing- I read your blog (http://ravenswing59.blogspot.com/) (except for the character write up) and I liked it quite a bit.
Why thank you, sir!
I admit I've a bit of an advantage. I'm a packrat, and I save things: e-mails, forum posts, suchlike. Not counting other gaming forums, I put up nearly six thousand posts on RPGnet, and have my posts from a couple hundred threads saved. If I decide "Hey, how about I do a blogpost on my feelings about alignment?" I don't have to write the sucker from scratch; I've got several thread's-worth of my views going back a decade.
My problem was the writing.
For instance, it would be "1. You're a TinkerER" not "You're a Tinker". To be a Tinkerer is to refine an object with workmanship. To 'tink' is to make a light metallic sound. "You're a Tinker" means you make little metallic sounds, or you are the character Bug from the Marvel Comics adaptation of the toyline "Micronauts".
I think the problem you're running into is that you're fighting a war on two fronts. It does not matter how marvellous your mechanics are if you cannot present them adequately as a writer. These are really two entirely separate skills. Lots of writers write very well some mediocre rulesets, and do reasonably well for themselves, but poor writers rarely get anywhere even with a great system.
I don't necessarily mean beautiful language - I mean the ordering of your ideas, the delineation of information; the sequential presentation of the material.
We all have our own hangups with the written word and they can be hard to get over - as I go on and on - but the cruel fact is that no one pays attention unless you present the information well.
...which is just practice. I agree with earlier posters - don't expect this to happen overnight, but like a castle siege you should be prepared by having everything in order.
Remind yourself why you're doing this - because if it's for fame and glory, it's going to fail. If you're doing this because it makes you happy, then damn the rest.
//Panjumanju