The Dog Blog

I made Primetime Adventures for sale on Oct 8, 2004, after selling roughly 34 copies at Gen Con.

To date…

867 books direct from my web site. I stopped in early September, due to logistics complications.

285 pdfs. Made available Dec 05

Since mid-May, IPR has sold 68 books direct.

Since August 2006, IPR and I have sold 218 books to retail stores. I handed that off to IPR in May.

187 books sold at Cons. Most of that number is Gen Con.

Total: 1618 units in three years. About 1.5 per day.

For anyone wondering, signing up with IPR hasn’t hurt my sales any. September this year was better than the previous two septembers. I stand to net as much this year as I did last year, and the game’s a year older. Go long tail!

Gen Con looms, and I’ve decided to throw sanity to the wind and attend. Bought plane tix today, and sent money to Paul for a share in the Ashcan Front.

I guess I better get that Ashcan awesomified!

To-do list:

• edits prompted by recent playtests
• more examples
• groovy ashcan layout
• ashcan intro text
• cover
• get some copies printed

The folks over at 2d6 Feet have invited Chris Bennett on their show to talk about his experiences at GoPlay NW. Among the games he played was a short playtest of Galactic. I was worried about how well the game would function in a con setting, especially in a playtest stage, but Chris seems to have enjoyed it. Check out his comments on the ‘cast.

Georgios Panagiotidis and his crew in Berlin have been playtesting Galactic for the last few weeks. Read the account of it here.

I’m likely going to be starting another playtest run soon. The overwhelming idea of busting open the file and dealing with much needed edits has kept me at bay during the move, but probably I’ll be dealing with that soon.
Also, check out this preview of new Galactic art: Belecia and her crew run into trouble on the Drift.

So last night I played Dogs. Sadly, it was the second time ever, but I really dug it. Let this be a sign of things to come.

One feeling I’ve been having about play lately that this game session supports is that I prefer play where the dice are out there and involved. More and more the words “let’s just roleplay it” translate to me as “let’s just have these next few minutes be less fun.” I like dice as cues and prompts and ideas and little polyhedron directors and advisors.

Dice in Dogs do a great job of that. I think Galactic dice do, too. They provide constraint and narration ideas. If you’re “just roleplaying it” anything can happen, and that’s often too much for me, but if I’m herded by dice results, I have a comfortable space in which to develop ideas.

All that sad time in the midwest is finally coming to an end. Tonight, I’m playing some Dogs in the Vineyard, Thursday I’m potentially getting together with the NY playtest crew, and all weekend long I’ll be at DEXCON.

I have a couple thousand words written up for this:

Many thousands of years ago, humankind in all its pride waged war on the mighty godminds. A great flood of fire consumed the earth, and all that remains of the human race—the repentant—lives in isolated citadels, walled off from the blackened landscape and the horrors that exist there. They exist now at the whim of the godminds, whom they devoutly worship and serve.

Each citadel offers up great champions to serve the needs of the godminds, to pilot and master the glorious MEKA, engines of honor and justice, five stories high, with thick steel armor and the last weapons of the old world. These champions go forth from their citadels into the wastes, undergoing perilous missions for the godminds, bringing honor to their citadels. Success grants charity and prosperity. Failure brings wrath.

On their quests, champions are brought together with champions from other citadels, combining their might to defeat terrible foes and accomplish great deeds. Yet only one citadel can achieve the most honor. Whose will it be?

Galactic just needs more playtesting, a few more runs out in the real world to see how things hold up. All I can do right now is wait and collect more art. Looks like Doyce is gonna try it out, and maybe John and his little mini playtest posse. If the NY crew weren’t backed up about four months I’d absolutely hit them up too. Are there other playtest groups out there? Get in touch!
So, while I’m waiting, I’ve started tinkering with a couple side projects. One of them seems to have taken off. It’s a sourcebook for someone else’s game. I pitched the idea to the game’s creator, and he’s totally thumbs up about it. How mysterious of me! It’s only because I want to be more like Luke or else I’d say what the project is.
The other one? Well, this sup above has kinda trumped it, but it’s also an idea for a supplement for someone else’s game. I think that I’d like to do that sort of thing for a while. I have a third game of my own that I want to make eventually, but for now, I think it’d be cool to support a few games I like with some supplemental material.

I wanted to post this to the Forge, but the damn server keeps timing out. Enough with the 500 already! Are we trying to one-up Frank Miller or what?

So in the GAMA thread, Ben was talking about needing to raise his prices to accomodate retail rates, and it set me down a whole line of thinking.

First I thought, Dude, why are you paying $11/copy to get Polaris printed? It would cost less at Kinkos.

Then I thought back to Gen Con 2005, when I had my revised version of Primetime Adventures done, and Luke was giving me the big-print sales pitch. I remember being terrified of the idea. Maybe of Luke, too. He gets going with gestures and stuff.

But long since I’ve done me a big print run, and I can’t recommend it enough. It more than halved my original cost per book, and it resulted in a really nice, quality book. Thanks Luke! Now Ben may have many reasons why he doesn’t do a run of a thousand, but he’s a great example of a publisher who could (and ought to, man, seriously). And I’ve been thinking about big runs in terms of a benchmark.

The thing about POD printers, and especially ones like Lulu, is that you can fix all kinds of errors and make revisions and it’s all seamless. Click, and the updated version is good to go. But why is a product that’s potentially full of errors available for sale in the first place? If you don’t know what might be wrong with it, why are you hawking it as a complete and finished game? I ask the me of 2004 that same question, don’t doubt it.

A run of a thousand copies (plus sweet, sweet overruns) cost me just over $2000, including shipping to my house. And that was roughly half up front, half prior to shipment. That’s for a 112 page digest size game. Do the math in your heads accordingly and imagine how much your game might cost. Then think about how much more you’d make per book. Then make sure the reason you aren’t doing it is a lack of confidence in the product.

This site in part is set up to discourage would-be publishers from printing ginormous runs of books, then getting stuck with a basement full of them; however, I’m proposing that a not-so-ginormous run be an excellent goal to strive for. Consider your finished game to be something that you’d confidently print a thousand of (plus sweet, sweet overruns).

Not to knock the Lulu stage* by any means. POD printers like Lulu are also an awesome resource, maybe a crucial one. I’ll leave that for another thread.

And Ben, by the white suit of Ackbar, get those per-book costs down! Down I say!

* I will, however, knock the people who work for Lulu. One of them didn’t show up for FM, and I have now made him my sworn enemy. Sworn! The deadly past participle of swearing! You know who you are!

Anyone played Knights of the Old Republic?

Remember Trask, the guy who helps you out in the beginning on the Endar Spire? Remember his voice?
That’s what Doyce Testerman sounds like.

People with the voices of Star Wars heroes are playtesting my game. That’s awesome.

FM was awesome for many reasons I mentioned below. This post is just about the playtesting angle.

I got some awesome and encouraging feedback from someone I greatly admire.

“I did nothing but playtesting at Forge Midwest… but of all those games I’m only convinced that one is going to be exciting and fun in actual play, and provoke folks to return to it for new games again and again. And it’s Galactic. “

Yeah. So that’s cool.

If you saw a playtest copy long ago, many things have changed.

First, the whole galaxy map-building thing is gone. I know, wah. But while it sounded cool, it was a design feature that I couldn’t get to work without serious agenda conflict. It didn’t add enough for what it did. So I took some feedback from Clinton, who said, make the map about the story, or some similarly cool thing.

Now the game is really driven by quests. Unlike, say, HeroQuest, quests in Galactic are a fundamental and unavoidable part of the game. You choose your quests, and they help you save humankind.

The other big change is a re-thinking of the whole plot/character thing from Primetime Adventures. John H and I were geeking out over the way conflicts in Otherkind make you choose what’s important. Aha, I thought. Now every conflict is about both plot and character. What’s more important: Your quest, or your relationship with the crew? In play it’s been monstrously fun.

So yeah, at this point it’s a matter of widespread play, shaking out the bugs that would only surface in widespread play. If you’re reading along and think there’s a reasonable chance that your group would want to try out a highly functional game (aside from bugs and rules clarity), drop me a line. I might have a pdf for you.