A Thing Of Beauty...

[Ancient History]

A Thing of Beauty is a Stout Green Toy is a fun little slide presentation relevant to gaming. The central thesis has merit: to stay relevant, RPGs need to reinvent themselves with a new model of play beyond the Mr. Cavern model.

I'm not entirely sure what that would look like. Perhaps a sort of cooperative game where each person is Mr. Cavern of a specific rules or story aspect, and the whole group takes turns with it throughout a session.

[TheWorid]

So, this is a slide show wherein the author throws a bunch of largely unrelated information at us and then wedges in an "RPGs suck!" comment at the end? Isn't this the guy who ragequit game publishing, sold his company, and then made a new game company a few years later? We're expected to take this seriously?

[Ancient History]

So, this is a slide show wherein the author throws a bunch of largely unrelated information at us and then wedges in an "RPGs suck!" comment at the end?

He does wander around a bit, but his argument is less "RPGs suck!" than "RPGs have been doing the same fucking thing for decades and everybody is ripping everybody else off."

Isn't this the guy who ragequit game publishing, sold his company, and then made a new game company a few years later?

No idea.

We're expected to take this seriously?

It's a slide show. You are never expected to take any slideshow seriously. When I saw the title, I thought it was going to be 70 slides about Gumby.

[Josh_Kablack]

I'm not entirely sure what that would look like.

It would probably look a lot like Once Upon a Time or Baron Munchausen - you know, games that Mr. Wallis there wrote before putting that slideshow together.

[mean_liar]

The guy sure doesn't like Mr Cavern, that's certain. He puts Shadowrun and Vampire and DnD in the same category... and presumably everything that's not Nobilis, because they have a Mr Cavern? I'm confused what his message is intended to be, since his company is enthusiastically publishing Dragon Warriors.

Personally I'm a Dragon Quest kind of throw-back, but whatever.


EDIT - for those that don't know, James Wallis made The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron von Munchausen and headed up Hogshead Publishing. Yes, he did ragequit the industry:

http://www.ogrecave.com/interviews/jameswallis2.shtml

Yes, he did come back:

http://www.magnumopuspress.com/

Yes, he's pushing Dragon Warriors:

http://www.magnumopuspress.com/?page_id=10

[hogarth]

"Stupid RPGs. Be more fun!"

-James "Homer" Wallis

[Josh_Kablack]

What was your submission to the D&D Fantasy Setting Search, and if you didn't have one, what should it have been?

I didn't have one. I jotted down some ideas but they didn't gel. I wanted to do something that involved exploring a new world, but I quickly realised that the ideas I was having would mean rewriting D&D so that each participant was equally GM and player,

Yeah, he does hate the very idea of Mister Cavern.

And while he's done some interesting stuff in that direction, his rants seem to be largely tilting at windmills.

Yeah, sure RPGs are all D&D descendants, and therefore tweaks on a design that's over 30 years old, but D&D was a Chainmail tweak, chainmail was a descendant of Little Wars which was a descendant of the Prussian Kriegsspiel that dates to 1812. But utility and fun of a game engine involving of "move miniatures around on a scale map in accordance with a formal rules set" has no correlation to its age.

While I cannot find fault with Wallis's calls for innovation in the abstract, I would counter by quoting Feng Shui designer Robin D. Laws, "We tell the same stories over and over again because those are the best stories."

There is certainly value to innovation and creativity, yet there is also value to going with the tried and true.

[Username17]

Mr. Wallis has a complicated relationship with D&D. Here's what he says about it:

I haven't played D&D in years. I thought AD&D2 was awful, a genuine step backwards for the game, and said as much in a review in Games International which got me blacklisted from TSR (UK). 3e was genuinely miraculous, a brilliant rebirth for the flagship that the RPG industry desperately needed and which TSR had ground into the dust, not least by refusing--through pigheadedness more than anything else--to release an introductory product that didn't have the word 'Advanced' on it.

I've done a talk at a number of (RPG) conventions about what a miracle OD&D was--the amazing number of things it got right, and how brilliantly they mesh. Take classes, levels and experience points. These are the core elements of pretty much every modern CRPG from World of Warcraft downwards, and the heart of the tide of gamification that threatens to swamp us in the next few years.

D&D is not bad. It's not to my personal taste these days but it is what it is: a solid, respectable, entirely decent and very playable game. It is Coke; it is Ford; it is the Rolling Stones. It hasn't moved with the times, but to expect it to is like wanting Windows to become something completely new and innovative. A large part of its massive following comes from the fact it'll never do that, it'll always be recognisable to some degree as the thing you've known and used for years. I recommend that people try RPGs for the first time with the Red Box--I used to tell them to go and hunt down an old one from the 80s, and now I don't have to any more.

D&D is the foundation of the RPG industry and hobby, and it's in safe hands. On the other hand it's had some shitty expansions and some dreadful supplements, plus I spent 1995-2003 as the publisher of a rival top-ten fantasy RPG, and so a little trash-talking of the competition was only to be expected.

That being said, I think the fact that he has been out of "the game" (and by "the game" I mean Dungeons & Dragons) for several years is really clouding his judgement about what is going on. Yes, D&D is still structurally the same, but no not all editions are the same. Just as 3e got him personally into the game again, it got a lot of people into the hobby. And just as he personally isn't playing 4th edition, a lot of people aren't playing RPGs.

A good edition of D&D makes there be more roleplayers. A bad edition makes there be less. Today is the first time in fifteen years that people who sell indie RPGs aren't primarily selling to people who play the current edition of D&D but want a change of pace. And just to put things in harsh perspective: right now they are selling primarily to people who play or played the last edition of D&D. Hell, there is right now a game running neck and neck with the current edition of D&D that may seriously push it aside and become the number one RPG at least for a while. A feat not achieved since the zenith of White Wolf, and it is some guy's shitty D&D house rules with good art!

If you want to know why RPGs are flagging today, it is because a lousy edition of D&D drove away 75% of the fanbase (According to WotC's own numbers), and not because the formula itself is incapable of holding peoples' interests.

-Username17

[CCarter]

The guy sure doesn't like Mr Cavern, that's certain. He puts Shadowrun and Vampire and DnD in the same category... and presumably everything that's not Nobilis, because they have a Mr Cavern? I'm confused what his message is intended to be, since his company is enthusiastically publishing Dragon Warriors.

Personally I'm a Dragon Quest kind of throw-back, but whatever.

They've in the process of discontinuing their relationship with Dragon Warriors, actually. There was some wailing and gnashing of beards over this at the wetpaint DW site and suchlike..(admittedly, I was doing it too). DW is perhaps most likely to become a GURPS variant or somesuch, or get an entirely different system.

One interesting thing about Wallis, IMHO - and I don't know if this is significant in assessing his thoughts: he's somewhat odd in that he's a game publisher but it would seem not a designer (he hasn't followed the usual Player--->GM---->Designer---->Publisher evolution pattern). Both Warhammer and DW under his aegis were reprints without any significant system revision.

Also unrelatedly, Dragonquest still seems to have a few players floating around. I haven't played it, but there's a yahoogroup for this I was a member of briefly where they're still homebrewing files and where they have much of the core book content available - 'abandonware' I guess.

[Psychic Robot]

Dear James Wallis,

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Love,

PR

[hogarth]

gnashing of beards

Ha! Good one.

[JonSetanta]

gnashing of beards

Ha! Good one.

I was about to quote-post the same line. Made me laugh, very appropriate.

[CCarter]

Cheers, all part of the service

[Zinegata]

EDIT - for those that don't know, James Wallis made The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron von Munchausen and headed up Hogshead Publishing.

If Munchausen is the "future" of RPGs then I'm sticking to computer games from now on -_-

[mean_liar]

Looking through the Ogre Cave interviews, one good nugget did come from this, though not from Wallis' interview.

It was from John Tynes (Pagan Publishing, Delta Green): he wishes that he could have done Pagan Publishing as a not-for-profit venture.

What a wise, wise thing that is to do as a game publisher, at least in the current market.

[Sir Neil]

"... populated by barely functional beings for whom gaming is their entire existence ...."

Yeah, I'm down with that.

[TheFlatline]

Dude lost me on slide 5 with his Seinfeld impersonation:

"Whhhhy... do they call it a play? You don't play. They don't play. They're doing serious work up there. It's all laid out for them. Play means creating things. I don't get it!"

Unless he's being sarcastic, he's showing a lack of the history of English language.

I remember Nobilis. I always wanted to check it out, but the book was 60+ dollars, and I could buy *two* core WOD or D&D books for that price and was promised to use them in at least one or two games. For a kid working a minimum wage job, that was significant.

So I read through all that. What a mess.

He also forgets about LARPs, which, while weird, are less about Mr Cavern and more about social interaction. Entire storylines occur without the Mister Caverns of the game ever knowing about it. In fact it seems like he's pushing for games to look like LARPs. That's well and fine but a LARP doesn't become something different than dorky table-top until you hit a critical mass of players, different for each gaming group, where the total creative output of the group exceeds anything the staff can create. That's not something you're really going to get with 4 people sitting around a table.

[hogarth]

Looking through the Ogre Cave interviews, one good nugget did come from this, though not from Wallis' interview.

It was from John Tynes (Pagan Publishing, Delta Green): he wishes that he could have done Pagan Publishing as a not-for-profit venture.

What a wise, wise thing that is to do as a game publisher, at least in the current market.

It's not immediately clear to me why investing your time and money in an unsuccessful not-for-profit is wiser than investing your time and money in an unsuccessful for-profit company.

[TheFlatline]

Taxes are handled differently, you still get paid, you just don't get royalties, and your overhead is lower.

Also, you can often negotiate lower prices with your suppliers because *they* can write the difference off of their taxes.

Depending, of course, on how you set things up.

It's an interesting idea. One I don't think has actually been tried in the RPG business.

[JigokuBosatsu]

John Tynes... wishes that he could have done Pagan Publishing as a not-for-profit venture.

So sayeth the company that sent me a cease-and-desist letter back in the day because I wrote some Delta Green-themed fiction and the magazine publisher neglected to credit them.

Of course, that was many many years ago...

[mean_liar]

One could charitably assume that by wanting to have done it as a not-for-profit he wouldn't have had to chase down every profit-seeking derivative work... but I'm an optimist.

[JigokuBosatsu]

The only coin I was paid in was a perverse satisfaction at having DESTROYED a Canadian scifi mag with an intellectual property dispute.

Though as I recall it was Scott Glancy who I dealt with... Tynes definitely seemed the least stabby of the bunch.

I have to say in fairness it wasn't a terrible experience, just kind of silly. Apparently Pagan had a problem with some Polish RPG pirates, and weren't able to tackle them, so they decided to flex their IP muscles with the first problem stateside. I was 18 and my spirit had yet to be broken by my abusive ex-wife, so as I recall I was pretty aggressive with telling them the four tests had my back. But it all worked out, except for the publishers of "Imelod".

[Todd Fischer]

The only coin I was paid in was a perverse satisfaction at having DESTROYED a Canadian scifi mag with an intellectual property dispute.

Though as I recall it was Scott Glancy who I dealt with... Tynes definitely seemed the least stabby of the bunch.

I have to say in fairness it wasn't a terrible experience, just kind of silly. Apparently Pagan had a problem with some Polish RPG pirates, and weren't able to tackle them, so they decided to flex their IP muscles with the first problem stateside. I was 18 and my spirit had yet to be broken by my abusive ex-wife, so as I recall I was pretty aggressive with telling them the four tests had my back. But it all worked out, except for the publishers of "Imelod".

Strange that they never actually contacted us about it.

And don't worry, you didn't kill imelod. We folded due to a lack of time to continue publishing as mundane concerns (9-5 job) ate up all our time.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Hey Todd, long time no hear. Google notifications are a hell of a drug.

Well, it's a shame that banality got Imelod instead of some corporation's brutal legal fist. Are you still publishing?