Meta-Blogging – Page 2 – Mailanka's Musing

The State of the Patreon: March

Last month, I gave everyone a heads up on what they could expect in February, and I’d like to do the same, now, for March, as well as make an announcement at the end of this post, so stay tuned!

Last month, Psi-Wars doubled its pledges and achieved its first goal! Thank you, my dear patrons, for your support, and for your feedback! The next goalpost means I can afford to fund one piece of art per month.

Next month, I’ll be diving into Psi-Wars as a setting, and we’ll start, first, with a discussion of how I go about building settings, then with the setting “as a whole” and then we’ll dive into history and then, most crucially, the Empire.

For Dreamers ($1+) I have two Patron-Only posts.

First will be Building Grav Cars, where I offer up my notes on my struggles in coming up with vehicles without having access to GURPS Vehicles, and I show the benefits and drawbacks of a few different approaches, and then show you how I used Vehices 3e in GURPS 4e.

Next, I have an all new template, the Security Agent! As I unveil Imperial Security, you’ll also recieve a template you can use to play as one.

For Fellow Travellers ($3+), In the beginning of March, you’ll receive my first draft material for the Empire of Psi-Wars.

For Companions ($5+), I have a new poll coming up, where we’ll decide on the Emperor himself.

For Disciples ($7+), I’m going to extend an offer to add signature characters to the Empire: Your own senators, admirals and ministerss, built right into the setting.

Introducing Orphans of the Stars

The big announcement! Alright, so, it turns out my blog has turned a few heads, and I’ve been approached to write a treatise on running politics in a setting inspired by Dune, and paid handsomely up front. This means two things.

First, it means I have to slow down Psi-Wars for a bit. I’ve already wrapped up the Empire, which runs into the middle of April, and after that, we’ll have to see when I can get back to it. The rest of my energy has been directed towards collating existing material (the Empire is huge!) and handling feedback/polls. If we get to mid April and I haven’t finished my work on Orphan of the Stars, then we’ll see less Psi-Wars content for time.

Here’s the bright side, though. After setting aside a responsible amount for real-life things, I’ve saved the rest and I’m going to use it to pick up some artwork for Psi-Wars. You’ve already enjoyed Michelle Kuster’s sketches for the Traders. She’s also agreed to help me build a vision for the rest of Psi-Wars, so that as the work continues, I can begin to show you with art as well as with words my vision for Psi-Wars.

This doesn’t mean Mailanka’s Musings will slow or stop, however. Part of the deal is that my written material is mine, so once we get to April, I’ll be posting some of my thoughts and design work for my material for Orphan of the Stars. This should prove interesting to anyone who wants to inject some politics, planetary domain management, organizational infighting or ideological struggle into their games. Psi-Wars may or may not see a slow down, but either way, I’ll have plenty of material for you.

See you in March!

A plan for my Patrons, redux

One of my more valued readers criticized my recent post, and I think he had a top-notch point. Why is my plan for my Patrons patron-only? Wouldn’t it make sense to tell everyone what the plan is, going forward? That way you could judge for yourself whether I am worth your patronage? What will you be getting for your money?

Originally, my intent with that post was to point out to my Patrons, the ones I already had, what my intent for the future was, because some people have given money already and that money’s coming out of their wallets on February 1st, and I wanted them to know that they were getting something for their money. That said, I think he has a great point, let’s do that. Let’s talk about what my plan is for my blog, for patron and non-patron alike, moving forward.

Not a Patron?

I still love you. You read my blog, and that drives me to write. I started this blog without patrons and I’ll continue it without patrons. The core conceit behind this blog is not that I want to get paid, but that I want to help you understand how to write, how to build, how to create settings and campaigns. I want to show you that top-notch gaming experiences are not out of your reach, anymore than gourmet cooking is beyond your reach, or a good job, or whatever. It’s all about education and approach.

I’ve been building a rather intense posting schedule for the next few months, which means I’m not as far ahead as I’d like: I’m only two months deep into my blogging schedule, so I can’t tell you what everything will look like, but you’ll have a taste of what to expect, as a non-patron, my blog will be like.

In February, I’ll finish off Iteration 5. The next couple of weeks, I look at planetary environments, then after that I’ll look at space monsters and aliens, then you’ll get the Iteration 5 documents.

March sees the beginning of Iteration 6, which will be specific setting material, and I’ll kick it off with a discussion on my theory of setting design, a quick look at history, and then I’m wind up with the Empire, which I’m in the midst of writing now.

It should be good stuff, and if it looks like how my blog has been up until now, that’s the intention. I want Psi-Wars to be available to people, not locked behind a pay wall.

So what is locked behind the paywall?

You’re a Patron?

I write a lot of material that doesn’t really fit into the flow of the “narrative” of my blog. For example, I’ve realized that Communion has a few problems, but where would I stop in the midst of setting material and discuss it? Or, recently, I needed to work out grav vehicles in detail, and no real material was there to support what I was doing, so I had to make some. I’m doing this in the context of building my setting, so it’s an aside, it doesn’t really fit anywhere. But I bed you’d like to see it!

So, I’ve split most of these off into Patron-only posts. Normally, these would have been “bonus posts,” but now those go to Patrons. They get a look at my deeper notes. Here’s the three Patron-only posts coming up in February:

Rethinking Capital Ships: I dive into what works and what doesn’t with the current system when it comes to actually running a capital ship, which I expect someone, as an Officer, will want to do, as well as looking at handling large numbers of fighters as a group, for when you want really big battles (akin to Rafari vs the Empire, only with spaceships.)
Power Ups: Conspirator and Magnate: I had associated these with the recently released Diplomat, but you’ll notice she didn’t really suffer for their lack of release. They’re more of an aside, and a distraction from what she was really about, but still very important. These discuss building up players as major movers and shakers in the setting, while still retaining their deeper action focus. In particular, I take a look at how Illuminated should work here.
Rethinking Communion: Space Monsters dives into some new Communion ideas (especially regarding Broken Communion), and I’ve felt since Rafari and Novina’s results in their respective playtests that I’m missing miracles. So, I’ve expanded all three forms of Communion with more combat-focused miracles that I hope fit their respective flavors.

Currently, this is the order of their release, one a week on Thursday, though I may switch it up so you see Communion first, because I think that’s what people want the most.

Now, to be clear, all of these are in the final release of Iteration 5. It’s not that Patrons get the extra miracles and the rest of you plebes don’t. No, everyone gets Psi-Wars. It’s that Patrons will get Iteration 5 on February 2nd, before Iteration 5 finishes and they get to see the design notes, the reasons behind them.

After that, I’ve got one set of notes I want to show my Patrons earlier, which are my notes on grav cars and using GURPS Vehicles 3e in GURPS 4e, how I build the grav vehicles of the Empire. Some of my notes on the Empire also demand additional expansion. This isn’t a promise, by any means, and it’s subject to change, but right now, I think I might be looking at:

Discussions of Imperial tactics, such as how to handle them in large fights
The Security Agent template
Early Access to the evolving setting notes, which currently includes the Empire, the history of the setting, and some notes on Aliens,

Though I have an entire month to expand this further before I settle on release notes, so expect more, rather than less.

Beyond that, I’d like to do something Amplitude Studios does, which I find really interesting: Getting community input on the game, and putting callouts to their community directly in the setting. I have lots of NPCs that need to happen in this game, and I think it would be fun for some higher level Patrons to put their stamp on some of them. Amplitude also runs polls for content creation, such as alien races or factions. Alien races in particular interest me, so I’d like to do a few “create an alien” polls and place them in the setting. I have some more ideas, but we’re talking several months from now, and a lot can change in that amount of time. So we’ll see.

Moving Forward

You can see that the intent here is early access, greater involvement and an exclusive glimpse behind the scenes, which will result in some additional content. Right now, I don’t have plans for a Ravens’n’Pennies-style “exclusive content,” not because I think that’s wrong, but because my process doesn’t really lend itself to that very well. But, who knows in the future.

If this impresses you and you’d like to invest now, that’d be great and I’d love to have you. If you’d rather wait and see if something pops up and you want access to that specific thing, I totally understand, that’s how these things generally work, and it’s one of the reasons I didn’t make that post publicly available, because I figured once the extra Communion notes dropped, for example, people would go “Oh hey, that looks neat” and become Patreons then.

However you want to patronize me is up to you. Some people spread the word of Psi-Wars, and that’s great. Other people make excellent commentary, like Kalzazz who improves my blog and my work. Some people support me directly and financially, and I deeply appreciate that too. I hope this plan strikes a balance between Patron and non-Patron, but we’ll have to see and revisit things as necessary.

As before, if you need the link to my Patreon, it’s in the sidebar, but let me put it below just in case.

Blogging, One Year On

In retrospect (ha!) I really should have posted this last week, but I wanted to be close to one year on the nose as I could.

Last year, I committed to running one blog post per week for the rest of the year. The result should be 52 blog posts, The actual result is nearly 5 times that, though not all of that has been GURPS as promised. Still, it seems I more than exceeded my goal.

My approach was to try to write about something that I felt would regularly generate content (that is, to have a framework) and to “write forward,” to pad my post count by writing two or three posts in a row and arranging for their eventual release. The result is that I always hit my deadline with loads of time to spare, so that pleases me. It means this approach works.

What I didn’t do is post about half the stuff I wanted to. It’s been all Psi-Wars all the time, and we’re not even done yet! People don’t seem to mind, as my approach is multi-faceted, so even if you’re tired of non-stop Star Wars, the specifics of a given post might still appeal. It also showed me a lot about the work involved in writing up a particular setting the way I’d like to. But it’s also shown me just how much work you can get done once you commit to something. I’ve generated some quality (by “my campaign notes” standards) material with a serious word-count associated with it. I’ve also put my Nobilis campaign back on the map. I think I’d like to continue this cycle of “4 posts a week for GURPS, one for some other campaign I want to get moving.” This year, I’d like to see if I can breath some life into an old Lady Blackbird project I had.

I think the blog has been modestly well received. My blog is pretty high up on the front page of SJGames when it comes to view numbers, though not nearly close to the big two of Gaming Ballistic or Ravens’n’Pennies (and likely Dungeon Fantastic, though I don’t think that has a thread on SJGames at all). That suggests of “the other blogs” I’m doing pretty well. My views are fairly consistently neck-in-neck with the other big name to start this year, Let’s GURPS (and the reason for our mutual success is likely similar: Consistent publication!). For my personal views, I went from having a high of ~400-500 views a month to sometimes having 400-500 views a day. I’m not sure if that comes from the quality of my material or from more extensive advertising on my part.

Or the part of others. I’ve received some traffic from aggregation sites, Reddit, 4chan and RPG.net where people, not me, have plugged my sight. I feel honored by that, I must admit. I’ve also seen a few people start up new campaigns inspired by my work. That’s even greater praise for what I’m doing. On the more critical side, I’ve had some complaints about my Psi-Wars material, but I think those criticisms have largely strengthened my work. Early on, some people suggested I was brave for “showing how the sausage was made,” but I think the result is more people figuring how to build their own campaigns, and my own work becoming better, so I feel it’s been win win.

This year I released my first PDFs for Psi-Wars and I’ve been able to track their downloads. I’m close to 75 downloads of the core PDF and nearly 200 downloads over all. That says my material is definitely getting out there!

What’s also surprised me is where my views have gone. Early on, I would try to predict what would be a big hit, or I would be especially proud of a particular piece, only to have something I ripped out in an hour completely dwarf everything else I’ve written. My general articles tend to be the biggest draws, but sometimes I feel like what works and doesn’t is more determined by zeitgeist than anything I can do, or perhaps that I’m just a terrible judge of my own quality. A selection of notably popular posts are:

Psi-Wars: Don’t Convert; Create! which likely gained popularity due to being one of my first posts, but it’s also a topic I see pop up in a few places, so people like to reference it.
The Riddle of Systems, a general gaming post that evidently spoke to a lot of people.
Rewriting Combat: Optional Rules likely earned a lot of views because it speaks very much to the sort of thing a lot of people need in their game.
Starfighter Tactics has had more than its fair share of views despite being something I tossed together larger as an after-thought because, I suspect, it addresses a hole in the GURPS system that a lot of people would like to see filled.
The Luke vs Vader Breakdown is fantastically popular, in my top ten of all time, despite being very specific. Breakdowns seem evidently rather popular, and this one seems to touch one something a lot of people would like to see, and is also paired with a sense of nostalgia.
Rafari 2.1, one of my signature characters, is peculiarly popular. Like, one of my top ten posts of all time. He has no comments or +1s, just a ton of views, don’t know what that’s about.
Assassin 2.0, and Scavenger 2.0, both templates, are also peculiarly popular, in largely the same way. Surprising, given how new they are, and their lack of artwork. Perhaps people are using them for their characters?
Psi-Wars: Linguistics just came out and is already rocking nearly 400 views, which is shockingly quick growth. As a fan of languages, that pleases me!
And last but definitely not least, the Psi-Wars Primer has not a single +1, but is the most viewed post of the year, and I regularly see traffic from it. It’s proven an ideal touch-stone for people who want to jump into Psi-Wars late in the game. This is probably my favorite post, as it’s the smartest one I think I could do.

If you have any thoughts on particularly beloved posts, dear reader, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Going forward, I want to wrap up Psi-Wars (finally!). I’m about half-way through Iteration 5, so I don’t expect it to take more than another 4-6 weeks. After that, I’d like to jump into Iteration 6, which will be a concrete setting, ready for play. I might go on to an Iteration 7, wherein I put together some adventures and run them as a final playtest. I’d like to be finished by summer.

Expansion Plans and Justifications

My original plan was to write for a single year to practice self-discipline. My original intent, after writing a year of GURPS material, which I would enjoy, I’d dive into something more difficult: Writing blog posts about programming. I already have such a blog, and with the sort of time and effort I’ve put into Mailanka’s Musing, I could write my own game or greatly expand my skillset, both of which have considerable economic rewards. However, I’ve been impressed by the warmth of the response of the community and, in particular, the number of people who’ve said that my material is worth money. If that’s so, I can certainly justify continuing to write at the pace I am “for free.” And, in fact, if you’re really willing to spend your pennies on me, there’s some interesting things I can do, like commission artwork! So, if you’re interested in furthering my writing, then by all means, check out my fully operational patreon!

Next, after tackling not-Star-Wars with Psi-Wars, I’d like to tackle not-Star-Trek with Heroes of the Galactic Frontier, which is actually a project I’ve already put considerable work. Where Psi-Wars has been the conversion of largely existing material to create a facsimile of another setting, Heroes of the Galactic Frontier will be about building new campaign frameworks and about using design elements to give us precisely the gameplay we want. It also won’t feature its own setting, but a more direct, toolkit approach for building your own setting (as a good Star Trek game needs to be able to conjure civilizations, space empires and planets whenever players go into a new star system and figure out what’s there)

Finally, I’d like to expand my look at the community: I happen to believe that the average gamer is more creative, more innovative and more interesting than he realizes, and there are a few fellow gamers and creators I’d like to highlight with interviews. I’d like to see if I can drop one interview a month, to introduce the larger gaming world to you, and to help particularly creative gamers get their message out.

So, here’s to an interesting 2017!

My feelings on GURPS Dungeon Fantasy

You’ve probably heard about the DF kickstarter already from better blogs. I’ve been silent on it, mostly because I’ve been very busy with life (I actually had a few half-finished blog posts on it that I just couldn’t get worked out). I’ll also confess to not backing the kickstarter at all, but to be fair, I’ve never backed a kickstarter (I lack a credit card). That said, I did make a point of buying a GURPS book once I heard that funds from that would go to the kickstarter (I picked up a digital copy of GURPS Religion, which I already had a hard copy of. I’ll make use of it in Psi-Wars iteration 5 and 6). But since Douglas Cole is going to make a giant pull of every GURPS blog post, I wanted this sitting at the top of mine.

How Dungeon Fantasy Changed My World

I’ve been running GURPS since high school, so more than 20 years at this point, and I had a pretty standard way of running it that I expect most people had. First, you’d sit down with the character creation books and talk to your players about what they wanted, and then you’d sort of hash it out together. Then you just played, and you grabbed from whatever book you needed at the time. The net result, especially if you had the sort of collection I had, were wild, wooly and largely unwieldy.

I found my tastes began to change. I began to understand game development better, and how a game should work. It needs focus, it needs interesting choices, it needs design. The problem with many of my GURPS games is that they lacked this focus. I cast about for a solution.

Then Dungeon Fantasy came out and it absolutely crystallized everything I was missing and needed. I suddenly grasped how GURPS worked as a toolkit system.

Dungeon Fantasy picked a focus for its gameplay (killing monsters and taking their stuff), found the niches for it and filled them with templates that ensured you had all the skills you needed. Not just stuff like “Oh, I forgot swim and so now I’m drowning,” but things like Mind Shield and Hidden Lore, which are pertinent to DF but aren’t pertinent to other games. At the same time, it removes skills you don’t need (but might think you do), like Cooking. It went further to emphasize forms of gameplay, so that a Knight had a purpose and a place a long side the Barbarian, and both played differently.

The second book, Dungeons, really rocked my world, though. It focused gameplay down to the things that mattered, highlighting what you needed to pay attention to in a game, giving you special or simplified rules for unique situations, and discarding everything else that didn’t matter.

I think the release of Dungeon Fantasy revolutionized GURPS and I think you could mark a calendar before and after. I’ll even state, controversially I’m sure, that it did more to change how I play GURPS than the change from 3e to 4e did, because that amounted to a rule-change, while this amounted to a paradigm shift.

As an example of what I mean, Psi-Wars is a direct result of Dungeon Fantasy. I draw my inspiration primarily from Action, but the premise of my design directly draws from DF. This applies to more, though, as Cherry Blossom Rain had similar design, as do other campaigns like Heroes of the Galactic Frontier. Even my non-GURPS games shifted with this fundamental understanding, such as how I look at Fate.

My Frustration with Dungeon Fantasy

I used to belong to an RPG group on Facebook, but I eventually ditched it because the feed was nothing but D&D people who seemed oblivious of all other games. I don’t mean that I was inundated with, say, people talking about D&D, but people talking about RPGs as though all RPGs were D&D, and all gamers were D&D players. For a certain subset, RPGs and D&D are synonymous, which is especially irritating to me as a non-D&D player.

With the release of DF, I’ve found a similar sort of GURPS player evolving, for whom Dungeon Fantasy is GURPS. The most common example of this are the perennial posts asking for Dungeon Fantasy to be “expanded beyond simple dungeon crawling.” They might want deeper social interactions, or perhaps sweeping, epic wars, or some material on setting building, or maybe even a setting! But because none of the books I’ve mentioned bear the “Dungeon Fantasy” stamp, they don’t count. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy has 26 books and counting, but it’s becoming something of a walled garden. Because it provides default assumptions, writers can write to those assumptions, and because readers demand more books written to those assumptions, then we get lots of books written to those assumptions, and less need for those players to branch out and adapt existing material to their own needs.

But for me, GURPS isn’t “the other fantasy game,” it’s a toolkit with which I can do anything. Dungeon Fantasy should be a gateway into the larger GURPS world, not a dead-end into which a GM can hide from the larger, scarier world of GURPS. A GM who wants to expand past DF can do so with any number of perfectly good supplements, and most of your veteran GMs do exactly that. It’s only this subset that seems so unaware of anything with the DF stamp on it.

In retrospect, though, perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on this group. I’ve already noted that there seems to be a split between the veteran and the inexperienced. Perhaps this comes down to Dungeon Fantasy attracting a new crowd who is intimidated by the totality of GURPS, but want to try it, and once they’ve finished with the kiddy pool, they’re nervous about diving into the deep end, so they ask for additional help. Fair enough.

My Experience with Dungeon Fantasy

None of this is to say that I don’t enjoy Dungeon Fantasy. I’ve only played it a few times, but this amounts more to a lack of time than interest. I enjoyed it more than D&D or 13th Age or other “F20” games because of GURPS’s concrete granularity over D&D’s “gamey” abstractions. You can fold the complexities of GURPS martial arts into the swashbuckler or a knight, if you wish. I played a wizard, and enjoyed the sweeping and unusual power that afforded me. And, of course, we definitely wanted a more detailed setting and simply built one with all the pieces GURPS gave us.

I tend to focus on sci-fi on this blog mostly because I feel it is underrepresented in the GURPS world. not because I prefer it to fantasy. I have several ideas I’d like to explore, but for now I think DF has everyone pretty much covered, while those who like sci-fi are struggling to find something of similar power.

So, I hope DF the best. I hope they succeed beyond their dreams and that DF shows people how great GURPS can be. I just hope that people don’t get so lost in DF that they lose sight of the rest of GURPS. By all means, enjoy DF, but realize that even if you have no interest in any other genre, there’s lots of great GURPS material out there that doesn’t have the DF logo stamped on it.

The May Retrospective

In May, Douglas Cole issued a GURPS Day challenge, which was to get a new blogger on his roles. I succeeded. He also asked us to talk about how GURPS Day has influenced us, or if GURPS Day has improved our blog.

When it comes to numbers, the share of traffic directed to my site from Cole’s has actually decreased, at least as far as I can tell. The metrics don’t show me everything, and Cole’s site has multiple possible urls, and so there might be a mess of them that are sufficiently low that they’ve fallen off the radar. I’m not sure why this is so, but I suspect it’s a combination of a surge from traffic from other sites, while a general watering down of Cole’s site traffic (as the number of blogs increase, the chances of a click on my specific links drops), but it’s just a guess.

My traffic is up. Way up. When I started this, I had nearly 3000 views. Last month, I had nearly 7000, and my numbers keep climbing. It’s not clear how many are real views however. I get huge surges of like 100 views in one minute that don’t actually track with any specific page or link, which says “Spiders!” to me. Those spikes only account for about a quarter of my traffic, though, so I suspect I’m getting real growth.

I wanted to take this moment to pause and give a retrospective because it completes my “the Force As” series, which gives some insights into what people liked and what people didn’t. My top viewed post was… the May GURPS Challenge! Which logged nearly 250 views, and has +11 on it, making it my most popular and most talked about blog post, but not my most viewed (That’s currently my “Don’t Convert, Create!” post, which actually has enough views that it’s showing up in my top 5 overview.), which just goes to show that my most popular posts are when I don’t talk about Psi-Wars. What lessons one might draw from this, I have chosen to studiously ignore.

The Stats

My top five blog posts, excluding the May GURPS Day Challenge post are:

That’s a nice and interesting spread, suggesting that all 4 of my approaches drew interest (Divine Favor isn’t in the list, but it’s also the newest and needs some time for the community to really decide on). Psionic Powers seemed to interest people the most, given that the top two both came from that series. I’m a little surprised (and pleased) to see that the Chi-version of the Force drew so many eyeballs (It was the most work, and I rather think it had some of the cooler designs), and I’m not surprised to see “the Other Side of Space-Magic” doing well. It had several reshares and was mentioned in quite a few comments. That particular version of the Dark Side of the Force seems particularly appealing to quite a few people.

The most +1ed were

The above rankings are somewhat arbitrary: The Force as Space Magic topped out at +6, making it one of the most liked posts I’ve ever written. The next three are all +4, and then there’s a mess of +3s, and I chose the most commented on. Interesting, these are almost all theory articles, discussing the idea of these powers, rather than the specifics of their execution, with the exception, again, of the Other Side of Space Magic. Here too, we see a broad array of interest, which doesn’t surprise me. Everyone had an opinion on how to treat the Force, and I knew that going into it, which is why I didn’t sit down and say “This is so!” but “This could be so.” I hoped that some people would see my ideas, and run with it.

What I’ll find interesting is how the community will react once I’ve made my choice. On the one hand, I can see a dwindling of interest (The more specific my work becomes, the less people can use it as a generic aid to their own work), or increased interest (the more detailed my work becomes, the more usable it is for people who want to simply run it without doing the work themselves). Time will tell.

My biggest sources of traffic were:

SJGames
Dungeon Fantastic
Google+
Facebook
Gaming Ballistic

Dungeon Fantastic shot up to the top of the charts. Whenever that goes nuts, I like to dig around Peter’s site, to maybe see if he’s mentioned me or linked to me and that’s what’s driving the traffic, but no. It seems it’s entirely coming from a sidebar he has which lists blogs. That is, people are reading my stuff from his site because they think it’s interesting, and the traffic is coming from that site because a lot of people go to his site.

Google+ beat out Facebook again (there’s a huge spike in the android version of Google+, which I suppose means more people are reading me on mobile devices), but I think it also speaks to the strength of the Google+ gaming community.

But the winner is, as always, my thread on the SJGames forum. I think the vast majority of my readership simply clicks through that when they want to read. I do get a few direct searches… though one, sadly, was “effect of Gods Divine Favor on my life”. I suspect that poor soul was disappointed by his click. Or he’s not just religious, but also a Star Wars fan! Who knows.

New Projects

In the course of inspiring the Gentleman Gamer, I was inspired in turn, and started up a new series on my currently defunct Nobilis game. It seems to have an entirely different sort of readership, which doesn’t surprise me. I’m not sure how my audience takes it, yet, but I will note that Kenneth Hite (yes that Kenneth Hite) left a comment on my blog. I’d like to think I comported myself well in my return response and kept my fanboyishness to a minimum.

A Total Retrospective

I decided to start this blog 6 months ago. I intended Psi-Wars to be “quick,” and it hasn’t been, and for that, I apologize, as it may give the impression that this stuff takes longer than it does. I do have a love of theory and research, which I’m afraid have spilled out into my blog as I expose more of my process, and that has slowed stuff down. I have, however, written nearly three months ahead (I have posts scheduled into September as of writing this post), so if you actually look at the time it took, remove the time taken from writing a bunch of unnecessary posts, I think I would be done and ready with my setting by now. Six months from start to finish for a full “quick bash” campaign, complete with templates, new power frameworks, a new spaceship rule set, etc, isn’t so bad, I think.

Has it benefited me? Yes. I’ve enjoyed writing much more than I thought I would and it’s generated a lot of useful material, and it’s building a following and comments. But better, it’s encouraged at least one other person to take up the torch as well. I haven’t heard if this has helped crystalize any campaigns just yet, but I do see hints of it here and there in some comments.

I think it was a good direction to go. It’s a shame that some of my other ideas have lain fallow, but we’ll get to them soon enough.

The May GURPSDay Challenge

Douglas Cole has issued a challenge so I wanted to leave it here, in plain sight, like a glove tossed at your feet.

Douglas wants you to write about GURPS. I do too.

Why write about GURPS?

Because to teach is to learn.

Nothing will teach you a system quite as well as working out the details well enough to explain them to someone else. Nothing will teach you a system quite like diving into it and using it. You have to understand a system to write about it, and thus in writing about it, you’ll come to better understand it.

Our habits, our daily routines, can force us to grow in a particular direction. Having a daily, or weekly, habit of writing about GURPS will definitely teach you GURPS, and likely make you a better GM. Furthermore, the act of having a daily or weekly writing habit will teach you to study and write. I took up this task of writing for GURPS not to improve my GURPS, but just to build a habit of writing. I intend to shift it to something less self-indulgent, from RPGs to programming, at some point.

If you make the commitment to write about GURPS, even if it only results in a single post, you’ll have still learned/clarified something about the system.

What do I write about?

GURPS, obviously. Oh, right, you need more detail than that.

You already know what to write. You’re surrounded with piles of material, filled to the brim with it, I promise, it’s just a matter of getting it out. When you think about GURPS, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Perhaps you think about the physical books, that you’ve read. So tell us what you thought of them (the forums regularly asks for more reviews of GURPS material). Perhaps you think about that great campaign you played, or the character you played in it. So, give us a campaign report, or tell us about your character. Perhaps you grit your teeth and you have some mechanic to complain about, or you think about how much you love a particular mechanic. Discuss the mechanics themselves, then, what works, what doesn’t.

You have tons of GURPS experience because you’re a GURPS gamer, thus you have plenty to say. Every time you’re posting a rant on the forum, that could be a blog post. Every time you tell a story to your friends about how great GURPS is, that could be a blog post. Every time you read a GURPS book, or you find yourself dissecting a movie in GURPS terms, or you have a great campaign idea, that could be a GURPS post.

“But those are lame,” I hear you say. To that, I say: Start simple. You’d be surprised how productive and interesting you can be. The things I have pointed to are what most of the big names in blogging discuss. But if you must have something richer and more complex, then look to the ideas beneath them. Rather than discuss your character, try to figure out why he worked and discuss that. Rather than talk about your campaign, ponder what made it work and what didn’t work, and discuss that. What makes a GURPS book bad? Why is GURPS your personal choice for system? And so on.

How do you write about GURPS for, like, a year?

So, you’re up for it, but you think “There’s no way I can keep it up.” Well, first of all, your stuff will be here forever. One of my inspirations for blogging was the Podcast: Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The guy hasn’t posted anything on the topic in literally years, but I still really enjoyed what he had posted. So if you post six posts, and they’re good, people will be using them for years. This idea that unless someone is constantly feeding a blog it’s “dead” and nobody will read your content is nonsense. Good content gets read.

But, okay, you want to stick with it. Then do what the big names in blogging do: Pick a repeatable theme. You like the idea of writing a review? Then review one book a week. You want to talk about a campaign? Talk about the whole campaign once a week. You like the idea of writing up characters and showing us? Write up one character for each published GURPS setting, once per week. You want to complain about GURPS? Pick something to complain about, once per week.

Cole has his Melee Academy and his Ammo Press. Hans just analyzes movies and discusses guns in fiction in GURPS terms (“One lovecraftian pistol a week”). Peter discusses his campaign… once a week. I’ve got Psi-Wars, which I can go back to, over and over again (and have).

That’s not to say that you can’t come up with something clever and innovative. All the big names do. But some people seem to try to come up with some clever and innovative all the time and they exhaust themselves. Don’t do that. If you want a consistent blog, have a consistent topic you can easily fall back on. That’s not to say that you can’t have something clever, but you can sprinkle your cleverness whenever inspiration strikes, and write your weekly review or character or whatever when inspiration doesn’t.

Now, you want to make that reliability extra reliable? Do what I do: Write ahead. Most blogs will let you store drafts, or even schedule them for later. Say you want to review books once a week: Write 4 reviews right now, while you’re all hopped up and excited. Then schedule them. BOOM! One month worth of content. If you feel like doing that again next week, you’re ahead by 2 and then three months and so on, until you’ve actually got a year’s worth of material, and then you can start, I dunno, doubling up, or working on something more dramatic. The point, here, is that you don’t have to try to think of something clever every week. If you’ve thought of something clever that’s big and repeatable and you’re particularly inspired, write ahead, so that when you’re not inspired next week, it’s okay, you can take a break.

Mailanka’s Challenge for those Thinking about Undertaking Gaming Ballistics Challenge but are a Little Nervous

Step 1: Pick a simple, repeatable topic. Examples include:

Formalizing my campaign notes
Reviewing each issue of Pyramid
Creating a character for each setting in GURPS
Actual Play Reports from my Dungeon Fantasy game
Reviewing other people’s GURPS Blogs

Step 2: Write the simplest, easiest, most personally-amusing version you can think of of your chosen topic.

Step 3. Rinse and repeat step 3 until you have about 4 entries.

Step 4. Schedule them in your blog so they come out once a week.

Congratulations, you now have one month’s worth of blog lead, a topic someone is probably willing to read, and you’ve explored something you wouldn’t have before.

Iteration 3 Retrospective

As usual, when an Iteration completes, I compile all of my notes onto my website for everyone to see. So, for those of you who didn’t want to wade through piles of meta-discussion and just want the rules, here you go.

Personal Retrospective

I found this Iteration frustratingly long, and I suppose this is the sort of thing that starts to turn gamers off of GURPS. If you want to sit down and play, Ultra-Tech will have you handled when it comes to gear and weapons (as you can see from that single week’s worth of posts). Robots take more work, but mostly in defining what you explicitly want. The lack of some pre-designed “skill-sets” for robots is, in my opinion, an oversight.

It was Spaceships where everything really slowed to a crawl. I don’t blame this on Spaceships itself being “crap” or lacking support. As you can see, I actually drew most of my rules from either the core of Spaceships or from optional rules from Spaceships, and most my Spaceships came from the Spaceships line… but what I did amounted to writing a new sub-game. That’s not something a newb just getting the books can do.

In particular, GURPS has a great focus on precision, and what you have to do is wade through piles of questions, switches and toggles and flip all of them, including a few hard-to-see ones, to “Space Opera!” I can understand where veterans like me might find that doable, but I can also understand why people with less than a gig worth of GURPS pdfs might find that more than a little intimidating. So, my solution was to write it for you, dear reader, but it exhausted me, especially the nitty gritty details.

The next part that really slowed me down was working all of these details back into the templates and the characters and especially that playtest. I feel it provided useful feedback, but it also felt like homework.

That feeling of “work” kills creativity, which kills motivation. Doing things like compiling all of my notes, doing my homework, making sure everything lines up is very important, as it separates the chaff from the wheat. But I have to watch my motivations levels. If they sap too low, I might lose my focus and get lost somewhere else.

Speaking of…

Community Perspective

I’m not nearly as involved with the GURPS Blog community as I would like to be, mostly due to a lack of time, and the fact that my particular working method keeps me very focused on a specific thing, and when a sudden element comes up in the middle of my week (“Hey, people are doing a thing on combat reflexes!”) I’m usually in a different headspace and can’t come up with something sweet in time to really jump in.

That said, I do try to keep my eye on things. We had quite an influx of blogs when I started this one. I was riding a wave of community enthusiasm, it seems… but since then, it has petered out. If you look at Cole’s GURPS Day summaries, then you can check week by week how many posts he’s able to collect. For a time there, it usually hovered around 60. Lately, it’s been hovering in the high 30s. I know we’ve lost RPG-Jutsu, for example, which is a shame, as he had some pretty good stuff.

I don’t expect this means that GURPS Bloggers are “dying,” so much as we’re winnowing out the weak. Maintaining a blog is difficult. You have to tip your hat to long-runners like Gaming Ballistic, Raven ‘n’ Pennies, Dungeon Fantastic and Games in the Brain for their sheer long-term doggedness.

Blog Stats

My views are through the roof. I broke records in March (hitting nearly 4000) and then again in April (breaking 5000!) and it shows no signs of slowing. I’m not sure how much of it is real though. Some of it surely is. You can see where these people are coming from, and I get more hits from Feedly or Reddit, and my SJGames advertisement thread has topped 10k views this month. So people are definitely looking. But I also get weird spikes of 100 views all at once with no associated pages or sources, which smells like bot to me.

I also get less comments than I used to. I get the sense that people read more, say less, which is fine. I think the people who want to be here, who are excited, are already here, and reading, and don’t feel the need to note this fact every week. Every once in a while, a fresh face will say “Wow, this is neat” or “Cool advantage, bro!” and they’re, perhaps a new face. It seems to happen less, though.

Moving Forward

I’m rather excited about the next Iteration. Powers! The cool stuff, the desert after all of my homework. I know a lot of people prefer to start with their metaphysics and their cool powers, but in my experience, it’s better to lay down the common-man’s experience, to understand how normal people tackle issues first, before you lather on powers, as a character with powers should generally feel like a normal person, only with powers, and even the really weird games, like Nobilis, benefit from this sort of layering.

I’m also doing something a little different: More posts with, ostensibly, less content. In practice, I think it turned into more posts with more content, but you be the judge.

In any case, we’ll finally look at the Force, and work on an analog for it in Psi-Wars. Cautionary note: I have long said that Psi-Wars is not Star Wars, and I see most of you smiling and nodding when I say that, but no, I mean it. It resembles Star Wars and is inspired by it, but it is inspired by more than Star Wars. Metaphysics are very setting specific. What will come out of Iteration 4 will not be the Force. You’ll recognize how the Force inspired it, but you’ll also see that it’s something different.

Each iteration has it own little departures from Star Wars, but Iteration 4 is one were we really start having to shake it off if we want to do our own thing, as the Force is so iconic for Star Wars.

After that dire omen, though, I hope you will join me. See you then!

Honeymoon!

As I had mentioned previously, I got married this month. One of the reasons I wanted to work ahead was so that you, dear reader, would continue to get your posts uninterrupted by my nuptials. Now, I’ll really put that to the test, because starting tomorrow, I’m putting down my computer and going to distant lands to delight my wife with romantic vistas and exotic foods. I will be unavailable for comments, and I won’t be able to promote my material: No announcements on the SJGames forums, no Facebook posts, no Google+ posts. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped: This week you should see all my posts on Alternate Spaceships for all your Psi Wars needs. It’s just that I won’t be broadcasting about them (though feel free to take up that torch yourself).

So, I hope to see you here anyway, but be aware that if I don’t get back to your comments, it’s because I’m relaxing in a gondola admiring my newly acquired carnival mask while my blushing bride rests in my arms.

March Retrospective

Upfront, I want to say something, so that if people skip the rest, they at least get this bit: I don’t mind questions. If I wanted my notes for myself, I wouldn’t publish them. I want you to read them and to use them and I know the best way to use them is to ask about them, push the boundaries, try to figure out how they work. Kalzazz on SJGames is forever complaining about my characters and templates and telling me how he would do things totally different. The result is that I know he’s definitely inspired, and many of his complaints have solidified my designs. I see some people apologizing for asking questions. Don’t! Feel free to ask. I enjoy it.

Alright.

Normally these retrospectives coincide with the end of an iteration, but such is not the case this time around. Our technological iteration continues apace, so I have no “Summary of the Iteration” for you. You’ll have to wait another month for that.

This has been an absolutely amazing month for views. I broke all previous records twice, first on March 10th with the most views in a single day (219), and then again on the 31st, with a staggering 322 views. This month also finally broke 3000 views for a total of nearly 3500 views! I suspect that I’m getting more views because I’m posting more, but I had roughly as many posts in February and didn’t get nearly this many views. It may well be the subject matter: I assumed people would be more interested in seeing templates that would actually allow them to sit down and play, but instead people seem more interested in getting Ultra-Tech and Spaceships to work for their sci-fi campaign. I also suspect that I’m slowly building a viewer-base, by keeping those who started checking me out in January and February, and adding new people.

SJGames remains the top source of traffic, of course, and Google remains secondary (especially Google+, where the GURPS community continues to be exceedingly supportive). Douglas Cole has ascended to spot 3: His weekly blog-roll has definitely helped funnel traffic my way. Coming in at 4th is Facebook, where people either are less interested in my material, or it’s simply less active there (given that I see more posts in general on the Google+ side of things, I think GURPS just has a stronger presence on Google+). In fifth place is some site called “Feedly,” where I evidently have 15 loyal followers. Dungeon Fantastic has fallen to 6th place. I don’t believe it’s because less people go through there so much as these other sites have grown.

My top five viewed posts were:

The popularity of Weapons and Armor and the Gear List doesn’t surprise me at all. They represent the sort of thing I imagine most people most immediately want from a sci-fi campaign, especially in a section about technology “What gear can I get for my character?” Robots rather surprises me, as I saw a precipitous drop during my discussion about robots overall, but the generic discussion about robots seemed to please people more than my advice for modifying robots, or turning robots into grab-and-go templates, which did surprise me. Similarly, FTL Travel and Spaceships were generic discussions about concepts, like Robots, and fared very well. FTL is the most viewed post I’ve had since the Iteration 1 announcement post, to give you an idea of the scale of the popularity of that post. I suppose it’s a topic a lot of people wrestle with.

My top five most liked posts were:

I try not to put too much stock into +1s as they’re relatively random. Someone might love the post, and then just not think to click +1. On the other hand, not every view results in a happy person. Perhaps people come back again and again to point and laugh, or to tremble in rage at how wrong I am, or whatever. Thus, +1s are the closest I can come to seeing what people actually like or not. Again, FTL travel tops the charts, and Gear and Weapon follow behind it, though they flip positions. This certainly suggests people generally like those elements. Spaceships remains on the list, but Simplified Space Combat joins it. Given how very new it is, that bodes well for its eventual view numbers (I suspect people might come back to reference it, or people will only discover it, say, today or tomorrow or what have you). Robots had a +3, which suggests that its fate might be as “random” as the Gear List/Weapons Armor switch. Also, I should note that a few people +1 my announcement posts, but never +1 the post itself. So, again, it’s somewhat random.

My top five most discussed posts were:

Comments are, of course, a place where I tend to interfere, as I’ll need to respond to comments, especially questions, so a high value might just mean I felt that I needed to talk more about a topic. Also, why people make comments varies, but I can actually look at the comments to give you a feel for response. They tend to vary between praise and questions, and most of the questions tend to be “Why did you do X?” Rewriting Space Combat had some cautionary notes that were, of course, completely valid (hence the need for a Revising the Revision post), and FTL had some excited “Let me tell you about my own FTL!” which probably made me the happiest. The real intent of the Psi Wars series is to help people turn their ideas of a sci-fi setting into a fully realized one. Sometimes what I do is to offer material for that (“Here, use these rules to make your starfighters work right!”), sometimes it’s to show people how to make that material themselves (“Have you considered using Action or Monster Hunters as a base for your sci-fi campaign?”), but often it’s just to inspire (“If I can do it, you can do it too!”)

Personally, this mini-iteration on spaceships is perhaps the most important version of this that I’ve done yet. A lot of people find spaceships troubling, especially for a space opera campaign (I want to note that this is only one version I have. Heroes of the Galactic Frontier has a More Star-Trek/FTL-inspired version, and I have yet another version I’m working on for Echoes In The Dark), but what matters more to me is showing you how I did it. The best approach I can offer for doing these things is to cycle through the three following steps:

Research
Write
Test

Rinse and repeat. Every writer will tell you to do the same. First, dig up as much material as you can on the topic, then synthesize it, then write out your new version, then test it, and then rewrite it based on the results of your testing, over and over if necessary. The fact that I have two versions of simplified spaceship combat is important, because for my other systems I often had far more than that. You will too, if you do something like this, and that’s okay, that’s normal. Of course, you don’t need to write a complex journal about it, or create characters and give them a story. I generally don’t. But you should at least walk through a mental experiment, poke at the sides, and then revise again.

My one real “disappointment” this month, in regard to this blog, is that I’ve been so busy that I’ve lost some of the lead time I’ve built up (I’ve got less than a month of lead time now), though I’m happy to report that I’ve already begun compiling my notes on Iteration 4: Cool Powers. The reason that I’ve lost lead time is that I got married, and I’ve been doing more important things than blogging, like eating cake, dancing, moving, and honeymooning (or, I will honeymoon shortly). I have no regrets! And, in fact, this is one of the reason I worked so hard on building up a lead, I just a lot of ground when I condensed a lot of this material into extensive data dumps.

Next month, we’ll round off the spaceship series with more gear, then I want to touch on scavengers, character-economics, stealth-in-space and how it relates to smugglers, then we’ll do a giant test of Iteration 3 and see how well everything works. See you then!

I'm not seeing all comments being made

And I’m investigating the problem. I know I’ve had some kind words regarding my wedding, and some questions about the Starhawk v Typhoon fight, but I can’t actually see those comments. I think it has something to do with using Google+ comments, but I can’t be sure.

If you don’t get a response on your comment, it’s not because I’m ignoring you or can’t be bothered. Sometimes, Blogger just hides them, or makes them vanish, or… something.