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The goal of the manifesto is simple; rebuild the network. Create a simple guide that, if used, if made popular, will result in a healthy and robust network of tabletop RPG players. We’ll get into what that means below, but let’s start with the manifesto. It’s simple.

1: A curious person is a new player

2: Playing is more important than learning.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. If we take these statements as axioms and put them to work, we will rebuild the network of gamers.

A Curious Player is a New Player

If people see you playing, if people see you reading, painting miniatures, if people hear you talking about the game and ask what it is? Tell them. Tell them it’s fun, it’s social, you get together with your friends and roll dice and kill stuff. You laugh, you have fun, and you come out the other side with intensely memorable experiences. Use references they’ll get. It’s like the Lord of the Rings except you get to be Gandalf. It’s like a video game except you don’t sit in a dark room staring at a TV.

Don’t be afraid to reference things people get. There’s nothing wrong with saying it’s like a movie, or like a video game. These are massively more popular forms of entertainment. If you feel  compelled to push the idea of “cooperative storytelling,” well, I can’t stop you. But regardless of what kind of game you play, I think this is the wrong way to sell RPGs. It’s at best an arcane idea and probably abstruse and misleading. People don’t know what ‘cooperative storytelling’ means and might not even realize they’re doing it while it’s happening. Let them discover the storytelling aspect. All RPGs have it. But people already know they like playing games, they don’t know if they like telling stories and it’s not your job to convince them they should.

Don’t wait for them to ask to play, invite them. Someone who asks you what you’re doing, even if they do it while seeming to look down on it, that person just overcame their natural tendency to keep their mouths shut, and tried to cross the divide. Meet them halfway. Don’t wait for them to ask! Ask them! They’re already curious!

If they say “no thanks,” let them. One of my friends thinks another of my friends is a douche because he spent 5 minutes trying to get her to play with us while she was trying to work. That was a long five minutes for her, after she’d already made herself clear. Respect their answers. If they say no, but you think maybe they can be converted, let them stew. Let them think about it, don’t bug them. No hard sell, we do this for fun!

This can be tough because if we all just always invite everyone who seems interested, many groups would very quickly get too large. But I think we can agree that we’d all be better off, happier, dealing with the problem of Too Many players, rather than Too Few. The first step, then, is to ask the curious person to become a new player.

Playing is More Important than Learning

When someone sits down to play with you for the first time, they don’t want to be intimidated. Stacks of books, charts, lots of choices that don’t mean anything to them yet, it’s confusing and it gets in the way of the goal: play. Even if your favorite game is a pamphlet you bought off someone’s website and then printed out yourself, the player who sits down with you for the first time doesn’t want to read that pamphlet, doesn’t want to make choices about their character, they want to play. You may think “but this game is so simple, there are only 4 choices to make in character creation!” That’s fine; if they like playing the game, they can make their own character and their own choices next time. But the first thing that happens when a new player sits down is they get to play.

Even if you did everything in your power to make it as easy to play as possible, a new player would still have a lot to learn. Remember that for a new player, everything is new. Including even the idea of getting together with your friends to play games! They’re going to be intimidated. It’s your job to make them feel welcome. The new player is going to be learning everything, they’re going to be learning you, learning the group, learning how everyone behaves and what’s expected. That’s a lot and we haven’t even gotten to the rules of the game yet! The goal, then, must be to maximize play, and learning through play.

How do we do this? Easy. Make sure new players have everything they need when they sit down for the first time.

• Dice
• Pencil and Paper
• A pregenerated character, preferably one that has cool stuff to do, but is not too complex. Don’t go overboard.
• A mini, if appropriate. You’d be surprised how many new players key off things like the funky dice, or the cool miniatures.

Once you’ve done this, you’ve just gotten started. Now you have to be a good GM and a good group of players, but the Manifesto can’t do that. That’s not its job. Just make sure the new player gets to do things, preferably right away. Helping a new player have fun is a short-term sacrifice for you and your friends, for a long-term payoff. It’s an investment. For this one night, it’s ok that you’re not the star of the show. Let the new player be cool. If the new player is intimidated by all the attention, let the new player watch for a while. Either way the goal is the same; make sure the new guy has fun.

A group that gets large may need to have more than one GM, more than one group, evolve into a collective where you show up and don’t know who your GM is going to be or which of the 20 players you’re going to be gaming with, but that’s how it used to be! That’s how RPGs were originally played in 1974, that’s how the phenomenon grew. We play now because those ur-players followed this manifesto without ever writing it down. They derived it. And for a long time the network was healthy.

The network grew to the point where it was so large, and the game was so popular, that eventually in the mid-1980s when the hobby exploded, people who weren’t full-time geeks became gamers and those people once they got into college and shortly thereafter felt weird talking about gaming to normal, non-gamers. People shut up, started playing in groups of 4 and 6 in private and saying “I play RPGs” meant you were weird. The network suffered.

But that was 20 years ago and while the damage that period did to the network was pretty bad, geek culture is now mainstream. There are more of us now than there are of them. Let’s go back to inviting new players. Let’s get the hobby back where it was, and then take it farther. Don’t wait for your favorite designer, don’t wait for the license holders and corporations, just follow the manifesto, and the network will repair itself.

Let’s make new gamers.

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Dan O’Bannon died yesterday. I knew this was coming, I’d been reading about the guy a lot recently and in interviews with him I thought, “This is not a dude long for this world.”

I’ve reading about him as research for a book I’m working on called Magnificent Failure: The Most Influential Science Fiction Movie Never Made. O’Bannon was one of a team of 5 artists and designers brought together by a visionary director to work on a movie that was never finished, never really begun, in spite of months of preproduction. That team would go on, together and separately, to define the look and feel, the themes of Science Fiction films over the last 30 years more than any of the directors we associate with those films. Lucas, Spielberg, Ridley Scott, these guys didn’t create the worlds they presented to us. They hired these 5 artists to create those worlds for them. (more…)

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Gentile or Jew
O ye who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

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If you’re a regular reader, and if you’re not I’m giving you a field promotion right now, you know I never do this. I never post links. I write essays, and I have a style, a narrative style where I make points by building a narrative around then and in this manner I avoid seeming too didactic. Or maybe more didactic. But based on my Google Analytics, it works. People read and tend to spend a lot of time here reading so I feel like I’m onto something. I post essays and I never just post links and I’m not ever going to do that.

But I’m posting a link.

http://wave.google.com/

This is breathtaking. Google is, typically, reinventing the manner in which we use the internet to communicate. Google’s data indicates that email is rapidly becoming obsolete. Already is obsolete for a whole generation of kids who take instant communication for granted. (more…)

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I have a Kindle 2. I could not be arsed to buy the Kindle 1, because I’m no longer a young man and I’ve ceased to enjoy paying for the privilege of being experimented on. A process colloquially known as “early adoption” whereby the manufacturer has a product so new, it can’t even afford to mass produce it, so they charge an arm and a leg for what is essentially un-perfected technology, using that revenue to build a cheaper, better version for next year. (more…)

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This is inspired by a couple of discussions I’ve been reading recently.

A lot of people think copyright law is fucked up. No reasonable person wants to deny an author the right to make a living off his work, but when we have situations like the song Happy Birthday still being copyright (meaning, technically, if you and your friends sing “Happy Birthday” together at a restaurant, you owe someone money) then something is fucked up.

I don’t want to argue about copyright law, that’s not my métier. Rather, I wonder what the current Genre landscape would look like if copyright had a hard, unextendable limit of 20 years.

First, 20 years seems a perfectly reasonable limit to me, let’s get that out of the way.

But consider what would be in the public domain under this version of the law.

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io9 is a site I frequent to keep up-to-date on goings on in the SF world. It’s a good site, focusing almost exclusively on TV and movies, but I recently read something that reminded me of a rant I’d been planning for some time.

In their list of the top death’s in SF cinema–which criminally omits Roy Batty from Blade Runner, arguably the great SF death scene–the author mentions Danny Boyle’s ill-fated SF outing, Sunshine, referring to it as “Space Opera.”

Similarly, on another forum, a poster referred to Iain M. Banks’ series of novels set in the Culture as “Hard SF.”

Things like this really bug the shit out of me, in the context of things that are basically meaningless. I’m not sure the phrase “nerd rage” is appropriate here, as I rarely get worked up about anything, including important stuff. Maybe “nerd ennui” would be better.

First, allow me to point something out that often goes unspoken. SF cinema is very different from literary SF. This doesn’t bother me, I’m not frustrated that there aren’t movies like I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, and we do occasionally get genuinely thoughtful and cerebral SF Cinema, but overwhelmingly Science Fiction movies are merely adventure stories set in space or the future.

Whereas written SF…ok, is also mostly adventure stories, but there’s a long tradition of genuinely thoughtful and relevant writing in SF literature largely absent from SF cinema. This often confuses the issue because terms like Hard SF and Space Opera were created to describe written SF and almost never apply to Cinematic SF.

Sunshine, for instance, is not Space Opera. The Culture books are not Hard SF. In fact, allow me to make a broad, sweeping, statement that gives me a title for this post, a much better one than “What Makes It Science Fiction?” which was the original title.

Star Wars is not science fiction.
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This has been an excellent season for movies. In the last 4 months, we’ve have Michael Clayton, American Gangster, No Country For Old Men, and There Will Be Blood. It’s fantastic that I can say the least impressive of these is Michael Clayton, because that’s a very fine movie.

Of those four, you really should see the last two in the theater. Both are movies in which the landscape does a lot of narrative work.

There Will Be Blood takes place in the mountains and oil fields of California in the early 20th century. It presents a stark, bleak, brutal view of this land, and in that it is a mirror of the titanic main character at the center of the story, Daniel Plainview as portrayed by Daniel Day Lewis. The film is worth seeing just for Lewis’ performance which is the best I’ve seen in at least a year. If I tell you he’s doing his John Huston Accent all through the movie, do not think I am in any way diminishing his accomplishment. It’s magnetic and repulsive at the same time.
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When I first started at Pandemic Studios, then EA Pandemic, now dissolved, it still had a very small-company vibe. At the time, the people I worked with weren’t concerned with things like brand, marketing, focus groups and, indeed, thought of the things as necessary evil. If you’ve worked in any kind of professional creative field you’ve probably experienced the same thing. Marketing treated as an enemy.

Brand management, however, is different. Creative people should be conscious of their brand. What do you want people to associate with your product? If you don’t get out ahead of the process, and define your own brand, the market with do it for you and the market has no obligation to be kind to you. Most of the people I work with still thought of ‘Brand’ as marketing double-speak when I came on board. I don’t want to dismiss the notion of marketing double-speak, I’ve been in meetings where I honestly thought someone was about to suggest we Rasta-fy someone by 10%. “I can see that he gets busy…but does he get biz-zay?”

I disagreed. I think Brand is important. At lunch I said that I thought Bruce Springsteen was damaging his brand by letting Classic Rock stations play his music. He wants people to think of him as musically, culturally relevant. He wants people to buy his new album, care what he has to say. But hearing his music on the Classic Rock stations means people associate him with the old dinosaurs of the past. If that association sticks, everyone who’s not a die-hard fan will write off his new work.

I’m not sure Bruce has a choice, there may be nothing he can do to stop classic rock stations from playing Born In The U.S.A. for the 10 millionth time, and that’s too bad. It’s interesting to see what happens when people who do have control over their brand start thinking in terms of branding. Like, for instance, Marvel.

Marvel stirred up a shitstorm recently in Spider-man. Spidey made a literal “deal with the devil” and Mephisto removed everyone’s memory of everything that’s happened to Peter Parker since he got married to Mary Jane. In the interest of journalistic integrity I should point out that I don’t read Spider-man, I’m learning about this second-hand.

Many fans consider this an outrage. J. Michael Straczynski, the writer, spoke out against these changes, which is to say his story on the net. This is a great example of how modern companies need to come to grips with Transparency, but that’s the subject of another post. Many fans blame Joe Quesada, the current Editor-in-chief, for wanting Marvel stories to be “more like they were when he was a kid.” And, indeed, there may be some truth to this.

The fans want a story that develops and progresses. They want Peter to marry, have kids, and live in a future in which he deals with the consequences of decisions made in the past. This seems very reasonable. But there’s a problem with this. It damages the brand. Joe Quesada wants Spider-man to be a college kid who’s having problems in school, problems with money, problems with girls, all while trying to be Spider-man and keep his identity a secret. Fans want characters and a setting who evolve and change over time. Certainly there are several reasons why they want this. Characters who grow and learn are interesting. Probably some readers would like to see their heroes change with them. There are dozens more reasons, all good. It’s important to remember, however, that this is what the fans want.

Fans should not always get what they want. Fans are hard-core. The process of catering to them is the process of alienating more and more casual fans until eventually the only people who are left are the hardest of the hard-core. I call this the Fallout Syndrome. Yes, this is exactly the game the hard core fans wanted. Missing all the fun and whimsy of the original, which was not a big hit in the first place. Instead of broadening their appeal, they narrowed it and a game that critics loved, but few people bought, turned into a sequel that no one loved, and no one bought.

Joe Quesada’s vision may be a personal vision, the critique leveled against him. But it’s also the brand of Spider-man and I submit that’s no coincidence. It’s recognizably the brand of Spider-man. And now the already-popular cultural icon’s brand has been cemented by the commercial success of the movies. It is in Marvel’s best interest to stick to the brand. Stay “on-message” as it were, and provide consumers with something that is recognizably the thing they’ve come to associate with the brand.

There’s nothing stopping Marvel from producing a The Web Slinger Returns, Frank Miller-esque, Old Pissed-off Spider-man graphic novel a la The Dark Knight Returns, but like the Dark Knight Returns this should not be part of the current story arc. The entire notion of continuity, the changes in comic plots over the decades and how they impact current stories, is consuming comics alive while the hard core fans tout it as critical to their experience. What I think we’re seeing, and here I’m playing armchair strategist, is Marvel forcing their comics into mainstream product development where people seriously talk about things like Brand Statements.

Continuity, almost a subject warranting its own post, is something unique to comics and soap operas. We’re all perfectly capable of loving art and fiction without needing it to grow and change, and reference the past, over years and decades. Hercules, Arthur, Robin Hood, James Bond, I don’t think anyone would argue that these figures would have been more iconic had their stories included years of continuity. Robin & Marian is fine. Old Pissed-off Robin Hood, no problem. But if you’re the holder of the Robin Hood IP it’s your responsibility to make sure that when people come to your product they find something that is recognizably Robin Hood.

I am reminded of Star Trek, a property I worked on as a Paramount licensor and which I have a lot of fondness for. If you watch Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan with fresh eyes, it ends on a magnificent note. Kirk, having struggled with old-age and death, with irrelevance, with fear of being obsolete, has lost his best friend. But amazingly, in that moment, Kirk is completely liberated. In the end when McCoy asks him how he feels he says; “I feel young.” And he’s smiling and tearing up a little. This is something his friend’s death gave him, and gave us. The ship sails off into the stars and we’re left knowing that these people, this crew, this ship, will continue on forever.

Had that been the last movie with that cast we’d all still think of them as young and vibrant, as having adventures among the stars. It would have preserved our memories of them from the original series. Instead Paramount went back to the well, over and over, and in many ways damaged the Brand. There are now many parodic references in our culture to Scotty’s girth, Kirk’s toupee. That’s now something we associate with Star Trek. And it didn’t have to be. That’s what I mean by “bad for the brand.”

I think there are probably a lot of people like me who consider comics an impenetrable mess, but worse, I believe many more people remember Spidey et al fondly from their youth, pick up an issue because of the movies, and not only have no idea what’s going on don’t recognize the character. By which I mean yes this is Peter Parker and yes he is Spider-man, but this is not the Peter Parker I remember.

Marvel can have its cake and eat it too. It can maintain the integrity of the brand by keeping the regular Spidey books on-message, and still do graphic novels that show Spidey more grown-up, or old, or whatever they want. They should be able to please the casual reader as well as the hard core fan.

And that’s good for the brand.

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