Today on approachable theory we’re talking about meta accessibility tools, and we’re going to start by breaking down what I mean by that term. Read more!
Today on approachable theory we’re talking about meta accessibility tools, and we’re going to start by breaking down what I mean by that term.
Continue reading “approachable theory: Meta Accessibility Tools”Devlog on Itchio: https://briebeau.itch.io/script-change/devlog/209532/script-change-update-2021
Hey all!
I’m excited to announce that Script Change has experienced a significant update with three more tools and a new layout! You can find the new free text version at briebeau.com/scriptchange and the PDF plus the handouts are still free with option to donate at briebeau.itch.io/script-change. I have raised the suggested donation to $5 because of the sheer amount of time and effort I have put into Script Change over the years, and the continued creation of new content. I hope that’s okay!
In 2021, I’ve added Bloopers & Outtakes, a formal wrap meeting structure, the Editor’s Notes with picks, squicks, and icks to help guide content and response, and Two Thumbs Up to help with quiet check-ins and for less verbal players. These changes have been developing for a while, and I’m so excited to release them for you all!
Note: For the time being, please use the previous revision’s handout to put out descriptions on the table for reference, as I need more time to do the layout work and nothing’s changed on it. Also, in the new Bloopers & Outtakes section, I managed to only write “bloopers” on each Reel listing, but I’ll fix this soon if I can. I apologize for missing it!
Thank you so much for your continued support!
I’m super excited to share this interview with Sharang Biswas talking about a lot of things, including Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games, which you should check out after reading what Sharang has to say below!
The images for the book are by Janna Heidersdorf (Illustration) and Jen McCleary (Layout). (update 7/37/202)
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I appreciate you taking time for the interview, Sharang! Would you share with me a little about you and your experience? How did you end up in games doing the kind of work that you’re enthusiastic about?
I’m a game designer, interactive artist, and writer currently based in NYC. I started formally learning game design under Mary Flanagan at Dartmouth (though I studied engineering), and then went to ITP at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU to get a Masters in Interactive Design. Since then I’ve made numerous games, won an IndieCade, 2 IGDN, and a Golden Cobra Award, exhibited my games at galleries and art museums, mounted interactive theatre productions at various venues, and given a bunch of talks at conferences and universities. I’m also currently on the faculty at both Fordham University and Bard College.
I’m actually pretty enthusiastic about many different kinds of work, so I try and keep myself being by doing different stuff all the time. My major project right now is co-editing Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games with Lucian Kahn. I’ve been into the idea of procedure and process for a while, and about how mundane actions, when placed in a game context, can convey artistic meaning. I explored this in my games Feast & Verdure, and out of that line of inquiry came the thought: “Can games use sex acts as game mechanics, where the acts themselves are not the sole goal of the game?”. From that arose the idea of the book, though Lucian & I expanded the scope to also include games that discuss sex, sexuality, and related topics, without the use of sex acts between players or characters.
Lucian and I were very keen to make this project come to life in a way that uplifts artists and game designers, and so we decided to apply for a grant from the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity. We received two consecutive grants, and are basically using all the money to pay the creators involved!
That’s so fantastic to hear! Honey & Hot Wax sounds really brilliant, and also like a unique challenge. One curiosity I have is how you handled ensuring that the games in the collection use consent and are responsible, considering how sex can be. What was your approach to safety and boundaries?
It is my firm belief that art can and should discuss difficult topics–art is one of the ways people, both as individuals and as societies, make sense of the world. However, such art needs to be practiced with care and sensitivity, and as such, Lucian and I were very concerned about issues of consent and safety in the games included in the anthology. To begin with, when we were soliciting proposals, we took a very broad definition of what sex is, and relied on the Effing Foundation’s definitions of “sex-positivity” and “inclusivity” (which you can read here). This was to ensure that everyone was on the same page regarding the goals of our project, and what sorts of depictions of sexuality we would be considering.
Once the finalists were selected, we commissioned Maury Brown for an entirely separate chapter on consent and safety in LARP and TTRPG, to act as a general set of guidelines when playing any of the games in the collection (or indeed, any roleplaying game at all). In the rules for their games, each game designer also included their own sections regarding safety and consent practices, to uniquely address the idiosyncrasies of the experience they were creating.
Additionally, each game was thoroughly vetted by Lucian, myself, Cat Tobin from Pelgrane Press, and Kit Stubbs from the Effing Foundation, a diverse set of eyes to ensure that the games all represented the values we wanted to promote, and that consent language was clear. As director of the Effing Foundation, Kit, in particular, offered valuable insights concerning such matters!
Finally, we were very serious about the playtesting requirement for each of our accepted games; holes and gaps in rules are hard to predict without playtesting. Running my own game with a trusted friend, for example, showed me places where I could clarify language about safety!
Of course, and unfortunately, no safety mechanics can handle every eventuality, or account for bad actors. It is in the nature of participatory, non-linear stories to defy our expectations and predictions, so to all the players of our games, we ask you to exercise judgment and pay attention to your own boundaries!
Is this the first game you’ve applied for grants for? It sounds like you’re pretty great at it! What did that process entail and how do you think it’s impacted how the games are designed?
Grants, like most sorts of applications in this world, are partially about luck, so “being great at it” doesn’t mean as much as one might think! But this isn’t the first grant I’ve received to make game-like work, and hopefully won’t be the last!
When Lucian and I sent in our proposal to the Effing Foundation, we were very clear about what the grant-funding would be used for: paying the folks involved in the project a fair amount. This was paramount. All our funding went to the writers and designers involved in the book.
The creation of any kind of art requires time and space. Time and space are luxuries reserved for those with money. Good art is impossible to make (consistently, at least) if an artist is forever worried about where their next rent check is coming from. As such, Lucian and I were hoping to do our small part in supporting and uplifting indie designers. At the very least, we’ve managed to create a space where artists who might otherwise not be able to make games about risque topics, have the ability to do so, and in a way that’s financially viable!
It might be good to note here that in addition to support from the grant, each designer is also receiving royalties, and a portion of sales is also going towards charitable causes that promote sex-positivity and sex-education!
It is great to hear that everyone is being well-paid and that you and Lucian are working to support charitable works! What do you enjoy about working on larger projects like this with lots of collaborators? How does it contrast with how you enjoy working on individual projects, and how that affects your design? (note: please feel free to give examples of your specific projects!)
I really enjoy working on group projects. Most of the work I’m proudest of is in collaboration with others. However, I wouldn’t call this a “group project” per se. Lucian and I were editors and curators of other people’s work. It was their designs…we just helped them. Granted Lucian and I have games in the book as well, but each of those was an individual work (albeit, with help from others). The book wasn’t really a group project in the same was as some of my bigger, interactive theatre pieces, for example.
For example, when Nick O’Leary and I made the Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance LARP for the Museum of the Moving Image, it truly was collaborative, both with each other and the museum education department. We went back and forth with each other for ideas, to refine mechanics, to flesh out bits and to write content. None of that really for H&HW.
What are some lessons you’ve learned through design over time that you think your particular path is the only way you would have learned them – as in, if I hadn’t done x, I would never have learned y?
Lol, I feel that’s a weird line of thinking. Who knows what I would or would not have learned under different circumstances or different decisions? Besides, I think looking at other people’s paths is at best an exercise in inspiration. Stories of paths taken ALWAYS leave out some aspect of luck or privilege, and few can ever emulate the advice given in these sorts of tellings.
Maybe the only truth that I can say that has a high probability of working for others is 1) constantly making stuff and pushing yourself to try things you haven’t done before is how you learn and improve; and 2) being kind to people is not only the nice thing to do but more advantageous for you in the long run!
What are some of your favorite projects you’ve worked on in games and what makes them stand out amongst the rest? How were you able to put your unique experiences into play while designing them?
Hmm… this is a fun question because it made me look back on my work, and turns out, I’ve made a fair amount of stuff!
In Honey & Hot Wax, what are some of the specific pieces that you’re particularly looking forward to seeing people talk about and seeing the impact on the design landscape from? Were there any you learned from?
I mean, Clio Davis’ “Pas the Sugar, Please” has already generated conversations, after it got picked up by Intramersive Productions as an interactive theatre piece, so that’s great. Otherwise, I thinkLucian and I curated a decent selection of game, each of which has something new and interesting to offer to the gaming landscape. Lol, obviously, I’d love it if people talk about my game and how (queer) sex can be more normalized in culture!
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Thank you so much Sharang for the interview! Check out Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games and get intimate!
The title sounds angry, but like. Readers, you know it’s time we had this conversation.
I talk to marginalized designers in games all the time, and to like just straight cis white guys like a lot, too. There’s a common theme of not being paid well – paid fairly even – that I’m seeing, I’ve been seeing, but like we don’t really write it down in a place and say it to the point sometimes. With the way social media has become our method of communicating, it’s rare that we put it down in a blog post or something linkable. SO I thought heyyy, why not Thoughty?
Note: A large number of the accounts in this article are anonymous. This is because the industry itself can be so vindictive and brutal that people don’t feel safe talking about pay and bad experiences, even if their complaints are fully justified. All of the quotes within are used with permission, and remained anonymous unless otherwise permitted.
ETA: I did reach out to some artists for their perspective, but wasn’t able to gather sufficient information. I intend to have a followup article by artists to address artist pay.
THANK YOU to all of my contributors for this article, named and anonymous.
Speaking of social media, there have been article-length Twitter threads about how to make your own rates for freelancing, including this one by @XCK3D which includes a lot of things we don’t typically think to calculate. Like having an asshole rate, for when you have to work for that person who is an asshole but you need the money.
One place it has been written down is in a specific call for fair pay for people of color in games, headed up by DungeonCommandr on Twitter and hosted here in a Google Doc. It is a really great document that shows a lot of valuable work! Here are the rates they request.
Consulting: $30.00 USD/hour.
Per-Word Work: $0.10 USD/word.
Player Streaming, 4-hours: $80.00 USD flat rate.
Facilitator Streaming, 4 hours: $160.00 USD flat rate.
Panels, Speaking, Facilitating Events: $200.00 USD flat rate, and the inclusion of room, board, and travel assistance.
We could also use rates for hourly design work that includes playtesting and for project management, something we don’t often address. My base suggestions are below, based on what I’ve been paid for design work with playtesting and prorated upwards for a fair wage and looking at some national salary data for project management.
Design Work: $40.00 USD/hour.
Project Management: $60.00 USD/hour.
The document didn’t mention editing, but as an editor I’ve done some research. The EFA rates are pretty fair, though, and are available here. The rates I suggest are:
Proofreading: $0.01 USD – $0.02 USD/word.
Basic Copyediting: $0.02 USD/word – $0.03 USD.
Heavy Copyediting/Line Editing: $0.04 USD/word – $0.05 USD.
Translated/Non-Native Language Charge: $0.01 USD/word.
When I read the document, my first thought was “hell yes!” My second thought: How do we make this the norm?
That’s a pretty hard question in the industry we have today. Every time I bring up fair pay for everybody, I run into the same brick wall: people not knowing why it matters to pay fairly, or not knowing why it matters to charge fairly. We all fear not being able to make our dream come true, and capitalism is a freaking stale bagel supreme. So where the hell do we even start?
Let’s dig in.
Continue reading “We Say Fuck You, Pay Me”I have an interview today with AdamD from Game to Grow about Critical Core, which is currently in preorder! It sounded like such a fascinating project focused on helping autistic gamers! Check out Adam’s responses below!
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Tell me about Critical Core. What excites you about it?
Critical Core is a starter set for therapeutic tabletop role-playing games. We’ve been using games to help kids and teens build social skills for around 8 years now, and have always wanted to reach a larger audience of people than we can reach directly in the greater Seattle Area. At Game to Grow we’ve been saying for years that we think the world would be a better place if everyone played more games together. This is our opportunity to get a game into more homes, hospitals, schools, clinics and libraries around the world.
What are the backgrounds like for the various people working on Game To Grow? What motivated you to apply it to games?
Adam Johns is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. I (Adam Davis) have a masters in education with a specialization in Drama Therapy. We met in grad school at Antioch University Seattle and started working together running drop in groups using Dungeons and Dragons with socially isolated youth. As we ran the groups we realized the potential that the game has as an intentional intervention for building social competence. We created Wheelhouse Workshop, a for-profit company, in 2013 dedicated to using RPGs to build social skills. After several years of running groups and serving the local community, they formed Game to Grow in 2017 to continue to expand on the use of games to help people learn, grow, and change.
Game to Grow was formed as a nonprofit to reach a larger audience to help with a wider range of challenges. Another member of the development team is Virginia Spielmann, who is a British-trained Occupational Therapist with more than 20 years experience working in pediatrics. Virginia is a specialist in the DIR Floortime™ framework of developmental intervention. Virginia approached us with the Critical Core project as a collaboration with the ad agency Mcgarrybowen Hong Kong, who sought to use their creative talent in design and project management to serve the autistic community in Hong Kong with an innovative idea. Critical Core was born from this international collaboration.
How does the starter kit work and what is included in it?
The starter kit contains three main components: the rules and materials for a simplified and easy-to-play role-playing game, a facilitator’s guide with the best-practices we have developed over the near decade of experience we have running groups and using this method to help clients, and adventure modules in which the in-game scenarios are targeted developmentally to real-world areas of social growth.
The goal is for new game masters to be able to pick up the starter set and learn a simple game they can use to help and connect with their family, students, clients, or community. They can use the modules and facilitator’s guide to improve the outcomes of their game and provide some support for kids, whether they’re on the autism spectrum or not. Experienced game masters will be able to apply the wisdom in the facilitator’s guide and adventure modules to other game systems and use the games they already know and love to help their community. Trained therapists, educators, and other community support will have a new tool in their repertoire to help their community in a way that is, fun, safe, and enriching.
How do you approach accessibility for those with disabilities like blindness, or who have mobility issues?
Our approach to accessibility is that, as our colleague Mike Fields said during a presentation: ”An impairment is only a disability when there is no accommodation.”
We also recognize that every individual is different and may need a different level of modification or accommodation for them to fully participate. The key element to accessibility is open dialogue around what a participant needs and how we can help. There are obvious ways we can improve accessibility, i.e., by making sure paths are clear for wheelchairs and walkers, or by providing braille dice, though it is impossible to be 100% prepared for everything so we must be open to conversation about how we can make sure our table has a place for everyone.
How do these starter kits work for people who aren’t experienced professionals, based on your testing?
We’re still developing the kit to make it the best it can be to professionals with less experience using RPGs to help. Our “official” beta-testing with Critical Core kits hasn’t begun, though in the trainings we’ve conducted over the years using the wisdom and best practices that will go into the facilitators guide, we’ve seen the largest area of growth is making sure that the professionals new to facilitating RPGs for growth remember that they are also a player, and that SO MUCH of the power in the work comes from relationships and play. So we’ll make sure that the kits have a clear outline of the game structure, but also explain in depth how to use the game to maximum impact. Not just the what, but the why and the how. Much of that will be in the facilitator’s guide included in the Critical Core box.
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Thank you so much to Adam for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Critical Core and consider preordering if it is a good suit for you!
Today, I am 30 years old, I work in my dream job teaching leadership using games, and I make $0.85/hour.*
Leading with Class, in case you don’t know (most people don’t!), is my YouTube show where I teach about leadership using roleplaying games. It’s the dream job I made real for myself through a lot of hard work and the support of my loving, and incredibly talented, partner John. It also still doesn’t feel much like a dream come true, because it comes with some overwhelming “but”‘s.
I get to teach leadership…but it’s not in a respected role.
I get to teach using games…but it’s not seen as “fun.”
I get to work from home…but I can’t pay my bills.
I get to work with my partner…but he doesn’t get paid any better than I do.
I get to share my vision with the world…but almost no one watches my channel.
In 2014, I made the decision to continue my pursuit of an education and get my degree in organizational leadership. From there, I continued on to graduate school and got a degree in leadership – and over that two year period, experienced continued health and career setbacks that left me unemployed at graduation. My job became Thoughty – and Thoughty is still my actual primary income. All $300-ish a month, maybe. I have ten years of career experience that the lessons learned can apply to my work in leadership, but no one wants someone who was mostly an admin in a position of leadership, and my health disallows a full time job.
So, whatever, fine, I said. I’ll make my job. With John’s encouragement (and from my other partner, Dillon), I started working on scripts for Leading with Class. Even now, it feels endlessly selfish, and working on Leading with Class instead of trying to dig through thousands of jobs to find at least one that pays $15/hr. and only requires 25 hours a week felt irresponsible. But I did it while still doing freelance work (as I am now) and Thoughty, and it was so wonderful to make something that meant so much to me!
What was less wonderful was the lack of feedback and viewership. I am incredibly grateful for the Leading with Class patrons on Patreon – honestly, it means the world to me that anyone would support this work. But it’s still extremely quiet. On all of our videos combined – all of them – we have fewer than 350 views. I’ve shared on LinkedIn, Facebook, G+, Twitter, Mastadon, and Instagram, and of course, they’re on YouTube. I’ve done streams on Twitch to garner interest, answering questions and writing the script live to engage viewers.
We have three comments on all of our YouTube videos combined.
Now, we’re lucky enough to have followers and subscribers on our various media accounts! There’s just really low engagement. I know we’re kind of a niche interest, but I’ve only ever seen (personally) fewer than 5 total shares of Leading with Class content outside of my own personal shares, John’s shares, and the dedicated shares of some of my close friends on G+. Most shares aren’t accompanied by any positive recommendation, either.
And you know, yes, this does sound like whining. But as a creator, as a person who struggles with impostor syndrome and serious anxiety and depression, and as a person, I think it’s essential that my viewers and readers know me as a real person, and that they know the truth. The truth is, creating the thing that means the world to me, living the “dream” like I am, is heavily dented by struggling to make it through financially every day and hearing basically silence when it comes to my work.
I am used to silence when it comes to my work. People don’t link and share my site(s) or my work very often, and this has been notoriously challenging for me. I struggle with professional envy, seeing others get praised while I can barely get a retweet at times. But I thought, with Leading with Class it will be different! Even if it makes no money, even if it gets no press, I’ll be making something meaningful. I’ll be using my degree to do what I wanted the most!
But if a YouTuber makes an amazing video and no one watches it, does it functionally exist at all?
When one of my key purposes with Leading with Class is to educate, and there are no new viewers, who is really learning? If one of the necessary aspects of so-called “edutainment” is that it is spread broadly and enjoyed by an audience, have I created anything really at all? Did I get hit on the head by a backdrop while recovering from a brain injury and struggle to put words together to make episodes and even my best friends, people I respect and admire, haven’t watched a single episode?
And I suppose it does often just burn me that John puts in so much work to make these episodes look beautiful, to make me look and sound competent, even through brain injury problems, and yet as of this writing, only 22 people saw our latest video? The lovely work he did? That makes me so sad! I feel I’m wasting his time. This thing that is meaningful to both of us feels injured by the quiet, by the feeling that we are working so hard, this is so good, it means so much, it should go far and silence.
I do try to bolster with every like our videos and posts get, and absolutely I could be posting more often. But the hype machine only does so much when no one else turns the gears.
And I don’t want people to think I hate making the videos or I don’t think they matter. I do think they matter, and I love them, and love creating them! I had to take a hiatus in July because my recovery from my brain injury (sustained last November) was taking a long time and writing and filming while trying to also do freelance work and get through recovery was just not working. I struggled so much, and I cried so hard about taking a hiatus! It would doom the show, I knew it, and what if we could never start back to it?
But we did, even though I’m still in recovery. Even though the cats insist on interrupting our shoots.
And I’m spurred, truly, to keep working on the project. I want to take it further – I mapped out a second series, and a mini-episode series. I’m even getting the chance to do my first workshop at Big Bad Con – one huge part of Leading with Class that hasn’t progressed far yet, but would mean the world to me to make bigger and broader. This is my dream.
I am a game designer, and love designing games – I want to keep doing that. And Thoughty is still important to me! But Leading with Class is a dream that I feel could make a difference! If it could just… grow. I know I need to work harder, I always do, but I have always worked best with the enthusiasm of others encouraging my progress, and John cannot carry all of that weight. He isn’t my audience.
I suppose, what I’m trying to say is, it is very hard to do the thing you love and feel unfulfilled by it. The perils of relying on others! But we are, as they say, a community, so I think a lot of people could understand what I’m feeling here, so I felt like I needed to finally speak these words clearly, so you don’t feel alone and so you don’t feel like your work is meaningless. Leading with Class isn’t meaningless, and your work that feels like it’s floundering has meaning, too.
So what the heck am I gonna do about this?
First, I’m going to keep writing scripts, filming, hopefully streaming, and doing workshops. I’m going to finish the first season of the show with the full twelve episodes, no matter what.
Second, I’m going to try to do better about promoting the show and increase my social media presence, as hard as that can be.
Third, I’m going to continue to be honest in how I approach this work and my purposes with Leading with Class. I’m never going to bullshit you about the work I’m doing, and I will continue to be transparent.
And fourth, finally, I’m going to be grateful for those of you who are here, who do support me and Leading with Class, and try to keep that in mind when the gremlins come to fight in my mind. I can’t let them win. I’m the winner here!
Thank you for reading, for watching, and for every moment of your being. The world is a better place because of you, even when you think it’s not. And hey. Come join me — in Leading with Class. <3
*For those curious about the time John and I spend on a given episode, here’s a breakdown.
Brie’s time investment per episode
~10 hours research
~5 hours script writing
~1 hours rehearsal
~3 hours filming
= ~19 hours
John’s time investment per episode
~1 hour research support
~1 hour script review
~1 hour rehearsal
~3 hour filming
~5 hour editing
~3 hour graphics and animation
= ~14
Total investment = ~33 hours per episode.
The Patreon currently sits at $28/episode.
We aren’t stopping, though. 🙂
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Check out Leading with Class on YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. For questions about the show, email leadingwithclass@gmail.com.
Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.
If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.
Hi all! Today I have an interview with Martin Lloyd on Amazing Tales, a roleplaying game that’s maybe a little more approachable for the kiddos of my readers than my normal fare! Feel free to check out some of the actual plays that exist for the game and the website, and check out Martin’s responses below!
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Tell me a little about Amazing Tales. What excites you about it?
Amazing Tales is a role-playing game for kids aged four and up. I wrote it to play with my daughter five years ago when she was four, and introduced my son to it at about the same age. We had so much fun playing it that I wanted to get it out there so other people could do the same. My first thoughts were to do it as a simple PDF download in the style of Lady Blackbird or Lasers and Feelings. But I was lucky enough to get a sabbatical from my job, and I decided to use that time to turn it into a full fledged book. I had a huge slice of luck when Iris Maertens agreed to do the artwork, that let me create the book I always wanted to make, packed with illustrations so kids can get inspired by it, and feel like it’s a book for them, even if they can’t read it.
Now 8 months have passed since release and I’m loving watching what happens as the game gets out into the real world. It is a huge kick to see people sharing pictures of themselves playing their first role-playing game with their kids, or pictures of their child’s first character sheet. One of my thoughts when I was writing the game is that as soon as role-players have kids they want to play role-playing games with them, but anticipate a wait of maybe ten years before they can. Amazing Tales gets that waiting period down to about four years, and that seems to be making a lot of parents very happy.
I am also delighted that Studio 2 have picked Amazing Tales up for distribution and an offset print run is happening. Amazing Tales is going to be in shops! For something that started out as a way to fill a rainy day it’s come a very long way.
Tests have two possible results, if you succeed, you succeed. If you fail, things get worse, but they don’t end. So the monster might catch you, but it won’t eat you. The GM – typically the parent – never rolls dice, which means they’re never playing ‘against’ their child.
I picked three as a target number because kids like succeeding, and I picked conflict rather than task resolution because it keeps the story moving. Watch how much stuff happens in the first two minutes of a kids’ cartoon show, that’s the attention span kids have. And that’s the kind of storytelling pace Amazing Tales aspires to. Tell some story, pose a challenge, choose an action, roll the dice, resolve and repeat.
What I’ve just described is a very very simple system and that simplicity is the key to making a game approachable for kids. I firmly believe that anyone’s enjoyment of a game increases when they know what they’re doing. We’ve all played games where we didn’t know the rules, someone told us to roll some dice, modified the result for reasons we couldn’t follow and then told us what happened. That sucks when you’re an adult, and it definitely sucks when you’re four. So Amazing Tales can be boiled down to ‘roll the dice for the thing you’re trying to do, if the result is three or more you succeeded’. Four year olds can understand that, they can repeat it back to you, or explain it to their grandparents and their friends.
In the early days of playing Amazing Tales I tried things like modifying the target number; providing magic items that gave +1 bonuses; or requiring multiple successes for difficult tasks, but I quickly realised that it made no difference to how much fun the kids were having. Young kids don’t understand probability, so why bring in things like modifiers? The only reasons for having different dice sizes for different skills are that one; kids love rolling dice, two; they like dice with interesting shapes and three; role-player parents can’t wait to introduce their kids to polyhedrals. To adults it’s clear that changing the dice size changes the odds, but that’s not why they’re there.
I have been pleasantly surprised by how happy older kids have been with these very simple rules. In my mind Amazing Tales was a game for kids aged about four to eight. In practice it turns out to be a game for kids aged between 3 and a half and ten. Seeing how well Amazing Tales works has also convinced me that most games for adults are unnecessarily complex.
The other way to look at this question is to think about what kids want in a game beyond a confirmation that it’s for them. Young kids don’t have the same breadth of cultural references to draw on that grown ups do. So when I was thinking about the settings to include in the book I tried to pick things that small kids would be familiar with from a very young age. I ended up with four settings, the Deep Dark Wood (think talking animals and fairies), Magical Kingdoms Long Ago (think King Arthur), The Pirate Seas (pirates) and Adventures Beyond the Stars (space). I thought about doing super-heroes, but left it out because my kids knew the names of super heroes, but had no idea what kind of stories they might appear in. In retrospect I think that was a mistake, there are plenty of kids out there playing Amazing Tales as super-heroes.
The settings themselves are quite vague. They’re really collections of prompts and ideas to get parents and kids making up worlds together. It’s up to you whether the deep dark wood is full of monsters or full of friendly animals, but the setting gives you a jumping off point to get started. What’s important is that parent and child can start from a shared idea of a wood, fairies that are small, have wings and can do magic, and animals that can talk. The settings include suggested skills, suggested plots and lots of ideas for parents to work with and artwork to inspire the kids. From there it’s up to the parents to work with their child to create something that will work for both of them.
I also wanted to write a game where that made good on role-playing games’ key promise – that you can be anything and do anything. That’s one of the reasons there’s a picture of King Tyrannosneak in the book even though he doesn’t fit in any of the settings. He’s a character my son came up with when he was five. He’s a giant robot t-rex, with four arms, which he needs because he has two swords and two shields. He’s also a ninja. When you tell kids their characters can be anything they want they take you at your word, and Amazing Tales supports that.
I was more concerned about making the game easy for parents to understand. I’d love non-gamer parents to consider Amazing Tales as something for their kids, so I tried to get as much advice for first time gamers and first time GMs into the book as I could. It’s also why I shot some actual play videos, just so people can see how it’s done. Amazing Tales also suggests that you don’t do much (or any) preparation for a game, it works well if you just improvise as you go. That’s a challenge for parents who haven’t done any kind of improvisational story telling before, so again I tried to pack in the advice.
A few experiences from play-tests do stand out though. One was with a friend of my daughter, a lovely five year old girl who elected to play a princess. At the first sign of trouble she announced ‘I stab it in the face with my dagger’, which was both fair enough, and rather jarring. Kids, it turns out, come out with this kind of thing all the time. This led to my including a section in the book on non bloodthirsty ways of resolving combats. I’m not a fan of my kids describing graphic violence, so I try to keep lethal encounters to a minimum when I run games. There are plenty of other ways to have fights end, with enemies running away, surrendering, begging for mercy, bursting into tears and so on. Evil robots, animated shadows, skeletons, those kinds of things are also great for heroes to fight their way through without having to worry too much about the morality of the situation.
Another thing that stands out happened when I was testing out the space setting. I had vaguely assumed that kids who want to play aliens would want some kind of star-trek kind of alien, a humanoid, with weird coloured skin and one or two distinguishing features. But no. At least in the test games I ran kids who played aliens launched into a competition to be the weirdest, most out there alien they could be. Tentacles galore, mouths on their feet, dozens of eyes…
And one last thing I noticed across a lot of the play-tests was that kids often like to copy each other’s characters. They’ll want to be the same kind of hero, then they’ll pick the same skills, describe their characters in the same way and so on. It’s doesn’t create a problem the way having a party of three wizards would in D&D, it’s just what they like to do.
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| King Tyrannosneak! |
So I hope that one of the things kids will get out of playing Amazing Tales is the idea that they can create new stuff and colour outside the lines.
Not that there’s anything wrong with more derivative characters. I know of a little girl who’s out there fighting the Clone Wars with a character who’s skills are ‘being a queen’, ‘shooting blasters’, ‘knowing things’ and ‘piloting spaceships’. I loved hearing about her, because her idea of being a queen involves saving the galaxy with laser guns, brains and charisma, which sounds like a good thing to learn when you’re growing up.
The last thing, and perhaps the thing that makes me happiest is all the stories from people who’ve found playing games with their kids to be a fulfilling experience. Because Amazing Tales puts most of the cognitive load on the parent everyone playing is really engaged. Anyone who’s tried to spend lots of time with small children knows how tedious it can get. They can play snakes and ladders twenty times in a row, they don’t get bored of the same (very short) story book again and again, and they value your attention so highly that getting you to read that book again is the most important thing in their world. Amazing Tales is different because it makes the parents do some brain work, and then it becomes a real joint activity. I think kids can tell when their parents are really engaged, and I think parents find that rewarding too. So seeing all these parents find a new activity that they can do with their kids that they both genuinely enjoy – that’s been great.
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Hi all! Today I have an interview with Tania Richter about Yarnia – A Yarn Quest Knitting RPG, Tania’s roleplaying game using knitting that’s currently on Kickstarter!
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| A lovely dragonfly patterned shawl. |
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| A lovely cowl & a creative designer! |
What are some of the types of patterns players will encounter during their Yarn Quest?
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| Gorgeous wings pattern. |
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| This black and white shawl with the bird pattern is so beautiful. |
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| approachable theory logo. (By Brie Sheldon) |
Mathematical balancing can be an intimidating subject for RPG designers, but crucial for making a game that works like the designer intends is the solid foundation of having the correct dice rolling method. While familiarity with some methods of rolling are usually understood by designers, what questions to ask when deciding on a dice rolling system, the differences between said systems, and how to pick what’s most suited to the game can be a tough subject. The first question to tackle is often one of how many dice are appropriate.
The most familiar method of rolling dice in RPGs is the simple “roll a 1d20, add a number to it, and compare to a target number,” due to its use in Dungeons and Dragons and related spin-offs. One common modifier to that is instead of rolling 1d20, use the sum of 3d6. These two methods make for useful comparisons of the difference between rolling a single die vs rolling multiple dice and adding them. Both average out to the same result (10.5), and have similar maximums (20 vs 18) and minimums (1 vs 3). The following graph shows the probability curve of rolling each result on a 1d20 and 3d6, comparatively.
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| This chart shows the probability of rolling a specific result, visual by Michael. Full details in alt text. |
The probability of getting any specific result on a 1d20 is equal – each number is equally represented by once face of the die, giving a 5% chance of rolling any number in its range. The flat nature makes it easy to do calculations with – if you have something that activates on certain numbers being rolled (like critical hits on 20, or special moves on even rolls), it’s easy to just add up those 5%s, even in your head at the table. On the graph “Probability of Rolling a Specific Result,” the line for the 3d6 is a “bell curve” shape – the most common results are in the middle of the dice range, due to an “averaging out” effect, where there’s multiple different sums that can achieve them.
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| This chart displays the probability of rolling a specific result or greater, visual by Michael. Full details in the alt text. |
What does it mean for the 3d6 that the extreme results are less likely, and average results more common? The biggest take away is simple: that if you’re already favored – and so the average result is a success for you – using 3d6 instead of 1d20 means you become even more so. But if you’re relying on an extreme result to have a chance of success, moving from 1d20 to 3d6 lowers your chance of success even more. Using a 3d6 allows a character to perform “lesser” tasks reliably, but struggle at performing tasks above their skill level. It promises easy success to the specialized, and warns away those not well suited to a task from even attempting it.
Deciding which tasks – reliable or risky – you want your dice system to encourage isn’t the only change in player behavior you’ll see from it either. An important consideration is how valuable a +1 bonus is to the success at any given task. This won’t be obvious to all players, but some will understand how this works, and others will pick up a sense of it as you play. The following graph shows the probability of a +1 bonus changing a failure to a success for each roll needed.
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| This chart shows the probability of a +1 helping, visual done by Michael. Full details in the alt text. |
The probability of a +1 bonus having changed a failure to a success is the exact same as the probability of rolling the number one fewer than whatever you’re trying to roll. As such, the graph of the +1 bonus helping is the same as the graph of individual roll results, except shifted one number higher. If you’re rolling a 1d20, no matter what task you’re performing, a +1 bonus is giving a 5% greater chance of success. If you’re rolling 3d6, that instead varies.
For tasks which are near impossible or very easy to perform, the +1 might not be worth sacrificing much for. But for tasks that you already have a near-even chance at, the value is very high – over twice as much as you would be getting on a d20! Players are more incentivized to spend resources or time in order to get any small bonus they can when they expect they’re close to the average of an attack or defense.
All of the above shows the difference between 1d20 and 3d6 – but what about other dice, or rolling even more? The following graph shows a comparison between six types of dice rolling methods, all with roughly even averages of 10-11.
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| This chart shows the probability of rolling a specific result, visual done by Michael. Full details in the alt text. |
The more dice are rolled, the steeper the bell curve becomes. Anything that could be said about 3d6 in comparison to 1d20 is even more so for 4d4, and the trend continues to strengthen the more dice are rolled. If you want it so the average result comes up very often, and people with even small advantages are heavily favored, you want a system that rolls many dice at once. Another design consideration that emerges is the range of values possibly – when rolling 1d20, there are 20 possible results. When rolling 3d6, there are only 16 results – and four numbers (9-12) come up almost half of the time. When rolling 7d2, there are only 8 possible results, and two numbers (10-11) come up 55% of the time.
When so few numbers are likely to be rolled, this means that characters gaining small bonuses or penalties can very quickly put them in the realm of instant success or failure. It only takes a +4 to go from the average value to an instant success on a 7d2, as opposed to a +10 on a d20, meaning there’s not a lot of room for individual bonuses to make a difference and still have a chance of failure. This however also allows a stratification in difficulty – it doesn’t require very large bonuses for an expert character to be able to complete tasks a non-trained character cannot, keeping numbers reasonable if you want multiple tiers of difficulty.
In summary, there are multiple considerations that go into choosing the dice rolling method for your game. A single large die, or fewer dice in general, is more appropriate if you want a game to have multiple conditional sources of bonuses such as gear, positioning, and teamwork, to keep tasks from ever seeming too reliable, and to encourage risky maneuvers. Multiple dice, or smaller dice, are more appropriate if you want to make small bonuses matter a great deal, allow characters to treat lower-difficulty tasks as trivial, or to have hard tiers in difficulty. Neither method is inherently superior; instead, both are proper tools for their tasks.
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Thanks so much to Michael for the excellent article! Please share around and I hope you all gained something from reading this post on approachable theory!
If you would like to write an approachable theory post, send an email to Brie with your name, pronouns, and pitch. Responses may be delayed over the next two weeks as Brie is recovering from grad school, but they’ll get back as they can.
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I wrote this for school, but I wanted to post it here so others could use it, also, example of how I’d like to use games to explain concepts of leadership and development. -Brie
The illustrations on this page are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by John W. Sheldon.
The best way for me to understand the different types of power was to put it into perspective of a fantasy roleplaying game. This might sound lazy, but it helps me remember it better and gives me perspectives.
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| Did I list druids here? Of course not – their power is more fluid in nature and depends on their interpretation of their magic, at least partially. I would consider them to have something like reward/referant. They’re a weird cookie. |
Paladins have legitimate power. Legitimate power is “the authority granted from a formal position in an organization” (Daft, p. 370). Paladins are typically given a role of power from their chosen deity, and can occupy a position in a church, as well. They are literally assigned power. With this, they can take actions themselves, as well as call others to action. To use this power, a paladin (or someone in real life) could call back to their own authority and speak to how their actions reflect the intentions of that authority.
Clerics have reward power. Reward power is “the authority to bestow rewards on other people” (Daft, p. 371). Clerics are also religiously-based, and can give people healing or blessings with deific magic. They have the ability to reward people for heroism through those blessings and through healing and recovery. A cleric (or someone in real life) might use reward power by promising that if a certain goal is met, there would be monetary, emotional, or needs-based reward.
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| Sassy fighter is sassy – and coercive. |
Rangers and wizards have expert power. Rogues also have this power. Expert power is “the authority resulting from a leader’s special knowledge or skill” (Daft, p. 371). Both wizards and rangers are experts in their fields, with deep knowledge of whatever it is they do. Wizards are academics, while rangers are more on-the-ground and experience based, and very skilled. Rogues have many skills but are more jack-of-all-trades in a lot of cases, which makes them have a lot of generalized authority because they know at least a little bit about almost everything. These type of archetypes (or people in real life) can use their power by explaining the facts and support behind the requested actions and goal-focus, and use their knowledge to propel action.
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| Rogues know where it’s at (in your safe, that is). |
Legitimate, reward, and coercive power are hard power because they are all about control. If you do this, I give you or take away this. If you don’t do this, the whole authority will know you defied them. They are concrete things that immediately threaten or promise things, or simply force authority on people, and that makes them almost immovable. Soft power like expert power and referent power are explanatory and guiding instead of forcing, and therefore can lead people towards success or goal-meeting without making them feel like they have no choice or making them feel like they have to do something instead of wanting to do something, because it makes sense or satisfies some higher-level need.
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| What kind of power would a dragon have compared to a barbarian? It depends on the dragon, frankly. |
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