Geek on the Borderlands

It’s almost the end of the year, and I’d like to talk a little about the past, present and future of FAD.

These rules have been around for 7 years now. They began as hastily written comments on a notepad, after playing and having my mind blown by Stargrunt II.

The things I knew I wanted, when I started the project was this:

Suppression should be automatic.

Only 6 sided dice.

Combat should be squad based.

The core mechanics would be roll 2 dice and pick the highest or roll 2-3 dice and see how many score over a certain target number.

With that in mind, the original game came into existence. My friend Paul liked it and gave some feedback, and I proceeded to talk it up a little on theminiaturespage.com and the old GW fan site Portent.net. As time went on, I realized that I had struck something that people actually took an interest in. I saw threads where people asked for advice on a rules set, and people I didn’t even know would suggest FAD. I googled it occasionally and found it mentioned on forums and websites I had never even frequented.

As time went on, I even learnt that people had run games using FAD at a few conventions across the world. That blew my mind.

Yeah, it’s nowhere near the popularity of games like 5150, Stargrunt II, Warhammer 40.000 or any of those. The twohourwargames yahoo group has 3600 members and multiple posts every day. The FAD group is fairly quiet and has just shy of 500 members. But it’s something I had never anticipated or experienced before.

Now it’s November of 2009, and FAD4 has been out for a good while now. So what is lying ahead of us all?

First and foremost are a few projects that have been in various states of development for the past year. We have a lot of little additions to the core rules (night fighting, more traits, some clarifications of points that could be clearer, that sort of thing) which will eventually become FAD 4.3. I don’t think there’s any chance of having this done by December so expect something in the first half of 2010.

We have been working on a campaign setting as well (Cyberia) which will give a “out of the box” option to people who don’t want to fiddle with designing their own units from scratch. There’s also work on a WW2 and possibly modern day options. These are propably more distant projects though.

One thing that have been churning in my head lately is the idea of having money go into, and come out of, FAD. I am not talking about making the game commercial only (I watched my old ww1 rules Trench Storm whither and die from that decision) or making a living off it. Let me explain:

There’s a lot of things I think could be achieved with a bit of cash. A few include:

Commissioning artwork, writing etc: This is by far the biggest one. We’ve been extremely lucky in having some very talented volunteers provide us some great art to use. However, volunteers are subject to the randomness of life, and are motivated mainly by interest and passion.

Being able to have some artwork commissioned for FAD products would give us another, additional source of material. It could also go to additionally reward and motivate people who have volunteered their efforts.

It would also permit some additional incentive to prospective rules writers who may otherwise be disinclined to spend hours developing a rules supplement.

Advertising: I would like to do a bit more work advertising (and thus paying money into supporting) popular tabletop gaming sites like theminiaturespage.com and rpg.net. Having some cash flow would allow for that, as well as give FAD some additional exposure.

Miniatures: This is faraway and expensive idea, but having a range of miniatures developed for FAD would be pretty cool.

Conventions: I’d love to have something setup where we could showcase FAD at conventions, and possibly provide some stuff for that, such as freebie print copies of the rules or whatever might be the case.

Cooperation with a miniatures supplier: This talk has come up before, and at least one supplier showed interest, however the arrival of my son into this world made me unable to follow through on this. I am however very interested in having some cooperation with manufacturers of scifi figures, particularly some of the small-scale operations. This would enable us to provide FAD stats and points values ready to use, and give them more exposure and advertisement, while giving FAD more exposure as well.

There’s other incidental expenses that could occur as well, such as server space if we move to our own server, website maintenance and whatnot.

So where does money for these ideas come from? Well, it can come from my pocket. I generally can’t really afford that, and I’d love for FAD to sustain itself.

I am also not keen on the idea of selling PDF’s. Anyone can develop for the game, and that is how it ought to be. So if I sell a supplement on urban warfare, and another guy does it for free and his is better, nobody will buy mine, and for good reason.

The core FAD products should be free and readily available.

Printed copies: An option that will almost certainly be used is to offer the printed version of FAD through a print-on-demand service such as lulu. Last I checked the cost of a book of this size would be about 10 dollars, so it could sell for a few bucks more. Based on polling on the yahoo group and comparing to existing products, most people are willing to pay 12-15 dollars for a game of this size.

This would not change the fact that it’s available for free, and there’d be no “exclusive” version. It’d simply be a service to people who prefer getting a printed, spiral-bound copy, rather than dealing with pdf’s and printing it themselves.

Ransom model: Those who play RPG’s may be familiar with Greg Stolze’s ransom model. You offer up a game or supplement and set a ransom. People pledge whatever money they feel is fair. When the ransom is met, it’s made available for free to everybody. This avoids PDF piracy, and nobody pays more than what they want to. If the ransom isn’t met, the money either never gets deducted, or is donated to charity.

Donations: Asking for money is basically begging, and in addition to being distasteful, people aren’t inclined to give money just for the sake of doing so. In the past when the topic of commissioning artwork came up, a few people showed an interest in donating towards that, so its conceivable that specific expenses could receive some funding through donation.

These are all ideas I have been mulling over, and I am still trying to lay out the best path to really push FAD forward into the spotlight more, and capture more ground.

Lastly, I’d like to put out a call for support and aid. I am at a spot where I have projects that I think FAD needs, but I do not have the luxury to work on all of them myself. I need people who are competent designers and tinkerers, creative writers or just plain thinkers, who may be willing to pitch in for some specific projects.

I’ll put forth more specifics, but the two main projects are: FAD WW2 and help with the Cyberia setting. I have two people lined up for the latter, but I need more, to really make progress in a reasonable time.

It’s been a strange and amazing 7 years, and I’d like to thank all of you out there for everything you’ve done. Here’s to another 7 years of fast and dirty wargaming

Ivan – authordude

So, I can’t just let my friends get all up in my blog and throw around their own opinions without adding my own, can I?  I figure that it’s high time that I throw down and explain just why I love 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons to itty bitty little pieces.

My friends and those that know me through various message boards generally know that I’ve always been a big supporter of the latest edition of just about any game (Changeling: the Lost notwithstanding).  Generally I feel that most new editions are actual improvements over the old ones, at least when it comes to my own preferences when it comes to roleplaying games.  Now, in the past I’ve been a bit of an edition elitist when it came to my favorite, but thankfully my friends disabused me of my superiority and I’m now what you’ll call a positive champion.  Yes, I like 4th edition over any other editions, but I realize know that it’s because the rules adhere to what I want in a game and not because it’s flat out superior.  I’ll never say that one game is strictly better than another game or edition, but I will state that I think it works better for me.

So, why do I love 4th edition so very much?  There are a variety of reasons, but the biggest is because I really love crunchy bits in a game, so long as those crunchy bits aren’t too complex.  I love 4th edition, and Mutants and Masterminds, but I also like games like Spirit of the Century or Savage Worlds.  I like my crunch on the medium to moderate level, not super complex like Hero or as fiddly as GURPs.

For me, 4th edition hits that perfect level of crunchy and “rules light.”  Yes, there are a lot of powers and fiddly bits, but by and large they all follow one generic framework that’s easy for me to understand.  I like combing through all the books looking for that perfect feat or power, I gather a great deal of enjoyment finding things like this.  For me character creation is just as much a fun part of the game as playing itself.  I love finding that combination of feats, powers, and skills that can be combined in an awesome way.

Some of my friends call me a power gamer, and I suppose that I have to cop to that to a certain extent.  I don’t like breaking the game or coming up with stupidly powerful combinations of things, but I do like my characters to be really effective.  System mastery and rules mastery are fun and enjoyable to me, and 4th edition definitely scratches that itch.  And best of all once I know all those rules I can tweak or ignore them to my hearts content when I run a game.

I also like class base systems, and after running at least two or three games for groups of newbies I can tell you that classes are actually really valuable when introducing new players to the hobby.  They’re a wonderful package of “cool things you can do” that are a nice shorthand for a new player to wrap their head around.  If I have a new player who wants to help his buddies I can point him right at any leader class and then let them go from there.

I also love running games, and for me 4th edition has been a vast improvement over the earlier editions.  I have all the tools, digital and otherwise, to create fun and dynamic encounters that are both flavorable and tactically interesting enough to make running them very enjoyable.  There is just something about how 4th edition monsters work that I can so easily understand that it’s been pretty trivial to prepare an adventure.  Compared to the previous edition my prep time is about 1/10th of what it used to be, which means I can concentrate more on creating interesting areas and plots than on what magic items an NPC might be carrying.

That and 4th edition is also interesting in that it’s kind of two games in one.  On one hand you have your classic “kill them and take their stuff” challenge of a traditional D&D game (not to say that my games are that simple).  On the other hand you have this wonderful tactical miniature style battle game when you start rolling initiative.  I have so much fun figuring out how my group of monsters is going to beat up the PCs, running each combat like a little miniatures skirmish game.  I live for this kind of stuff and 4th edition is pretty unique in that I can sort of get two games in one.

Finally, the rest of my regularly weekday group has always been a D&D group.  It’s the game they like far mroe than any other and we generally use the newest edition.  I’m lucky in the fact that my players actually enjoy the same system that I do, and that my good friend and fellow GM upstairs is just as enthusiastic as I am.  We talk for hours about how to do various things and what we’re going to spring on each other the next time we run.

All that said, I still enjoy a lot of other systems too.  The weekend group I have (I’m fortunate enough to have not one, not two, but three different groups) tends to dabble in a lot of different systems, and I have to say that it’s been really good for me over all to try out so many different things.  Learning how other systems work just reinforces my love of 4th edition and all the other games, because each one brings something different to the table.  And in this day and age all us gamers have no excuse not to use the perfect tool for the job.  Or the right system for our preferences.  And when it comes to a fantasy game, that right system is 4th edition for me.

I’d like to state that I’ve fallen in love with the Dungeon Tiles from Wizards of the Coast.  While the debate about 4th edition rages on, I feel that this little product line has been sorely neglected.  Let me give you a little rundown of the product, shall I?

For your crisp ten dollar bill (they retail at $9.95) you get one package of dungeon tiles.  They come in (I think) 5 sheets of very thick cardstock (I’m talking maybe 1/10th of an inch thick) that’s been laminated with this very durable and water repellent plastic coating.  They smell a bit funky coming out of the box, but I’ve spilled all manner of salsa and soda on these things and they’ve come out just fine.  In other words, they’re more durable than you really need, even for us messy gamers.

Each of the tiles are doubled sided, which adds a lot of value.  The newest set, Streets of Shadow, has the topside with street scenes and the other side as sewers: a very nice touch.  Other sets aren’t quite that opposite, but all give you a lot of versatility.

Quite frankly, for your $10 you get a massively good deal.  You can’t make a massive dungeon complex all at once with one set, but at that price you can afford to get multiples.  My lovely wife actually got me 5 more sets for my birthday, bless her heart.  With my 8 sets I can more or less make a dungeon so huge that it would take up about 3 of my dining room tables.

Visually they’re very nicely done, which is saying something considering how picky I am about my maps (being a professional and all).  They really add a nice dynamic to the game, helping imaginations come alive (at least in our group).  That right there was well worth my Hamilton.

So, to recap: they’re cheap (good), pretty (very good), and versatile (good).  There’s literally no downside here, unless you somehow think they should be free.  Well, they can slide around if you get overly excitable/clumsy and use a lot of the smaller tiles.  But that’s about it.

To give you an idea of just what you can do with these things, I set up a part of the village that my players had to defend from kobolds.  I must have spent a good 30 minutes finding a good setup, all of which was fun.  As you can see, the end result is rather nice.

Don't worry, the wizard managed to escape the kobolds...

My wonderful and fantastic wife got me a wonderful new camera on one heck of an awesome ebay auction: a Mamiya 645 Pro. That’s a real camera, boys and girls, not some pansy point and shoot folks call a camera. Oh my giddy aunt I’m excited! Nothing gaming related (unless I use it to take photographs of my miniatures) but man am I excited. I have such a lovely and darling wife.