May, 2020 | www.booksofm.com

Game Producer Journals: The Jumpstart

In the kickoff for my game producer blog series, I wrote about demo materials for different types of games, defined a few terms, and dove into quickstart design.

Today, I want to talk about jumpstarts. First question: why do you need one? Well, the answer is “it’s complicated”. A jumpstart is one method for obtaining fans of your game and, like any promotional tool, it has its utility. Some people believe jumpstarts deter corebook sales because they encapsulate the game and often have a lower price point. I am not one of them.

Jumpstarts are best designed when they are not conceived in a vacuum. When the jumpstart has a clearly defined goal like: “teach new players how to play our game” or “give existing players a sample of what they’ll find” or “use it as a free, promotional tool to attract all players”. Jumpstarts can be designed with several goals in mind when they’re produced with the understand that anyone–even those players unfamiliar with a publisher or gameline–might pick up a copy.

Like quickstarts, jumpstarts are marketing tools for a gameline. Unlike quickstarts, I don’t believe they’re always necessary provided the corebook teaches players how to play their game. Most corebooks do not have actual play examples, sample dice rolls, a step-by-step outline for a sample campaign, a full adventure, and a full page ad to show where new players should go if they need more information (YouTube!, Twitch, Discord, forums, etc.) Many corebooks, especially second editions, serial games, or collector’s editions, are not designed with new players in mind. Many games are crafted for people who already know how to run a tabletop gaming session.

Jumpstarts are often needed because they serve players who need a different type of game design. Often, jumpstarts employ word conservation by focusing on what players need to know in order to play the game. Jumpstarts are great for a) complex settings b) complex rule sets c) new or debuting rule sets d) games with multiple playing styles e) original settings and d) messaging/visibility showing how the publisher is new-player friendly. Players who have fun with a jumpstart will have more confidence when running the game–and that player confidence is key.

It can be challenging to distill a corebook into a jumpstart. My approach to writing/designing in this form is to empower the player while providing value. I’ve found the easiest design method is to utilize a 3-to-5 act narrative structure, 3-5 non-player characters, and a sample fleshed out location. All games need setting–especially places where the players can hunt, search, investigate, etc.–and a jumpstart helps ground the players in it.

My last post included five steps to producing a quickstart. These are the same steps to follow when plotting a jumpstart with one, major caveat: conceiving a jumpstart requires greater analysis of your corebook’s content. You could repurpose some material for the quickstart. A jumpstart that rehashes all of the corebook’s materials is less useful, however, and you’ll miss out on residual sales–even if the jumpstart’s release precedes the corebook’s.

Lastly, I want to mention that while there’s no “one way” to design a jumpstart, I do believe a good jumpstart provides value. The jumpstart shouldn’t be an exact replica of your corebook’s content–there’s a different type of product for that called a “beta”. Instead, use the jumpstart to frame your corebook’s material so players transitioning from one to the other are confident they know the basics and are eager to learn more.

May 27, 2020

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Magic Monday Dispatches No 2: A Few Good Fantasy Worldbuilding Terms

To kick off my Magic Monday Dispatches, I talked a little bit about the definition of magic and offered twenty questions to help you worldbuild.

Today, I want to introduce a few worldbuilding terms I use to help you think more deeply about the magic in your fantasy world.

Ability: In this case, the skills and knowledge a practitioner possesses to perform magic.

Area of Effect: Or range of effect. When a spell is performed, all characters within range will suffer its effects. This is used a lot in fantasy roleplaying games, but it’s also useful if you’re thinking about ways to limit your magic.

Backlash: In this instance, an undesirable result caused by the spell. A type of failure. The spell could have been: the wrong incantation, performed poorly, interfered with, had the wrong components, defended against, etc.

Cost: I’m sure you’ve heard the words “magic must have a price” before. The cost of doing magic implies something that must be spent in order to influence the natural world. Costs can be scalable to complement a spell’s complexity and relay rarity or potency. A spell to summon a pixie might have more common components than one to hail a fairy queen, for example. Typically, the cost of performing magic becomes more complicated when types (or schools) of magic are added. Having necromancy and creation magic in the same setting, for example, might generate directly opposing costs and ritual requirements that include time of day, dried herbs or flowers, crystals, candles, animal/body parts, blood, etc.

When there’s no consequence or cost to using magic, then the scale of effect is harder for the reader to place. In these situations, the magic presents itself as limitless and the only thing stopping practitioners from significantly changing their environment is moral fiber.

Effect: Or consequence. The effect is simply what happens when the spell is performed.

Frequency: How often magic is performed and by whom. The frequency of spells performed can contribute to a backlash or it can stretch the practitioner’s limits.

Limit: A limit can mean 1) the maximum exertion a practitioner can extend for a spell or period of time. 2) the limit of what the magic system can do. Or 3) The number of magic practitioners able to perform magic. Building limits into a magic system is a good idea, but often we see a system holds infinite power but can only be accessed by literate characters or those with the proper blood/parentage. There are other ways to add limits without tapping into a user’s genetic makeup by introducing an element of time. Celestial events, time of day, age of ritual components, etc. are natural limits to performing magic because they are recurring states or access points. These limits force the player to conserve the use of magic until replenished. The mage must find new ingredients. The wizard must wait until the next full moon.

Magic System: Also known as a “school” of magic. A set of magical spells and rituals around a common theme. Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Solar, Lunar, Birth, Death, etc. Most magic systems that possess schools have more than one.

Scale of Effect: Or, magical potency. The scale of effect typically shows how powerful the practitioner (or their spell/components) is. A magician who can summon a thunderstorm steamrolls any character who can only conjure a glass of water. The reason why magic often has an associated price (or cost) is to limit its usage which reduces the frequency of magical effect.

Source: Magic can be found in sunlight, moonlight, earth, fire, water, air, metal, blood, words, etc. The scale of effect, limit, and cost can naturally stem from any of these, because the sources themselves aren’t limitless. Daylight doesn’t shine for twenty-four hours; a cloudy sky could spell disaster. The source of magic can be renewable (sunlight) or finite (crystal).

May 25, 2020

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Game Producer Journals: New Players and 5 Steps to Quickstart Design

Two of the ongoing needs in game production are to retain players and attract new players. In video games, short interactive demos give players the feel and basic functionality of the game. Part-marketing/part-preview, player demos are arguably the best way for them to understand gameplay outside of actual play reels.

In hobby gaming, there’s a number of ways to preview a game before a title debuts ranging from actual play videos to hands on demos at conventions or retail stores. This introduces a lot of challenges for veterans. After a while, it’s easy to associate who’s playing a game with personal interactions online and off. This can skew a designer’s perspective and lend to design decisions geared toward the audience you’ve encountered and not the people who play the game but never contact the publisher. Setting sample data set analyses aside, the people that interact with a publisher are not typically new players, either.

Jump starts, quick starts, convention demos (live, recorded, and in print), and actual play videos work well when they’re designed to attract new players–people who don’t typically interact with your company. Otherwise, you’re targeting players in the same audience at different times. Though existing players and player retention are both incredibly important, new players are crucial to the overall health of the industry. If you’re having trouble understanding why, please remember that gaming is a dynamic industry. New players often become core fans integral to the community in direct and indirect ways.

Attracting new players is a complex process that requires a multi-pronged approach. It is often intimidating to be a new player because they don’t know the culture (of the publisher, fans, and intersecting micro-communities) or the linguistics on top of not knowing how to play that game. These are barriers to new players that can be resolved in multiple ways, but doing so requires intent and knowledge of both community management and basic marketing techniques.

This process is easier for new games that don’t have previous editions attached and becomes increasingly more challenging the older the game (or property) is. These legacy games (Shadowrun, Vampire: The Masquerade, Dungeons and Dragons) are more complex to manage because of their multi-year, multi-edition spanning history. Each edition that debuts, which is healthy for a publisher to consider, has a core audience and the potential to welcome new players. If the game is primarily being played solely by legacy players with few to no new players added, then over time the core base will shrink.

Using Product to Attract New Players

One product that can help reach out to new players is a quickstart. Here’s where it gets fuzzy: the words “jumpstart” and “quickstart” are often used interchangeably, even among publishers. I asked Matt M McElroy, the Operations Manager for Onyx Path Publishing, what the difference was. He said that: “Jumpstarts are more robust, and are basically starter sets in book form. Quickstarts are very light introductions with some marketing attached.” The jumpstart can also serve as a quickstart and often does, which is partly why the terms are swapped so often.

Going forward, I’ll use the word quickstart to mean “a short standalone marketing product designed to demonstrate the core rules and feel of a game” and a jumpstart as “a robust starter set for a game that includes an adventure, characters, etc.”

Quickstarts are almost always free and are treated as a marketing expense; jumpstarts can be free, but are often not due to the costs involved. Often, jumpstarts must hold more perceived value for the consumer than a free product because of the cost.

Designing the Quickstart

Designing a quickstart is one-part game design, one-part marketing. I personally feel that game designers shouldn’t develop the quickstart’s outline by themselves. This task is something the publisher and marketer should be involved with for a few reasons. They typically 1) know their core fanbase 2) have a rough budget in mind and 3) know how to brand their game. Who works on the quickstart, in particular, is less about skill and more about perspective.

Step One: Identify Your Audience

How a team is set up to handle production won’t matter unless the publisher has a clear idea of who the quickstart is for. Typically, that answer is one or more slices of an overall audience. Just saying “new players” is pretty generic. New players who like “X” system can be too specific if that fanbase is small or insular.

To figure out audience, I recommend reviewing a minimum of five similar products produced by different companies. In this way, you establish a marketing baseline for your game by analyzing what others have already produced.

Step Two: Determine Your Message

Once you have your audience in mind, you can then brainstorm your message. Saying “we have the best game evah!” is not a good message and, quite frankly, is challenging for engagement. Rephrase that to be: “here are the reasons why this title is the best game of its kind”. Then, list the reasons.

Unpacking my last statement, here’s what my rephrased statement means:

this

Codifying these reasons will force you to think about your game from the perspective of someone who’s never heard of it–which is typically the hardest audience to write for.

Step Three: Identify Components

While an outline is valuable and typically follows next, I feel that quickstarts necessitate a different conversation before it can be finalized. Components are key elements of a game that are important to the audience and messaging.

Items might include:

I recommend that this stage occurs without a clear page count or product spec to freely allow for brainstorming.

Step Four: Outlining

This phase is where the nuts and bolts shape the quickstart. I personally believe a sample layout here is crucial, because knowing how many words are on a page will impact the outline. Once the production parameters are known and a page count is determined, then content can be assigned on each page.

Here, it’s also smart to figure out how you intend to distribute your quickstart, because that will affect its intent and budget. Saddle-stitched and digital quickstarts are the two most common types and are used for different reasons. Printed quickstarts are great for conventions/retail distribution and may attract people who have never heard of that game or publisher before. Digital quickstarts can do the same thing, depending upon where it’s offered and what the perceived value is.

If you’re on the fence during the outlining phase and find you’re adding more information, you might want to consider a hybrid jump/quickstart that you can charge for. This is the perfect step to make this decision!

Step Five: Production

Following this, it’s time for production to begin. I would treat this product just as you would a gaming supplement by hiring a writer who can simplify setting and rules into a condensed space. Less is usually more. The quickstart is a slice of what your game is all about and why it’s unique. I would absolutely lean into that to best inform potential players.

If you’re worried about art, I agree with your instinct. People make decisions to buy games for all kinds of reasons and mentally associate gameplay with emotions that are invoked through their experiences. Art can invoke emotion and is important to their impressions of value and setting.

Lastly, you might get to this point and realize you don’t know how to market your game. That’s okay! It’s for this reason you’ll want to plan a quickstart even if you don’t go through with production. The elements you decide during this project further shape how you want to present your game. If you need to stop and rethink a detail, that’s a good thing to happen early on.

Thanks for joining me and good luck!

May 20, 2020

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Magic Monday Dispatches No 1: Worldbuilding

Welcome to Monica’s Magic Monday Dispatches where I dive into magic, magic systems, and worldbuilding! Behold, the first dispatch.

What is magic, anyway? According to the Oxford Dictionary, it’s “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces” (1). That power, then, is wielded by a practitioner–witch, wizard, sorcerer, mage, etc.–to affect themselves, other people, or the organic and inorganic in their environment.

Science, on the other hand, is “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment” (2).

Magic and science have been entwined for millennia because the universal system–the scientific method–wasn’t commonly applied to study, observe, experiment, and record findings until the late 19th century. This proven method is the best way to separate magic from science in our world and is still being used today. There’s a longer history of the scientific method and its deployment, spanning multiple countries and centuries, so if your interest is piqued? This is a fun rabbit hole to fall into… *evil grin*

The process of separating magic from science is recent (within the past 150 years or so) and slow; many scientists are still dealing with this today. Despite this, its impact cannot be overstated. The term pseudo-science, “a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method” (3), was popularized as a result of this process. Other words, like witch, have since been rebranded as well. More on terms in a future post!

Questions for Worldbuilding

Applying our basic definition of magic to a fantasy setting, it’s clear you’ll need three components to form a magic system: source of mysterious power, practitioner(s), and one or more vehicles (such as a wand, potion, rune, spell, etc.) to access, store, and wield that power.

With this in mind, here’s twenty basic questions to help you worldbuild and troubleshoot different areas. Please keep in mind your answers are to help you brainstorm the components of a magical system and will spawn other worldbuilding elements. Ultimately, what the reader interprets about magic in your story isn’t linked to your notes, it’s connected to your characters. Before you can figure out how your characters view and treat magic, though, it’s helpful to understand what it means to you.

1) What is the source of your world’s power? Is it unlimited or finite?
2) What effects does your power have on your world?
3) Who has access to that power?
4) Who has the ability to use that power?
5) Can that power be stored? If so, how long does it last?
6) Is your magical source perishable or no?
7) If magic can be stored, how are those objects distributed?
8) Are there any side effects or chance of failure?
9) How is magic taught?
10) How does society view magic? Its practitioners?
11) Is there more than one source of power?
12) Is there more than one way to access that power?
13) What “in universe” nomenclature will you use to describe your practitioners?
14) Is gender a factor? Why or why not?
15) Must a practitioner be literate to perform magic?
16) Is there a moral attribute (good versus evil) to that power?
17) How does faith and religion intersect with its use? Study?
18) Does your world have scientific disciplines? If so, how are they impacted by the presence of magic?
19) Is disability a factor for your practitioners? If so, why?
20) Does class affect the use and distribution of magic? If so, how? Why?

Hope you have fun with this exercise. Until next Monday, my lovelies. Have a magical week!

May 18, 2020

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[New Release] Dark Eras 2

Rebellions swell and vampires feed. Casualties of war draw Reapers to blood-soaked battlefields. Gilded ages benefit mortals and monsters alike.

How? Why? What role do the monsters play with us —- and each other?

Dark Eras 2 explores 13 new eras scattered throughout the history of the Chronicles of Darkness. This supplement was developed by Monica Valentinelli, Matthew Dawkins, and Meghan Fitgerald. Each chapter features two to three game lines which include Vampire: The Requiem, Mage: The Awakening, Hunter: The Vigil, Changeling: The Lost, and more!

The rules in Dark Eras 2 are compatible with second edition Chronicles of Darkness. Each terrifying time period and location is examined through the supernatural creatures that dwell there. Inside, you’ll find historically-inspired settings, story hooks, character-creation tips, gameplay advice, new Tilts, Conditions, and era-appropriate rules–and more!

Unlock the past. Find out what hides in the shadows. Dark Eras 2 is available now!

May 18, 2020

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Game Producer Journals: The Jumpstart

Magic Monday Dispatches No 2: A Few Good Fantasy Worldbuilding Terms

Game Producer Journals: New Players and 5 Steps to Quickstart Design

Using Product to Attract New Players

Designing the Quickstart

Step One: Identify Your Audience

Step Two: Determine Your Message

Step Three: Identify Components

Step Four: Outlining

Step Five: Production

Magic Monday Dispatches No 1: Worldbuilding

Questions for Worldbuilding

[New Release] Dark Eras 2

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