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4 Hours w/ RSD: Who Am I?
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<blockquote data-quote="RyanD" data-source="post: 5442157" data-attributes="member: 3312"><p>Well Living City was one of the most humbling experiences I have had so I better have learned something from it. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /></p><p></p><p>OrganizedPlay was never supposed to be in the content creation business. I designed the company to be the "back office" for hobby gaming businesses (and hopefully later videogame businesses) that wanted Wizards of the Coast level on-line support for their games.</p><p></p><p>I licensed Living City from Wizards because I felt that I needed a test case for RPGs. My relationship with AEG meant that I would have a test case for CCGs with Legend of the Five Rings, and I thought Living City would be a good platform to show what we could do for RPGs.</p><p></p><p>When I was extricating myself from Wizards Living Greyhawk had not really "hit". Living City was still doing well in terms of drawing submissions of content and interest from event organizers. In the 6 months or so between the time I started the licensing process, wrote the software, and took charge of the campaign, all hell had broken loose. RyanD of 2011 would have known to pull the plug right there, but RyanD of 2000 was still too damn stubborn to admit he'd made a mistake.</p><p></p><p>What happened was that the supply of usable scenarios completely evaporated. The ability of Living Greyhawk to induce vastly more content out of the community just overwhelmed Living City. That in turn lead players to prefer Living Greyhawk, and eventually event organizers to cater to the market by running Living Greyhawk in place of Living City.</p><p></p><p>Here are some key lessons I learned:</p><p></p><p>1: It's all about the scenarios. CCG organized play is all about the event organizers. RPG organized play is all about the content.</p><p></p><p>1A: Writing a good 4 hour scenario is really hard. It's not something that most people get right on their first try. Most people tend to make them too long, so that they can't be finished, and they tend to assume too much about the potential characters (they mostly vastly underestimate them).</p><p></p><p>1B: Making a 4 hour scenario that will be generic enough to be interesting to a lot of people for a long time is hard too. These things have to live in libraries of content for a significant time so they really can't be too locked in to a moment of continuity.</p><p></p><p>1C: The default designer idea of making "X of Y" scenarios is a rat hole. Far too many abandon the project in the middle leaving players who were playing them frustrated. Players who have been burned before don't start them. Soon nobody will use them so it's all wasted effort.</p><p></p><p>1D: You have to assume the min-maxed character. When building a scenario you have to assume that the Rogue will have the maximum possible skills vs. "thiefing" stuff. And you have to really understand the game to understand how big that number will get. Likewise you have to understand how high the save DCs have to be and how high the AC of the PCs will be. All these numbers astound the average home gamer.</p><p></p><p>2: People care less about who they play with than you might think, with one major exception. You really don't have to worry too much about who sits at what table so long as there's a good mix of classes and the right levels.</p><p></p><p>2A: The exception is parents who play with their kids. There's a number of people who have convinced themselves that this is a family bonding opportunity and if they can't play with their kids (or less common their significant other) they won't play. Even if they "only" have a 15th level character and the scenario is for 5th level PCs.</p><p></p><p>3: Cheating is rampant. We shut down several well organized cheating rings during my time running Living City and sadly, some of the most intense volunteer effort for the campaign went into stopping this. Far too many people were willing to look the other way and not report cheaters, or served as "laundromats" to "wash" forged materials creating a chain of provenance to hide their compromised origins.</p><p></p><p>3A: This is why we were working so hard on digital certs. Today, with iOS this would be a snap but in 2000-2001 it was perceived as "impossible" technology by too many players & event organizers.</p><p></p><p>The #1 biggest lesson I learned is that you <strong>MUST</strong> monetize through sales, not through subscriptions or event fees. If we had started with the idea of publishing the scenarios for profit and letting people play for free, we may have been able to make the campaign work because good content will be purchased by people who aren't playing the campaign just for their home games.</p><p></p><p>This is (in hindsight) particularly irksome to me because the contract I had with Wizards would have let me do this including using the Forgotten Realms and the Dungeons & Dragons brand trade dress. My desire to <strong>NOT</strong> be a game publisher blinded me to the fact that I should have become one if I wanted to try and keep the campaign alive. I started down this path but didn't have the resources or the will to continue.</p><p></p><p>(All to the better though. I was really unwilling to invest money in a publishing company at that time and I really did want to be a service company instead so the correct decision was to exit the campaign, not transform the company. I wish I'd done it before I spent a couple hundred thousand dollars though. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /> )</p><p></p><p>I can't comment on anything happening currently because I stopped paying attention when I exited Living City. Just had too many other things on my plate. I do like to cruise through the "Living" area of most cons I attend and get a sense for the crowd size and activity levels. Seems like there's more of this than ever but a fairly diverse mix of what's being played. The RPGA, to my mind, seems to have had its act very well together but that's a surface impression not a detailed analysis.</p><p></p><p>RyanD</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="RyanD, post: 5442157, member: 3312"] Well Living City was one of the most humbling experiences I have had so I better have learned something from it. :) OrganizedPlay was never supposed to be in the content creation business. I designed the company to be the "back office" for hobby gaming businesses (and hopefully later videogame businesses) that wanted Wizards of the Coast level on-line support for their games. I licensed Living City from Wizards because I felt that I needed a test case for RPGs. My relationship with AEG meant that I would have a test case for CCGs with Legend of the Five Rings, and I thought Living City would be a good platform to show what we could do for RPGs. When I was extricating myself from Wizards Living Greyhawk had not really "hit". Living City was still doing well in terms of drawing submissions of content and interest from event organizers. In the 6 months or so between the time I started the licensing process, wrote the software, and took charge of the campaign, all hell had broken loose. RyanD of 2011 would have known to pull the plug right there, but RyanD of 2000 was still too damn stubborn to admit he'd made a mistake. What happened was that the supply of usable scenarios completely evaporated. The ability of Living Greyhawk to induce vastly more content out of the community just overwhelmed Living City. That in turn lead players to prefer Living Greyhawk, and eventually event organizers to cater to the market by running Living Greyhawk in place of Living City. Here are some key lessons I learned: 1: It's all about the scenarios. CCG organized play is all about the event organizers. RPG organized play is all about the content. 1A: Writing a good 4 hour scenario is really hard. It's not something that most people get right on their first try. Most people tend to make them too long, so that they can't be finished, and they tend to assume too much about the potential characters (they mostly vastly underestimate them). 1B: Making a 4 hour scenario that will be generic enough to be interesting to a lot of people for a long time is hard too. These things have to live in libraries of content for a significant time so they really can't be too locked in to a moment of continuity. 1C: The default designer idea of making "X of Y" scenarios is a rat hole. Far too many abandon the project in the middle leaving players who were playing them frustrated. Players who have been burned before don't start them. Soon nobody will use them so it's all wasted effort. 1D: You have to assume the min-maxed character. When building a scenario you have to assume that the Rogue will have the maximum possible skills vs. "thiefing" stuff. And you have to really understand the game to understand how big that number will get. Likewise you have to understand how high the save DCs have to be and how high the AC of the PCs will be. All these numbers astound the average home gamer. 2: People care less about who they play with than you might think, with one major exception. You really don't have to worry too much about who sits at what table so long as there's a good mix of classes and the right levels. 2A: The exception is parents who play with their kids. There's a number of people who have convinced themselves that this is a family bonding opportunity and if they can't play with their kids (or less common their significant other) they won't play. Even if they "only" have a 15th level character and the scenario is for 5th level PCs. 3: Cheating is rampant. We shut down several well organized cheating rings during my time running Living City and sadly, some of the most intense volunteer effort for the campaign went into stopping this. Far too many people were willing to look the other way and not report cheaters, or served as "laundromats" to "wash" forged materials creating a chain of provenance to hide their compromised origins. 3A: This is why we were working so hard on digital certs. Today, with iOS this would be a snap but in 2000-2001 it was perceived as "impossible" technology by too many players & event organizers. The #1 biggest lesson I learned is that you [b]MUST[/b] monetize through sales, not through subscriptions or event fees. If we had started with the idea of publishing the scenarios for profit and letting people play for free, we may have been able to make the campaign work because good content will be purchased by people who aren't playing the campaign just for their home games. This is (in hindsight) particularly irksome to me because the contract I had with Wizards would have let me do this including using the Forgotten Realms and the Dungeons & Dragons brand trade dress. My desire to [b]NOT[/b] be a game publisher blinded me to the fact that I should have become one if I wanted to try and keep the campaign alive. I started down this path but didn't have the resources or the will to continue. (All to the better though. I was really unwilling to invest money in a publishing company at that time and I really did want to be a service company instead so the correct decision was to exit the campaign, not transform the company. I wish I'd done it before I spent a couple hundred thousand dollars though. :) ) I can't comment on anything happening currently because I stopped paying attention when I exited Living City. Just had too many other things on my plate. I do like to cruise through the "Living" area of most cons I attend and get a sense for the crowd size and activity levels. Seems like there's more of this than ever but a fairly diverse mix of what's being played. The RPGA, to my mind, seems to have had its act very well together but that's a surface impression not a detailed analysis. RyanD [/QUOTE]
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