Goodman Games: Our Efforts Have Been Mischaracterized

Goodman Games' CEO Joseph Goodman made a statement via YouTube over the weekend*. The video itself focused on the content of the controversial upcoming City State of the Invincible Overlord crowdfunding product, but was prefaced by a short introduction by Joseph Goodman, in which he reiterates his company's commitment to inclusivity and diversity and its opposition to bigotry, something which they say they "don't want to be associated with".

Goodman goes on to say that the company's efforts have been "mischaracterized by some folks" but does not go so far as to identify the mischaracterization, so it's not entirely clear what they consider to be untrue other than the "inaccurate" statements made by Bob Bledsaw II of Judges Guild about Goodman Games' plans, which Goodman mentioned last week.

For those who haven't been following this story, it has been covered in the articles Goodman Games Revives Relationship With Anti-Semitic Publisher For New City State Kickstarter, Goodman Games Offers Assurances About Judges Guild Royalties, and Judges Guild Makes Statement About Goodman Controversy. In short, Goodman Games is currently licensing an old property from a company with which it claimed to have cut ties in 2020 after the owner of that company made a number of bigoted comments on social media. Goodman Games has repeatedly said that this move would allow them to provide backers of an old unfulfilled Judges Guild Kickstarter with refunds, but there are many people questioning seeming contradictions in both the timelines involved and in the appropriateness of the whole endeavour.

Despite the backlash, the prospects of the crowdfunding project do not seem to have been harmed. The pre-launch page has over 3,000 followers, and many of the comments under the YouTube videos or on other social media are not only very supportive of the project, but also condemn those who question its appropriateness. In comparison, the original (failed) Judges Guild Kickstarter had only 965 backers.

The video is embedded below, followed by a transcript of the relevant section.

Hi everybody, I'm Joseph Goodman of Goodman Games. We recently announced our City State of the Invincible Overlord crowdfunding project for 5E and DCC RPG.

In the video you're about to see, some of our product development team is going to tell you about what makes the City State so amazing and why we're bringing it back to 5E and DCC audiences nearly 50 years after it was first released. It really is an amazing setting.

But we could have rolled this project out with a lot more clarity. Now, to be clear, Goodman Games absolutely opposes any sort of bigotry, racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, transphobia. We don't want to support it. We don't want to be associated with it.

Our well-intentioned effort to launch this project in a way that refunds backers of a former failed Kickstarter from another publisher kind of backfired in the way we announced it. Rest assured, the funds from this crowdfunding will actually fund refunds to backers of the original City State crowdfunding for the Pathfinder edition from 2014.

Unfortunately, our efforts have been—you know, I didn’t clarify them perfectly when we rolled it out—and they've been mischaracterized by some folks since then. But please rest assured, we stand for inclusivity and diversity.

You can read a lot more detail in the post that's linked below, and there's another video linked below where we talk about this in even more detail. But for now, we hope you will sit back and enjoy as some of the product development team tells you about really what makes the City State of the Invincible Overlord so amazing, and why you might want to check it out when it comes to crowdfunding soon.

Thanks, and I'll turn it over to them now.

The statement refers to a post about this that is supposed to be linked below, but at the time of writing no post is linked below the video, so it's not clear if that refers to a new post or one of Goodman Games' previous statements on the issue.

I reached out to Joseph Goodman last week to offer a non-confrontational (although direct and candid) interview in which he could answer some ongoing questions and talk on his reasoning behind the decision; I have not yet received a response to the offer--I did, however, indicate that I was just leaving for UK Games Expo, and wouldn't be back until this week.

*Normally I would have covered this in a more timely fashion, but I was away at UK Games Expo from Thursday through to Monday.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I certainly see a benefit in having some kind of visual divider over everything just flowing together in one long text.

View attachment 426719

The monsters do not really stand out much either, which was one of Ben's complaints, along with having the same stat block four times on about as many consecutive pages. He said the adventure could be half as long if not for all the bloat of repetition (not that he did want no repetition at all, he sees the value of having all relevant information on two pages)

I'm running Empire of the Ghouls, and it uses formatting like this. You have to read through a massive paragraph, some of them an entire column of text, to find out -- mid-paragraph -- what monsters are in a room. What they're doing is often in a different paragraph. There's literally no benefit to doing it this way, beyond "well, this is how we've always done it." I have 100% screwed up encounters because I missed some of the stuff happening in a room, which wouldn't have happened if the monsters were listed in bullet points or were even just bold-faced.

 

[zakael19]

I'm not sure that I would necessarily find that easier for conveying information about what the characters see around them. Though, to be fair, I don't have much experience with their products, so maybe I would feel differently if I had more familiarity with their products.

I provided some examples in the thread we had on module layout and presentation, but here's a quick example of one of the first Winter's Daughter rooms:

The intention here is to give you information in the order relevant to how you'd narrate it so you can quickly embellish at the table: "Yeah so as you approach you see a granite door, a giant slab sealing the entrance to the mound. It's like, totally overgrown with multicolored lichen all blue-grey with specks of brilliant orange, and then these cute little wild roses that fill the air with their delicate sweet scent."

And then you've got the unique rules for that item. Likewise, any time there's the Hidden-> Secret info after the core atmospherics/interactables, you get it with that little >If Examined: style callout to draw your eye down there.

 

[mamba]

I'm running Empire of the Ghouls, and it uses formatting like this. You have to read through a massive paragraph, some of them an entire column of text

yeah, the Kobolds also had (/have ?) that issue, probably esp. in the long adventures rather than their adventure collections. Good thing they only have two long ones

 

[Argyle King]

I provided some examples in the thread we had on module layout and presentation, but here's a quick example of one of the first Winter's Daughter rooms:

View attachment 426724

The intention here is to give you information in the order relevant to how you'd narrate it so you can quickly embellish at the table: "Yeah so as you approach you see a granite door, a giant slab sealing the entrance to the mound. It's like, totally overgrown with multicolored lichen all blue-grey with specks of brilliant orange, and then these cute little wild roses that fill the air with their delicate sweet scent."

And then you've got the unique rules for that item. Likewise, any time there's the Hidden-> Secret info after the core atmospherics/interactables, you get it with that little >If Examined: style callout to draw your eye down there.

For rooms that may be encountered in a different order or from a different direction, is the information given more than once?

Say there was a way to get to those stairs from the perspective of them ascending rather than descending, would that be listed differently somewhere else? I don't expect that. I'm asking so as to gain familiarity with the style.

 

[GothmogIV]

I grew up on TSR modules: two columns per page of 10 point font with the occasional picture. 1st and 2nd edition Call of Cthulhu was even harder. Read, re-read, underline, highlight, take notes, photocopy the maps (which was difficult to do back in the 80s. Someone's parent had to take the module to their office at work to get it done!). So I look at the layout of a DCC module and think, this is easy! Shadowdark and OSE even more so.

With regard to Goodman Games DCC modules: I've read maybe 10 or 12 of them at this point, and I find them highly entertaining. I love the art, and I love the old-school vibe. We've played about that many and always have fun. But: they are linear to a fault (at least the ones I've read and played). It's the classic formula that concludes with the BBEG and a treasure haul.

 

[mamba]

I grew up on TSR modules: two columns per page of 10 point font with the occasional picture. 1st and 2nd edition Call of Cthulhu was even harder. Read, re-read, underline, highlight, take notes, photocopy the maps (which was difficult to do back in the 80s. Someone's parent had to take the module to their office at work to get it done!). So I look at the layout of a DCC module and think, this is easy!

They definitely mimic the TSR style, whether that is a good thing is another matter. One could argue that it is intentionally ignoring 40 or so years of progress in usability

 

[Argyle King]

I grew up on TSR modules: two columns per page of 10 point font with the occasional picture. 1st and 2nd edition Call of Cthulhu was even harder. Read, re-read, underline, highlight, take notes, photocopy the maps (which was difficult to do back in the 80s. Someone's parent had to take the module to their office at work to get it done!). So I look at the layout of a DCC module and think, this is easy! Shadowdark and OSE even more so.

With regard to Goodman Games DCC modules: I've read maybe 10 or 12 of them at this point, and I find them highly entertaining. I love the art, and I love the old-school vibe. We've played about that many and always have fun. But: they are linear to a fault (at least the ones I've read and played). It's the classic formula that concludes with the BBEG and a treasure haul.

Maybe that's why I find it easy.

I didn't grow up TSR. (I would have liked to, but I grew up during the Satanic Panic; and Toys'R'Us, the only store selling D&D here at that time, refused to sell it due to backlash from various groups.)

Prior to DCC, most of the adventure modules I've used were written by WotC. A lot of the recent ones that were critically acclaimed (i.e. Curse of Strahd) are things that I found to be cumbersome, convoluted, and difficult to use. So, going from that to something like Sailors of the Starless Sea has been an exponentially more enjoyable experience.

I partially agree that some of the DCC adventures are very linear. When I've made adjustments to them, it has most often been offering alternate routes to get to something or offering more choices where few were written. Though, overall, how I've used the adventures hasn't been very linear.

What I've done is use the pre-published adventures as my bullet points for a campaign, but then how things in between get filled in depends on a combination of what setting details I've decided (as the GM) and emergent gameplay growing out of how the players approach things.

For example, one of the groups for whom I ran Portal Under the Stars wanted to try to save Old Man Roberts in the village. After being successful with the adventure, they wanted to use the resources gained to improve the town and try to decipher the book. So, the game became about those things. I was (and am) still pretty new at running DCC, so I picked a few modules of various levels to be the other defined bullet points of the nearby area, but filled the gaps in between with whatever grew out of playing. So, while the modules themselves may have been linear points, how they connected to each other wasn't.

 

[Micah Sweet]

They definitely mimic the TSR style, whether that is a good thing is another matter. One could argue that it is intentionally ignoring 40 or so years of progress in usability

One could also argue that a quality of richness, gravity, and history can be lost in that march of "progress". I know I enjoy reading DCC material far more than a lot of material optimized for playability, but reading and interpreting material for world building, designing verisimilitudinous mechanics, and pure enjoyment is my favorite part of the hobby. And I doubt it's just me.

 

[zakael19]

For rooms that may be encountered in a different order or from a different direction, is the information given more than once?

Why would you do that? It's a keyed dungeon, you refer to the key and the room, unless there's directional corridor details.

NG modules do tend to have either have a map that has an ultra-concise set of keys with the most important elements of each room though (eg: enemies, traps and dangers, hidden stuff), or a portion of the overall map as like an "area" of the dungeon.

 

[Argyle King]

I provided some examples in the thread we had on module layout and presentation, but here's a quick example of one of the first Winter's Daughter rooms:

View attachment 426724

The intention here is to give you information in the order relevant to how you'd narrate it so you can quickly embellish at the table: "Yeah so as you approach you see a granite door, a giant slab sealing the entrance to the mound. It's like, totally overgrown with multicolored lichen all blue-grey with specks of brilliant orange, and then these cute little wild roses that fill the air with their delicate sweet scent."

And then you've got the unique rules for that item. Likewise, any time there's the Hidden-> Secret info after the core atmospherics/interactables, you get it with that little >If Examined: style callout to draw your eye down there.

Thinking about this more, I think I would like it as a quick blurb at the beginning of a section (as it is here,) but I would still want the other details that I get from the short paragraph at the beginning of each of the area descriptions in a DCC adventure.

But then I compare what you posted and the OSE adventure to Portal Under the Stars, and I'm not sure that the keywords and the OSE layout necessarily give me better information.

"Area 1-1 - Portal" of Portal Under the Stars gives me a quick description, a bolded "Door" section (as well as others that area relevant to the area). So, that's roughly the same. Just a different choice of aesthetic.

I think area 1-2 could be improved by a clearer and quicker explanation of how many statues are there. On the other hand, altering the number of statues has typically been how I've snapped scaled this area during prep for groups of different sizes. Still, it could say something like "N+2 iron statues..." with 'N' being the number of players.

Area 1-3 could be greatly improved. It's an area that I had to read more than once the first time that I read the adventure.

1-4 through 1-7 vary in clarity, but nothing is especially difficult or egregious. Of those, 1-6 would benefit the most from quicker access to information.

1-8 is a bit complicated and is would benefit from presenting the information differently. Though, I think it would be difficult to boil the concept down to keywords.

1-9 is mostly fine, but improved pagination could be helpful.

Overall, Portal is user friendly.

The copy of the DCC book that I have in my hand right now also has The Howe King's Horde. I think it suffers more from having walls of text. There is a gray box that calls out the general features of the area, but you don't see that until you're part way through reading the intro. There are certainly places where Howe King could use a quick blurb or a few keywords to give me the general idea before having me read through things. So, I see the benefit of doing things similar to what OSE is doing, but I think there's a middle ground that would borrow some of the general concepts without going completely in the direction of OSE and losing the aesthetics and aspects of DCC that I find enjoyable or preferable. Some of the 'dated' things are things that I vastly prefer over contemporary WotC aesthetic.