Blog @ Canadian Geek

Experience Points #6: Board Games

Posted on May 22, 2008 under Experience Points | 2 Comments

I’m going to go off in a different direction for this post - I’m going to talk about Board Games. I’m certainly no expert on the subject, but I find several different titles quite enjoyable.

I don’t know alot about what goes into designing a board game (of course, by extension, one could argue that I don’t know anything about RPG design either, which isn’t stopping me). What I do know is what I like - which is what I’m going to focus on in this post.

Here’s a few board games you should check out.

Diplomacy

Diplomacy was introduced to me by a very close friend. The draw that Diplomacy has to me is that chance is not a factor to the outcome of the game (unlike Risk or Axis and Allies). Personally, I really disliked Risk because of a few games that burned me due to die rolls screwing me over. Axis and Allies had a bit more strategy involved, but it was still possible to watch a single infantry unit eliminate a vastly superior force.

Originally, Diplomacy was designed to simulate the dealings of the major powers prior to World War I. The players take up the helm of one of: England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungry, Russia and Turkey. Each turn, the nations confer with each other, looking to make alliances and determine strategy. Orders are submitted and executed simultaneously. This is where the fun begins. Who kept their word? Who didn’t?

Diplomacy is an excellent study of game theory, which in itself, is a very interesting subject. This could be why I enjoy the game so much.

Players worldwide have developed many different variants. Some simply modify the basic board (changing the starting units, modifying the layout of supply centers) and some develop entirely new boards to reflect different areas (and times) of the world. Articles on strategy are abundant.

Diplomacy is an excellent game, especially when played with a number of skilled players.

Settlers of Catan

I really don’t know what to say about Settlers. I really like this game. I’ve only played a few times and I’m sure that I haven’t even scratched the surface of the strategy and awesomeness of the game.

Settlers also has several expansions that add new rules and change the experience. I’ve yet to give any of these a try, but they look cool.

Just play it. You’ll understand.

Arkham Horror

I had the opportunity to play Arkham Horror for the first time this past weekend. I quite enjoyed how the game played, even though we lost. It definately is a game for ‘gamers’. It’s also co-operative, which is pretty different.

There’s several expansions available, which changes how the game plays, with more on the way, to make sure each play is vastly different than the previous play session. I’d like to play again to get a better grasp on the rules, but overall, It was very fun.

So, obviously, the recommendations this month are:

Diplomacy
Settlers of Catan
Arkham Horror

If you like board games, at least one of those games will suit you just fine.

Behind The Counter #198 - Buying Collections

Posted on May 18, 2008 under Behind the Counter | No Comment

Since the point of Behind The Counter is to give you all an insight as to how comic shops work, instead of “just” ranting this time around, I thought I would share some more of the process of running the store. This time around, we’ll deal with the love/hate relationship retailers have with Back Issues (BIs).

On several of the industry blogs and forums, there has been recent discussion on the usefullness and profitability of BIs. As a touched on a dog’s age ago, Chuck Rozanski of Mile High Comics believes that any retailer who does not carry back issues is doomed to fail. Easy for him to say as the primary objective of his online company is to supply back issues. But not every store WANTS to carry BIs or NEEDS to carry BIs and the reasons for those would fill another column. Here, we just want to get into how retailers decide what collections they will buy and why they pay what they do.

Let’s set-up a senario to help things along. Mary, after kicking her mousey, insecure, $8/hr Subway working boyfirend to the curb, decides that the best way to get back the money she loaned him for Cirque du Soliel tickets was to sell his comics. Mary has heard that comics appreciate in value and are good potential retirement assests so she calls around to the local comic shops to see who’s buying.

The first question Mary should reasonably expect to get is “Do you have a list of the books?” It’s not likely that Mary does, nor does she know who many are even in the collection. She’s got several boxes of varying sizes and the books are in no particular order so, over the phone, there’s little to no chance of moving the collection as the retailer will have no idea what’s s/he’s getting into.

Now Mary will be inclinded to say things like, “They’re all in their original wrappings/plastic.” which is a bad thing to say since very few to any comics ever came in “plastic”. Retailers will know that she means they are in comic bags but even that could be dubious. I have bought collections where the issues were in their original “plastic” only to see a ton of books wrapped in plastic kitchen wrap. Also, just because a comic is in a plastic sleeve doesn’t mean it didn’t get read repeatedly before getting there.

With little knowledge of what Mary is selling, the retailer may offer a blind, low amount ($.10 to $0.15 per book) or just not bother, the latter more likely. As in any medium, 90% of everything is crap and in a blind collection, hoping for 10% of anything good enough to get a return on the purchase is slim, especially in such a chaotic collection.

Aside from the gamble of quality in the collection, there are several other factors that play into purchasing a comic collection. Most sellers only consider the upfront cost of the collection and often get offended when a store owner offers $200 for 1500 comics. However, from the owner’s side of things, there will be;
1. the time to sort through the collection, culling out the heavily damaged books, removing any outdated or improper storage material and alphabetizing
2. the time to catalogue the books
3. the time to grade the books
4. the time to calculate the values of the books
5. the time and costs to bag and board the books.

So let’s say HH bought Mary’s 1500 books at $0.15 each. Right off the bat, HH is out $225. Now to go through the process above (which we have just done recently with several collections we have bought), a total of about 15 hours of staff time is required for steps 1 and 2, another $150-$175. Now, steps 3 and 4 are normally done by “the boss” and, depending on the collection, can take from 2 to 10 hours. Let’s say Mary’s collection is mostly all newer books so they can graded fairly quickly in under 3 hours, adding another $100 (yes, that’s conservative) to the total.

For the final step of bagging and boarding, we’re going to say that out of the 1500 books, only 1000 were worth converting to BIs and to clean those up, that would take about 4 hours of staff time ($40 to $60) and the cost of supplies ($45 to $60). So, now the final cost of each of those $0.15 books is an average of $0.58.

On the surface, that still seems pretty good if each book retails on an average if $3 to $4. But the real question still remains; how many of those comics are sellable? If we take the “90% of everything is crap” adage, then the retailer is only going to make $300 to $400 from a collection that cost him $580 and there’s no telling how long it will take to recover that money. A few books may sell right away but in reality, it will take a several months to recover the cost if they are lucky.

There is not a lot of data (if any) on the percentage of sales a typical comic shop does on back issues. Some stores specialze in them while others won’t go near them. They require space, time and captial. They are a long term investment and, increasingly with the competition of high discount/no overhead online sales, more of a good will gesture for a shop’s regular clientele.

Of course, things also change dramatically with smaller collections containing key books, older collections and larger collections, all of which will incease the amount of time involved in grading. When selling your collection, especially a big bulk one, do not expect a generous offer from your local comic shop guy. There’s a lot more on the line for him that just cutting a cheque to you.

Experience Points #5: My Take on Character Creation

Posted on Apr 01, 2008 under Experience Points | No Comment

Every game basically starts the same way - you make a character. For me, character creation has always been one of the hardest things to do, mostly because of the various GMs I had played for requiring an extremely large backstory. Since I think of myself as fairly uncreative, I usually had fairly cookie cutter backgrounds, followed by some fairly exciting stories about my characters in the game. This realization helped me to discover my philosophy on character creation.

Simply put, for MOST games, I believe characters are/should be be relatively uninteresting at the start. Sure, if you’re not starting at level 1, then maybe a more intensive backstory is required (but not always!), but I think the real interesting things about a character is what happens to him/her IN THE GAME. My view is you aren’t a hero until the game starts - then you start developing your true character.

This isn’t to say that you should sit down at the table with just your stats. You need to develop a personality. Where did you grow up? What was your family situation? You need to have some sense of what your character’s worldview is, so yes, you do still need a backstory. I’m just saying it doesn’t need to be long.

Dark Heresy’s character generation chapter has a great outline of what you need to do after you’ve finished the stats for your character. Spirit of the Century’s character generation phases offers several key questions to answer with regards to your character (keep in mind that SotC characters actually are heroic prior to the game begining, by design), but has the goal of keeping your overall story short.

I could continue to discuss this topic, but I think I’ve passed my point along. Its not the right way to do things, its just the way I like the best.

Game Recommendations

As promised, here’s a group of indie games worth a look.

Cold City - Monster Hunting in 1950s Berlin.
Burning Wheel - There’s several settings already produced for the Burning Wheel system. Character creation sounds quite interesting.
Piledrivers and Powerbombs - Pro wrestling without the spandex!

Experience Points #4.5: Cold City First Impressions

Posted on Mar 14, 2008 under Experience Points | 1 Comment

[Author’s Note: I posted this originally on my personal blog, (joshbazin.com) but I felt that it was worthwhile to post it here as well. As this isn’t a regular post, I’ve numbered it as such and will not be providing game recommendations!]

I’ve been buying alot of games recently, which is great, especially since I’ve actually started playing tabletop again. I’m really wondering why it took me so long to get back into it. My most recent purchase included Cold City, A|State, Don’t Rest Your Head, and Piledrivers and Powerbombs. I purchased everything from IPR, and I was quite impressed with the shipping time (from the time I clicked to the time I had the product wasn’t the best, but that was due to the order date). I also had the opportunity to run Spirit of the Century a few weekends ago, but I’d like to run another game before I put up a review (but so far, it’s double-plus-good).

Cold City is published by Contested Ground Studios out of the United Kingdom. The softcover book itself is very compact, measuring 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, with a mere 128 pages. When I first held the book, I thought to myself “Is this it???”. Don’t let the size of the book fool you. There’s tons here. Opening the matte black cover (complete with blood droplets!) brings you directly into the meat of the game.

The premise of the game is that you’re a agent of the Reserve Police Agency (RPA) in 1950s Berlin. Each player is a different nationality and must consider a variety of issues in their actions. These varying viewpoints must come together to fight the monsters developed by the Nazis, living in the forgotten areas of Berlin.

The layout of the book is wonderful and the type is easy to read. Character generation sounds like alot of fun, and extremely simple. First, you pick a nationality. No two characters can have the same nationality. You’ll select your name and your draw (how you became involved with the Reserve Police Agency), then you’ll begin your stats. Each character has 3 attributes:

Action - To do physical things
Influence - To do things like intimidate, seduce, etc.
Reason - To use thought, willpower, etc.

After assigning values to these (between 1-5), you’ll begin to develop traits. Your character has at least 5 traits, 3 positive and 2 negative. These traits will come into play during conflict resolution. You’ll pick your hidden agendas and finally, you’ll assign trust to the other agents. I won’t get into alot of detail because I want to see it in action first (this is just first impressions you know)!

The conflict resolution mechanics are also quite simple (in my mind, at least). You create dice pools from your attributes, traits, hidden agendas and trust. Before rolling, each side must state their desired outcome from the roll, then the conflict resolution process begins. You roll a number of d10s equal to the size of your pool, which is then compared to the opponents roll. Successes are measured by how many dice beat the best result of your opponents pool. So for example,

Ricky has a dicepool of 4. He rolls and the dice come up: 4, 6, 8, 9. The GM rolls the opponent’s dicepool of 3, resulting in: 5, 7, 10. The GM succeeds with one success.

The really cool thing about this game is that whomever wins a particular conflict gets to narrate what happens. It sounds cool, so I’m excited to see how it plays in practice. The other thing I like is that the book tells GMs to only roll dice when dramatically important.

My first impression of the book is hugely positive. I love pretty much everything about it (some of the art could be better, but really, its a minor thing) and I’m really excited about running a session, just to give the tires a kicking. The book does leave alot of setting to personal imagination, which I like. You’re given enough to see the basic idea, but you’re not confined to anything hugely specific.

On a personal note, I’m quite disapointed that I didn’t decide to buy the Dossier or the Companion - but I’m confident I’ll end up buying them in the future. These books give some new areas to put in your games as well as adventure hooks.

If you like what you hear so far, check out Contested Ground Studios for previews of the product, or just buy the game from IPR.

Experience Points #4: Brief Game Master Pointers

Posted on Mar 03, 2008 under Experience Points | 1 Comment

Sorry folks, I’m a bit late on composing this one. I just hope that I don’t get myself fired for it!

I’ve got a few administrative items to pass along this month that I’ll pass along before we get to the meat and potatoes. Firstly, I’m going to add something to the end of my columns - a few game recommendations. These titles are likely going to be games I’ve never played and have barely read through, but something about them caught my eye. I hope some of these turn out to be gems in your collection. The second item is to blatantly self promote - if you’ve never RPed before, or if you just haven’t been able to find a group, be sure to check out the Edmonton Gamers’ Association. You can check them out on Meetup, which will tell you about all the events they have planned (There’s one this weekend, March 8th!).

With that taken care of…here’s a few pointers for new Game Masters.

Game Master Tips

The first two pieces of advice I’d give to new GMs are:

Plan out your session beforehand. Know where you plan on taking the adventure.
Don’t plan out your session beforehand.

Of course, I’m sure you realize these points contradict each other. Let me explain what I mean in a bit more detail. For most GMs, just making stuff up as they go just does not work, you’ll end up forgetting something and your players will call you on it. You need to have an idea of what the goal of the adventure is. Know some of the details of how the characters go from point A to point B. But…don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Players hate ‘box canyons’ with one direction of travel. They will find a way to break your intended path. So, don’t plan everything. Make multiple-plan ideas. Think of one or two alternate paths that can be chosen to get to the end goal. Sometimes, they’ll think of something you never thought of. You’ll have to make that up - but take personal notes of what you’re telling players. It will help you later on.

Ask for feedback.

If you’re playing a game with friends, you should be playing to have fun and hang out. Ask your players for feedback on the game. Find out what they like and what they dislike. Add more of what they like, take out what they dislike. Sure, you might want something different from a game than your players, so if you’re a Narrativist stuck in a game with a bunch of Gamists (GNS Theory is a topic for another article), you might have a problem. Or maybe you don’t. As long as everyone is having fun, the game is a success.

Lay out ground (house) rules with your players.

You’re the GM. You make the final say on the rules - make sure your players understand how you plan on interpreting them. Discuss with your players any modifications to the core rules you intend to be using. For example, Star Wars: Saga doesn’t contemplate the kneeling position - I developed a set of rules that I will use in those situations. Make sure your players understand them. Maybe you don’t want to look a rule up in the middle of play - ensure your players know this is how you will approach the game (and make sure you make the same ruling throughout the game!!). Maybe you want everyone to turn their cell phones off during the game. There’s multitudes of house rules, make sure you and your players understand them.

Learn from your mistakes

Face it - you’ll make a mistake at some point. When you do, its easiest to own up to it, apologize, and learn from it.

Make notes/keep a notebook

While you are playing the game, make notes on what happened. It will help your next adventure, especially if you plan on running a longer campaign. When you aren’t playing, keep a notebook with you because you never know when you’ll think of something or see something that will trigger an idea in your head for your game. Use the everyday for inspiration, you’d be surprised how much is there.

This short list is by no means exhaustive. It is meant as a starting point and to be fairly general. There’s many people who have different views on gaming and on game mastering. Find one that fits you and follow that advice - or blaze your own path.

Game Recommendations

I’ve got quite a few games that deserve a mention this month.

Dark Heresy - this game is set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Characters are under the charge of an Inquisitor, searching out heretics and other threats to mankind in the 41st Millennium.
Spirit of the Century - an awesome looking pulp pickup game using the revolutionary FATE 3.0 system.
Don’t Rest Your Head - surreal setting based on works such as Dark City and Neverwhere.
Star Wars: Saga - in case it wasn’t obvious from my review last month.

Next month, I’ll be giving an all indie lineup.

Behind The Counter #197 - RESPECT, find out what it means.

Posted on Feb 22, 2008 under Behind the Counter | 1 Comment

‘
There’s a lot of sayings that go along with the word respect; “You have to earn respect.” “You have to give respect to get respect.” “Respect your elders.” They also all seem to be said as absolutes but frankly, I think they’re all more just starting points or guidelines. Enter into relationships with a mutual respect and over the course of time decide if that respect is warranted or not. Case in point, I recently had a conversation with an elder who was trying to earn my respect but in the process out right lied to me. Killed two out of three of those sayings right there.

Comics are a medium that has long gone without much respect, in my opinion, though I’m baffled to understand why. The only logic I can apply to it is just being uninformed. I have found, generally, that those who “dislike” comics have never read them. Sure there are some that have read a comic or two, probably not very good ones, and were turned off never to look back but a greater majority haven’t even tried.

There are two conflicting opinions about what comics are these days; “Comics are just kiddie stuff” and “Comics are only for adults.” Kinda tough to be both, eh, but those are the two most common sayings I hear from the general non-comic populace. Interesting how something can be only for kids is only for adults at the same time but that’s where over a hundred years of a lack of respect will get you.

When I go and speak at schools, for any first time visit I try and open with my “comics are a medium” speech, to help clarify to those in the room what comics actually are. And it’s not just the kids I’m giving perspective to. Once I finish my mini-speech, facial expressions change to the, “Oh, really? Wow” faces that everyone should have when talking about comics. Frankly, I believe there’s no other medium where the creative output is as high, the creators work as hard or are as accessible to their fans as comics. And yet, so few know than a couple of the big names or even that Spider-Man and Superman are owned by two different companies.

Granted, things are changing in our favour. Personally, I have been invited to speak at more schools and, astoundingly enough, also asked for return visits. Another big deal is the number of conferences I’ve been invited to speak at. This summer I’ll be at three different events spreading the news about my favourite medium and all instances I often hear a phrase that, while said innocently enough, always makes me chuckle;
“Can you tell the kids / talk about the world of comics for 15 to 20 minutes and then answer some questions?”

As many of you know, I can talk about anything for 20 minutes. How I enjoyed Spider-Man: One More Day, how great John Byrne is, how tasty my rice was last night in my dinner. So you can imagine how challenged I must be to talk about the entire medium of comics in just 20 minutes and then field some questions. I, somewhat foolishly, made the comment to a customer the other day that went like this, “Would you ask the Rolling Stones to come and speak about music for 15 to 20 minutes and then field some questions?” to which the customer said to me, “Did you just compare yourself to the Rolling Stones?” Ego aside, the point was more to that no one can speak about any medium for such a short period of time nor would, in most other cases, anyone be asked to.

Many would argue that it’s because comics are such a young medium that people aren’t familiar enough with it to truly respect it but when you look at it against film and television, comics are the oldest of the three. In fact one could even argue that the “art” of comics could date back to the Egyptians making it ridiculously old but really, we’re just looking at the modern day comic book.

It’s been a long road for comics to try and gain respect and an even tougher one to decipher. Why did comics not receive that same acclaim as early film? The appeal to children was there and that may have created the misconception that they were only for kids but film had cartoons and it’s now a mega-industry. Television, really just an extension of film, provides viewing material of all sorts aimed towards children and adults in many genres, just like comics, but they still can’t compare. What is it that held comics back? Here’s my outlandish theory.
Comics are the most complex medium to create, consume and enjoy and, thus, it holds less appeal to the general masses.

More next time.

The Shepherd

Blog @ Canadian Geek

Experience Points #6: Board Games

Behind The Counter #198 - Buying Collections

Experience Points #5: My Take on Character Creation

Experience Points #4.5: Cold City First Impressions

Experience Points #4: Brief Game Master Pointers

Behind The Counter #197 - RESPECT, find out what it means.

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