Obama-King Art Arrived

Last week, we received a print we’d ordered from a local artist Kenan Pulliam. After Barack Obama’s inauguration as President, Kenan made prints of a painting he calls “Fulfillment of a Dream,” which features Obama looking out over Martin Luther King Jr. You can see a picture of him and the piece in an article about Kenan and his work that ran in the Beloit Daily News.

It’s a great piece, and it does a fantastic job of capturing that proud moment in American history. Now we just have to get it framed and find some place to hang it.

Ann Speaks about Homeless Kids

Today’s Janesville Gazette has an article about homeless students, and it features quotes from my wife Ann about what she and others in the area are trying to do to help. She’ll be giving a lunchtime seminar on the subject, sponsored by the League of Women Voters, on Wednesday.

I really enjoy what I do, but I’m always so proud of how much Ann does to directly help people–especially kids–who really need it.

Mark Waid on How to Edit

Over on John Rogers’ blog, Mark Waid has an excellent post about how a comic-book editor works–or should. This is required reading for any editor in any creative field. Mark boils it down to two rules:

Mark Waid’s First Inviolable Rule For Editors, Including Himself: Never point out a problem unless you have a solution to offer.

Mark Waid’s Second Inviolable Rule For Editors, Including Himself: If you want something changed, it had damn well better make the story better, or else shut the hell up.

Go read the whole thing.

Play MonsterCon!

At the Alliterates meeting on Monday night, I had the honor of playtesting MonsterCon!, a new card game designed by Lester Smith. As with much of Les’s work, it’s wickedly funny and simple to pick up and shows surprising depth.

Best of all, it’s free! Les has posted the rules online, and all you need to play are a deck of cards, plus a pencil and paper for keeping score. It’s a fast and fun game, and it won’t cost you a dime, so be sure to check it out and give it a whirl.

The Game Designing Life

Matthew Sprange, one of the founders of Mongoose Publishing, just released I Am Mongoose, and So Can You!, a new book aimed at showing you how you can make a living in the tabletop gaming industry. I’ve only read through the free sample up at DriveThruRPG.com, but it seems like solid, sensible stuff. The PDF’s a bit pricey at $29.95 for 37 pages, but it could easily save a reader several times that much, plus even more grief.

In the sample, Matt does say he only knows one freelancer game writer making more than $50k/year. I suspect there are several out there, like Robin Laws, Ken Hite, Robert Schwalb, and many other friends I’m likely insulting by leaving them off the list. I’d count myself in there but for the fact I don’t make most of my money in tabletop gaming these days. When I did, though, I’d regularly rocket right through that ceiling.
In any case, if you’re serious about trying your hand at working on games for a living, it might be worth checking out.

Who Quits a Day Job?

Sandy Antunes has an excellent column up on RPG.net today, in which he reveals the results of an informal survey of RPG designers and developers. The question he put to them was: “What is your day job?”

The results are not particularly scientific, which Sandy (whose day jobs include astrophysicist and stay-at-home dad) freely admits, but they’re fun. I didn’t take part in the survey because writing books and designing games is my day job, but I enjoy seeing how others in the field approach their work.

Around the World in XX Games

My pal Keith Baker (the man who created Eberron among many other great games) is planning the adventure of a lifetime later this year. His aim? To travel around the world, running roleplaying games in exchange for hospitality. He calls it Have Dice, Will Travel.

If you are a gamer who happens to live in an interesting place and have crash space to share, stop by Keith’s LiveJournal and give him a shout. He’ll make it worth your time.

Game Balance Is Overrated

I recently wrote this bit on a private mailing list. Jeff Tidball saw it and asked me to repost it over at Gameplaywright.net in the discussion about Things We Think About Games, the game-ruminations book he and Will Hindmarch put together. Which I did. And so I thought I’d post it here as well. I’m interested to hear what you think.

Game balance is completely overrated.

People conflate balance with fairness all the time. They are not the same thing. If you’re all playing by the same rules and with the same pieces, the game is just as fair to every player.

By that, I don’t mean that you shouldn’t have a game that’s roughly balanced, nor that you shouldn’t try to root out the bits that throw a game completely off the rails. However, if all choices are always optimal (i.e. equally good), than what’s the point of playing?

Games should have their rough spots, their peaks and valleys in the mathematical sheet of balance. They should be crunchy, not smooth, filled with secret caves of hidden knowledge for players to discover, ponder, and exploit.

Scrye Folds

ICv2.com reports that Scyre, the last remaining magazine devoted to collectible games, is ending its run in April. By my count, Scrye was also the last adventure game magazine of any stripe left in wide circulation, joining Dragon, Dungeon, InQuest, Games Quarterly, and several others in the periodicals graveyard.

I used to love reading gaming magazines, but with the rise of the internet, there’s clearly not much space for them any more. Any news articles they run are out of date before they even go to press much less by the time they hit stands. The same goes for their price guides. Chewy, well-written content still has a place of course, but it’s hard to appeal to a broad audience if you focus on just one game. If you spread your wings a bit wider, you find that most players only play a handful of games and don’t care for omnivorous coverage instead.

The only magazines I know of that are left are Polymancer and Kobold Quarterly. I’ve never seen an actual copy of Polymancer, so I can’t comment on its quality.

Kobold Quarterly, which is edited and published by my fellow Alliterate Wolfgang Baur, rocks, but it’s focused exclusively on D&D material. At that, it does a wonderful job. It leapfrogs backward over the wide-ranging magazines of the ’90s and lands squarely in the days when D&D was all that most gamers cared about.

If that suits you, go for it. I read KQ–in PDF form rather than print–but I still have to mourn the loss of a wider-ranged print magazine. Of course, I have the massive resources of the internet to console me, so I can’t feel all that bad.

ETA: I forgot to mention, of course, the various gaming comics books like Knights of the Dinner Table, which features a lot of game content too. With Nodwick cancelled and (I believe) Dork Tower and PvP on print hiatus, that seem to make KoDT the last book standing.