Reading Indie Games At The Club (w/ Paul Beakley)

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This week, we're talking to Paul Beakley has been involved with the games industry since at least the mid 1990s. He's a Game Chef finalist, a Golden Cobra honourable mention, and an official designer/adventure module writer for games like Deadlands, Earthdawn, Mutant Chronicles and more. He's also been writing about games for a long time, across various websites, forums, and magazines like Pyramid and Inphobia. But we're here today to talk about the Indie Game Reading Club, which began on the long lost shores of GooglePlus in 2015. It's now a standalone website and slack community where there's a lot of great writing and discussion of small-press storygames. I love reading it and you will too!

Show notes:
1:38 - Starting the Indie Game Reading Club
16:32 - Why do we write about games?
21:31 - Roleplaying as faith practice
26:03 - How to be critical without being mean
38:02 - Who is your audience?
43:54 - Infectious Enthusiasm: a|state, Fellowship
49:58 - Tyranny of Numbers: the economics of criticism
51:53 - RePlay
59:30 - All Advice Is Advice For Myself

This episode was edited by Gabriel Caetano.

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The Yes Indie'd Website // The Indie RPG Newsletter

Transcript

Thomas: 0:00

Welcome to the Yes Indeed Podcast, created by Mark Shepherd and run by me, Thomas Manuel. Before we get to today's amazing interview, I want to shout out that this episode was edited by Gabriel Caetano AKA the Gift of Gabes on Twitter and Mastadon, you know, a lot of thanks for their work on this. This kind of collaboration makes doing the podcast along with the weekly ND RPG newsletter, actually sustainable for me, and you can help by supporting me on Patreon like Yohann Kunders, Arktosaur, Fluke, Mynar Lenahan, Gabriel Robinson, and Zoheb Mashiur. There's a link below paton.com/indierpg. With those credit credits out of the way, let's get to today's interview. Hi everyone. I'm sitting down with Paul Beakley. Uh, Paul has been involved with the games industry since at least the mid 1990s. He's a game chef finalist, uh, a golden cobra, honorable mention, and an official designer slash adventure module writer for games like Dead Lands Earth, Dawn Mutant Chronicle, and many others. Uh, he's also been writing about games, which is what I'm interested in talking about today. He's been writing about games for a long time across various websites, forums, magazines like, uh, pyramid and In. But we're here today to talk about the Indie Game Reading Club, which began on the, on the long Lost Shores of Google Plus in, uh, 2015. And it's now a standalone website, a Slack community where there's a lot of. Great writing from Paul, but also generally like discussion of small press, uh, story games and indie games. I love reading it and you should too. So Paul, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. So I wanna just get started with talking about the indie Game Reading club. Where did come from? What was the landscape at the time that that kind of maybe required it? Was there personal impetus from your side? The identity

Paul: 1:53

of the Indie Game Reading Club emerged from Google Plus where I had been writing about games on a very private circle of people and I hadn't been writing publicly cuz I was a bit concerned about putting public writing out. And I'm not totally sure why I was concerned about that, but I was, when I shifted over to a public mode, one of my readers suggested it as a name and I liked it very much. So I just like kept running with that. And that was on wanna say, 20, 15, 16, somewhere in there, maybe earlier than that. I can't honestly remember anymore. But, uh, yeah, that writing, the private writing, which unfortunately I lost because I couldn't download that. I was able to download all my public stuff and turn that into the first posts of the blog. But there was a solid year or two of just the private writing at a couple thousand, uh, readers. And they had largely come from story games.com and a few RPG net people, and a few Reddit people. And I had tried to be present in lots of communities, but they all got progressively more. Dysfunctional and weird in ways that, um, were bigger than me. I couldn't control the weirdness. It's just a, a natural phenomenon of how online game reading and writing and talking and advocacy gets right. And so that was all Post Forge. I had never, ever participated in Forge Conversations, but I was kind of coming in on the ongoing conversations after those forums closed and story games started and I stepped in. That was a level of game discourse, weirdness that I could understand better. Cause I knew it was where it was coming from. And I was able to kind of get it, understand some of the personalities, exit it almost immediately, and begin writing on Google Plus rather than within the cultural expectations of story games.com. What

Thomas: 3:56

were those early pieces like? Were you reviewing games? Uh, was it more, uh uh, was it more ad hoc than

Paul: 4:05

that? You know what, I did a lot of actual play. Probably the, the first actual indie game reading club writing that looks like how I do it now. Were lengthy, detailed, mechanically oriented, actual play reports at the burning wheel forums. My first like indie, indie game was Burning Empires, and then from that I learned burning wheel, and from that I learned everything else. But Burning Empires was my first kind of, Foray into that format of game, and because I was coming from a very, very outsider perspective, I had a very outsider perspective on like how the rules worked, what the rules did, what they actually said, which is the central nugget of the weirdness around. Game discussion, game discourse is the difference between what they think they say and what the rules actually say and the gap. Cuz that gap is interesting. It's a fruitful, interesting space to talk inside of. But that was the first things I did and I would break down the events of the story, which worked that interesting. I didn't try to like hype it up and spice it up that much, but mostly like what mechanical inflection points were there that led to the decision points. That led to me trying to fill in the gaps of where the game didn't address things. And of course, me trying to reconcile old tread game training. My first role playing game was traveler and it was 1979. It was a very, very long time ago. And so I had a couple of decades of one kind of play and then this transformational. Period of this other kind of play. But I thought that the gap between those two things was a useful place to poke at. And that's still how I write today. Cause I wasn't raised up in the indie tradition, nor am I an advocate for the tread tradition. I feel like I'm kind of spokes bird for between those two

Thomas: 6:11

spaces. Yeah, I mean, I know you use the word trendy a lot on your blog. That's, uh, you know, people haven't come across that word. It's a awkward porto of, of tread and indie. And like all labels. I think there's a lot of fuzziness that comes with something like that, but like there is a lot of interesting writing on the blog with you kind of exploring that fuzziness. What was the big difference for you at that time, coming and playing Burning Empires versus what you had played for decades before

Paul: 6:43

that in the Burning wheel communities? There's kind of a running joke where there was, when I was still participating in that community about how Luke crane's burning wheel games break up long-standing groups. It's just that it's a known phenomenon. Yeah. People are, are faced with how the game works and what it came down to for me, um, the thing that initially broke away the, the first of the, of the players who just couldn't hack what the game wanted you to do was this level of kind of radical transparency about what you wanted your character to accomplish. So not only is it not me, I'm not my character. I'm playing a character and it's not me. I'm not this dude. Right? And that's important, but also just telling everybody, this is what I, the player wanna see happen and this is what I want my character to try to achieve. And that dug in so deeply into completely incompatible kinds of play things like the players who do want to be their character, they want to just set aside themselves and have this, this level of alibi to say and do outrageous things because it's their character is not them. So there's the alibi question. There's also the competitive question. I wanna outsmart the GM and win this contest, which raised all kinds of weird questions like, how do you set up a fair contest at all in this format? Right? And so some of my players. Figured that out and they saw, oh, oh, oh. This is about creating dramatically interesting moments rather than tactically interesting moments. And I don't have to be my character. I can. Advocate for this absolute scumbag who doesn't have to be me. And that's still a central point of tension in this thing we all do. Yeah. Uh, we've been having conversations about this on our Slack very recently about the gap between being you and being your character. And that's still a, they weren't still a, a, a deal breaker. And I, I've run events at conventions all the time, and I have folks drift into the games on demand style environment, and they're coming in from the d and d, you know, uh, moneymaking portion of the cod, and they just couldn't get their d and d table that time. So they came in and they sat down and played the dust devils, or they played inspectors, they played root or whatever, right. And there's always that weird moment where I'm like, nah, you're not you. You're advocating for a character who ain't you, and that gives you so much freedom. But that was the main, I think, pivot point. Early on was getting into my head. It's okay to say it out loud. My little brother stopped playing with me forever. He was one of my most steadfast players when I asked him to define his character's beliefs in Burning Wheel. You have to say, these are things that my character believes and they don't have to be right. In fact, it's better if they're not. It's actually better if your character believes crazy shit. Yeah, absolutely. It's absolutely better, right? You can't be a moral upstanding. You just gotta like be a person and that's where the good stuff comes from. But he said, if I just tell you what my plans are, you'll stop me. And I'm like, oh my God. And I had nothing to say after that. I'm like, I don't, I don't know how else to explain this to you other than you gotta trust me that my characters also want things and it would be poor play to just give my characters what they want and take away what you want. That's not even what this is about. This is a completely different language of play. And he didn't care for it. He's like, Nope, don't want in. And I still run into that. I still run into the problem of players today who don't want to collaborate. They don't want it. They want to be fed the situation so they can solve the situation, which is okay, but it's not where the strength of this stuff lies. It's the most traditional of the trads, because that's what trad means. It means traditions. Right. And traditions are peer pressure from dead people. Yeah. That's the truth. Yeah.

Thomas: 11:01

Yeah, yeah. Right. It is strange to me that you say that because I mean, I know, I know that I, I know that player. I, I know that archetype but you know, I've just been reading, uh, John Peterson's elusive Shift, and it's clear that this thing that we call, uh, the trad play style isn't simple. Even when you go back to 1977 or whatever, right? Like there is at least this split between the war gamers and the science fiction fan club people, the theater kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, the, the nerds who were into, you know, uh, into books and things like that. And there's an, obviously an overlap between these two communities. But the thing I think you are bringing up is also the one thing they have in common where the SFS people were, were ready to accept the GM as, as a collaborator rather than an antagonist, which the war gamers were not. There's still this idea that. I am my character, like immersion matters. There is this clear delineation between my role as a player and a gm. Mm-hmm. You know, a lot of roleplaying theory talks about like, you know, play styles like, or of stances, right? The author stance versus the, the, the actor stance, right? The narrative play style versus the, you know, uh, game or whatever. But is that the line that these players are running into? Is it like, if I start discussing aspects of the world with you, if I start pre-planning, if I start telling you what I want, then it's less fun because, because it feels like I'm doing it to myself.

Paul: 12:45

I think so I think there's a lot of kind of magical thinking about the process and not a lot of real thinking about the realities of that. Right. Like, I, I like immersion. I like feeling the emotional immediacy of my character facing difficult problems. And I. Actively dislike games that are very like story boardy, kind of like microscope. I totally appreciate on a technical level, I think it's a brilliant tool and it is a game I don't enjoy playing. I think it's an astonishingly useful and interesting tool, but as a game, it's not a game that interests me at all. Because you're very story boarded. You're very at earned length, right? Yeah. But there's also a level of irresponsibility maybe is a word where, well, I'm just playing my character. I'm just being true to my character, and there's a complete disregard for the social context in which that's taking place, which is other human beings at the table. Right? Another big pivot point, going back to your question about, uh, burning empires and kind of the, the trendy question in, in general, right, is this kind of sliding scale of embracing tools or rules or procedures that are not about the material facts of the game, right? Like strength is something you can measure. How much can you lift versus like a stat say that talks about how willful you are. You know, well, if you're very willful, you might lift something, but you might also really like fight for what you believe in or you might really like be stubborn or that's not, those aren't material facts. Those are more kind of thematic. Right. All the way up to like kind of structural things like the infection phase and burning empires, which is completely abstracted set of rules to help you pace out the conflict of the game. Yeah. And those are purely meta rules and they're not anything you can immerse yourself in. And to engage with them, you have to specifically eliminate your emotional immediacy. You can't feel that, cuz if you do, you can't engage in the tool in good faith. Right. And so like, I think that's the sliding scale, that's, that's where trendiness is, how much that dial is turned. Like the dial was originally the reaction role. The reaction role in d and d was the first one, I think. Right? The thing where it's not a material fact, it's more of a, a ephemeral kind of a vibe. There's a, of someone's unhappy with you, why are they unhappy? Who knows? They can kind of dig into why they're unhappy or happy or whatever. But now, like games add that in all kinds of places. They're all kinds of ways to kind of thematically approach or, or use some other tool, uh, pacing or, um, You know, use these other economies to trick you into feeling emotional immediacy, particularly, I think it's particularly useful, like, uh, say corruption in, um, urban shadows, right? It's a mechanical, it's a, it's a tool, right? It's a, it's a, it's a thing you can use and if you wanna engage with that as a, as a war gamey type of thing, like, I really want that power, so I'm gonna do things that crank up my corruption that trigger that effect to get that power so I can win this next scene. At the very least, you did those things in the fiction and you look like a bad guy because you did all these corruption. It's, it's still a useful way to trick you into, you know, but it's not a material fact, not really, that's a thematic rule. So, I don't know that I directly answered the question, but I, I do feel like, uh, we've evolved a lot toward those kinds of rules being okay and accepted and not weird. Although there's still definitely a hardcore out there that does not want, you know, the immaterial to be addressed by their rules. They wanna know how much they can carry. They wanna know how are they hit. They know how long they can last in the scene and that's, that's all they really care about. I

Thomas: 16:32

feel like one of the things why I write about games and you know why generally people write about art is because when you write about these things, you not only learn about games cuz you're thinking out loud and you know, you also learn about yourself, right? About your own tastes and you developed that. So like going from a conversation we just had, like do you have, you has your taste. So define in a way that you are able to clearly articulate, Hey, these are the games that I like and these are the ones that I can appreciate, but I don't like, and how does that affect kind of what you write about?

Paul: 17:04

That's great. Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's the biggest reason why I started writing in the first place, was to settle the stuff out in my head. There's, I think there's a lot of value, uh, to, to kind of the whole brain integration of just kinda living up in your head and putting those words through your fingers, through a pen or through the keyboard or whatever. Right. And it kind of like assembles the ideas, right? But here's the thing I learned about myself is I'm actually maybe more interested in why different styles of games are appealing, not necessarily why I am drawn to a particular kind of game. Like I have a, a strong theoretical understanding of virtually any play style, and I can emulate any play style. That you could ever choose to throw at me. I can larp with the best of 'em. I can osr, I can story game storyboard, I can improv, I can indie, I can trendy all those things. And I, and I kind of get the appeal of them all. And that to me is actually almost more interesting. One of my underlying themes is I would love it if people would just understand things that aren't them, you know, get out of their own heads. So I find that generally very good luck. You know, assembling really strong tables of players and being able to accommodate different reasons why people are at the table all at the same time. And I didn't have to create a large grand theory of what games are. I just had to understand why he and she, and they. Are there, why they're at the table and what they want to get out of it. As far as my own interests, that's the thing I kind of learn. It's like it's really interesting to me to figure out what it is. Not like to look at a game and say, ah, this sucks. Uh, what I can say is, doesn't work for me, but I can understand why it works for this kind of player. And if you're this kind of player, it's gonna work for you. So, well, I run Amazon Demand type, you know, little indie tables at Cons whenever I have a chance to, cause I love it. It's kind of a fun intellectual exercise to say, okay, all right. I got Dust Devils and I gotta explain, I gotta sell Dust Devils. This table of Pathfinder players who. How do I do it right or I'm gonna run trophy dark for this table of d and d dudes. True story. I've actually done this, a table of d and d dudes walking from like the nearby marine base and they like just started recently playing. They didn't know anything and they loved it. They loved it because I know what they're looking for and I know what this game's good at. And so it's just like, rather than trying to dig myself into a deeper and deeper and deeper hole of my own particular style, I'm trying to dig a wider and wider and wider trench that includes all the styles so I can pull from all the different traditions whenever I try to run a thing. That's really

Thomas: 20:04

interesting. But I remember at some point, I think I read you saying that the primary thing you look for when you're at a table, what you are there for as, as, as a GM or a player is, is like camaraderie right. Like that sense of like, we, we are here for a social experience and we're here to have fun. I assume there's also a pleasure in like just playing new systems and things like that, that you kind of like, oh sure, novelty. Sure. Love it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So are, are those the two things that like drive you and like that you decide games based on that you're like match players with and things like that? Yeah,

Paul: 20:40

I think more or less, I mean, novelty is fun, but I gotta say like, I think despite the fact that we seem like we're living in a golden age of game design, I feel like there's less actual novelty all the time. I see lots of evolution and not a lot of revolution, and it's been a pretty long time since I've seen something truly new show up. On the camaraderie front, I don't know that I'm trying to match, um, uh, games to players so much as I'm trying to like help players. Match themselves to the game, right? Like, here's how this game works, and it may not work for you right now, but I know what you like and I know how you think. So let me like frame up what we're doing in a way that you understand and you understand and try to get you two people to talk to each other and not me. So I'm not the hub of all the spokes because that's irritating too. You know, I need you, you guys talking to each other, not just me. Um, the camaraderie thing is important. I think it's actually like the main thing. And I also have my theory, I've been sharing kind of recently again on the slack, that role playing is actually more of a faith practice than a hobby. And I believe that I truly do. I really feel like the stuff that faith practices do is what games do. And a lot of that is camaraderie it's, it's social bonding.

Thomas: 21:59

I mean, you'll have to expand on that. Just what,

Paul: 22:04

all right. I don't, I don't even know that if it is that hot, a hot take. I mean, there is religion. I. And that is, you know, studying this kind of external document or belief system, whatever. And that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking faith practice, which is showing up at a place to share, uh, things that you all believe in together and to reinforce each other's values. That might, that might be the entire list, honestly.

Thomas: 22:27

You're building a support system of

Paul: 22:29

sars That's right. In supporting each other. There's this long-standing tradition in, in LARP and sometimes in indie talking about drawing the magic circle. And the magic circle is, that actually comes from, I think, uh, museum curation is this sense of entering a space and creating a safe wall around it. So anything you do or say or feel or experience is okay inside that circle. We can say outrageous things. And for the love of God, this is the biggest thing that bugs me about streamed play is you've destroyed your magic circle. You cannot have one with a camera on you. It's a different thing, but the thing we do is everything is allowed, but we also trust each other to not like be crazy and like not pull really weird gross shit. Because weird, gross shit is not something that that builds fellowship. You know? That's me being weird. And maybe we all didn't know you were weird about that thing, but now we do. But that magic circle is so powerful and you know the moment it's drawn and you know the moment it's gone, you can just feel it instantly. The little level of distrust or hesitancy or fear or. Now I try to run my games in quiet private rooms whenever I have a chance to do that. At conventions, if we have a private room con, it's awesome because boy, we can go places. But if it's at a live table, I am constantly aware of the fact we're at a live open table in a big ballroom and there's places we can't go, and that's not necessarily gross or weird or problematic places. It's emotionally vulnerable places. I just can't get there, you know? But that's what I'm looking for is that protective wall around us. And that is what a faith practice also does. It creates a wall of safety around you to get into what you're really about. That's really

Thomas: 24:23

interesting. Have you written about this on

Paul: 24:25

blog? No. There are whole categories of things I won't get into on the blog. That's not on the list. Actually, it is a thing I am working on, but I have to build up towards it because it reads really woo woo when it just say I need to lay it out. Um, my theory of case before I drop out, bomb, there's a lot of things need to lead up to that. And when I lead up to it, it doesn't seem so crazy. But when I just say it, it sounds spicy and crazy. But I think what I just said is a fairly reasonable thing where I think the guys who have been playing d and d for this 35 years in their same basement, they have an impregnable. Magic circle and they're absolutely participating in a faith practice. Every Saturday. They show up for six hours and they read from the same tone and they share their stories and they re, they they remember their past lessons and all the things you'd ever get outta going to church, going to temple. And it's more than entertainment. That's why I say these aren't games. Cuz to my mind, and again, this gets down to definitions and definitions are bullshit. Definitions are a way to avoid conversation, not a way to facilitate conversation. They're, they're their conversation avoidance tools. Right. But, you know, a game is, you know, there to be played, I think is a fairly non-controversial thing to say, right? But like, this is more than play. There's something beyond play. We're using play to accomplish a higher goal rather than play being the goal. If that kind of makes sense. I

Thomas: 26:03

mean, there is something about you having a list of things that you won't touch on the blog, which is interesting. But I mean, there is, anyone who has spent any time on the internet will know the kind of anxiety of having opinions publicly. Right? And how modern social media is, is simultaneously set up to do that. And very bad at it. But also I think if you say that you're going to be a critic and you wanna write about games and you wanna write about how they work and things like that, there is this innate tension, which is not kind of the anxiety of, of social media. I think it's more than that. This tension between the fact that, you know, genuine engagement of the subject is never really like purely positive. Like, you know, like Right. Genuine engagement goes deeper than that. But at the same time, you don't want to criticize people who are trying to make a livelihood selling like colorful, like zines at faires. Like it does feel mm-hmm. Like you're on the same side and you don't want them to think you're not, I am trying to support their practice, but there is always this chance that it feels like I am being inadequately supportive.

Paul: 27:13

Right. And a lot of that's on the recipient, on the, on the other side. Like, um, the approach I take is I don't slide games. I don't come in and say this is a bad game, despite the fact that there are so many incentives to do so. Oh my God, I am leaving so much money on the table. I am. It's true. But just not coming out and saying, this is good and this is bad. My approach has been, Does this game achieve the its self state goals? If the game says it's going to do this thing, I can't say I hate this game because it said it was gonna do the thing. Right? It's like that's I, all I can do is look at the game and say, did it accomplish the goals? It set up for it? In many cases, it never sets out a goal. Is this got a very assumed goal because it's a zine or it's a small game, or it's a first game being written to your own silo and your own echo chamber of the kinds of games you've always played. And so everyone knows I'm putting air quotes in the air, but you can't see that on, on a podcast, uh, of what the goals are. Right. But given that I can still kind of guess, you can, you can make some best guesses, especially from like kind of first games of, of what the, of what the goal is. But I have to say, what I have found is, um, you never know how seriously the creator is about their craft. I always get good responses from the folks who are serious about their craft. And what I mean by serious is they want to get better at accomplishing their stated goals. They're not necessarily making better games for me. Oh shit, I don't care. Whatever, you know. But like I said earlier on, about understanding all of gaming as best I can, and so I can understand what is it your creation is trying to accomplish, right? And in many cases, they don't wanna get better. They want thanks. They want money, they want attaboys, they want recognition. And the recognition is the thinnest thing underground. There's less recognition than there is money. If you think there's not much money in gaming, there's even less recognition in money. I run into this all the time. Um, some of my best earliest and sometimes toughest writing was some of the earliest stuff that Magpie games put out. And. Setting aside anything about the problematic nature of the people behind Magpie games. I love them. They're my friends. I like these people. Okay. I've also been pretty like hard on their games, but they're serious about their craft. They want to get better at expressing the things they want to express at accomplishing their goals. And we've like had an excellent synergy over the years talking through urban shadows and cartel and blue beers bride and a pillion and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And they've got better. They're better at it. They're great at it. But at the same time, I've had designers who just get like, why they fuck did you tag me in Twitter for this shitty review? Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you over and over again. I'm like, wow, dude. I thought you wanted to know that the thing you trying to make your game do, didn't do it right. But I can see what you're trying to do. And it was 80% positive, but 20% wasn't positive. But if you wanna get better, you have to hear where it didn't work. Not that it's bad, it didn't work, it didn't work as a morally neutral statement. There's no bad to that. It, this didn't accomplish its goal. The math didn't work, the procedure didn't work. The headspace, he didn't, he didn't provide enough context, whatever the reason might be, right? But it happens with alarming frequency and it seems to be happening more all the time. And I feel like that's tied into a couple of other trends I'm seeing out there, but I'm seeing that more all the time. Uh, less seriousness about getting better and more emphasis on applause and the money and the recognition, how

Thomas: 31:15

do you factor in, didn't work versus didn't work for me at this moment in time,

Paul: 31:22

right? So, um, I do, I do games in two different ways. I, I sometimes write reviews based on only reading the games, and I always say it up front and it's not my preferred mode. That's not how I would like to do it. My preferred mode is the deep dive. The deep dive is no fewer than three sessions and sometimes far more sessions than that. And I'm taking notes the whole time, what worked, what didn't work, you know? Um, part of why I write extensively on my blog is to keep notes for myself. So remember I can go back and look and say, ah, that's right. And the third session we ran into this weird thing where the travel rules just didn't work, and why didn't they work, but didn't work and didn't work for me. I always assume the, the second I always assume, why didn't it work for me? What is it about me? And that's like the personal aspect of critique, right? Because a good critique should be about your dialogue with the work. Not objectively the thinking machines have designated this as inadequate. This does not work objectively. Yeah. But I've tried to provide is context. Why didn't it work for me? So like, that's, that's always true. That's always the, the place I start from. And uh, so you try to provide context in the, um, in the writing as to why it didn't work for me. These are the biases I brought to it. This is what I was hoping for, this is what I was told I was gonna get right sometimes, but I didn't get that. But like, that's such a small portion of what I write honestly, you know? Um, I mean, They talk about the, uh, compliment sandwich, right? Yeah. Say something good, say something right. I build like the compliment, hokey. I mean, I've got like layers and layers and layers of like a lot of positive things cuz I like talking about all the way something worked. But I, I'm not being honest about my work. If I'm not talking about the places where I tripped up on it and why I tripped up on it. I don't think there is an objective this, well, sometimes it's true. Sometimes there is a math thing that that just wasn't play tested. Sometimes there's just a math thing and the math thing, I almost don't care about that. That's usually pretty easily solved in play test. Occasionally it's the insoluble. There's something fundamentally completely busted of a little subsystem. He can't fix it and it will never work, but, I'm less interested in, in that name and the other stuff, like, why didn't it work for me? I thought this game was gonna be blah, blah, blah. You told me it was gonna be blah, blah. I played it. I didn't get any aspect of blah, but I did get this other thing. So I have to assume that these were where you were kind of coming from

Thomas: 33:55

as a creator who thinks of themselves as pretty par for the course in terms of insecurity and things like that. I, I totally get this fear of being judged or being taken out of context, being misinterpreted in terms of, uh, what you're going and kind of being panned for that. I know it's, it's very kind of standard practice in other sort of creative practices for people to say, don't read your reviews. Right? Like, and there's, there's a reason for that because if you're an actor in a stage play or a movie, the, the review isn't aimed at you at helping you, right? Or like, it doesn't take into account any, any context you have. It could even blame you for the failure of a, of a creative project for which you have. Some middling like contribution to and things like that. But I think we are starved for four discussion in RPGs and I, I think, I think everybody craves reviews and, and fears them, uh, simultaneously, uh, to some extent, you know, depending on how professional a practice this might be for you and things like that. I think there's also that specific danger of being misinterpreted as professional when you are, uh, uh, when you are, you know, someone who's just starting out and things like that. I

Paul: 35:09

think there is a fundamental tension between writing for an audience and writing for the creator, and that is a tension that I have always not struggled with, but try to embrace. I think it's interesting tension. My approach is usually to engage with the work as seriously as I can. And when I do that, I'm engaging with the creator I have to be right? And so I'm engaging with the creator and their work, but I'm doing that. In a way that is hopefully of interest to an audience. I am fundamentally uninterested in the. Commerce side of this whole thing, which is why I don't really like writing reviews. Cause reviews are more of like a buy don't buy kind of thing, right? And critique is more like, here's what I got out of it. Here's what you might get out of it. Here's what I didn't get out of it. Here's what I would maybe do different to get more out of it. Right. Kind of be productive. But that productivity hopefully is of use both to the player and the creator. And that's a tough balancing act to hit both of those messages at the same time. Which I suppose makes it different than like a review of a movie that I saw in the newspaper. I used to review movies, uh, for local newspaper and I knew that Spielberg was never gonna read my review of the Fayetteville mens or whatever, right? He doesn't give a shit. But all that's really for is to like kind of prep people going to the movies, like what they're gonna see and what they might get out of it and stuff like that. But this is different than that and I think it's because of this crazy high level of parasocial relationships we all have with each other. And, um, I've inserted myself at a pretty high level cuz I'm very comfortable talking to creators. I, I know everybody. You've seen the people that are on the slack. I know these people, they're friends. They're not just acquaintances. I haven't begged them to please, please, please come on the slack and, and, and improve my, my, my, my brand's value or anything like that. You know, these just my pals. And so like, because I'm talking to my friend, that's also how I write. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm critiquing your work usually to a friend or someone I envision could be a friend occasionally, not occasionally afterwards. The fuck you guys. Oh, okay. We were never gonna be friends. Got it. Okay, cool. But I'm also writing for people who hopefully find it of interest to kind of be a fly on the wall rather than being told to buy or don't buy the

Thomas: 37:25

game. I think that resonates with me a lot. I think it's very clear to me when someone is taking the effort to criticism, sandwich or whatever, like, you know, build in like a genuine like piece of feedback or criticism. It's probably as disappointing. I think for most people to receive a positive review that is purely superficial. Like it doesn't enrich you or inspire you to create more either. Right? Like, you know, um,

Paul: 37:50

Thomas, the page layout of your last thing was very readable, for example. So legible.

Thomas: 38:02

Uh, another thing that you brought up, this idea of like balancing who you're writing for, I think that is one of the most interesting things about writing about RPGs for me right now, which is, uh, the specific tension about who I'm writing for, whether I'm writing for someone who has not played this game, or I'm writing for someone who has, because to me that is a big difference in just how much. In the, in the, in the, the most superficial way. It's a big difference in how much of a runup you have to take to get to the thing that you want to talk about. But there's also like so many more knock on effects, right? Like, you know, uh, so when you sit down to write about a game, do you have a clear picture of your audience? Is there somebody that you are writing for? Like specifically this question of play not played? Is there somebody that you're definitely not writing for?

Paul: 38:49

Yes, I do. And this took some time to figure out demographic clay. I, who I'm writing for, I am writing for older readers with tra game experience. Okay. If I can hit any two of my three targets, I feel like I've done a pretty good job. Okay. The first target is that age. Okay. So I think you need to have, have had some experience in games of some flavor and more than just one people who are already, um, interested in novelty and people who are inde partisans. The third one is my least interested. An interesting kind of market to write towards, but they're already going to be kind of sympathetic towards the kind of things I wanna talk about. But if I can hit any two of those, like, you know, older gamers who are also inde partisans, but what I'm also interested in is, is not the have or have not it's, I'm interested in writing to the people who might want to play this well, shall I suppose by definition means they haven't. I think in my writing, I haven't really broken it down your way because I will also, thinking back, talk a bit toward my experience having played it and try to hook in either with experiences that other people who have played it have probably also experienced. Okay. Or talk in general terms about the kinds of experiences that experienced players from other games might have had. Like I'll bring up whether the travel rules in the game work well or not, right. And do they evoke interesting stuff or is it like a logistics puzzle or is it just kind of this boring set of roles you just have to make and it's not really there to do anything except burn off your resources before you arrive and, and all that kind of stuff. But that's like a general kind of thing that anyone who's played a pastoral journey off as an adventuring party kind of, you know, group might, or I'll talk more specifically about, say whether or not a forge in the dark game addresses how and what to do with your kind of free role play time during downtime. That's a fairly common question, and so like that's something that only makes sense. People have played other Forge of the dark games, but hopefully I can write it in such a way that I'm also flagging, like, this is a thing if you've never played a forge of the dark game, you may or may not know what to do with your downtime, and this game does it this way, which is a pretty good way. It worked out well for me. Yeah. I haven't broken it down the way you have, but it, it's always in there. It's always definitely in there trying to kind of talk to, to both audiences at once. That was very

Thomas: 41:20

interesting. I it is very cool that you have this good picture of your audience and their kind of like interests and things like that. I know. I have no idea. Like I, in the sense that like I have no. Facts that this is based on is purely like me thinking, uh, kinda abstractly and theoretically every time I sit down to write,

Paul: 41:38

figuring demographics might be actually be very interesting. I come from a, from a marketing and, uh, PR background, that's like one of my many lives I've lived is I owned a, a marketing company. And so that sort of thing is, is, is of use to me. Yeah. And so just kind of being real about that and knowing who you're leaving out can, um, also help kind of. Clarify how you write about things. Like there's a, there's a, a very young demographic of players, either inexperienced or just like young, young, and I can't talk to them. I don't know, I don't understand their interests well enough. And so rather than trying to like please everybody all the time, just like, sorry guys, like jump in, try to ride along if, if you can, but if you can't, sorry, I just can't, can't accommodate your interests or, or your whatever's. Right. But, uh, yeah, it would be good to have like some kind of a survey you could send out or you know, how much have you played? How old are you? Where do you live? What do you do besides play games. If you'll notice in our community when I was curating our list of channels, we use, uh, the Slack platform. I'm gonna give your, your audience become a background here, uh, for a number of reasons. One of the things you can do with Slack is that you can break out channels and the channels I've broken out are of interest to me, but they're also. They mostly exist as opt-outs, not opt-ins, right? Yeah. If you don't wanna read about sports, don't go to the sports channel. If you don't wanna read about fitness, don't go to the fitness channel rather than making everyone read everything all the time, which is kind of like fitness court problem in a way. But the other part of the community structure is I want people who have interests and lives and perspectives outside of gaming because I think they're more interesting people and they play more interesting games. Not unlike, you know, movie makers who have only ever watched movies. They make movies about movies. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Quentin Tarantino great movie writer, but he's only ever seen movies. He makes movies about movies and so like, I think his stuff is less rich than the people who have, like, have lives and, and make movies about life, not about movies. And people who write games about games now are, now we're into that, we're now three generations into people who write games about games that were about games, and it's so far up your own ass that you have no idea what the game's actually accomplishing. It's a very abstracted out kind of, kind of experience to read these games.

Thomas: 43:54

I think. I think this is a good time. We're coming up on the hour, uh, for me to get into those general questions I have. The first section is called Infectious Enthusiasm, and you do a lot of this on your blog already, but this is, this is from the, the podcast audience. What's a game that you've had a lot of fun with and you want to recommend to them?

Paul: 44:16

Right now, we are in the middle of a game called a|state. Which is a forge in the dark base game put out by Handiwork Games, which is a Scottish operation. It's the second edition of of an old kind of Forge era Indie darling. That wasn't very good, honestly. It was a very traditional game just with some very non-traditional subject matter, but it is, in my opinion, currently the best forge in the dark game out right now. And it does so many things so well and will teach you how to use the Forge in the dark platform better across every other game. Court of Blades, band of blades, blades of the dark, all of it hack the planet, the whole girl underground. Probably you'll get a better play out of it if you play a state. I just really believe it does a lot of things very, very well and explains things really, really well. And it also, I. Is about a true community building positive rather than a zero sum kind of crab bucket. Like the original Blade of the Dark Great game, played a ton of it, but it's very much a crab bucket. It's a very like zero sum kind of. I took it from you. You can't have it anymore kind of game. But as far as games, I really wanna like advocate for that. Don't get enough Ex positive exposure is uh, Val's Fellowship. Fellowship is such a smart game. It's a P B T A based game and it is broadly conceptually. Based on kind of the Lord of the Ring's, group of adventurers facing off against an implacable evil and eventually destroying it. Another game from the other end of the telescope is like that is against the Dark Master, which is a, uh, a role master, uh, uh, osr kind of re-imagining, right? But Fellowship is so great. It's got a vibe to it that kind of leads a little towards some kind of sigh fantasy zaniness. And you can fight against that a bit, which is fine, but it does travel well. It does the fellowship aspect of it really well. You wander around the map, it tricks your group into collaborating on your world. Setting in a way that my players who have said, I don't wanna collaborate. They'll do it, they'll do it cause they don't realize they're doing it and then, then all of a sudden they're doing it and then they did the thing they, and it's great. It's, it's, it's amazing. It unlocks so much of my players' brains playing this game just by virtue of traveling around. The actions that you take, the playbooks, it is really, really interesting. I believe she's doing a fourth edition of it. There's a third edition of it. There's a bundle of holding, I think came out recently. You can get the whole fee for 20 bucks. Oh my God. I paid a hundred I think for all the printed books. Absolutely worth every penny. I think we played 18 sessions, which is insane for a, uh, P B T A game. If I get eight out of a game, it's usually kind of a lot. I'm getting a little bored by then, but it was just onward and upward, forever. Loved it. I hope people pay attention to it.

Thomas: 47:20

Is there, is that a, just putting, putting, uh, uh, put putting your skills to the test, is there a kind of player that you think, uh, will really appreciate fellowship? Is there a kind of player you think will not get into it?

Paul: 47:32

Yes. Uh, the players that won't get into it are the players who need to have a really strong grasp on the material facts. The game. Getting back to the theme we were talking about earlier, there are a lot of moments in the game where the fictional positioning. Has mechanical results. And some of my players, more trade minded players, had a very hard time with that. The core kind of way to solve a conflict is a move whose name escapes me at the moment. But basically to do it, you need to be positioned in such a way to take the action simple. Very straightforward. It's not a big deal, right? It's called advantage, which is terrible. I hate that. She called it advantage, because everywhere else in the world, advantage means roll a third die and take the best two, right? And disadvantage is same thing, but advantage in this game means you've done something. So you can take the final blow, whatever that may be, a physical blow or a social whatever, right? And there are moves, it'll give you advantage, but you can also fictionally position yourself to have advantage. Nice. So either you're collaborating and saying, okay, well I have dug a trench and I've placed a trap and I've lured the overlord into the trap. I feel like I've got advantage. The jam's like, yeah, sounds like advantage. Oreo players who are like, I don't know how the fuck to get advantage. Just tell me what to do. Just, just tell me what I'm supposed to do and I'll just do it. And there's checkout. It's very, very low faith. And they're like, it's bad. It's, it is bad for them. My player who did that finally just gave up on trying to, cuz he felt like he was trying to read my mind where at no point was he trying to read my mind. I was regularly handing out advantage. But when he came to me, like a very high stakes moment in the game, he didn't wanna. Feel like he was reading my mind. He wanted to know. So we'd roll the create advantage, move to have advantage to take the next move. And then it all feels very mechanistic and ticky talky and that's not the best use of the game, but that at least that move exists. It's smart. She made that move exists so that that kind of player would have a handle on how to do it. Yeah, so really smart. That kind of player won't be into it. Uh, the players who are super into, uh, feeling collaborative and feeling very safe inside the magic circle will adore the game because everyone's vibing together and the game is so good at building the positive collaborative vibes all the time, you know, and, uh, those people will be very, very

Thomas: 49:58

into it. My next kind of standard question, uh, is a section called Tyranny of Numbers, and I ask what's a number of statistic that you can share from your work that you think would be useful, uh, to listeners?

Paul: 50:11

Useful to listeners. Okay. Well, uh, you're a listener, Sammy. We can talk, uh, kind of, um, uh, writer to writer about stuff. Okay. Uh, let's see here. I currently have 102 patrons. Okay. And we make about $250 a month on p That is, I believe, largely in support of the Slack community, but also in support of the blog. I don't allow people to buy access to the Slack community. You have to have a personal invitation to the Slack community. So I never say in the Patreon, pay the money, you get access. That's not how it works. Yeah. Everything's based on a personal invitation and that is what keeps things sane. I have, I believe, uh, 3,200 or so, uh, subscribers to the blog and I get about 10,000 hits a month, hits being individual AR articles read. Uh, total number of visitors is somewhere in the 2,500 ish range per month. And that's an aggregate of, of, of, uh, social media readers, Twitter, unfortunately, which is going away. And also like my best, uh, organic, uh, audience generator, uh, Facebook, uh, Mastodon, uh, Patreon itself. Sometimes we'll send audience back out of Patreon. I don't have any exclusive stuff on Patreon. I just have, um, I repost things there. So it,

Thomas: 51:25

it feels like then those patrons are supporting the, the blog, right? Like they're there to support your writing because they don't get anything That's right. Community wise. That's right. And the community doesn't have costs except your time, of course, which is a important cost,

Paul: 51:38

which is not inconsequential. Uh, another number for you is I spend between one and four hours a day, uh, moderating writing, mediating, sometimes pe Oh wow. They'll get a little spicy every single day, day in, day out.

Thomas: 51:53

In a section I will replay, I ask, what's a story or anecdote you've heard about someone maybe playing your game or maybe you could tell a gaming story, uh, about, uh, if they happen at your

Paul: 52:03

table. Okay, so gaming stories universally suck. There is bad. You can't tell anybody about your character. You can't, well, I, I, I think I tell pretty good stories about my games, but I have time to write them and edit them and think through them and structure them and everything else. So, so just like off the, off the cuff, uh, woo. Let me think about that for a second. Okay, here's one. Here's one. One of my favorite conventions that stopped because they all stopped during the pandemic was New Mexico Con held in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And New Mexico was like kind of the southwest go-to indie gaming con. That's where Magpie games is based, and they had a strong presence there. Uh, it was run by a really terrific local indie advocate, uh, with the grudging help of their local trad store. Albuquerque's a pretty small town, right? And so they're one gaming shop. You saw Magic, War Hammer, Asmodee Games, and d and d, like that's, those are the money makers, right? But sure, they'll throw some money at the Con and everything else. This was the first year I attended and I was offering a session of Mutant Year Zero, which is Free League's first. Big game and it used their year zero engine game that's now being used by Twilight 2000, ed Bladerunner and Alien and Coriolis blah. It was a long, amazing, amazing success story. But the first game mutant, they were still like legitimately trapped, whatever, legitimately indie, whatever legitimately indie actually means. And boy, that's a deep rabbit hole, right? What is indie? But they were, that was the first thing. It was great. So I beg and plead I wheedle and whine until I get like five people. And because the game has kind of a lot of tread looking stuff to it, even though it really. Isn't. It's got a long list of skills. It's got a couple of like mechanistic economies that drive the game to create the apocalyptic wasteland you go into, there's a lot of die rolling on tables. It's very osr. It's kind of a, kind of a hex crawl element to the game. But inside the arc is the arc being the little survival community that your folks are all like belong to. All your mutants belong to, right? That's very indie land. It's all relationship maps and cross purposes and social infighting and melodrama and, and who's having sex with who and all that stuff. All the good stuff happens inside the arc and all the hex crawl stuff happens outside the arc. So I sell 'em all on that basically using the pitch I just gave you that it's a nice, like still, I, I think best in class crossing of the streams, the best of indie, the best of osr all at the same time, and so. Eventually the stuff that happens in the arc, it drives you out into the wasteland, out into the zone. That's the point of the function of it, right? So in our game, uh, the characters water pump, it's from a draw from a deck, right? A deck of cards creates the, like arc crisis. Uh, the water pump goes out. They don't have any more fresh water. The local gang is about to like, take over authority from the local leadership, and they are going to take it all over using the fact that they have a pump in their possession as leverage. So the local leadership is like, please, please go get us a pumps. Great. They go off, they go off the wasteland. I roll, I roll, I roll. I create like the next couple of miles of zones they're gonna go out into. So our, our mutants all go out and they go out and. And at least one of my players, maybe two of them are indie partisans. And they're like, I cannot believe you've tricked me into this OSR bullshit. I cannot fucking believe making you roll for my endurance. Oh my God, my food really? My food really? I'm like, yeah, yeah. Just, just go with it. Right? But in the course of play, right, the random events kind of come up, uh, because as you wander around your role, did you run into, you know, some, some cannibals out there? Did you run into some weird weather, whatever? And in the course of play, my indie partisans become so hardcore o s R guys. I. In like two hours of play the first two hours. Oh, they're in their comfort zone. They know, they understand our maps, they understand relationship maps, they understand melodrama. They're, they're all into that. Then they get sent outta their comfort zone and they're like, oh my God, I don't wanna deal with radiation levels. This sucks. And I'm like, nah, it doesn't suck. Just, just go with me on this. They end up trapped under a highway overpass with acid rain falling on them, and cannibal mutants like hiding in the wings, waiting for the rain to pass. They feel completely cornered and they spend 15 minutes. Rolling a fistful of dice to see if the radiation burns through their suits and kills them all. And they are hooting and hollering and laughing and screaming the entire time. And it is so funny, and I still don't understand what the transformation was, but somehow they got so wrapped up in the drama of seeing these numbers pips come up on dice. And they're so, IM personally invested in the immediacy of this situation where they're, they're caught by the ring and they're caught in the mutants and, but they gotta get back with this pump in time. And all these, you know, leveraging moments were all just like on top of them. And it was the most incredibly fulfilling, and I've never really played an o s R game after that, that generated that level of intensity of the emotional immediacy and pressure. It always feels like, how do I. Maximize my tactical advantage and minimize my exposure is a constantly, that's the calculation of my head. And this was not that. And so whenever I look at aspirationally mean, I rather large pile of OSR games back behind me here, um, I always think back to that moment of mutant and I wonder like, why don't more of these games give me the tools or the expectation that those are the moments we can get at. But that was it, that was my, my all time best OSR adjacent experience. Nice.

Thomas: 58:08

That is a fun story. I don't get why people are so down on gaming stories. Like,

Paul: 58:12

oh, because they're telling stories, right? They'll, they'll talk about the specific role. They'll talk about like what powers they brought, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You ever seen that thing? One of my favorite things to explain, like good characterization, this is an old internet thing and maybe you're too young to have seen this. It was, describe Luke Skywalker without mentioning. His powers, where he is from, who his father is, right. None, none of those things. And it's a little hard, right? But it does make you think about like thematic stuff, like the through lines of, but uh, that's, that's one of the things I almost always, uh, whip out when I, uh, pull in a real trap player as I'll use that metaphor. Okay. Describe your character without mentioning their powers, the faction they belong to, uh, their race or species, or, you know what they're really great at.

Thomas: 59:01

Tell me that they wake up every morning and look at the horizon and. Wish they were out there having adventures. Yeah,

Paul: 59:08

exactly. Yes. That they, he's lonely at home and his best friend just left and he doesn't know his dad is, and there's all these other, like, that's where the, that's where the good stuff is. It's not like I have a plus three lightsaber and I can attack three times, uh, around, and I have an area of effect, uh, attack I can use with my force power or whatever. That's not, that's, that's, those are bad doing stories.

Thomas: 59:30

Yeah. I agree. I agree. The last question here is a section called All advice is advice for myself. I ask, what's a habit or technique that you are trying to get better at doing at your table?

Paul: 59:43

Something I'm trying to get better at, at my table. Woo. Interesting. Because I'm always trying to get better at everything all the time. And isn't it interesting that there's a whole demographic a, a not inconsequential one that reject the idea that you can or should. Strive to get better at this, and that is one of my main differences. I think you can, I think you should. I think better experiences come from better skill, right? So, right. Yeah. Now what I'm trying to work on says I'm also the forever gm. I'm always running stuff. I am trying to get better at clear characterization of my NPCs, but not through play acting through, like, through kind of their agenda items, right? Mm-hmm. In a lot of cases, I need to kind of skim over scenes. I'm not a big believer in blow by blow, word by word, direct dialogue between sometimes we need to bullet point things, okay? In the scene. You know, they've brought you in. The king is really unhappy that you tried to, you know, steal from his treasury, but whatever. Just kinda like, kind of just bullet point through it, rather than me trying to find the voice and center my breath and think about the funny voice the king is going to use or whatever. Right? And so, but you still need to characterize, you still need to make it very, very clear that the king is. Secretly in love with the treasurer, but their empire can't know that two men are in love for social reasons. And so like, I don't wanna mince around cuz I don't, I'm not gonna play the king gay. Right. But I still need to like express it through like kind of their priorities. So I don't know how to describe that. Like a abstract characterization that's still very clear. So you know who you're talking to. So everyone doesn't just sound like an exposition engine cuz that's the downside, right? Just the exposition engine is just me. Like this, these things have to happen. They happen. Great. Let's move on. Okay. These things have to happen. They happen. So, yeah. Yeah. So that's what I'm trying to work on is abstract characterization.

Thomas: 1:01:53

That's definitely a GM skill to be, like, when you introduce a an npc you characterize them really fast and players go like, oh, okay. Cool. I, right. I know how to, how to handle this person. Like I, you know, came to react to something. Right. Otherwise, you don't, you don't. This also was incredibly full

Paul: 1:02:10

of himself. Yeah. He's always gonna be full of himself. Right. This guy has got a secret. He's incredibly shame, ashamed by his secret. All right. I can work with that. It's just like one thing, but it doesn't have to be through the voice or the accent or the dialogue. Just like through everything they, their entire embodiment. Yeah, you're right. So he has something to play against. Otherwise it's just, it's not even echo chamber, it's just yelling off into the void,

Thomas: 1:02:35

you know? Thank you so much for doing this, Paul. This is, this is good for I, like I said, before we started talking like this, ideally would've been another hour long, but. You know, we will speak again maybe in another episode, of course, course before, before uh, you sign off. Where do you wanna send people to on the internet to come read your stuff, find you?

Paul: 1:02:57

Sure. Okay. So they wanna read me. I'm at indie game reading club.com. No spaces, just indie game reading club.com. Uh, I also have a patreon@patreon.com slash I G R C, which is not I R G C, which is the Iranian secret. Police don't go there. They might also have a Patreon. It turns out I didn't understand that when I came up with I G R C, but, uh, yeah, apparently that's a thing.