Sometimes The Numbers Don't Work

Sadly, I do not believe that the numbers add up for the viability of getting Magnesium Games up and running at this time.

It's funny how much an individual's situation can change in six months.

When I started work on MgG, I was working 30 hours a week and had almost no financial commitments.

Six months later, I find myself working 40 hours a week and looking at signing up for a mortgage.

Suddenly, the 10 to 15 hours I needed to put in each week to make Magnesium Games work seems like an impossible reach. More and more I find myself only working on the bare minimums - and not always reaching those - and less and less working on the underlying products. Plato's Game, despite its compact size, has more or less stalled in development. And the big project has seen a mere two dozen pages of setting work completed in the last three months.

Financially, where before I found it easy to put aside 5 grand for start-up costs, I now find myself eyeing off that money as essential to buying a house for myself.

Motivationally, I have always derived a lot of my drive from my own gaming group. Unfortunately, it has proved increasingly difficult to organise games (a side-effect of getting jobs, I guess) and the last few campaigns I've run have been... poor, at best.

Still, this is not the end of Magnesium Games. But it does mark a change in approach. The blog will be much quieter for the foreseeable future. I will still post the occasional article, but mostly it will be silent. Until I am much closer to the release dates, the blog simply takes too much time. Especially as I looked at expanding it to include other authors.

I have also decided that it is mostly likely unfeasible to produce a game by myself. Financially, not having a partnered artist is prohibitively expensive. Creatively, not having someone to closely bounce ideas off is not conducive to my best work.

So, Magnesium Games will not be getting its own website in the near future and will be mostly quiet. Work will continue, albeit at a slow pace, on the core projects. And I will once again renew the hunt for a dedicated business partner.

Under the Hood #3 - Social Capital

Welcome to the next instalment of Under the Hood. Today, I’ll be looking briefly at the social traits in gaming.

This is an area where I’ve often found mechanics to be the least helpful. After all, for many groups, the social aspects are always played out in detail role-playing without actually using any mechanics. This can cause difficulties where a player’s ability and a characters ability are widely divergent.

And so, I’ve been looking at alternative systems for representing a character’s social advantages and disadvantages.

There are two alternative systems that I’m looking at employing in our current project. The first is a descriptive set of mechanics that defines your characters personality generally. Each trait would be on a spectrum with a personality type at each end – shy versus outgoing as an example. This helps for two reasons. Firstly, it makes social mechanics a bit more interesting and thus more likely to be played with by those more interested in the game aspect of role-playing (it’s also a tad more realistic, where being outgoing isn’t always an advantage). Secondly, for those Weavers (such as myself) who aren’t inclined to use the mechanics as much, it provides a better framework for the players to map out their characters. The ratings in each social trait help provide a foundation on which to build the character’s personality.

There are many disadvantages to this system. It may get very clunky. It struggles to deal with individual characters having different levels of shyness at different times. It works differently to the character’s other traits, meaning another system has to be learnt and dealt with.

The second system is my current preferred idea, but is still very much in its embryonic stages. Characters will have social traits as normal and, I imagine, these will be largely ignored during sessions. However, character creation will also detail the family, friends, and important acquaintances of the character and the character’s social traits will be used to affect a Weaver-maintained resource pool of trust, favours, and the like. As characters then act within the world, they will expend their social capital by asking for favours and gain more social capital by doing favours. Of course, there will also be other means for social capital to raise and fall. The system will support both individuals and organisations/communities positions on the character and will track a couple of forms of social capital (renown, love, and respect). Most importantly, all the stats for each character will fit on a single side of a character sheet (or a sheet maintained by the Weaver) and the system will be no heavier on the bookkeeping than health systems are for combat.

These ideas are only at the earliest stages of development. They may be discarded entirely or they may change beyond recognition. At this time, they’re being presented here because I’m very keen to get some feedback on how you all think systems of these types (especially the second one) could be of use to you and your gaming groups. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Service Interruptions to Continue...

Apologies for the sudden disappearance for a couple of weeks. A combination of sickness, a heavy load at work, a friend's birthday (and the ensuing hangover) and getting a Google Wave invite meant that I was rather lax in meeting my writing requirements. For various reasons, I've also been emphasising work on the actual projects themselves rather than this blog. Still, that's no excuse for failure to meet a deadline and it's an even poorer excuse for not mentioning that the deadline would be missed.

In related news...

Until recently I, personally, had been expecting to move interstate for work later this year. I have recently changed my mind and will be staying in sunny old Adelaide for the time being. This has meant several significant changes to my personal plans for the next several months (and indeed next couple of years). One of the more significant of these changes being that I am now looking at purchasing a house in the immediate future. As a result of this, I have had to review some of the time lines for Magnesium Games and there have been some substantial changes.

Firstly, the weekly schedule for posts will not recommence until 8 November. It is my intention to post a couple of articles between now and then, but there will be no regular structure to them. During this time I will also be working on developing a buffer of articles, which will then help to ensure that service interruptions do not reoccur. If this buffer reaches a sufficient size before November 8, I will reinstate the regularly scheduled articles sooner.

Secondly, the website will be delayed in its introduction. Initially, the intent had been for the website to go live by the end of the year. Financial (buying a house is rather expensive) and logistical considerations mean this is no longer possible. It is now my intent for the website to go live in late March next year. This date is tentative, as I have not yet confirmed any sort of time lines with the potential site developers. I will keep you all up to date with the expected timeline.

Thirdly, the original intent had been to bring additional authors on board as the website went live. I am now looking at bringing one or two authors on in late November, with more to follow after the website goes live.

Fourthly, for those interested in Plato's Game - it will still be released shortly after the website goes live. For various reasons it is simply not feasible to release the game prior to having our own website.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask in the comments below.

We Proudly Present...

This week was going to be the next instalment of Under the Hood and I was going to save the unveiling of our new logo until the long week-end next week, but some recent illness has impacted my ability to write coherently and I'm just a little bit too excited about the logo to hold off any longer before I show it off to everyone.

So without further ado...

Logo Design by: Tom Buttery

Laying the Foundations #2 - The Importance of Community

Welcome to the second instalment of Laying the Foundations. In this week’s article I’m going to touch on the fundamental unit of our hobby – the gaming group.

In the same way that the family is the building block of society, the group is the building block of our gaming community. Whilst some people do buy gaming books just to read them, the overwhelming majority of us buy the books because we want to play the game – whether or not we do is another question entirely.

Gaming belongs to a network market – the more people that are playing in your area, the easier it is to find other gamers with compatible schedules, and the easier it is to find people who want to play in the kind of games you want to play in. It surprises me that so many gaming companies aim their works at single players rather than the group.

Magnesium Games intends to buck this trend at least somewhat. We’re focussed on the fact that the group is the building block of the community and the community is the key to thriving in the gaming industry. Of course, we also recognise that many individual gamers belong to multiple groups and we’re going to provide for that as well.

There are two main ways we’ll be looking after gaming groups. The first is our website. Whilst at first it will be predominantly a collection of articles and reviews, it will later be expanding to include a selection of gaming tools. These will be designed with a collaborative, group approach in mind. We’ll also be structuring our premium memberships around a group basis as well as an individual basis.

Secondly, our game products will be released in three ways – In the traditional hard copy and e-books, and as boxed sets. The boxed sets will be sold with a range of options so that you can customise it for the members of your group and the size of your group. Depending on the exact set, it might include a hard-copy of the full main book, multiple hard copies of a shortened version of the rules for players, various props, character sheets, maps, tokens, dice, and other goodies.

Of course, all of this is quite a long way away, so why am I talking about it now?

Put simply, I’m talking about it now because the group experience is at the core of all our design and business philosophies at Magnesium Games. With few exceptions, we don’t game by ourselves but as part of a group and we believe that every aspect of the hobby should be designed to cater to the group as well as to the individual.

See you all next week…

Under the Hood #2 - Multi-Dimensional Mechanics

In this instalment of Under the Hood, I’m going to talk about our second Design Principle, which I’m currently calling Multi-Dimensional Mechanics. Partly because it’s a somewhat apt description, and partly because it sounds kind of amusingly steampunkish.

What do I mean by Multi-Dimensional Mechanics? Well, let’s start with the singular dimensional rules you see in most systems.

Under these rules, a character will have a set of traits which affect their chance of success. They may do this in any number of ways. Some systems have a flat bonus that is added to a die roll and then has to beat a target number. Some systems might change the number of dice you are rolling.

The thing that all these systems have in common is that there is only one number from the character that affects the roll. So, if you make your character better at something they tend to increase their chances of getting a success of any type and to increase the level of success that they can achieve.

That may sound reasonable but there is an important difference between how easily something comes to a person and how much they can accomplish with it. Some people may find solving a given mathematical problem simplistic, but only be able to do it through a complex and circuitous route that takes them three times as long as someone for whom mathematics comes just as easily but who has a greater knowledge and can thus accomplish much more with it.

Another way to think about it, is the idea of representing the ease with which someone with a high potential manages the simpler tasks in a given field before they’ve learnt enough to even attempt the harder tasks. Both characters may have a rank of 1 in their Computer skill, but the natural talent is going to have a lot easier time with that 1 rank than the person who has struggled to learn it in the first place.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this is definitely represented in the overwhelming majority of systems. It’s just that there is no dividing line between the two and generally, to improve one is to improve the other.

In our system, we’re determined to make that line a little bit sharper. As in many systems, to make a roll you combine two different traits. One of these traits – the one that determines how easy a task comes to you – tells you what sort of dice to roll (d4, d6, d8, d10, or d12), and the other- the one that determines how much you can accomplish with a task – tells you how many dice you can roll.

Thus you can create a character with phenomenal potential, but very limited abilities – or one who has toiled for decades to have an in depth understanding of a given topic, but still struggles to apply it to new works.

This system doesn’t divide the two out perfectly, there’s still some overlap. But it is a bit neater than many other systems. It also creates some interesting options to improve our take on the first Design Concept (the Narrative Character), and as you’ll see later – makes it a little easier to do some of the things we want to do with Tokens and Experience.

Laying the Foundations #1 - The Core Principles +2

Welcome to the first Laying the Foundations column. In this series of articles, I’ll be looking at the reasoning behind Magnesium Games’ online presence and what we hope to achieve.

To start things off, I thought I’d talk about the core philosophies which Magnesium Games operates on. For those wondering how this ties in to our online presence - the decision to have an active online presence and to make the online portions of our business the most active and important aspects have their roots in these principles.

Last week I mentioned that we have five underlying principles. I’ll go through each in no particular order.

Openness

Magnesium Games will strive to be as open as is practical. This doesn’t mean that we’ll tell you everything there is to know about everything we do. It does mean that we’ll tell you a lot more than most people would.

We won’t tell you everything for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there are some things that can’t be told for security, privacy, or legal reasons (for example, no one is going to want us to tell everyone all the details we collect when you sign up to our website, password included). Secondly, as every Weaver and the majority of Players know – the right amount of anticipation at the right time can be a vastly enjoyable experience. Thirdly, it’d take a lot of time to tell you everything and that’s less time we’ve got to spend on making games or improving the website.

Oh, and chances are very few people will want to know everything that we’re doing.

Openness also means that we’ll make our products and services as readily available as we can, which means at as a low price and in as many formats as we can, as well as striving to make the best possible use of Creative Commons licences to allow derivative works.

Adaptability

Times change. Markets shift. It’s survival of the fittest, and that generally means those most able to adapt to change. Magnesium Games will strive to be very quick to react to, well, everything. Many organisations seem to take forever to make even simple changes to the way they do things. Often because to get one thing changed you need to get approval from numerous people. I once worked with an organisation that required seven people to sign off on fixing a single typo on a form. It took three months to change. For three months the form read ‘shit to’ instead of ‘ship to’…

Magnesium Games is designing its internal processes with a strong view to keeping them highly flexible and as easy as possible to adapt without compromising on quality or security.

Respect

Respect is the foundation of all human interactions and is the second most important of all the principles (see below for the most important). It’s a fairly simple concept – Magnesium Games will act in a respectful manner towards all those it has dealings with and expects to be treated with respect in return. This will, no doubt, be the cornerstone of our forum rules.

Sustainability

Despite what you may be thinking, this principle is not specifically about being environmentally-friendly. It’s about being viable. The business must operate such that it does not run at a loss and such that it can pay all of its suppliers and employees in a timely fashion. It needs to turn a profit only if it needs to build capital reserves so as to either expand to achieve better economies of scale or to ensure that it has sufficient reserves to survive unexpected events.

Not-Being-Evil

This is the most important of the five underlying principles. It’s also the easiest and the hardest to explain. Easiest because it is what it says it is – Magnesium Games will always endeavour to act in a good way. We won’t cook babies. We will help little old ladies cross the road.

Hardest because enumerating exactly what is evil and what is good often gets far blurrier than any of us like to think it does. It’s also a principle we expect to find easy to live by- the gaming industry not being one that is fraught with moral perils (at least, not outside of our games and imaginations).

The Extra Two

There are two other principles that are worthy of mention. Though I’ve not included them in the core five yet, it is likely that they will be included in an eventual revision to them.

The first is the principle of moderation. Extremes tend to be bad. And that holds for seemingly good things as well as for obviously bad things. So it applies to all our principles as well. You can see it in Openness where we promise to protect our member’s privacy despite our commitment to being as open as possible.

The second is a trickier concept to verbalise, but one that will underpin all business ventures I take part in. Unfortunately, I don’t have a single word or short-phrase for it just yet. Suggestions are welcome. Economists have a concept they call externalities. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Wikipedia has a decent explanation. In all the decisions we make, Magnesium Games will endeavour to do so from a Social Benefit and Social Cost point of view rather than a Private Cost and Private Benefit point of view. I could talk on this subject for several pages, but will refrain from doing so here. If you want to know more about what this business model means, drop a note in the comments.

Final Thoughts

The astute amongst you will have noticed that this was not the article that was promised a fortnight ago. I decided that detailing these principles was of far greater importance and far greater benefit to understanding what Magnesium Games hopes to accomplish, than the original topic would have been. The next Laying the Foundations will feature the originally intended “Importance of Community” topic.

Thanks for reading!