Stone, Steel, and Steam Wordle

It might be passe by now, but I still find word clouds enchanting. I've seen it done with political and religious speeches to analyze what they're really talking about. doing it to my own work helps me see if I'm balanced in my emphasis the way I want to be. At first, Taksan stood out even more prominently, until I realized that it was doing double duty as the name of the country and as a demonym. I went through and did find and replace to consolidate all of the demonyms and funky plurals, and it came out more even. The setting stands out above the system terms, which is what I want, and the two most influential nations do get the most mention, which is okay, but I should maybe give a little more attention to the smaller nations.

Posting on The Forge

I recently posted to The Forge about Stone, Steel, and Steam. The Forge is the forum for indie RPG development and game theory, and it is vastly intimidating to post there, because for these people, game theory and design is serious business.

I've lurked the community off and on over the past several years, enough to know that I don't really belong. I feel like a reasonably bright elementary school kid that really likes animals and wants to be a zoologist when I grow up, wandering into a conference of university zoology professors discussing the mitochondrial RNA of annelids. So, when confronted with all these great and important scholars, operating on insufficient sleep and my brain still wrung dry from squeezing out the new draft of SSS on deadline, I couched the post in terms I hoped would let the community know this game addresses Serious Issues and deals with Complex Problems, and made an idiot of myself.

In my post I proclaimed myself a 'Narrativist' and the thread quickly became an argument about how the game elements worked "in terms of 'Story Now' play". Ron Edwards - the Ron Edwards, creator of GNS theory and co-founder of The Forge - entered the fray. It's like I posted up a screenplay and Jared Hess commented on it. I was literally dizzy from my first brush with Wikipedian notability. (Actually, Jared Hess was my Intro to Film TA at BYU, but he wasn't notable at the time, so it doesn't count.)

Anyway, it seems I've massively misunderstood some of the terms of GNS theory. I came across it sometime earlier in the decade, before I was seriously considering design. I know that the theory has moved on to a new version. I'm not sure if I fully understood the old version and the community moved forward and I didn't, or if I never understood the old theory at all. Either way, the terms are now stuck in my head and I have a working theory that uses the same terms, but all wrong by indie community standards.

I'm an amateur, but I'm not indie. And while the humanities major part of me does care about the layers and levels of philosophical constructs that make up role-playing games, the greater part of me would rather shut up and play. I challenge the conventions of the genre: the elves, the dwarves, the classes, the levels; but I'm not interested in questioning the conventions of the medium: the gamemaster, the dice, and the character sheets. Like Stone, Steel, and Steam, I don't fit into a convenient category.

SSS Version 0.10.12 Release

Finally, and just in time for the holidays, too:

Stone, Steel, and Steam Beta Version 0.10.12

Changes from version 0.10.2

• Bigger (and, arguably, better) nation descriptions
• Revised combat system - easier, faster, deadlier.
• More and better examples and explanations.
• Character sheet.
• In-world systems of measurement.
• Disclaimer.

(here's the February draft for comparison)

Self-Criticism
For the past couple weeks I've really been pushing myself to meet my arbitrary, self-imposed deadline. If there's one thing I learned from school, it's better to turn in something imperfect on time than to create something perfect and late. There are several parts I know are clunky, perhaps even clunkier than the February version. The expanded nation descriptions are all over the map, uneven, disorganized, and inconsistent. The February version was a little dry, a little terse, but at least it was fairly polished. So, that's the big thing to work on, but my deadline has arrived and my brain is wring dry for the moment. I hope the more detailed descriptions give players a better sense of the scope and wonder of the world.

The increased length - not just the nation descriptions, but the whole thing is 65% longer - makes it look like big walls of text. Before, illustrations would have been nice. Now, they're almost necessary to break up the bulk.

The "Example of Combat" was pretty much a blow-by-blow simulation of the revised combat system. In it, one PC (which we met in the "Example of Character Creation") faces off against two warriors. The PC is city oriented and alone, the two NPCs are serious fighters, and the PC nearly dies. On the one hand, it does show pretty well what happens when one city boy gets in a fight with two barbarians, but I think it sends the wrong message, that Stone, Steel, and Steam is dangerous and my character needs to be on all-out defense all the time, which is not true, it was just a disadvantageous scenario. In future editions, the example of combat will be a bit more heroically scripted or at least more evenly matched.

I felt like I was restarting this after a long break, approaching it with fresh eyes. And that's partially true, I did leave it to cool. I actually had fairly presentable June and October drafts that corrected the things I was kicking myself about in February.

I only pimped the February version for a couple of weeks. I didn't get a word of feedback until earlier this month. This time, at least, I have a group lined up for a four-session playtest to see how it holds up under sustained abuse.

By the way, I recently reinstalled my OS and lost all my RPG community links. I've recovered some from memory, but if you know of any forums to promote and get feedback for this, I'd be grateful for links.

Version 0.10.12 Coming December 15

Since moving to San Antonio in March, I've been blessed with a couple of eager and dedicated game groups. I've run a Star Wars campaign and a couple of Exalted one-shots - my early loves that are perhaps the strongest influences on my design. And I've been running a Pathfinder campaign and playing in another which, while fun, have reminded me of how much the d20 system irritates me. All this and the fact that I'll be moving back to Japan in March has reminded me how little time left I have to get Stone, Steel, and Steam proofread and tested while I still have access to unlimited native English speakers.

Ever since the February release of version 0.10.2, I've poked gingerly at my drafts, changing some things that were apparent to me even without feedback to make a more stable but never released version 0.10.6. with the current Pathfinder campaigns drawing to a close, our group has announced its willingness to run a two-month playtest of SSS alongside an Exalted campaign wherein I'll be grooming my successor. With that determination in mind, I've been ramping up a new draft with more details and examples, and I've set for myself an artificial and arbitrary deadline, which helps get my but in the chair and the words flowing through my keyboard. Version 0.10.12 will be ready by December 15 and will go into extended playtest in January.