Thought Eater: Ray Otus

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It took going on the show to actually give the show a proper listen. I had listened to maybe 2-3 random episodes of the Frothcast before and enjoyed them but I hadn't dived in proper. And when I was on the show I hadn't listened to any of the Sunday Zine Club episodes. Shame on me.

Ray Otus is on this episode. I discovered Ray's stuff by randomly finding his zine Plundergrounds. I thought it looked killer even though I didn't know anything about Dungeon World. I quickly signed up for his Patreon and I generally stalk him about the interwebs.

In the interview I found myself nodding in agreement over and over. Seems that Ray and I share a lot of philosophical ground when it comes to creativity. Specifically, he was talking about how monetization often ruins a creative space. And I agree. There's a beautiful energy in creative spaces that are fueled not by money, but by passion. When you create something in spite of not making money on it then you really love it.

It reminds me of my days in small press comics. We would make our comics, photocopy, fold, staple, and mail in trade to lots of other creators doing the same thing. We had co-ops and clubs and conventions. We had review zines and zine zines. It was awesome.

So I agree with Ray on this. But there is a big caveat.

For some people, their creative life is a dream of freedom. They are stuck in shitty jobs (or no jobs) and they have talent. They want (need) to be paid. I never hesitate to pay someone for their creative work, especially if I know that person isn't just doing it for fun. If they are trying to make a go of it as a living then I will support that effort, if the creations compel me.

I think Ray totally agrees that creators must be paid. His point wasn't that people should give away their work for free. His point was that if you're in a position to be able to give it away then that's a noble thing. I think.

When I published issue #1 of Black Pudding I remember having an internal debate about whether or not I should make it Pay-What-You-Want. I considered setting a price. I didn't want to charge too much so that no one bought it. And I didn't want to make it free so that I couldn't earn any money from it at all. This was my creative labor, I wanted to have the option of being paid. So PWYW was, for me, a perfect solution. If you can pay me something, and you want to, then I'm happy to accept. If you can't or don't want to, then enjoy the work for free with my compliments.

As an aside, this reminds me of old debates back in the oughts among webcomics creators regarding charging for your stuff. A lot of comics back then were experimenting with paywalls. As far as I remember, those experiments didn't work out. A more reasonable model, and probably more enduring, was to publish your comics for free online and sell peripheral merchandise such as print collections, tee shirts, and mugs. Very early on in my online life, I adopted this philosophy. My preferred model is to offer my primary work for free (digitally), then sell related items. DriveThruRPG makes that super easy. But I'm too damned lazy to really capitalize on actually selling merch. There's a tee shirt link on my blog that I doubt anybody ever clicks. There's no Black Pudding shirts up there! I need to fix that.

Big Swords

One thing I forgot to mention when I talked about Dungeon World in this post was that the way Moves are described and named reminded me of some game designs I had in the notes folder back in 2002-2005. Specifically I had this idea for a game I was calling "Big Swords: Badass Fantasy" (working title only!), which was one of the many attempts I made to emulate my beloved old school D&D. This was way before I even knew there was a slowly growing DIY D&D trend happening that would eventually take on the name "OSR". If I had been clued in to this trend I think it would have been a revelation for me.

Big Swords worked like this. Characters had a couple of stats, such as Power, and then they had a series of traits that I called FX. The FX were related to a Way (class). Then individual PCs would have SFX... which were invented by the players. Stuff like this:

Break Face
Strike a Terrifying Pose
Summon a Salty Devil
Blow a Kiss
Why Does This Keep Happening To Me?

And so forth.

Each of these FX basically gave you some + to your d20 roll, which was an opposed roll. They were very specific, as the names imply. They were like Dungeon World's Moves, in a sense. And I think these kinds of ideas were rampant in RPG design during that time and beyond. Hell, D&D 3e had already started exploring this territory with Feats (back off! I'm not saying Feats and Moves are the same). And D&D 4e certainly explored it more with all the various Powers that characters could use x times per day/encounter.

What I mean by that is Moves were not an entirely new idea and my use of a similar concept in the un-fulfilled Big Swords game idea was certainly not a new idea. The specific implementation of these ideas was clearly unique in each case, but RPG design was just kinda going that that way in general, wasn't it?

BTW, here's the opening spicy text for Big Swords. And no, I have zero plans to actually develop this game, though the setting concept as described below lives on in my work-in-progress Dead Wizards:

Civilization. Labrynthine, sprawling, decadent, and lecherous.

Theirs is a world of corpulent priests who cry doomsday to their sheep-eyed masses while sycophants skitter at their sandaled feet. Theirs is a world wherein tyrants rule from white towers and slave-masters crack their whips in the street. Theirs is not a real world.

Your world lies beyond splendor and squalor. Your world is a place of reality where a man or a woman can carve a name in the very landscape and drench it red with blood or wine. Your world is a place where enemies wear the faces of conjurers, demons, and lusty deceivers whose fingers slip into your purse while yours are still having their pleasure.

This has been yet another rando post spilling out of my brainpan half-formed and ill-conceived.

Dungeon World

Here's a game I haven't played or even read or explored to any real degree: Dungeon World. Which is a shame because it has a fairly robust following with a DIY community of content creators.

I remember picking the book up while in a game store in New Orleans years ago and the reason I put it back down was IT WAS TOO THICK. That's right. I'm at that age where anything over 120 pages is going to make me think "Oh man... I can't commit to reading this." *sigh*

Of course a large bulk of the book is apparently rehashed lists of standard D&D tropes, such as classic monsters and spells. So you don't have to just read all that... it's reference if you need it.

The system seems to be simple. It's 2d6 and you just have to hit a standard target number. There's also a gray area so rolls are not binary. It is based on Apocalypse World, of course, which is where the system comes from. Here's a video about that's fun to watch, though I think he wasn't aware that this is Powered by the Apocalypse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meov7EG163c

So yeah. This game is next on my to-buy-and-play list. Just as soon as my obsession with Troika! levels out.