Ramping Up The Difficulty

Increasing the difficulty in a game is much like
motorcycle jumping. Too much throttle and you overshoot your mark;
not enough and you land flat on your face. 

I am the Warden!!

In my last post, I talked about the major challenge for Killshot: Reloaded, the upcoming supplement for tabletop's deadliest game. I want to use it as an extension for more experienced characters, particularly with Operation: Killshot, the international espionage theme.

As we all know (and if you've never read or played Killshot yet, you can fix that problem with this link), active rolls attempted against non-opponents are challenged by difficulty levels, each one increasing the number of circumstance dice applied to the Director's opposed roll. By taking on experienced characters - such as those with over 50 training points - the difficulty has to keep up or else the game starts to collapse in on itself.

So here's the issue I'm addressing. Using the rules for difficulty levels as is, I could simply add more difficulty levels with more d10s. In all honesty, that's what I'm trying to avoid. As much as this system is built on dice pools, it can get really out of hand as the experience goes up.

And that's what we're here to brainstorm today. How do we address difficulty levels for experienced characters? Let's begin with some ideas I'm cranially tossing about at the moment.

Killshot... Advanced?

I am the Warden!!

On Thursday, I finally sat down and used a series of words to form sentences, which collected into paragraphs to create an introduction for Killshot: Reloaded. The next supplement has begun.

What was nice about nailing down the intro's first draft was settling on the key aspects for each theme. I had been tossing around a few ideas, collecting notes, yet never truly agreeing on anything save for the general idea and it's name. Having forced myself to make a decision, I can honestly say I'm really looking forward to the challenge this supplement will offer.

Having a basis to work from, I can now sit back and assess what this book is truly about. It's not just about new themes; it's about stepping this game up a notch. An advanced version of Killshot, if you will. I'm going with the assumption many characters (now that "assassin" will not always apply) will be close to 50 training points in total or simply looking to mix it up a little from their previous exploits. I realize now this book has to meet and exceed that challenge in many ways, including handling "higher level" characters.

Let's go through each one by one, shall we?

Two Years

I am the Warden!!

That's right, two years ago today saw my world turned upside down. Or at least rammed from the driver's side and shoved into a ditch. At 4:02 PM on Friday, September 17th, 2010, I was nearly killed.

Hence I look at the shape of things two years later and ask myself where things stand now compared to then. For the sake of today's solemn memorial, I'm concentrating solely on the accident and its effects.

Pain: That ever constant bitch gnawing on my right foot continues to this day, so much that I'm off to a pain clinic this afternoon for treatment. And what is that treatment? Pills and a recommendation of various exercises.

Mobility: I get around well enough, though with a moderate limp toned down by orthotics. The dogs still get their frequent walks and I still go up to an hour at a time, but it requires pushing and aggressive force ("I will walk to that park tonight!") to make it happen. Paved walkways only, never hiking and I do miss my hikes.

Phase 2: Planning for Reloaded

I am the Warden!!

The Killshot core release is complete. By that, I mean there's no more game design, editing, or layout remaining. All that's left is press production, sales, and the ongoing marketing that remains eternal for all core rulebooks. It's time to start a new project and, in typical fashion, I'm looking at more than one.

Those of you familiar with this blog, BRG, and Killshot in general know the next supplement will be Killshot: Reloaded (and the ongoing Killshot Files, of course). Four alternate themes/setting applying the Killshot RPG: Hong Kong gun-fu, Wild West bounty hunters, CIA operatives, and ninjas. It's a project conceived during Killshot's early days (there's even mention of it in the original Kickstarter project) and has been on the back burner for months waiting for the opportunity to start investing time and energy. Before I can type the first word, I need to know what I want from this book and how to make it all happen through Kickstarter.

What I Learned And Should Have Remembered About Kickstarter, Part 2

I am the Warden!!

With the demo copy arrived and a list of minor corrections/revisions noted and costs for production written in stone, I was finally able to make a complete tally of all costs involved for the production of Killshot's initial release. Remember when I talked about lessons learned from my Kickstarter experience? Now it all comes into play.

As promised, all relevant costs involved in this Kickstarter project will be posted and I'm hoping to provide a bit more information to match. Not just for the sake of updating my backers, but to pay it forward in a way. Learning as much as you can from as many people as you can before setting out on a first project is huge and my intention is to share my experience with others looking to do the same. It's also by sheer coincidence that I was invited to an impromptu podcast interview specifically to talk about this topic and the timing to post these numbers is too perfect to pass up.

Here we go.

Unexpected Delays

I am the Warden!!

It's just past 6AM on a Monday morning as I start to write today's post and there are two things I'm waiting for: a review of Killshot and an email from Lightning Source accepting my POD files. Both have taken longer than expected, yet not unexpectedly longer than expected, if that makes any sense. In other words, while I was hoping both issues would be resolved and happily promoted by now, it's inevitable for either matter to be more complicated and/or slower than desired.

There's nothing to do about the reviews, such matters are out of my hands. The fact that there are three websites willing to perform a review (including Game Knight Reviews) is very good news considering Killshot's another game in a crowded field from independent publishers like me. Combined with the issues I've been having with the POD (print on demand) files makes it a little more stressful.

My original plan was for all the POD copies for the Kickstarter backers to be in production at this point with an expected delivery time of August's last week. It's now looking like September. It's my first time using a POD printer - being Lightning Source through OneBookShelf, owner of DriveThruRPG - and there's a unique twist to dealing with these kinds of printers: they're all computerized. In my past life (or one of them, at least), I was a printer/press operator. Whenever we received files, we'd run a preflight check on them, perform some checks to ensure what's missing, wrong, or perfect about the file(s) and fix whatever needed to be fixed right away. In many cases, what a computer would consider imperfect, we could manually override as a minor or insignificant glitch. For example, if an image in the interior pages came in at 293 dpi instead of the standardized 300 dpi, that's not a big deal. Skip. Computers don't see if that way.

It's also come to light I'm very inexperienced at creating layout files and I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to every graphic designer out there I cussed out during my press operator days. Perhaps it's not as easy as I insinuated and now I'm learning my lesson the hard way. Not that my files don't work, but it's another matter entirely to get minor details in order (which is complicated by my technology issues address in the last post). As of last week, I've had three POD files rejected and am waiting to hear back on the fourth.

The process has been incredibly eye-opening, just like everything else in this process of building and publishing Killshot. A very welcome process, I might add. While I've dabbled in every step before, it's never been to this level and I'm planning to take it even further. It's like the old saying goes: We learn better from our mistakes. I'd be a fool if I thought these were the only mistakes/problems/hiccups I'll ever encounter and that does not make me a screw-up. It makes me human. 

Out of Date = Out of Touch

I am the Warden!!

Let me start today's post by saying how much I love my office. While we've been in our current house two years now, the office is finally in awesome shape and provides me with a creative space to work. My entire RPG collection is arranged alphabetically to my right, there are dragon figures on all sides, printouts from assorted projects - new and old - on the wall in front of me, and a glass tray balanced on a pewter skull holding a pile of dice, including Big Red. Sometimes I like to sit at my desk, a large corner unit, and admire the space.

There is one flaw in all of it and it's rather ironic: my laptop. I have a 6-year old Macintosh iBook G4, one of the last models before they switched to Intel processors. She's served me well these many years, got me through school, and busted her ass keeping up during Killshot's various production phases. Her age is showing as she's been horribly overworked on a daily basis; the cooling fan's broken, I can't get more than 6Mb of memory available no matter how hard I try, and she freezes up at least once a week. I've known for a while now she needs to retire, it's just impossible with money being so extinct nowadays.

Despite all those technical issues, her current state is not what bothers me. It's the exclusion from nearly every computer-related activity. The processor's the biggest issue because with the new Intel chips came new coding and resulted in the old Macs like mine being incompatible with everything out there.

I'm not talking about programs, apps, and games (though it counts, but is understandable). It's even things online. Little things one would hope is universal. Google Hangout, for example, cannot run on my laptop. There goes my plan to attend CONCurrent and run Killshot as a replacement for Gen Con. Skype still works, so I'm not completely in the dark, but there are quite a few professional options eliminated just from my inability to access Google Hangout alone.

I have an iPhone supplied by my insurance company to help keep my scattered brain organized, but there's not much good hooking it up to my laptop unless I want to use it for charging. Because I can't upgrade my iTunes to a version that understands there a device called an iPhone, I can't perform some of the simple actions like swapping music, photos, and such. I've eventually been able to find third party apps to help with those issues and that's the point. I have to "cheat" in order to performs tasks the commercials proclaim as basic on their products.

This past week almost became the final straw when preparing to upload PDFs for Killshot's print copies, I noticed they required an export standard (PDFx:1/2001) only available on InDesign CS3 or later. I'm working with CS1 (and Illustrator 10). For a while, it seemed as if even PDFs were out of reach. PDFs!! That universal format of all universal formats. After some research, I found out one my CS1 export standards was equal to the requested one and had only been renamed a few years back, but it was a disturbing and frustrating moment to that point.

I hate new editions and the constant stream of updates, upgrades, and eventual exclusion in our technology-dependent era. Desktop publishing is horrible for that as Adobe alone seems to release a new CS every year. Add to that new hardware launches every year and everything gets drastically out of hand. I understand the intention of upgrades - it's technological evolution combined with a conspiracy theory of money grabbing by their owners - and I accept it in some cases. When it starts to get out of hand like it is now, I shake my head.

It's a losing argument, I know, and nearly pointless to make. Perhaps my frustration is more at my financial situation preventing me from doing anything about it mixed with the realization nothing can be done to fix the problem until next year, if everything works out for Plan G. Or maybe it's that all this upgrading crap is itself an upgrade of exclusion from when we were kids. If your parents didn't buy you the latest clothes, toys, or school accessories, you were excluded by the other kids. Now we've found a way to do it as adults.

Somewhere in the Toronto area is a woman named Wendy laughing cruelly for no reason and calling my family poor on a Google Hangout.