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In 2016 I was interviewed via email by the magazine RPG Review. Here is that interview, divided into three parts. This is part 3 of 3.
What can you tell us of some of the more recent planned and upcoming games like Barbaria and Germania? And Sea Kings, which I believe has recently been published? What other gaming endeavours is planned from the mind of Lewis Pulsipher? And whilst on that topic, why is it we've never seen an RPG from you? Do you think RPGs have a future?
Sea Kings is on a Worthington Publications Kickstarter until 1
November, and the Kickstarter says it will be published in December (although
I’m a little skeptical). My “Game Design” channel on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/LewGameDesign)
has at least one video about the game.
As you know I wrote a book titled Game Design (McFarland 2012) and
I have several other books in mind, but the return on my time spent, in an era
when fewer and fewer people read nonfiction, is quite discouraging. I'll be
self-publishing three reprint books RPG material and Diplomacy variants as well
as some books deriving from my online audiovisual courses.
The online game design courses - latest news at Pulsiphergames.com
- provide a much better return on my time spent, and more and more people would
rather listen than read. Also there's no competition, the only other online
game design courses that don't cost an arm and a leg because they are for
degrees, are text rather than video.
(Brief titles of my courses are: "Learning Game Design",
"Brief Introduction to Game Design", "How to Design Levels and Adventures",
"How to Write Clear Rules", "Get a Job in the Video Game
Industry". Many more coming.)
I am still on track to have at least five games published next
year including Sea Kings, Germania, Seas of Gold, Pacific Convoy, and a zombie
game. (Haven't placed Barbaria yet.) I say "on track" because lots of
things can go wrong. But the traditional
wargame publishers are desperate to get out of what I call the "wargame
ghetto," and many of the games I've been designing are in between wargames
and peace games: games where everyone would like to be at peace so that they
can prosper but most likely someone's going to start a war when they see
someone else doing better. They are definitely
games of maneuver and geospatial relationships, which is not true of many
Euros. That's probably because most of
my games are meant to be models of some reality, and most Euros are abstract (with
a story tacked-on afterward).
Why no RPG from me? Well at one point I was writing a supplement
(in those days before the hardcover Advanced D&D) that Games Workshop was
going to publish as TSRs representative in the UK (I was living in the UK at the
time). But that didn't work out and
ultimately Games Workshop lost their representation of TSR. And I was getting boardgames published, so I
worked on boardgames.
AD&D was my favorite game for decades and I could make it do
whatever I wanted with my own house rules and additions, so I didn't feel the
need to design another RPG. Even now, if I designed an RPG it would be intended
to be and remain simple, and that doesn't fit what's left of the market. So
until a few years ago I didn't even think about designing an RPG, and when I
started it was to be used in conjunction with a boardgame, not in the
traditional sense.
Another way to look at it might be this: the composer Sir William
Walton, when he finally wrote an opera, said something like "never write
an opera - too many notes." So I
could say about RPGs "too many words." More important, I'm not a fiction writer, I'm
too literal-minded, and I think most people who design RPGs are really
frustrated fiction writers, not game designers per se. Game design is about problem solving and
critical thinking within constraints, RPG design is (especially now, when
gamers in general are much more story-oriented) about storytelling with few
constraints.
My favorite game nowadays is the game of designing board and card
games.
The future? RPGs will be
played as long as the real world holds itself together, though I think
gradually computers will overtake tabletop RPGs, not because they're better but
because they're easier . Being a good
referee of a tabletop RPG is difficult, and for most people it's a form of work,
work they're accepting to entertain their friends. (In fact I've always said I don't trust
people who would rather referee than play!) As computers become more powerful
and computer programming gets better a computer can take on more and more of
the work required of a really good RPG referee. Perhaps computer assistance is
the wave of the future but I suspect in most cases it will be "let's play
this cooperative RPG or this MMO " on computers, rather than "let's
use computer assistance for tabletop games."
Tabletop RPGs have the social aspect in their favor that you can't
get with computer RPGs, even MMOs. Many of my friends are D&D players. I
met my wife through D&D in 1977, and in that group of five, two others (who
were not in a relationship when we started playing D&D) married one
another, and the last one married my wife's best friend! And we're all still
married. You can't beat that!
Unfortunately, RPGs tend to be "prisoners of capitalism"
(see my video about this on my YouTube channel: http://youtu.be/fZy6Lvc7kxY),
so we more or less inevitably get more and more rules until the game gets so
complex that it starts to collapse under its own weight, and we go on to a new
edition. At the same time in other forms of gaming we see games getting simpler
and shorter, not more complex. The RPG
market collapsed several years ago, and between capitalism, crowdsourcing, and
saturation of the market we're not going to see it recover. The biggest companies
can prosper in that climate but it's extremely hard for little companies to
make a living. Yes, a little company can sell 500 or even 1000 copies of
something, but that's not enough to make a living. People can do these kinds of
things as a hobby but having to earn a living another way takes an enormous amount
of time and energy.
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