Category: RPG Design and Business

Flotsam: Adrift Amongst the Stars – playtesting

Josh Fox Leave a comment

I’ve just completed a full version of Flotsam for external playtesting!

Flotsam is a roleplaying game about outcasts, misfits and renegades living in the belly of a space station, in the shadow of a more prosperous society. The focus of the game is on interpersonal relationships and the day-to-day lives and struggles of a community that lacks the basic structures of civilisation.

System-wise, it was originally a Dream Askew hack, but has wandered a great deal from those roots. It owes quite a bit to Hillfolk and Archipelago, too. Everyone gets to act like a GM some of the time, controlling one aspect of the game setting and the threats it contains, and everyone gets to play a Primary character some of the time, exploring their life and relationships.

If you like the sound of that, and you think you might like to give the game a try, please get in touch by commenting here or emailling me at flotsam (at) vapourspace (dot) net.

List of UK game designers

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For those who haven’t seen it elsewhere – I have created a list of UK game designers. I have mostly done this because I intend to try and play and run more games by UK designers, and then… well, I got sucked into being completist.

Here it is:

List of UK RPG designers

Something tells me this list is neither complete nor 100% accurate, but it’s a good start. Let me know if there’s gaps or errors in comments!

Game feedback: different kinds

Josh Fox 3 Comments

I was listening to one of the Metatopia panelcasts from last year, and the panelists[*] mentioned that there are different types of feedback and wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to say what kind of feedback you wanted. Well, I agree, and it’s something I’ve been meaning to write about. So here goes.

Before I start, let me say that when I send my games out for feedback (playtesting, normally) I always provide a list of specific questions. This is partly to ensure that specific things I’m wondering about get covered; it’s partly to avoid feedback I’ll find unhelpful; and it’s partly to provide a structure to help people think about the play experience. But anyway. Let’s talk through different kinds of feedback.

  1. Drafting feedback. This includes identifying spelling and grammar errors, as well as areas where language might not be as clear as it could be. You might want this when your game is in its final draft form. You probably won’t find it that useful before that point, because you’ll be redrafting anyway.
  2. Comprehension feedback. This is a bit like drafting feedback, but a bit higher level. It’s asking whether there are aspects of the rules that are confusing. Can you understand the game? This might be particularly useful for an early draft read-through. I normally check on it with playtesting as well.
  3. Experiential feedback. What did the game feel like to play? Was it humorous or scary? Was a particular mechanic hard work? Did you get emotionally invested in your character? This is generally a key component of playtesting for me. I want to create a game that feels a particular way, and so I need you to tell me what it felt like to play it. That’s much less useful if you’re just testing out a mechanic in isolation, though. You also might not need it so much if, say, you’ve already playtested the game quite a bit and you’re just testing a modification to the original design.
  4. Mechanical feedback. What happened, mechanically? Did you seem to crit fail constantly? Was there an exploit where you could build up unlimited bennies? Did some mechanics just never get used? Did anything break down at the table? You’ll probably want this sort of feedback at some point in playtesting, unless your game is super freeform. Some people like to playtest mechanics individually, outside the context of a full session. It’s not something I do, but worth considering.
  5. Design advice. It is often said that it is very annoying when people try to design your game for you through their feedback. And generally, I do agree with that. But, sometimes that may be exactly what you want: you know something isn’t working in your game, and you want suggestions on what to do about it.

So, when you’re asking for feedback on your game, be clear which kind(s) of feedback you’re looking for and, where appropriate, which kinds you aren’t looking for. I would add that you can, and probably should, say which specific bits of your game you are asking for feedback on. If there’s a particular mechanic or aspect of play you want to hear about, say so! Even if there isn’t one particular aspect, you might want to break your game down into specific areas you want covered.

Of course, it bears noting that you might not always realise that you need feedback on something. Maybe you think your mechanics are working perfectly and you don’t need feedback on them. If a playtest reveals they broke down completely, I’d hope my playtesters would tell me that, even if I was only asking for experiential feedback.

I hope that’s useful. I’ve probably missed something. Comments welcome!

[*] I don’t know exactly who said it. Panelists included Emily Care-Boss, Julia Ellingboe, Avonelle Wing, Shoshana Kessock and Amanda Valentine.

Crowdfunding calculator

Josh Fox 2 Comments

In the run up to our planned Kickstarter of Lovecraftesque, I’ve been busily crunching numbers to make sure that the whole thing will fly financially. All of our figures have gone into a spreadsheet, where I can easily update the costs as I get better information, and tweak the prices of the rewards to reflect those costs. In turn the spreadsheet works out how much we need to ask for.

Anyway, having gone to the effort of creating it, it seemed like other people might find it useful. If you give it basic information about your crowdfunding campaign (like reward levels, costs and so on), it will work out your reward levels for you.

I’ve included instructions on how to use it (at the top and in comments on the relevant cells). In brief: fill in the yellow bits and then read off the information in the green bits.

Crowdfunding calculator

Crowdfunding calculator

EU VAT for indie roleplaying publishers

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I first noticed the changes to EU VAT when they started being shared all over my social meejas around about December last year. Everyone was all doomy about it. It didn’t seem that relevant to me at the time, partly because I don’t sell digital stuff on the internet, and I suppose mostly because I assumed it would blow over.

It hasn’t blown over, and now I’m contemplating selling digital stuff on the internet. So I’ve been doing some research into this. For the uninitiated, it basically means that anyone, anywhere in the world who sells digital products or services to customers in the EU is liable to pay VAT at the local rate to the member state where the customer lives. Phew! That’s a lot of people. And in due course – scheduled for 2016 – it will apply to physical goods too, though one might hope they’ll make some improvements to this confusing and opaque law in the interim.

I have seen some people, mostly Americans I think, rolling their eyes and saying “how do you plan to enforce that”. Well, I wouldn’t want to put my business in the position of breaking the law in the EU, even if I was in America; but as it happens I am also in the EU, so that makes it… pretty easy to enforce, actually.

Anyway: my research is, essentially, a bit of googling, a fair bit of looking at the website of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), and an email conversation with same. HMRC’s answers can probably be considered as definitive as it gets at this point, for UK businesses at least, and probably for everyone.

And before I go any further: I’m not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. I am not responsible if you mess this up.

Why is this so hard?

Well for one, it’s not that easy to determine where your customer is. You’re selling them digital goods, so it isn’t like you can easily tell by looking at them. And the VAT rate is different in different EU Member States, so it’s pretty much easy to mess this up.

The HMRC online guide to the new rules says that except in some weirdly specific circumstances (it’s along the lines of, if the customer is buying through their mobile bought from country A while flying in a plane from country B to country C but is in the airspace of country D when the sale is made…) then you have to “obtain and keep 2 pieces of non-contradictory information to support and evidence the member state where the customer is normally located.”

And, “Examples of the type of supporting evidence that tax authorities will accept include:

  • the billing address of the customer
  • the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the device used by the customer
  • customer’s bank details
  • the country code of SIM card used by the customer
  • the location of the customer’s fixed land line through which the service is supplied
  • other commercially relevant information (for example, product coding information which electronically links the sale to a particular jurisdiction)”

So, that might be easy or difficult, depending on how you handle your payments and so forth. Administratively, it’s definitely not going to be easy for anyone who has an appreciable number of EU sales.

Oh, and you’re required by law to include the correct rate of VAT in your prices, too. In theory that means you need to get the above bits of information in advance of sale and then work out the correct VAT and include it in your price which, let’s forget about that. I can’t see any reason why you can’t just quote a blanket price to all customers and say “if you’re in the EU, we’ll pay the VAT”, but then you have a tricky balancing act to set a price which ensures you can afford to pay the VAT, when you won’t know how many customers you’re going to get from each country; plus you’ll be marking up your prices for non-EU customers to make sure you have the funds to pay VAT for the EU customers.

I don’t like the sound of this! What can I do about it?

There’s a lot of ways you might legally avoid having to worry about all this.

First off, if you’re selling bundled products, and the digital product is only “ancillary” to the main product, then you don’t have to pay, at least as long as the law only applies to digital stuff. But you have to be careful, because the definition of when a component in a bundle is ancillary and when it’s part of the main thing you’re selling, doesn’t seem to exist. My guess is that a hard copy RPG sold with a PDF version counts as primarily a physical product, but I wasn’t able to get a straight answer out of HMRC so I’m not 100% confident.

There’s a sort of loop-hole in the law – I say loop-hole, it seems to have been deliberately designed this way to catch the likes of Amazon but miss smaller operations – which says that if your product isn’t delivered automatically then you don’t have to pay VAT. Emailling an attachment doesn’t count as delivering automatically. Emailling a link to a download site does. I can’t really see the logic, but that seems to be the rule. Still, you probably won’t want to manually email attachments to large numbers of people if you can help it. Also, you may want to check up on your email providers policies, as some email providers (e.g. gmail, or so I’m told) blacklist people as spammers who send too many such emails.

What about selling through a third party? Or crowdfunding?

A third way to get around the tax is if there is an intermediary in your sales process. This is crucial for a lot of roleplaying games, because they are frequently sold through online platforms such as DriveThruRPG, Indie Press Revolution, or through crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. I wasn’t clear on whether digital products sold through such a platform would be subject to the EU VAT rules, so I asked HMRC. I am going to quote their reply in full:

“If the platform operator identifies you as the seller but sets the general terms and conditions, or authorises payment, or handles delivery/download of the digital service [my emphasis], the platform is considered to be supplying the consumer. They are therefore responsible for accounting for the VAT payment that is charged to the consumer.”

I think that’s pretty clear. In the case of sites like DrivethruRPG and Indie Press Revolution, they will handle the payment and delivery of the digital service, so they are liable to pay the correct rate of VAT. In the case of sites like Kickstarter, they set the general terms and conditions and authorise payment, so they are liable to pay the correct rate of VAT.

[edited to add:] The HMRC website also has this to say ”

If you operate a digital platform through which third parties sell e-services you are liable to account for the VAT on those sales unless every one of the following conditions are met:

  • the digital platform and everyone else involved in the supply must identify who the supplier is in their contractual arrangements
  • the invoice, bill or sales receipt must identify that supplier and the service supplied
  • the digital platform must not authorise the charge to the consumer
  • the digital platform must not authorise the delivery
  • the digital platform must not set the general terms and conditions of the sale”

Again, this seems pretty clear to me. [/edit]

Kickstarter have specifically said that they will not do this, and that the campaign promoters are responsible for dealing with EU VAT. However, I think HMRC’s advice makes it pretty clear that they are wrong about that. This may not be particularly good news: after all Kickstarter is a big enough target that at some point someone may go after them for the VAT they have said they won’t pay. VAT is generally paid at around 20-25%, so the bill could be pretty big. If I were Kickstarter I think I’d be thinking pretty hard about this. But HMRC’s advice strongly suggests to me that you, as  the campaign promoter, do not need to think about this.

Finally, it’s worth noting that there are payment platforms out there like Payhip, who as well as being legally bound to deal with EU VAT, have said that they will do so. Where possible, you should consider using such providers, simply because those who are still in denial may be on a rocky road, and if you use them you may take some bumps along the way.

Playtesting: some reflections

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Lovecraftesque playtests

I’ve collated the information from the first Lovecraftesque external playtest and I thought it might be useful to discuss it here. I’m not going to talk about our game, instead I’ll be talking about the playtest in more general terms, in the hopes of deriving some more general lessons about playtesting.

Recruitment

We advertised the playtest through our website, Black Armada, and through G Plus, Twitter and Facebook. We put the files in a public drop box but only provided the link on request to people who expressed an interest in playtesting.

We received 31 expressions of interest. 29 of these were from people who appeared to be men, 2 from women. 6 were from people who we know quite well in real life, and another 3 from people we’ve met a few times in the flesh. The rest were from comparative strangers.

We allowed six weeks for playtesting from the day we announced it. We sent a reminder out at the midway point to anyone who we hadn’t interacted with for at least a week, and another one a few days before the deadline.

Of 31 expressions of interest, 19% sent in a report.

We received 6 playtest reports within the playtest period – just under a 20% response rate. All of these were submitted by men. 2 came from friends, 4 from comparative strangers. Between these we got 22 session-hours of playtesting, or 72 person-hours.

It seems to me that we were fairly fortunate to get as many as we did. In previous playlists using a similar method I only had a 10% response rate, from a smaller number of expressions of interest. The improved success comes, I think, from a combination of us being better connected within the indie roleplaying community than I was back then, and having a game pitch that was always likely to be a bit more popular.

Method

None of the playtesters received any guidance from us or clarification. They were given a set of detailed questions covering 10 aspects of the game, which were rather bossily labelled “READ THIS FIRST”, in addition to the rulebook and some supporting materials.

None of the playtests involved us, either as a participant or a witness.

Results

All six playtest reports responded to the questions we asked fairly assiduously. I wouldn’t say they were all completely comprehensive, but none of them ignored the structured questions, and all responded to most of the points we wanted covered. One came with a blow-by-blow actual play report (which was quite valuable beyond what our questions elicited).

I shall now provide a breakdown of the issues identified by the playtest. (Either identified by the playtesters themselves or apparent from their report whether they themselves realised it or not.) I have classified them as follows:

  • A critical issue is one which would make the game unplayable.
  • A serious issue is one which would make the game not fun or prevent the design goals of the game from being realised. If even one group identified a serious issue, I’d count it.
  • A major issue is one which makes the game very clunky or interferes with realising the design goals of the game.
  • A minor issue is one which doesn’t interfere with the design goals or make the game avery clunky, but rather is a matter of polish. Minor rules clarifications also fall into this category.

I’ve obviously had to exercise judgement as to whether an issue identified by a group is attributable to the design, and whether there’s anything that can be done in the design to ameliorate the issue. In one or two cases, because different groups reported radically different observations, I haven’t recorded an issue, but will instead watch for these recurring in the next round of playtesting.

Here’s what our groups found:

  • Critical issues – 0 (phew!)
  • Serious issues – 1
  • Major issues – 2
  • Minor issues – 16

50% of our groups caught all three major or serious issues, but 33% only caught one and 17% didn't catch any.

A note here about consistency: not all our issues were detected by all of our groups. Two groups (one of which played twice) did not pick up the serious issue identified above, and the two major issues were each picked up by only three of the six groups (arguably one of them was detectable in a fourth group, but I think we might have dismissed it based on their evidence alone, as it didn’t look that serious). More importantly, these were clustered: 3 groups caught all the serious and major issues, 3 groups missed at least two of these issues.

I want to be clear, by the way, that I don’t consider the above to be a poor reflection on any of our groups. I suspect the ones that missed issues did so because they were more familiar with the style of game or the genre. Some of our clearest and most helpful feedback came from groups that didn’t catch a lot of the bigger issues, but did notice many smaller ones. All the feedback was immensely useful.

The above suggests to me that you want at least three groups to test a game to be reasonably confident of picking up on major and serious issues. With fewer, you might get them, or you might be unlucky. (Of course in our case, we would need four groups to guarantee catching them all.)

By the way, I haven’t analysed the minor issues, but my impression is that they were sprinkled liberally through all six groups. I doubt if there’s a single group that didn’t pick up some minor issues missed by the rest.

Conclusions

The top line conclusion is that you need to playtest, and not just with one or two groups. The comparison with the playtesting on my previous game is instructive. I only had one response, which added a little to my own efforts at playtesting. But clearly, my analysis above means that there is a high risk of failing to catch even quite serious issues with such a low level of response. There would be innumerable smaller issues that will have slipped the net.

Getting playtesters isn’t at all easy. I think we were fortunate this time around. Our voices carry a bit further as a result of a few years circulating in the online indie gaming community. We got support from a couple of people with a very wide reach, and although it’s hard to say how much impact this had, I would guess a lot. And our game concept was more grabby – though whether we would have been taken as seriously if we’d proposed such a concept three years ago, I can’t say.

One thing I would observe is that it’s a lot easier to make playtests happen if you offer to organise them yourself. That’s pretty obvious, but it is worth saying anyway. You can tackle the tendency for the game to get cancelled by providing a venue, making sure you pick people you can rely on and above all not dropping out yourself. And you can make sure decent notes are taken and guarantee to take them away with you. It’s more effort, and if you want it to have the same value as an external test you’ll have to be disciplined about not facilitating the game itself, but it dramatically increases your sample size, which reduces the chances of missing a given issue.

Will people like your game?

Josh Fox 3 Comments

I’ve recently been playtesting a game, and the difference in response to that game and the previous one I designed got me thinking about what makes a game successful. The diagram below massively simplifies the process:

Screenshot 2015-02-21 18.22.17

Notice that if your ideas aren’t engaging, you’re already at a disadvantage. I doubt this will come as a surprise to anyone, but I think its an important observation.

Notice also that if you fail to communicate your ideas (or your design) then once again you are hampered.

There’s also feedback loops between these three streams. If people don’t buy your game (or download it, or sign up to play it at a con, or whatever) then you don’t get past the first hurdle, and people never play it. If people don’t play your game then they obviously won’t get to enjoy it. If people enjoy your game then they will talk about it, helping you get your message out and get more people to buy your game.

So, every element in all three chains is vital. And, unless you’re hiring someone else to do parts of the process for you, you need to be able to do all four things – ideas, communication, networking and design.