White Wolf: Now It’s Semi-Official

Today’s been an interesting one for White Wolf, CCP’s tabletop imprint. At ICC it announced that it was “freeing” (and dismantling much of) the Camarilla, developing new community and game management tools, and kinda sorta maybe not printing game books as we know them any more. Ryan Dancey was quite a bit firmer in a Gamasutra interview where he declared the whole thing a “legacy business.”

I’ve been aware of what was coming for a while and suspected it since 2008, when I heard some serious shifting of the tabletop release schedule, ranging from the EVE RPG being shelved to some other developments which were leaked to the tabletop gamer public, but as I found the rest out in confidence I’m not going to repeat them here.

Can I tell you exactly what’s going on? This is difficult as there are some things I know which I think give me a somewhat informed opinion, but which even couching in weasel words would make for a breach of ethics. But I can use it as a way to comment on trends I think apply to the situation and are relevant to a wider audience.

Tabletop RPG Producers Are the Best Open-Ended IP Developers in the World

Is this a hubris-ridden statement? Maybe — but it ain’t braggin’ if it’s true. There are multiple occasions where RPGs have had a drastically positive influence on intellectual properties. Star Wars is the best known example. As an open-ended property, Star Wars essentially owes its chops to West End Games, which managed the thing while it lay fallow and turned what was a closed, small story into a possibility-laden narrative field. Oh, and you know how Enterprise turned from a lousy series into something passable by the end? You can in part thank Paramount sending an intern to the Merril Collection to photocopy its Trek RPG archives. They didn’t keep them around at Paramount.

(That last bit of info comes from the collection’s curator, by the way, when I toured with Justin Mohareb a while back.)

Also, about ARGs? You’re welcome.

Now aside from these examples (which I’m sure will spark their own special nerd war) this particular skillset has managed to earn me a fair chunk of change for clients outside the tabletop gaming field. Fans tend to believe that this kind of work is at its best when done by the IP management team with the most money. These fans are wrong.

Unfortunately, well-heeled IP management teams tend to believe this too — and so do tabletop RPG developers who would really like to have as much money and prestige as folks in mainstream media and games. So with the exception of some visionaries, this kind of thing isn’t well known. On the Big IP side you get closed concepts without backbones. (Terminator, anyone? Yes, I am really saying that a Justin Achilli or Matt Forbeck could make it a bajillion more dollars.) On the RPG side you get creators learning the wrong lessons because they mistake a fat wad of cash for an applicable creative style.

(This is one reason why licensed games often under-perform. Game designers and developers are at the mercy of people who really do know less about how to transform their IP into an enduring success than they do.)

What does this mean vis a vis CCP? They’re pretty smart guys who seem to know the kind of talent they acquired. Do they know how to fit it into their own culture? The folks who were on the White Wolf side seem to be doing okay and I trust them. But this is a fragile situation. When you’re trying to show how a process that moves thousands of copies is legitimate in a culture used to a few orders of magnitude more, you have to be really goddamn convincing. And if you do convince them, why would they want you earning them beer and toilet paper money from tabletop RPGs? Even if you win, tabletop gaming doesn’t.

Converged, Mashable, Hackable Content — and Confusion

Think of DDI. It sucks — and it looks successful. It’s an underwhelming set of tools and resources but it still meets a need. We feel the need because familiar technology has primed us to do so. We’re reaching a convergence point right now where cheap ebook readers, mobile applications, netbooks and PoD technology are poised to radically change tabletop gaming. I currently have the rules for all of my go-to games on a tiny touchscreen MID that cost 150 bucks. Want a book? High quality PoD is simple and cheap; OneBookShelf nearly has the option ready for its merchants. It’s already easy to hack together exactly the game book you want, use it in multiple forms and share it if you’re an early adopter of the necessary tech. By 2011-2012 a physical RPG book may well be an affectation and right now, it’s only a marginal convenience.

(And let’s not forget about piracy. It matters. The tabletop RPG business isn’t the music business, folks, and it’s not the work of Cory Doctorow either.)

Here’s the rub: Nobody really knows what this means yet. My feeling isn’t that this isn’t a new way to play tabletop games but a new type of game — a “third way” of gaming that isn’t a managed electronic property or traditional RPGs, but draws a lot from self-organized social networking — something that White Wolf fandom adopted early.

(You know those chat games everybody craps on? Rough and tumble stuff like that is called “innovation.”)

The community is primed for a new type of game, and letting loose the reins on fans will help CCP understand what that is as long as management doesn’t listen to attractive, high level prognostication that tries to force it all from the top down. That’s always that danger when there’s a big difference in the monetized accomplishments of one group (CCP) compared to another (the nerds running a zillion chat games and fandom RPs).

And if you can’t get into this new game there’s always PDF and PoD. With piracy rampant, CCP probably has to emphasize the convenience of their own option by building better fulfillment and exerting some fearsome downward pressure on pricing. The price of an OBS-hosted game is already approaching bottom-tier smartphone app levels and CCP already has plenty of content in the system. Adding new content that lacks additional features isn’t cost effective unless it exploits fan contributions (always risky) or uses a new scheme to draw them into the sales funnel gracefully.

I don’t think anybody really knows what the next step is here, but let’s make one thing clear: LARPing with an iPhone or Droid isn’t going to bring back the earthshaking Mind’s Eye Theatre hordes of the 90s any more than a slide rule App is going to replace your calculator App. But is CCP going to give it a serious shot? Making money off of this sort of thing isn’t easy, and social media-based schemes are vulnerable to fads and fan refusal to participate in the moneymaking side. (Most Facebook ads and apps have a shitty most desired action rate, for example). Plus, some successes are bad example from a creative point of view, a la Mafia Wars.

Come on: We all know Mafia Wars blows. But it sure makes bank.

Ehm-Ehm-Oh

Yeah, a lot if it probably is about that — after all, it’s probably coming next year. The question is whether CCP will use its assets properly, or kill off what made White Wolf’s in-house style special. This is not to say the rest of CCP should just learn, since from what I’ve read, the tabletop staff seems to be get real inspiration out of their current roles.

The Unsolicited Advice

What do I think CCP should do? Aside from finding some excuse to pay me significant sums (which I am qualified to receive — email me!) I think they should stick to some form of traditional gaming as a form of rapid IP prototyping. Tabletop RPG design is an ideal technology for developing and testing intellectual property with a minimal budget in a short time frame. It’s inherently social and provides a way for quick, meaningful feedback. Plus, you’ll build fans and anticipation cheaply, and might even get a new idea or two about game design.

But about that feedback: Let’s filter the online RPG community. If we map by fan/non-fan and player/non-player we get a nice set of quadrants we can use to figure out what matters. I can’t help but suspect that the New World of Darkness reacted to the wrong quadrants — guys who want to fantasize about certain structures in games (5×5 splatitude!) instead of having a vivid participatory experience. We all know that there are very vocal folks out there whose opinions don’t really have bottom-line relevance. You want to make retired gamers happy, but you want to see what compels people to play more. On the fan/non-fan axis . . . that’s tricky. Some fandoms are toxic and closed, but some are open, and draw people from the non-fan category. The boundary between the two types isn’t fixed. Open fans identify with closed fans. The Games Workshop approach is to fire fans likely be in the closed category by demographic (defined as “boys with hair where there wasn’t hair before”). Use RPGs to fine tune an IP for an open fandom, but see if you can grab the odd grognard.

I’m not saying this as a stuck in the mud tabletop guy. I love that medium, but I’m working on my third electronic games/media project now and it’s awesome. There are substantial differences in presentation and practical role. Still, I think the tabletop (or wired post-tabletop) medium can enrich every stratum of IP development. Use it intelligently, respect its assets and keep its budget sane, and it won’t steer you wrong.