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Interview with a Game Designer: Mike Pondsmith
Mike Pondsmith is a cornerstone of gaming. He started off designing table-top RPG games right out of college, then moved on to video games, and is now teaching Game Design full time at DigiPen. He took some time out of his busy schedule to let us interview him about his history, how he got where is he today, and where he’s going tomorrow. Read on, won’t you?
Obsidian Portal: So what got you started as a game designer?
Mike: I have always designed games, even as a kid. Most of them where board games or chess like ideas. (Game Design) was always something in the back of my mind. At one point, a friend of mine came home from college. He had a copy of the original D&D.
Obsidian Portal: The white box?
Mike: Mhmm, the white box. He also had a copy of Chainmail. So we started playing Chainmail and then moved on to D&D. We had played Naval wargaming before so up until then I had been big on that, designing all these ships and things, but we started playing D&D and I said “There might be something we can do with that, but I’m not all that fascinated by this entire idea of doing a Fantasy world.” I’m much more Science Fiction based.
We played, had a good time, but it kind of fell along the wayside. We did a lot of other wargaming and we had fun doing that. But then I meet my wife. And she’s into D&D gaming. In order to… go after my wife, I have to get into her D&D game. With her GM trying to kill me the entire time. Why? Because he’s her ex-boyfriend.
So, basically, he’s trying to take me out, and I’m still in the game, but the whole time I was thinking “You know, I’m not into this whole fantasy thing.” So one day I walk into my local game store and I’m going to buy some new D&D dice and all that, and I see the holy black box of Traveler. And I go “Whoa… Beowulf under attack S.O.S. Alright! This is what I need.” Finally, they had written D&D for me. It’s got some Fantasy; I’m big into Science Fiction. I love the whole idea, this is perfect.
I get home, build some characters, and kill my first character off while generating it. Kill my second character off while generating it. So finally I get it right, and I get into a game, and I find that I can’t kill my character. I found out that, in order to kill my character I have to effectively knock down 3 stats to be able to off my character. I’m realizing… this is bogus. I can’t kill the guy except when I’m generating him. This sucks.
At the time, I was working as a Graphic Designer for a University, so I have access to a type setting machine. So I write this game called Imperial Star, which is essentially my version of Traveler. And I redesign the system. I changed it to be something a little more percentile based. And it works, and I play a character, and it’s streamlined, and we all liked playing. And it had me thinking “Wow, this is really good!”
There’s a running joke on that, where years later I met Mark Miller, the designer of Traveler and I said to him “You’re to blame for me becoming a game designer.” And he said “Why’s that?” And I said “Because I played the original Traveler, where you couldn’t-” And he finished my sentence “kill your character except in character generation, yeah I know.” Then he groaned and said “Here, I owe you this.” And he handed me a hardback copy of his revised version of Traveler, and I still have it to this day. It’s one of my most treasured possessions.
Fast forward a few years, and I’m down in Santa Cruz. I’ve become a fan of Anime. I’m in a bookstore one day, and I come across some copies of the Mobile Suit Gundam manga, all in Japanese. I’m looking at these giant robots and I’m thinking “This is great.” And then I think “Hey, this is Science Fiction. I have a Science Fiction system… I can adapt that, no problem!” The only problem is, I don’t read Japanese, so I have no bloody idea what is actually being said, what the plot line is, I have no idea what’s going on. So I have to make it up as I go along. So as I’m making it up, I add in some of my own ideas, and essentially this becomes Mekton. I’d like to say that Gundam influenced Mekton, but I didn’t know enough about what was going on to make Mekton into Gundam.
That’s it for the first part of this interview with Mike Pondsmith! Tune in tomorrow for Part two, where Mike tells us when he felt he “Really made it to the Big time.”
Stats & Art Contest Mar. 2010: HamSTAR 2099! 3/02/2010 – 3/31/2010
UPDATE: Results can be found here
This contest runs through the 31st of March. The Facebook fanpage has done it again, Adventurers! This time they’ve invented a game system. Well, ok technically they invented two (See here for details).
Stats
If you can come up with stats for Feral Space Hamsters (or their Feral Space Chinchilla PCs) as PCs for Ironclaw, Rogue Trader, or the strangely defined laws of HamSTAR 2099 & ChinKILLA 3010, then you’ll have a chance to win a $25 US gift certificate to Amazon.com! We’ll pick the best three entries, and they’ll be our winners. There’s no limit to the number of entries, and you can win for more than one setting!
Art
If you can dream up art for the fictional cover of either the HamSTAR 2099, or ChinKILLA 3010 core rulebooks, then you’ll have a chance to win a $25 US gift certificate to Amazon.com! We’ll pick the best three entries, and they’ll be our winners. There’s no limit to the number of entries, and you can win for more than one art piece!
Good Luck, and Good Gaming!
Email submissions to dan(at)obsidianportal(dot)com.
Four new site updates, 3/1/2010
Hail Adventurers!
We’ve been busy behind the portal making changes so you don’t have to! As you know, we’re dedicated to providing the best campaign management platform in the world, and that means that the changes are always fast and furious around here. Here’s what’s changed in our most recent round of updates.
1) Co-GM Functionality –Ascendant Members Only!
You’ve dreamt about it. You shouted about it. And we’re finally giving it to you! Just log into your account, open one of your campaigns, click on Manage Members, and the screenshot above says the rest! This feature is available to our Ascendant Members only. Why not become one today?
2) Improved Notification System –Ascendant Members Only!
Want your players to know about an important update to a page in your campaign? Or perhaps you’d like to share a particularly sensitive update with a single player? Now you can send automatic email notifications for any of your campaign pages!
Additionally, we’ve tweaked forum notifications so that each poster can control who gets notified for each post. It’s super nice! Just like the last feature, this one is only available to our Ascendant Members. Why not give it a go?
3) Changing your Username
This feature is available to all users! Did you enter in the wrong Username when you signed up? Does it haunt you throughout your day with a dark whisper in your mind saying “You did it wroooooong. I’m a scary voice in your heaaaaaaad!” Well fear not my deranged friend, because now you can change your Username!
If you’d like to change your Username, log into Obsidian Portal, click on “My Profile” and then “Edit My Account”. Your Username is the first thing on the page. Changing your username will change the URL for your profile and all the previous links to your Obsidian Portal user profile will no longer work! So be careful when you make the change, or the hauntings will continue forever.
4) 15 day free trial for new Ascendant Memberships!
All new Ascendant Memberships are eligible for a 15 day free trial! Simply choose the length of subscription you’d like and checkout with Amazon. If you don’t like your Ascendant Membership, cancel any time before the trial runs out and you won’t be charged a cent! Sign up today!
Forgotten Realms: The Savage North
It’s March! That means a number of exciting things, but first and foremost for you, dear Adventure, it means that there’s a new Featured Campaign! As you know, we feature a new Obsidian Portal campaign every month. We do this so you can see some of the best table-top campaigns the internet has to offer. And this month, we have something very special for you this month.
This month’s Featured Campaign is DMed by Rodney Thompson, RPG Developer at Wizards of the Coast. Rodney was the Lead Designer for the Star Wars: Saga Edition RPG and he’s currently the Lead Developer of the upcoming Dark Sun 4th Edition setting. And his Obsidian Portal campaign, Forgotten Realms: The Savage North, is awesome. Rodney was kind enough to let us interview him about his work at Wizards of the Coast, and his campaign.
Obsidian Portal: So we hear that you work at Wizards of the Coast. Can you tell us more about what it is you do there?
-What are your responsibilities?
-What cool stuff are you working on now?
-If you could change any aspect of the current edition of D&D, what would it be?
Rodney: My job title at Wizards is technically RPG Developer, but I’m a man of many hats. While my primary responsibility is to be a Developer on D&D, I’ve also spent the last few years as the lead designer and developer on the Star Wars RPG.
As for recent projects, my biggest projects coming out in 2010 are the Dark Sun Campaign Setting, which I was the lead developer for, and the D&D Essentials line, which I co-designed. I was also the lead designer on the Monster Vault.
It’s tough to say what I’d change right off the top of my head, because any change has a lot of repercussions once made. I’ll say that we’ve got some exciting new stuff coming up in the Essentials that really are going to surprise (and, I hope, delight) people. I think if I was going to make one change to my 4E campaign, it would probably be to change the way magic items interact with character math. Basically, I like my magic items to be a little more special icing on the cake, and a little less of a required part of the character needed to succeed. That said, we’ve made some headway down that path with DMG2 and we go even further in Dark Sun, so that’s one change that’s coming about.
Obsidian Portal: Where do you get your inspiration for your games?
Rodney: I tend to be a very classic fantasy/classic D&D style of gamer. That said, my current campaign is heavily inspired by Western films—not necessarily in their environment or visual aesthetics, but definitely in terms of the story. My campaign plays on a lot of classic Western themes—lawlessness vs. civilization, dangerous men on a dangerous frontier, authority figures who are little to no help at all, etc.
Obsidian Portal: How much time per week do you spend getting ready for a game session?
Rodney: I tend to prep one adventure at a time, and each adventure I design covers about 1 level’s worth of play. I usually do a few hours of up-front prep before I start the adventure, and then over the course of the three or four weeks it takes to run I usually do about an hour of prep every Sunday night before I run on Mondays. On top of that, I’d say I put about an hour a week into things like maintaining the Obsidian Portal wiki for the campaign, sketching out custom magic items and other rewards, and generally brainstorming the direction that the campaign is headed in.
Obsidian Portal: So your campaign is called Forgotten Realms: The Savage North. Can you tell us about its world, its inhabitants, the PCs, and the overall story?
Rodney: I’m running the campaign in the Forgotten Realms of 4th Edition, but in the North, mostly in Icewind Dale and the lands north of the Spine of the World mountains. Since the 4E Campaign Setting didn’t really touch on that area much, I’m pretty much filling in the gaps using my 2nd Edition FR materials. When I was in college I ran a pretty expansive 2E campaign in the North, and I’m using all of my old materials as a basis, but updating things to the new timeline.
The great thing about the North is that it’s very much the frontier, and there’s a lot of fertile ground for thrusting the heroes into a position of influence right away. There’s less intervention from higher powers there, and plus I’ve always liked the sort of frigid, snow-covered lands as a backdrop for D&D.
The main antagonists of the campaign’s heroic tier were a group of bandits called the Blackhands, known for their distinctive black gloves. More than just outlaws, the Blackhands were pretty much controlling the entire North through fear and intimidation, and were found in most of the Ten Towns “protecting” the inhabitants from harm. When the heroes arrived, they started liberating Icewind Dale from the clutches of the Blackhands, and at the conclusion of the heroic tier they finally discovered the secret citadel used by the Blackhand leaders, laid siege to it, defeated the white dragon Aurelion that had been aiding the Blackhands, and discovered that the Blackhand’s leader had secretly been dead for years. As we enter the paragon tier, the players have discovered that some githyanki had been manipulating the Blackhands all along, and were clearly involved in some kind of plot that seems to encompass not only the North but also the Nine Hells, Baldur’s Gate, the prison-city of Wheloon, Zakhara (yeah, that’s right, I’m including Al-Qadim material in the campaign), and Myth Drannor.
Towards the end of the heroic tier, the heroes started to realize that they were not just brought together randomly, but that they all have some connection to the greater scheme of things. Zereb-Khan (a genasi swordmage, played by Logan Bonner) discovered that an old apprentice of his former master was once a Blackhand lieutenant who served time in Wheloon with Sardon (a genasi warlord, played by Chris Tulach). This apprentice and Sardon were members of the Seven of Wheloon, a group of criminals who escaped from the prison-city after being broken out by drow of the Shadowstep clan. Malkyr (a drow rogue, played by Mike Mearls) is a member of this clan, but wasn’t involved in the breakout. Theren (a half-elf warlock, played by Derek Guder) discovered that his father was murdered by this old apprentice; Theren’s father was also once an instructor at Blackstaff Tower, who set Harold Glimmerswick (a human wizard, played by Greg Bilsland) on a hunt for a mysterious substance known as godsblood. They all recently discovered that the aforementioned apprentice was turned into a seeker of godsblood by the Order of Blue Fire, who apparently have plans to do the same to Sardon. As you can tell, there are a lot of connections between the heroes’ backstories that have come to light over the course of the campaign.
Obsidian Portal: How closely do you stick to the Forgotten Realms canon?
Rodney: I like to use the FR setting as a backdrop, but not as a metaplot. The story I’m telling is definitely my own. As I mentioned before, I’m using a lot of 2E reference materials for my game, so it’s kind of a hodgepodge of the 2E Realms with 4E Realms overlays. In general, I’ve used the 4E Campaign Guide as a jumping off point, and occasionally circle back around to pick up things from time to time, but it’s very much my own story.
Obsidian Portal: We hear that many of your players are also game designers. Do you have to grapple with them for control of your game world, or do they typically let you DM as you see fit?
Rodney: I’m usually pretty flexible about letting my players define the campaign world anyways, so there’s no grappling. If anything, I try and encourage them to take ownership of the setting. For example, Chris Tulach completely made up the whole concept of a group of escapees called the Seven from Wheloon, and I took that and ran with it, tying it into the character histories of other characters. I find that letting my players be creative like that keeps them engaged, and whether or not they are game designers.
Obsidian Portal: How much of the campaign world is original content developed by you and your players?
Rodney: Almost all of it. While I use canon FR locations for most things, every single NPC and storyline is completely of my own making. The only exception is that I inserted the Scepter Tower of Spellgarde adventure into the game at one point, but customized it heavily.
Obsidian Portal: Where do you get your inspiration for your story?
Rodney: The heroic tier, at least, is heaviliy influenced by Westerns. The Blackhands are sort of a cross between the Zhentarim and the Cowboys from Tombstone or Calveras’ men from The Magnificent Seven. Going into the paragon tier, I’m easing back on the Western themes, and leaning more toward classic D&D adventuring. It’s tougher to do the Western-inspired stories at paragon tier, so for that I’m drawing a lot upon the design work I did for the upcoming Plane Above sourcebook, as well as the Al-Qadim campaign setting. I feel like the campaign may head to Zakhara at some point, but up until then the players will be spending a lot of time in Baldur’s Gate, if I had my guess. We’ll have some urban adventures, and then go from there to Zakhara, or possibly to the Underdark or to the Astral Sea, depending on how the campaign develops.
Obsidian Portal: Where does your game group typically play?
Rodney: We have played in numerous places thus far, but we currently play in conference rooms at Wizards of the Coast. The office has some really nice rooms with big white boards, large tables, and comfortable seating that I like to take advantage of. Some rooms even have speaker systems, so I can connect my iPod to it and play background music during the game.
Obsidian Portal: How well do you know your players?
Rodney: I’d say we’re all pretty good friends. I currently work or have worked with four of the players, and the others are either close friends or have come in from other campaigns. We hang out outside of the game, and of course I see several of my players around the office on a daily basis.
Obsidian Portal: What kinds of challenges are you faced with in your campaign?
Rodney: It’s definitely had its ups and downs. I originally started the campaign as a more casual, beer-and-pretzels kind of game. While we were having fun, we weren’t making much progress, and I was itching to run a game that was more fast-paced and plot-heavy. So, late last year I started implementing a series of changes to make sure we played more regularly and got more gaming in. Since then, the game has really picked up momentum. In fact, I started a series of blog articles on the Wizards Community site called Campaign Repairman to chronicle the process of me turning my game around. I figure a lot of DMs probably have some of the same problems that I have faced, and could benefit from some advice on how to make changes and salvage a lackluster campaign.
We’ve also lost a couple of players due to real-life obligations, and so we’ve had some challenges in introducing new players, but so far the core group has remained engaged.
Obsidian Portal: What aspects of your campaign are you really proud of?
Rodney: I’m really excited about how well the game has turned around after slowing down from time to time. I was worried that the campaign was going to fall apart at a certain point, but things look to have turned around. I’m also very proud of the capstone adventure I ran to get the players from 10th level to 11th level. It was an all-day adventure that played out over the course of about 8 hours. It was a blast, and I hope I can top it in the future. Maybe for the 20th level adventure…
Rodney has dedicated his career to his love of gaming. His Obsidian Portal campaign is a living testament to his cause. For the dedication exhibited by Rodney and his players to keeping table-top RPGs alive and well, we welcome them with open arms into the immortals halls of the Obsidian Portal.
New System Thursday, 2/25/2010
It’s New System Thursday! We take some time each Thursday to add a new system to our list of over 130 supported table-top RPG systems and settings. Today’s system is 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars by UK RPG demigod, Gregor Hutton.
In space, you murder a lot of aliens.
Is 3:16 a perfect game? Well, no, as it’s not got….. ummmm…… then there’s…… errrrrr…….. OK, I’ll admit it; I can’t think of a damned thing to add or take away from 3:16 that would make it a better game. So I guess it must be perfect after all.
3:16 is a stupidly simple beer-and-pretzels game and a deeply complex moralistic one, all at the same time. The players’ characters are members of the elite 3:16th Expeditionary Force who’s task it is to rid the universe of alien scum to keep the Utopian Earth a safe and wholesome place to be. It’s Starship Troopers, Those Guys from Alien II and every dumb Space Marine movie all rolled into one. Add in rules which perfectly fit the tone and setting, the utterly brilliant Flashbacks concept, the promise of Starkiller missiles and the lightest touch of moral decay and you’ve got a system that everyone should be legally mandated to play at least once in their life.
If you haven’t it yet you can buy a PDF of the rule book here. Then, Make a 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars campaign now!
Finding a Gaming Group
by Zachary Houghton
This week’s article comes to us from Zachary Houghton, who is a freelance RPG writer and proprietor of the gaming blog RPG Blog 2. He lives just outside Indianapolis, Indiana with his lovely family, where he waits all year for Gen Con to come back around. You can visit him at www.rpgblog2.com, or email him at mail.rpgblog(at)gmail.com.
So you’ve just had another gaming group end in failure. Perhaps you had too many no call/no shows, perhaps players drifted away, or perhaps the same old incompatibility issues sunk your campaign for the umpteenth time. There’s nothing more frustrating as a Game Master than to see poor group cohesion tank a campaign in which you had invested a massive amount of time.
Let’s face it: as our hobby gets older and our outside obligations and responsibilities increase, it becomes important to maximize our gaming time. All too often, we ignore one of the biggest reasons for a failed campaign: our group isn’t up to the challenge, or isn’t what we need for what we’re trying to do.
Of course, forming a solid gaming group is easier said than done, isn’t it? Often times, especially in small-town life, we have to work with what we have. We don’t have a large gaming network to pull from, or at least that’s what we think. That’s because we often ignore all the resources we have in finding and forming a new group.
I found myself in a similar predicament not too long ago. My buddies and I had just seen a campaign crash and burn very early on. There were chemistry issues, and we felt that new blood was needed—it wasn’t that we didn’t like the rest of our group, just that we all had different expectations and wants from our gaming.
We could have gone back to the same well we’d been going to for several campaigns. But frankly, it wasn’t working. We’d been in the same small gaming circle for so long, we’d stagnated. A small remnant of us decided we needed a new core. Over coffee one night, we discussed how to find more gamers. We knew they were out there, but how to reach them?
We decided on a “blitz” strategy. We didn’t know which approach would be successful, so we tried them all. We printed up fliers and hung them up at the library. We registered on online sites such as Meetup.com and Nearby Gamers. (Editor’s Note:We also have a resource here at Obsidian Portal you might like to try.) We slid fliers into RPG books on the shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble. We put out the word on various social networking sites. We ended up receiving at least one inquiry from each method tried! If you were trying to get word out about a new product, you wouldn’t just use one medium, would you? Why should recruiting for a RPG campaign (a definite exercise in salesmanship) be any different?
From this, we received a number of interested parties. But how do we figure out if we’d all play well together? Well, email was our first way of communicating, which was good for getting an idea of their likes and dislikes. But I’m a firm believer that a face-to-face meeting can be important. So we didn’t waste their time or our time in a gaming relationship that may not work, we scheduled an informal meeting over coffee and bagels one night. We all showed up in a stress-free environment, and were all to talk about gaming, our hobbies, our schedules, our expectations—all things that may not have otherwise happened. More importantly, it was an excellent icebreaker and allowed us get into a comfort zone with one another earlier on in the subsequent campaign.
Admittedly, the group still could have had issues—that didn’t happen, but it’s important to remember that recruiting and meeting before your game isn’t a magic wand; it’s risk management. Treat it as such, and you should be fine.
Once you have the group, it is up to the Game Master and players to provide the continued momentum and dedication to make your campaign successful. But you need to start off on the right platform.
