【RPGdesign Activity] Published Developer AMA: Please Welcome Mr. Kevin Crawford, designer and publisher of Stars Without Number

[u/jiaxingseng]

This week's activity is an AMA with designer Kevin Crawford

About this AMA

Kevin Crawford is Sine Nomine Publishing, the one-man outfit responsible for Stars Without Number, Godbound, Scarlet Heroes, Other Dust, Silent Legions, Spears of the Dawn, and the upcoming Wolves of God. He's been making a full-time living as an author-publisher for the past two years, after realizing that Sine Nomine had paid better than his day job for the three years before that. His chief interests here are in practical business steps and management techniques for producing content that can provide a living wage to its author.

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On behalf of the community and mod-team here, I want express gratitude to Mr. Crawford for doing this AMA.

For new visitors... welcome. /r/RPGdesign is a place for discussing RPG game design and development (and by extension, publication and marketing... and we are OK with discussing scenario / adventure / peripheral design). That being said, this is an AMA, so ask whatever you want.

On Reddit, AMA's usually last a day. However, this is our weekly "activity thread". These developers are invited to stop in at various points during the week to answer questions (as much or as little as they like), instead of answer everything question right away.

(FYI, BTW, although in other subs the AMA is started by the "speaker", Mr. Crawford asked me to create this thread for them)

IMPORTANT: Various AMA participants in the past have expressed concern about trolls and crusaders coming to AMA threads and hijacking the conversation. This has never happened, but we wish to remind everyone: We are a civil and welcoming community. I [jiaxingseng] assured each AMA invited participant that our members will not engage in such un-civil behavior. The mod team will not silence people from asking 'controversial' questions. Nor does the AMA participant need to reply. However, this thread will be more "heavily" modded than usual. If you are asked to cease a line of inquiry, please follow directions. If there is prolonged unhelpful or uncivil commenting, as a last resort, mods may issue temp-bans and delete replies.

Discuss.

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[u/jiaxingseng]

Hi Kevin,

Thank you for doing this AMA. I have a lot of questions.

1. It seems your games often use sand-box tools to help GMs. Is this part of your core direction in your design?

2. Do you feel pre-created campaign arcs are compatible with your design?

3. What do you feel about player-created settings and narrative (outside of what their characters can do)?

4. Onto other topics. How do you distribute your books in Europe? Any advice on fulfillment options?

5. What's the best way for new designers to promote their games?

6. What's your favorite recent fantasy book? What's your favorite recent sci-fi book?

[u/jiaxingseng]

Hey, here we go. Paging u/CardinalXimenes . You

[u/jiaxingseng]

On behalf of the mod team at r/RPGdesign, I would like to thank Mr. Kevin Crawford for sharing in the last AMA. Your generous participation led to exciting and informative discussion which benefited our community.

The AMA thread is now over. If Mr. Crawford or anyone else wishes to continue discussion, you are welcome to.

(paging u/CardinalXimenes )

[u/[deleted]]

Kevin, what would be your dream RPG writing project? That one thing you would love to write, even if it might be too niche or unusual to necessarily sell well.

[u/Nwabudike]

Hello Mr. Crawford, I was wondering what part of being a one-man show you dislike the most and what part was hardest for you to learn how to do? If you were part of a larger team what would you enjoy working on the most?

[u/Lord_Sicarious]

If you had to make a game focused on a single, rarely explored game/story element, what would you choose?

Alternatively, what game/story element do you think needs more attention across the industry?

[u/khellick]

Hi Kevin, fan of SWN here, thanks for making such a great game. I got into it and your work as a whole through your talk with Adam Koebel and his show Far Verona, and I'm about to start my own SWN campaign.

When you're developing a game like SWN, what's your design process like? Do you have a specific way you design a game, be it around a specific mechanic or through a general idea/theme? And from this starting point, how do you build that into a full game and how do you iterate on and refine each individual idea?

Thanks so much for taking the time to do this, and thank you for making such great games.

[u/CardinalXimenes → u/khellick]

I begin by imagining what I'm going to give the GM with a particular game. I always write for GMs, because if you get the GMs you will get the players. What kind of fun is this game going to offer? What setting, what tools, what appeal is this game going to have to a GM? Why would they decide to buy this game instead of another?

I never design around mechanics, because nobody cares about mechanics. At least, nobody as a definable market segment I think is worth pursuing. I design around ideas and hooks that I think are going to pull in the GMs and players, whether through the strength of the game premise or the promise of tremendous GM utility in the tools and resources.

Then I write it. I don't refine it until it's written, and then I refine it until I'm sick of it and then I publish it. If you polish each part individually before you get the whole thing done you'll never finish the job, so getting to that complete rough draft is always the very first job. You can polish something that exists, but you can't fix a part you haven't even written yet.

[u/AuroraChroma]

What's something business-wise that you think people should know, that nobody ever seems to ask about?

[u/belphanor]

any chance of doing a superhero game? I'd love to see your take on the genre.

[u/superstranger]

Thanks for doing the AMA. From what you’ve seen so far in the industry, what do you think is the best way to break into game design? Is it better to try to self-publish, shop your ideas or games around to large publishers, or post free PDFs online and advertise around?

[u/megazver]

Have you done (you're prolific, so I'm afraid I haven't read all of your work) or are you maybe planning on a book that focuses on urban settings and campaigns?

I love generating sandboxes, but if there's one thing that bugs me about sandboxes SWN or Godbound generate is that, let's say, a hamlet or a small space station has exactly the same amount of complexity as a fantasy megapolis or a planet with the population in millions - and if I wanted to actually flesh those out in more detail or start a campaign that's entirely set in one, there aren't really many tools to support it. Just going off of two tags for the entire campaign is a bit rough and the tags don't quite work if you try to, say, roll them for neighborhoods or try to generate a web of city's factions.

[u/Odog4ever]

A few questions:

1. Where do you think the sweet spot is between supporting existing games lines with new supplements and just creating brand new games altogether? OR how to you prioritize projects in a way that is feasible and manageable?

For example Stars Without Number 1/2 ed, and Godbound have gotten quite a few supplements but games like Silent Legion don't have any and now Wolves is coming out.

2) Any interest in branching out and making content for the following genres?:

• Cyberpunk. Basically city-based campaigns for Stars without Number, with GM tools for running mega-corps, organized crime, law enforcement, terrorists cells, AI cults, taking systematic "control" of sections of a city, etc. A more generic version of Polychrome. (OK actually I'm offering my first_born for an Earth-based cyberpunk opus that takes place centuries before the Scream but alas, I know where the bread is butter.)

• Urban Fantasy. Supernatural protagonists trying to stay hidden in a city that doesn't know they exist while wielding influence from the shadows; so your own take on a political intrigue sandbox i.e. Vampire, World of Darkness, etc)

[u/[deleted]]

Kevin, have you considered more work with Silent Legions? It's a gem of a game but seems to get no attention from the community - which may be in part from a perceived lack of further support. Anyway, keep doing what you do. Love your work.

[u/Jalor218]

Thanks for doing this AMA. I've got a few questions:

1. I know that releasing Stars Without Number for free was a huge bump in popularity for Sine Nomine, but I've also seen free games languish in obscurity. What did you do to get the word out about SWN?

2. Sine Nomine has pretty much carved out a niche of making books with sandbox tools. Is there another niche you've noticed in OSR games that's gone relatively unfilled?

3. You wrote one of my favorite RPG settings in Godbound, and you managed to fit multiple campaigns worth of adventure hooks onto one page per country with space left over for a map. Are there any techniques or guidelines you followed when designing Arcem that could be applied to other games?

4. Are there any new Godbound releases on the horizon?

[u/nicholasleegoodman]

How much do you playtest your mechanics before publishing?

When working from an OD&D base, at what point do think it stops being an OSR game or even a retroclone?

How do you feel about designers borrowing mechanics from other games, including your own?

[u/WyMANderly]

What is your single favorite RPG game mechanic, and why?

[u/rubiaal]

What books would you recommend for getting more into RPG design? What do you think all helped you become better at it?

[u/bluebogle]

If it's not too late: How do you go about marketing your games. How do you get them in front of potential customers in such an over-saturated market?

[u/SquigBoss]

Your most well-known game, Stars Without Number, is a sort of riff on D&D (with similar stats, rolls, etc.). What made you settle on using the classic d20 system as opposed to creating your own dice system? I spend a lot of time deliberating between making my own dice system and just hacking an existing one, so I would love some insight.

[u/[deleted]]

Hey Kevin. I heard a while ago you were thinking about tackling an RPG set in Ming Dynasty China (and contemporaries, e.g. Japan, Ryukyu, Korea). Is that still on your mind? Would it be mostly a setting thing, or would you develop another new system for it?

[u/seanfsmith]

I'm a big fan of the solo adventurer games of Scarlet / Stellar Heroes both from a narrative perspective and from a games design one.

How did you approach the action / power level balancing? Was the concept of "works with existing old school modules" a late addition or an early constraint?

My own Quarrel & Fable balanced encounter maths by way of taxing each miss in combat with a free counterattack — functionally doing away with the action economy of attrition combat. Was the HD=hp scaling in Heroes a similar decision?

[u/[deleted]]

What modern rpgs inspire you? Are there any features or trends on the story/PbtA/indie side that you'd like to play with in your work?

[u/wdtpw]

Hi Kevin, big fan of SWN here, and in particular the random generator tables you seem to have made your particular genius.

a) To what degree do you think the setting of a sandbox game lies in the GM's purview, and to what degree do you think the random tables help set expectations and drive particular themes? I realise this is probably going to be "a bit of both," and I wondered if you could explain how you see the dynamic here between the setting you instill via the tables, and the ones you expect the GMs to add.

b) Do you ever fancy doing a license? For example, taking a pre-existing work like Firefly/Star Trek/Shadowrun, etc, and having that license as part of the sales pitch? Or is the fun of development for you the settings you come up with as much as the rules?

c) What do you think of 5e compared to the more b/x type rules? Have you ever considered making a 5e-compliant game?

d) What's the usual incubation time for you, between having the idea for a game and actually putting the notice out to the world that it's going to be a thing? What elements do you have to be sure of before you know it's going to be a game worth doing?

e) To what degree do you know the demographics of your customers? Eg do they tend to be older, younger, etc? I've heard that OSR games tend to an older crowd, but then I've also heard the reverse too!

f) What do you think of the OSR movement in general? Other than producing more small and creator-owned games and modules, do you think it fully occupies the space it could, or is there somewhere you think it might end up exploring next? Is there anywhere you'd like to take it towards? Here, I'm thinking that there have been some different waves of OSR-ness, with some lying very close to their D&D module roots, and others trying different things in very diverse ways - the sandbox gaming you produce, the lifepaths of Beyond the Wall, etc. I'm wondering if you see anything coming next as a trend, or one you might like to introduce?

[u/megazver]

I must admit I have no idea how the Magic User in Scarlet Heroes is supposed to survive the first few levels, even with the SH buffs. The wording in the book is a little ambiguous, but from what I can tell MUs still fire-and-forget spells and, like, a level 1 MU casts Thunders once, doing less damage with the spell than anyone else does with a regular attack and is then as dangerous and sturdy as soggy roll of toilet paper. Am I missing something?