That looks like an fun idea.

Do you have a playtest document anywhere people can look at? You'll get more feedback if people can see the whole of the thing, as a lot of this stuff is on how elements feed into each-other.

Do you have any specific issues you'd like feedback on?

-Matt

Realms Publishing

Well, I don't want to put too much on the net yet until it's fully out. However I want to get peoples opinions on the system and the general game.

Also, I'm trying to find a publisher and somone to put it on their stall at cons.

I was hoping "CE" here could do it.

Well, most of us here publish our own stuff, which isn't as hard as many people think these days. There's some good overview threads in the Publishing section of the forum if you want info on costs, pitfalls, varying approaches and so on. You might find somebody to publish for you, but that's comparatively rare.

To be honest, polling for opinion isn't really that productive. You'll get a good spread of yes, no, maybe, some mildly offensive comments about grammar and not a lot else of use. If you can narrow it down to aspects of the game you need feedback on, then you'll get more useful results as it gives folks a context to work with.

Again, without a system run-through to work with, people will be stabbing in the dark a bit. If you don't want to be public about stuff, contact interested folk offlist with what you have.

Games about all kinds of random stuff are popular, played and sell. So don't worry about it being niche. Make the game you want to play and chances are other folks will want to play/buy it too.

-Matt

Realms Publishing

Quick points about LULU...

...they have been good for me for making print copies available at short notice and in small numbers, and the margins are OK for me selling direct in the UK.

...the margins are not good for selling through a third-party.

...if you do not make a "good" PDF then LULU will make you spit teeth, as it fails to print or prints with errors (the fault, by the way, is with your PDF rather than LULU). (F'rex: Edgewalkers failed because of transparency in the PDF, so I have to go back and re-order their book, it happens.)

GENERAL ADVICE...

...we're not mind readers, so we can't comment on anything specific about the game from the text above. It's (intentionally) vague, so I have no clue what does and doesn't actually work, or encourage what behavious and play you want.

...publish it yourself, as publishing it through someone else will be painful to you (you will have no control, get less than you feel you deserve, and will be more frustrating all round). The chances of a publisher working with you and giving you creative control for almost nothing are remote (though it has happened). If it's for charity then you'll want to make money for charity, but be clear to purchasers how much is going there (all of it?).

George's Children was done for charity, I wonder if Jon Hodgson has anything to say on that?

Only that I found a few individual's attitude towards it strange - some people seem to get annoyed if you do things for charity. Worth watching out for. I rather naively thought we were just doing a nice thing to the best of our ability in our spare time. Some folks on the net seemed to take issue with that, and seemed to think it was a cover for something else. I never could have predicted that response.

But hey its the internet.

Keep the donation very simple, keep it very transparent. Every last penny that we received from Lulu went to the charity. So there's not much to account for. It wasn't a case of dubious net profits being donated, i.e: "We gave everything to charity right after we paid for our new computer". People get very twitchy about that kind of thing and rightly so.

Jon Hodgson
www.jonhodgson.com

Thanks for the input Jon. It's a shame that people thought that of you and George's Children.

I think it's a great little book.

Good points about the transparency, too. People on the net can be very cynical.

Yeah publish it yourself - that way if you make a loss you've lost money for charity, which is far nobler than losing money for oneself. :)

Back to the original post, I'd play a bat it sounds quite entertaining. I think Alexander still has some work to do on what the game's focus actually is.

Oh and if you don't want the game to be about using brute force to overcome obstacles then don't have a strength stat as one of only two stats you numpty!

+++
JoE
+++

Prince of Darkness Games
Rock N' Role-Play....

This is looking dogpile like. Can we hold off on posting more to this thread until Alexander posts something more.

-Matt

Realms Publishing

I'll hold off commenting on the actual game until you've had a chance to respond to the replies you've already got, but I thought I'd drop in and mention one item that might be of interest to your game.

There is a species of giant centipede that actually eats bats, by climbing the walls of the cave tunnel, dangling itself downward from the ceiling and snatching them right out of the air. Here's a video of that. Might make a good enemy for your game.

Ash

Sorry it took some time to get back to you all.

I must admit, my worst fault is that I am terrible at telling people about my ideas, but I'll try and answer as many of the questions and comments as I can.

Why a Strength Stat? Well, you will still need strength to move things, tip things or if you really have to fight.

The other "stats" so to speak, are free form traits. They can be used to either help yourself or help the group. The downside of helping the group is that you will fail any action you are using that trait in.

So for example, if you take the trait "Runt", you could use that trait to add another dice to your pool to say, squeeze into a small air vent.

However, you could use the same trait in a negative way.
Say the colony dice pool is running low (the colony dice pool is a pool any player can dip into, but if it runs out its game over), you can say, get trapped under a falling branch, if it's in that scene, any not be able to do anything all scene. However, you may replenish the colony dice pool by 3 dice.

As for the charity side, I was planning to (and I will say this in the book and proper adverts) that ALL profits go to charity (The Hampshire Bat Group), I am on a very low wage being disabled and need to cover at least some of my publishing costs.

The focus of the game is survival. Bad things happen, the world is generally against you. Predators on all sides, adverse weather, natural disasters, humans trying to take you away for their evil ways. You must rely on each other to survive, maybe set up a family of your own, or just to survive the trip to the winter hibernaculum.

I'm really looking for people to co-operate all the way through the game. Your characters don't really have to like each other, hay, you could even be "evil" vampire bats.. But you know you need each other to survive, there is no such thing as a "lone bat".

Possibly more to come :)

As a word of friendly advice to prevent future upset, be very careful about your use of terms like profits on a project like this. You began by saying "all monies". Now you're saying "all profits". Now as a rational human being I understand what you mean. Of course I do. But remember when selling over the net to the gaming community you aren't dealing with necessarily rational human beings all the time. And it only takes a few hard comments and you can potentially have some kind of ridiculous internet smear on your hands, and all your work goes sour.

"All profits" isn't transparent enough for many people. By way of explaination you could list the following as costs, deducted from the figure you list as profit:

Printing, shipping. That's what we did with George's Children. Basically what Lulu charged us out of the cover price. We didn't want to pay anything beyond donating our labour, since we'd probably be better off just making a big charitable donation and not making a game at all if we went down that road. Every penny that came into our hands from Lulu went to charity.

But you could also list as pre-profit costs: paying for writing, artwork, layout editing. IMHO that's less reasonable if you're paying yourself for these jobs, but still billing it as a charity effort. You could blow tons on advertising and deduct it from the bottom line.

You could also list: stationary, overheads (25% of your mortgage in line with UK tax?), power bills, equipment like a printer to proof the thing, a laptop so you can work on the train, software, refreshments at meetings (ie: nice meals out while you discuss the game) and so on and so on. You could deduct all those things from your gross income and still be totally truthfully saying you are giving all profits to charity. (ok some of those things could be considered assets rather than costs, but there's ways round that.)

But hey, that's all very hard headed and serious sounding. Donating to a bat charity is well cool, and I'll certainly buy a copy when it comes out.

Heh heh a few years back I curated and edited a charity comic, and man, working with charities was an experience. I naively thought they would greatfully accept any fundraising efforts. A comic? urgh no! We can't be associated with that! Maybe things have changed, and I probably approached them incorrectly, but it was an education!

Phew long post!
Good luck!

Jon Hodgson
www.jonhodgson.com

Hehe, thanks, I understand it might sound hard but I totally get what your saying. I thought "all profits" meant everything after production costs are met, so I'll probably add the disclaimer that "All money after printing costs".

Personally I am happy to do it for no money, even though it sounds like financial suicide I am doing two things I love. Writing and helping a bat charity.

I have spoken to the head of the group and they have said that they are happy for this to go forward and they are going to put it to the comity about putting it in the charities newsletter.

I am also putting a lot of information about certain types of bat into the game along with bat facts and so on.

It isn't going to be a huge book, maybe even 50 A5 pages max, but I wont be charging a lot for it.

You should *so* have 'bat fact' box-offs in spots where the facts they illustrate are relevant to the aspects of the game being discussed. You could have a little info-character-portrait thing to pop into a circle on the border of each info box to delineate the fact from the fiction, and I bet you could find some good royalty-free stock photos of bats to use as illustrations for those parts.

Ash

I have been trying to do that for ages, find photos that is. Sadly I have searched through many of the websites that do this, and they don't have the bats I'm looking for.

I am putting bat facts in the back of the book :)

Alexander, drop me a line via my website about the possibility of me doing you a cover (for gratis given that its for charidee and all) if you're interested and/or need one.

I'm booked up to nightmare proportions for the next few weeks, but I reckon I could find some time for our flying fuzzy buddies in the bat world if it was something you needed.

Jon Hodgson
www.jonhodgson.com

I know it might be obvious, but have you tried Wikimedia Commons?

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

They have a load of bat-related imagery. Of course, those may not be the bats you are looking for.

*waves hand in a mysterious way...*

Neil

Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/

I hate WikiMedia myself. All too often you find a great picture only to discover that it's got hidden licensing regulations that makes it impossible to use. By all means browse through what they have, but check each picture thoroughly for hidden problems, and make sure the resolution is high enough to print well. The ones I've looked at on WikiMedia have tended to be at too low a resolution to be useful for anything other than web pages.

Having said all that, Take a Look at These and see if they are of any use to you. I find the DeviantArt stock images category an extremely useful resource, although like WikiMedia you do have to check that your intended use is OK with the original artist. Pics tend to be in a good resolution though.

I'm one of the guys playtesting. I can confirm that Alex is rubbish at describing his game. We tell him off repeatedly but he never listens.

http://www.ukroleplayers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=3573&start=0#p41934

Oh well.

Regarding lack of focus, I think I agree. Mechanically, the game is 95% there, but that still leaves all the wishy washy stuff about how those mechanics are meant to be used. At the moment I think the game is at the tricky stage where you have to actually realise and write down all the little things that make the game work in play.

I mean, contrary to Alex's stated opinion on the matter. The game isn't about survival, its actually about saving the colony. And all the things you have to do to make that happen, including not surviving yourself.

So yeah, a reliable method of giving the game a bit more focus (an over-arcing set of stakes or something) so that that things don't devolve into just bumbling around through random encounters.

But the Strength stat thing is misconstrued. Strength is important to a bat (worth having a stat for it), but what you can use it for is wholly different to how human strength is used. Like, when you're 4cms tall, you're gonna be using your Strength to pull on a Yorkshire terrier's ears, with a mind just to distracting her. Actually harming the dog is completely out of the question.

Or to put it another way, you're a naked human in an extremely hostile landscape vastly outnumbered by dragons.