The first star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight

That idea sounds like it could be excellent fun. There's an obvious link into Stardust but it looks like the game could be a lot broader than that which is very very cool.

Rather than give direct advice, it might be better to share some experiences. When I first arrived here I was convinced that Duty & Honour was a done deal. I read the words on the paper and they made sense to me. I could GM it and it worked. Yey!

Of course this was utter rubbish and I wish I could go back and burn every copy of the game that exists prior to release! There were massive holes in the rules and in the gameplay that I covered over through my GMing style and assumptions that I never put to paper. So it was a priority that the game was blind playtested. Thats the only real way to ensure that the document stands a chance on its own.

I also found a great way to see the game in the raw was to playtest at conventions. In so doing, you expose yourself to people who are not sympathetic to you or your GMing style and won't give you the leeway that comes with that.

Now, onto publishing! Again, I can only relay my scant experience. I have found that selling the game, face-to-face, has been the best part of the whole gig. When you can actually speak to people who are interested and enthusiastic about your work, it gives a massive buzz to the entire affair. To that end I would consider print and pdf.

PDF is great. Its free (I know some people were charged $40 for OBS membership, but I wasn't and I'm probably the last of us to have joined so the rules may have changed) at the start and then, whilst there is a cut for the host, its not that bad at all. The best thing about pdf distribution is that you have no inventory, no stock costs, no boxes of games lying around the house - its all very convenient.

Of course, people may well want a printed copy. YOU might want a printed copy! For a small run of product in the UK, I have found Lulu to be awesome. Great quality printing, super-fast delivery and very useful online livechat help functions. Just running over the Lulu pricing calculator, a 36pp B&W interior, 6x9, perfect bound book is looking at between £1.80-1.90 per book. Postage is a flat £7ish.

Other printers do exist - and I certainly wouldn't recommend Lulu as your sole online source for exposure - but they have done me good so far!

Exposure. Ye Gods. Yes, thats the most important thing. If you want to make some money out of your game, you have to get some exposure or else its just one more thing on the internet. Having a presence on forums helps, as does attending and interacting at conventions. Creating some word-of-mouth buzz helps a lot too, especially if you have some friends who have a lot of community presence who can name drop your game occassionally. Double that fun if they actually mean it!

However, before all of this, you have to be 101% convinced that the game is concrete and safe to be played 'sans writer' and still deliver the game experience you envisaged.

Hope that helps a little!

Neil

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

Hey, no problem.

It sounds like a grabby idea.

If you have it as a PDF then it can be published rather simply. I'd suggest sharing the playtest one privately, but once you have a finished game it is very easy.

Most basically you could distribute it for free. I have done this and it is rewarding (though not financially of course). You can upload it to a filehosting site or put it on your own webspace (I did the latter and I still enjoy seeing the download stats for old files each month).

Or you could have a page for your game somewhere (a free blog or something) and sell it with a PayPal button.

In this case you can also alert the world to your presence by having a page on the "un-store" at http://games.indie-rpgs.com - it's really just a portal and not a shop.

Similarly, you could put it on Lulu (as Greg Saunders has done with Summerland and we did with the Journal) and sell it as a PDF and have a print option. There are Lulu threads on here easily found with search.

Or you could sign up with OneBookShelf (rpgnow/dtrpg) for about $40 free and sell it through them. (I bow to Neil's more recent knowledge -- it cost me $40 back in the day!)

Or perhaps YourGamesNow though they pick and choose who they let in.

Finally, you could try and sign up with IPR, e23, Key20 and so on if you wish to go into publishing as a company. I would suggest to anyone starting out that you leave those ideas aside in the first instance. Walk before you can run.

Oh, and making a PDF is easy and there are people here willing to help you with playing, playtesting, editing, reading, illustrating, laying out and PDFing your work.

(Edited: since my iPhone garbled grabby into crabby and so on...)

...the reason I say privately sharing it is not because there will be some supersecret thing inside it that will be stolen the instant it hits the net.

It's just that google does a good job of finding things and people will often find an old version of a doc and assume they have your final one (and for free too!).

Now, this can work for you: there are 24-hour versions of Contenders and 3:16 out there. They were entered in a public competition, after all. And these can be good adverts. Look! This is great in 24 hours, and rest assured the final one is better.

On the other hand some people still assume the 24-hour version isn't far off the final one (it is!).

So, the decision is yours on whether to share it openly with the world or not, but just be aware of the consequences of throwing a rough idea onto the web and google's watching eyes.

(I have from time-to-time made PDFs available in secret folders to share them with people who know what to look for, by reading a forum or whatever, and that can work well so that people you don't know can grab the file and run with it.)

Just a quick note before I head to bed (me being on the other side of the world and all): no need to apologise at all, glad to see some more detail about the game.

I'll edit this post in the morning to add some coherent questions and thoughts.

Cheers
Malc

Contested Ground Studios

The game sounds fascinating.

Neil's advice, that it's probably not as ready as you think it is, is worth listening to. (I paraphrase).

Also, if you go through a phase of playtesting, sharing it with other people, getting feedback, you start building a fan base. You'll build a group of people who will talk about the game and run it themselves.

So, I would really suggest a lot of playtesting and sharing of the text. I'd love to see it, for example, if you don't mind. If you can possibly get to a convention and run it, do that. (Where are you based?)

To summarise, as Tony said over on Story Games: the battle, especially with PDF games, is getting your game noticed. You don't just want to put the game on a website, somewhere, and watch as three people download it.

Publishing-wise, you have so many options. Choose first whether you'll publish it in print form. I think you should (which is my personal opinion, not received wisdom). It gives you something solid that people will show to each other. PDFs: people buy them and leave them on their hard disk. (This is my personal opinion, again.)

Publishing PDFs: you can do it yourself with a PayPal button, emailing PDFs to people as they buy it; you can do something similar with the Unstore; you can sign up to a service like Indie Press Revolution or RPGNow.

Publishing print copies: you can do it with Lulu, which has worked well for Neil, and requires no initial investment on your part. Alternatively, you can do a short print run (30, 50, 100 copies), which has worked for me. Sell those copies at conventions and either: with a PDF button, mailing out the print version as people buy it; or via a service like Indie Press Revolution or the Unstore.

All that said, I do encourage you to start playtesting your game, sharing it and playing it at conventions, before thinking about publishing.

Graham

Thank you all, gents!

Having been a playtester for many years for a whole load of stuff, I know how easy it is for it to make sense to the writer but not the playtesters, so external testing would be great (I'll send copies over to people later on when I get home from work, so if anyone else would like one, please yell).

And I know what Gregor means about old pdfs - it is amazing what you can find lurking in the depths of a Google search.

I'm actually based near Sunderland in NE England. And sadly, its time to go to work, so I shall comment more later ;)

--x Lynne x--

I'm across the river in North Shields!

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

Firstly, I'm a Dying earth man myself, I wrote some stuff for XPS (6 and the last one I think) and violet cusps - great game, and I really enjoyed reading your Fields of Silver.

Sounds like an interesting idea - when I read your post 'It's a wonderful life' sprang to mind. So, in a typical session, what would you see as the goal of play? To get 'back upstairs'? For most players, how do you think that is achieved? Sounds like the players have to resolve the issues that have tied them to the earth, is that right? I'd be interested to see if you plan on having specific mechanics that support the regaining of star stuff.

As to publishing, in my own experience Lulu is great for printed copies, but absolutely rubbish as a portal for sales - it's hard to navigate and has no rpg-focussed area, so unless someone goes their specifically for your product they are unlikely to stumble across it. If you plan on PDF then RPGnow and the like are far better, as is IPR if you meet their criteria.

http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fStoreID=756346

Hi Greg! I thought I recognised the name. And thank you :)

In one session, the aim would be for one character to regain at least one piece of their starlight (currently set at a maximum of 8, based on the number of arc degrees defining an area of the celestial sphere, which seemed like a good idea at the time rather than going for something totally arbitary!).

The players may well have to resolve ties to retrieve more bits of themselves, the big bad being that if they consistantly fail, they are driven back to those ties to find comfort (basically, they can never escape them).

And waving back to Neil! Guessed you were somewhere near by the Newcastle badge ;)

--x Lynne x--

I'm afraid I can't offer to playtest, I just don't have the time, but I'd be happy to read anything for you that might help.

Cheers,

Greg

http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fStoreID=756346

Graham, can you send me an e-mail address via the contact button and I'll forward you a copy of the PDF?

Cheers

--x Lynne x--