It’s an interesting little book, and a fun experiment … I wrote the BCC text to be quite explicit about what you get with the book, so people don’t buy it expecting a dozen magical groups; nope, there are three, and the BCC tells you exactly which three. I think that’s the correct way to handle short projects like this. I think four bucks is an awesome price — if you use *one* thing in the PDF a few times in your game, you have your money’s worth. Compared to some PDF books that are two bucks for 4-6 pages, we might actually be a little underpriced, but we’ll see how things shake out during the experiment.

Digital Grimoire on BattleCorps.com

Digital Grimoire on DriveThruRPG.com

©2008 talkin' about • Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

©2008 talkin' about • Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

©2008 talkin' about • Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

In short, Gen Con LLC has come up with a plan to pay back their debts, and the creditors have until the end of December to decide on whether to accept those terms. So, it’s likely that everyone will have to wait a few more months for further news.

For my previous posts on Lucasfilm’s lawsuit against Gen Con LLC and the Chapter 11 filing, please check the posts under the gencon tag.

©2008 talkin' about • Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

©2008 talkin' about • Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling (or the Kindle Edition) is now available in the USA. I read the Canadian version when it was released last year, and it’s one of the finest books written about professional wrestling, and a great autobiography in its own right.

It’s a relatively large book [many wrestling fans describe it as "huge," but I wouldn't go that far], and Bret tells a great story, aided by his note-taking and audio-recordings from his decades in the wrestling business. Hart has always had a large opinion of himself, his wrestling abilities, and his place in the wrestling business, and that bleeds through the pages of this book; but he also lays bare his sins [largely as an adulterer, but also as an occasional drug user] in a way no well-respected wrestler has done before. Lifelong fans of the Hitman may question whether he was really someone to grow up idolizing.

And then there’s the Hart Family, torn apart by tragedy after tragedy: Owen Hart’s horrible death, the fall of Stampede Wrestling and Bruce’s struggles to keep it alive, the deaths of Brian Pillman and Davey Boy Smith, and the bitter family infighting. Like Pain and Passion: The History of Stampede Wrestling, Hitman leaves you in a place where you can’t help but think that the Hart family sacrificed far too much while becoming “Wrestling’s First Family.”

If you’re a wrestling fan, this book is a must-read — no other wrestling title has covered Stampede Wrestling and the 80s-90s World Wrestling Federation in the way that Bret Hart can. If you’re not a wrestling fan, Bret’s ego and his long-winded descriptions of his most famous matches may turn you off, but there is a great story in this title, well-told, beautiful and disgusting at the same time. Mick Foley’s Have a Nice Day! may have broken the door down for wrestling books, but Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling keeps them relevant.

I can’t resist throwing in my favorite quote from the book:

“I told Bruce [Hart] the spotlight needed to be on Owen [Hart] because Survivor Series would be the beginning of Owen’s heel turn on me. After I explained what everybody’s role would be, Bruce went right back to designing the match around himself, and I had to reprimand him in front of everyone. Shawn [Michaels] muttered to him, “If my brother was world champion and the best in the busines, I think I’d quit fucking arguing with him and start listening to him!” There was nothing Bruce could say in response to that. He shut up, but I could tell the reprimand stuck in this craw.

©2008 talkin' about • Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve listened to dozens — hundreds, probably — of Paul’s podcasts over the last few years, so it was a no-brainer to throw a few bucks down to support this effort.

©2008 talkin' about • Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

About the Book

I expected this book to be a series of essays. I don’t think any of the promotions for the books misled me — they just didn’t really specify what was in the book, so I just assumed it was essays. It isn’t; the majority of the book are short “proverbs” about game design, game playing, game teaching, and more. It’s introduced by Wil Wheaton, and closes with am modified version of John August’s Seven Lessons I learned from World of Warcraft and an essay from S. John Ross.

So while a quick flip-through of the book showed me that it wasn’t what I anticipated, that flip-through sold me on the book, as I was able to instantly absorb, agree, and disagree with several of the entries. It sparked instant conversation with the people I was hanging out with, and Rob Donoghue made great use of the book’s format, having various friends and industry people sign his copy of the book … on a page they strongly agreed or disagreed with.

About the Contents

Will Hindmarch was inebriated a few nights ago, and via Twitter gave me permission to quote a few entries for purposes of this review.

001 - The player of any game has, at most, two hands

If your game requires a player to hold, handle, or move more than two things, you should know where the player sets one item while she is manipulating another. You should have a good reason for not including some indication of that place on your game board, in the rulebook, or in the money shot of your game on the box.

In poker, for example, the placement of cards and chips is customary. Even still, a nice poker tabletop has a chip rack and maybe a designated place for hole cards. A board game should provide a designated place for a draw deck, discard pile, and scoring if at all possible.

Hell yeah! I’d pay for an expansion to Ticket to Ride that contained the following:

• A number of racks suitable for stacking destination tickets again (much like tile holders in Scrabble).
• A cool board for setting the 5 face-up cards, the draw pile, and the destination tickets draw pile.

That’s it! I’d put down my money for that product right away. It would be great to replace the handmade racks I currently have to stack destination tickets against, and the board for placing the various draw piles would be a nice bonus.

The game is by no means defective without them, but it could be that much better with. I’m actually relatively new to Ticket To Ride [been playing less than a year, have probably played 50-75 times], but each time when I teach it to someone, they find it confusing that they have two different types of cards, and no place to easily put and refer to the destination tickets.

030 - Dollar for dollar, a roleplaying game is very nearly the most efficient entertainment you can buy.

I want to agree with this, but I think for the majority of groups, the majority of the monetary cost and the majority of prep-time/organizational work is placed on the gamemaster. It’s efficient entertainment for players, but not necessarily for the GM.

023 - In a tabletop roleplaying games, the characters are all wearing pants.

This is true even though none of the players informed the gamemaster that their characters were putting their pants on.

Issues such as these–things that any person would do without comment–are collectively “pants issues,” and players in any sane game may always assert that they have done such things if it ever becomes important.

This is one of those issues that makes me stress that all roleplaying groups should talk in advance of the campaign about expectations and defaults. It shouldn’t be necessary to say “I grab my cel phone when I leave the apartment.” each and every time your character prepares to go out, nor “I load my gun.” before going out on a shadowrun. If your character is going to be a goofball unless you “babysit” him during the entire game session, is that really fun?

078 - If a rule is optional, give it a name.

Players should be able to quickly describe their house game to other players by casually citing rule names.

Jargon is good. It creates a culture of player and is just more fun than quoting a rulebook. Part of what makes poker excellent is the swollen insider vocabulary that comes with it. For example, “We’re playing Chicago, Follow the Queen, so high spade in the hole splits the pot.”

If you can get players talking like your game talks, then you’ve got them.

I heavily agree with this, especially as it pertains to RPGS and properly calling out rules that are truly optional. However, this doesn’t pertain to inventing new slang for common terms–this is covered elsewhere in the book, and it’s viewed as a bad thing.

There you go — that’s a quick sampling of the type of material that makes up the majority of the book.

Criticisms

While many of the entries in the book are numbered [as the examples show], the pages aren’t. This bugs me. Rationally, I know I don’t really need page numbers in this book, but it still bugs me.

Most of the pages have tags — just like a blog — in the corner. Samples are “all games”, “play”, “poker”, “history”, “teaching games”, etc. Sadly, there is no “tag cloud” in the book; no reference to tell you which pages talk about game design vs. game teaching vs. poker.

Both of these problems could be fixed relatively quickly in a future print run …

Buy It

Bite-sized and approachable, Things We Think About Games is well worth reading for both casual and hardcore gamers, and especially for game designers. You won’t agree with all of it, and that’s part of its charm: one page may make you smile and nod, the next will have you curling your lip in a bitter sneer. Hopefully, it will help you avoid that sneer during the next game you play.

©2008 talkin' about • Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

©2008 talkin' about • Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.

So last week I decided I wanted to sell something for the first time.

I wrote up a blurb, took some pictures, went through the web forms and bam! an error! Some sort of generic error after I tried to do the phone authentication thing. I waited a half hour, tried again .. same thing. Waited until the next day, same thing.

Then I tried to use eBay’s “live chat” to get a solution, and got two solutions, one of which didn’t work, and the other was “make a new account.”

So I emailed tech support. They told me that I could use the same first solution that didn’t work, and a second solution — which also didn’t work — of recreating the auction from scratch. They also misidentified the problem [I was not getting a "page not responding" error; I was getting an error from the web app, not the web server.

[You will note that I am using the term "solution" in a loose manner.]

So I went back to the tech support email form, pasted in my original email, the original set of solutions, and a note that neither of the two worked.

Guess what I received?

A form letter listing the same two non-working solutions! 100% identical except for the name signed to it!

So today I gave in and created a new account, and it worked peachy keen, and if you’d like to buy the rare-ish Classic BattleTech book FedCom Civil War, you can checkity the link below. I’ll be listing some other gaming stuff that I’ve had sitting around my office, but maybe not until after Gen Con. We’ll see how things go.

My eBay Auctions

PS: If you work for eBay, and if you have a smidge of care for me and/or my work in the gaming industry, you know how to reach me. I’d love for my original eBay account — adamjury, not adamjury2008 — be properly set up for selling.

©2008 talkin' about • Adam Jury. All Rights Reserved.