The New Year

So, 2011 has been interesting. My blog found a new home, and built a small but apparently dedicated following. I’ve met a lot of new friends through WANA.

So, while I don’t really ‘do’ resolutions, there are some things that will happen with me in 2012:

I’ll be finishing a novel instead of abandoning it because it stopped working as a story.

I’m going to graduate with a Associates degree in Management Information Systems.

I’m going to update the TweetDeck Learning Guide.

These things are going to happen, and who knows what else?

Anything you know will happen in 2012?

Humility

While I was growing up, I went to a Mormon church. An important concept I was taught was humility. In the Mormon church, humility has a slightly different meaning than the dictionary.

Humility is the state of being teachable.

It’s an important lesson.

I bring this up due to recent trips into the world of editing for others. One did not like what I had to say, asking me to stop editing eventually. The other took what I had to say and approached her prose from a new angle.

Between them, the first was a much better writer, but the second will eventually go further if that person has the drive.

No matter how skilled we are, we can always learn more.

Build a Better Mousetrap: Creationary

How many of you remember Lego?

These blocks contributed to the largest containers of toys as I was growing up, and my brother and I built all sorts of things. Including making our own games of various types.

If only I could make something like this. . .

Now Lego makes board games!

The one I want to discuss today is Creationary.

Creationary is a party game using Legos. Using cards with various images on it, the turn player tries to build one of the images out of Legos so any other player can guess. If someone guesses, both the person who got it right and the builder get a point. Whoever gets five or ten points first wins!

The game takes the best part of Apples to Apples with the creativity of Pictionary, and then takes away any complaint I could have with either of the aforementioned games. The luck factor is minimized into choosing your category (Or possibly doubling the worth of a card!). Because you don’t have Apples to Apples limitation of only offering what’s in hand, you end up with a bit more chaotic table. Then because it’s just a point game, instead of a roll and move with a caveat, it’s got a leg up on Pictionary.

I definitely recommend this for families, but it goes beyond that. If you just like Legos, this is high on my buy list.

Your turn, what’s your favorite Lego memory?

Hooked: What A Great Opening Line Gets You

So, Christmas managed to cut some key titles off my Amazon wishlist. The one I was most looking forward to, though, was Brooke Johnson‘s The Clockwork Giant. I’ll admit to being just a teeny tiny bit of a steampunk fan, enough of one to argue what ‘makes’ it steampunk.

So I loaded up Clockwork Giant and was greeted with this:

Petra Wade was a ticker engineer — or, she wanted to be.

I stopped reading and had to share this opening line with my friend and editor. Simply, I felt this line was brilliant. Without reading any further, I had a pretty clear picture of who this character was, even if I didn’t go any further.

She’s a driven character, proven from her self-identification as a ‘ticker engineer’ in a setting where clockwork is the technology of the day. For some reason, she feels that while she believes she deserves the title, she’s not there yet. The open loop this internal conflict creates automatically creates an interesting character. It also defines her goal, which is critical to helping identify with the character.

The other piece of this line that interests me is the term ‘ticker.’ It’s a term I’ve not seen in steampunk before, but it’s meaning is obvious. It tells me she may have done a lot more work on her setting than most steampunk writers, and that is a great sign.

Once I got over how brilliant that line is, I finished the first paragraph. It goes on to explain that only men are ticker engineers, but it’s presented all at once, in an infodump style. Normally, this would concern me, but I didn’t care enough to stop reading. A few paragraphs later, we find our heroine trying to enroll herself as a boy in the University.

While it’s been done before, I know this isn’t the ‘real plot’ from being an opening, but it creates conflict. She’s doing something forbidden, and we want to know how it turns out. But around this, Brooke describes the University in fairly minute detail. I don’t feel it was necessary, and the big blocks of description would have turned me off in a lot of books.

The key is, I was already hooked. The story may have flagged a little here, but I wanted to know more. And let me tell you, at a quarter of the way through the book, I’m glad I was hooked early.

Your turn, share your favorite opening line, then dissect why it works in the comments!

The Big Bad Troublemaker: Finding My Antagonist

With the break from my school schedule I got back into the writing game. Instead of sticking with the project I was working on that I knew needed more work, I switched to a project I’ve had on the back burner for six months or so. It’s been a blast as I dig through the planning, but it’s involved in interesting ways.

Quick background, the initial idea (Not concept) for this was to approach the ‘Vampire vs Werewolf’ cliche from a new angle. I know it’s been done to death, but you never know what kind of ideas can come out of it.

So I started with ‘how I can I change my vampires?’ That was easy, vampire myth is so diverse that coming up with a new flavor just takes a little thought. Then the ‘werewolves’ were a simple process of going to the roots of lunacy.

Then I started developing my protaganist. He would be a ruler, and a vampire. (Yes, I know, totally falling for cliche!) His trouble would come from his daughter, and the peasant boy she fell for. As I expanded the conflict, I added a bunch of new characters, a deeper conflict for our vampire lord. Apparently there are vampire kings, and the vampires have replaced the British baronage, so our Vampire is a baron, with his handful of elite knights and a loyalty to a crown.

Then I stumble upon the conflict that drove him to training his daughter (His oldest child, with no sons) for taking his place. The king is dying. With this revelation, I also discover that the vampire’s most trusted warrior wants the throne if the vampire leaves, for any reason.

Then the most interesting discovery of all: My baron vampire isn’t the protagonist. He’s the antagonist, more specifically, the big boss trouble maker, for his daughter. She’s the one with the longest character arc, with the most choices to make, and the most conflict to go through. So now I write it with a new focus, a young daughter of a vampire who finds her fathers secret and has to face the decisions of dealing with the monster.

So from now on, I’m planning my stories from the antagonist’s side first, and let the protagonist assert itself through that planning.

Taking a Risk

How about a little change up today?

I’ve discussed how I like strategy games. I play one of the oldest, after all! Not all strategy games are created equal. So let’s talk about Risk.

Risk is a game of global domination. Move armies all around the world and destroy your enemies to win! Battles are simple, and there’s a built in escalation mechanic via the use of “Risk cards.”

Risk started in France in the 50s and was bought by Parker Brothers. Over the years, the particulars of game play have changed, some versions adding random events, others switching to a ‘victory point’ end game.

While I used to love Risk (It was a common family past time), I’ve grown weary of its older iterations of play.

It has almost everything I hate in games. Player elimination in a game that takes hours. High luck factor. Severe king-making.

Let me break those down a bit.

Player elimination is pretty obvious, it’s when a player is removed from the game before it is over. In short games, this isn’t really an issue, but in long games it can create situations where part of the group stops having fun because the game says so.

Luck is one of those things that you sometimes want a little, but too much can create situations that just create bad environments. Specifically, if a good decision can be negated by chance, it’s usually a bad design. War games are particularly prone to this sort of problem.

King-making is a thing that exists in almost all ‘free-for-all’ games. The basics are simple: one player helps decide the winner who is not himself. In practice, it generally means the second place player wins. What happens is one person will all but cripple an opponent, and that person throws their lot in with any other player on the board, effectively becoming a second regiment for that player.

All of this is bad, but most of it gets mitigated in newer versions of risk, such as the ‘Black Box’ Risk. In Black Box, the win condition changes to a victory point system, and the number of units on the board is much smaller. While this increases the luck factor, it does so with the intent of speeding up game play.

So, if you plan on getting Risk any time soon, find the Black Box, or other versions with victory point conditions, such as the new Risk Legacy, Risk 2210, or even further afield, the new D&D board game Conquest of Nerath.

So, who’s familiar with Risk? Have you encountered any of the issues I described here?

Pricing Theory

A common debate in the writing and reading community right now is pricing of ebooks. Obviously, there’s a huge number of factors that go into the pricing of any product, and ebooks are no different.

Seth Godin has taken the topic to task on his Domino Project blog.

“In a market where the marginal cost is close to zero, prices tend to race to zero as well. Except…

Except when there are no substitutes…”

For those interested in the conversation, definitely check out The Domino Project.

Getting Involved Made Easy

So, I’m talking politics, and the big news lately has been SOPA. For a brief moment, we thought we beat it, but it turns out the Judiciary Committee is going back to the grind stone with it soon.

So what now? Well, obviously, write your Representative. Tell him to vote no. Write or call the President.

Oh, and one more thing:

We The People: Your Voice in Our Government

Simply put: Write a petition for the white house, spread the word, if it reaches a certain threshold of signatures, the White House replies. You can check out current responses, current petitions (With more than 100 signatures), and even write your own.

So, in an effort to put one more stumbling block before SOPA, I implore you all, head over to the SOPA petition and sign it for yourself!

To Those Who Write Fan Fiction: Beware

Let’s come out and be honest: I dislike fan fiction. Hell, I dislike the very idea of fan fiction. No, not like Anne Rice. The first thing I tell fan fiction authors is to consider derivative fiction. I ask them to look deeper and write about the thing that excites them about their fandom. It doesn’t work, but I have to get that out there.

There’s a more pressing reason I dislike fan fiction: bad habits. One common thing I see in fan fiction when I do read it is the first page information dump.  The writer will very quickly recap recent events of their fandom in an effort to ‘ground’ the reader.

Simply put: Don’t.

This is something fiction writers contend with regularly, we can’t dump the back story on the reader, and in fandom it’s less necessary, not more. Members of the fandom will know the information, so more than a sentence is unnecessary. New readers, people who don’t know the source, don’t care. Seriously, if they’re reading your fan fiction and don’t know the source material, updating them on it will not improve their reading experience. It will detract from it.

So fan fiction writers, if I can’t convince you to step away from fandom and make awesome new stories, at least take this and improve your fan fiction. Your readers will thank you.

Update: Marcy Kennedy has a wonderful response on her blog, you should check it out.

The Granddaddy of Role Playing

By now, it comes as no surprise I’m a die-hard nerd and basically like anything geeky. So when I start discussing role playing games, I hope it doesn’t surprise you. Obviously, I cut my teeth on the current version of D&D a little over a decade ago, and I’ve tried more games than I can count.

For those in the dark, there’s a few interesting ways to look at role playing. For the so-called ‘crunchy’ systems, there’s this wonderful quote:

Role playing is like a combination of improvisational theater and double-entry accounting.

It’s humorous, and only half untrue. Complex systems have a lot of paper work for the players which creates a weird environment trying to introduce new role playing games to people.

The description I like to use when introducing new playing to role playing games is simple: It’s like a story, but you’re the main character. When you decide what to do, we use the rules to find out how well you did and what happens to you next.

Now that you’ve been primed, let’s look at the current Dungeons and Dragons, the ‘grandfather’ of RPGs. The 4th Edition of D&D has been around for about three years now, and while the book release schedule has slowed down, there are still plenty of players out there.

Dungeons and Dragons setting is specifically sword and sorcery or high fantasy, with various settings giving slightly different focuses to the game. If you want a setting you can jump in to and just start playing, D&D has three worlds that you can pick up: Forgotten Realms, a venerable setting that’s been kicking around with D&D for decades. It’s largely high fantasy with plenty of areas that are fantasy analogs to real world areas. Then you’ve got Eberron, a ‘magipunk’ setting with post Great War feeling driving tension between the nations, far away jungles with dark elf savages, and a unique look at faith. It’s definitely your pulp setting. Then you’ve got Dark Sun, a post apocalyptic fantasy world, where slavery, starvation, and sorcerer-kings are only some of the things you’ll face.

One of the biggest complaints I have about Dungeons and Dragons in general comes down to complexity. While 4th Edition definitely is the most straight forward of the D&D line, it’s still ridiculously complex, now counting thousands of pages of rules available. While you don’t need all of them, new players will definitely have a learning curve ahead of them!

Overall, I really like Dungeons and Dragons, and the tactical nut in me loves the latest edition because smart tactical choices in combat are definitely rewarded. If you want to try a heavy RPG, D&D is easy to find players for, and even has a strong organized play program, so your local hobby shop may even have a game ready for you to join!

Your turn:

If you’ve played D&D, what’s your favorite memory?

If you haven’t played D&D, or any RPG, what’s your general perception of role players in general?

I’m going to make it very clear, if you bring edition warring to the comments, your thoughts will be deleted.