luke
02-27-2005, 03:07 PM
Open Letter: 02.28.05. On Imperfection.
What follows is a rather personal look into the last 12 months of work on Burning Wheel. If you're not interested in this side of self-publishing, read no further. But if you like salacious details, by all means read on.
I've been trying to write this essay/letter for the past four days. I've been thinking about it for weeks. Ultimately, the goal is to clear my head and close the book on this chapter of my game design career, while providing a few necessary details "for the kids."
In order to get to the necessary, I've got to plow through the unnecessary. I hope you'll forgive my self-indulgence. I've been writing for "you" for the past year: I'm writing this for me; to clear my head.
I'm sitting in my bedroom, in front of my G4. This is where I write. I've got gloves and a hat on. (Yes, I type in fingerless gloves.) I'm wrapped in a blanket and my unsocked feet are cold. I'm listening to ISIS' Oceanic Remixes through my 10-year old Sony V200 headphones.
Friday night, I stayed up too late finishing Fritz Leiber's Ill Met in Lankhmar. It was very satisfying -- swords, rascally dialogue and vile sorcery. Yesterday, I started re-reading Katherine Dunn's Geek Love. I felt like an abuse survivor discovering that the world is not merely comprised of those who seek you harm and hate -- who knew a novel existed in which there are no sorcerers, swords, machismo, violence, Elves, or epic quests; a book which contains no scholarly essays on medieval laws, no accounts of battles gone wrong and no discussions of primogeniture? I quite literally started to cry as I read Dunn's beautiful prose. At the time, I thought it was the most beautiful written word ever committed to paper. She's an amazing writer, but I think I just needed a break.
Imperfectly Yours
So, it's finished. The complete revision of the Burning Wheel is at the printer. There's still a mountain of work to do, but the hard part is over.
It's not perfect. This is immensely hard for me to admit. In fact, I was in rather low place when one of my roommates grabbed me and shook me: "It's never going to be perfect."
He quoted to me: "Great works of art are never finished, they are merely abandoned."
Ouch. But he was correct. I had done all I could with the resources at my disposal. The game is as good as I can possibly make it. Which is to say, it's imperfect at it's best, but far better than it ever was.
This is the game I set out to make in 1994, in 1998 and again in 2001. I finally did it right, which is, of course, imperfect.
However, it is what it is. The only way I want to impact your expectations is in regards to its imperfection. Other than that -- whether you like it or not, and why -- is utterly up to you. (But I think you'll agree, even if you disagree with the changes, it's better.)
Pressure
Each book in the set is 304 pages. 608 pages of material. The last 10 pages of the Character Burner are indices and character sheets. The last six pages of the Burning Wheel are notes and indices. Everything else is game.
The pressure to produce a perfect product is immense. This was absolutely not the case the first time around. But Burning Wheel's moderate success multiplied the pressure ten-fold.
I want to make you all happy. I want to please you all with the game's excellent and clever mechanics. And I hope you'll understand my saying, I want you all to pleasantly fuck off. It's a bizarre dichotomy. But true and real. I've got to take into account the perspective of the players, but I've also got to maintain my focus as a designer.
The pressure manifested itself in many venues: my drive, my work habits, my "real" life and my health.
Drive: I wrote, edited and published 1000 pages of material in the last 13 months.
Work habits: I worked on Burning Wheel to the exclusion of nearly all else. My daily schedule consisted of 4-6 hours per afternoon on Burning Wheel, 4-6 hours per day at my night job and another 2-4 hours per night on Burning Wheel. That left 8 hours a day for eating, traveling to and from work and sleeping. On the weekends, I would either spend friday and saturday with my girlfriend, or be at a con promoting the game, or be working on the material. Sometimes Dro and I would catch a movie, but then it was home and back to work. Sundays when I wasn't at a con, I ran my own Burning Wheel game at my house (GHQ).
Real life: My girlfriend has been very supportive, as have been my friends. But my gf is in a PHD program and suffering under her own insane pressures. I've been unable to support her to my satisfaction. As for my other friends? I don't see them unless we're gaming. For a New Yorker, I have a very minimal social life.
My health: I won't bore you with the details, nor am I pissing and moaning, but I felt the toll on my body for this year. My teeth, my eyes, my weight, and my hair line. I aged. I felt it. Coupled with my inability to exercise while writing intensely, I fucked myself good. Oh well.
Hallucinations
I've also come to a personal realization about roleplaying this past year; it's not profound: I like to roleplay because I like to be other people. I like to force myself to think in different perspectives.
This hit me as I began to hallucinate. I'm sure I'm exaggerating, but I don't know what else to call it. I would be walking down the street or in my office, lost in deep thought. Someone would talk to me, question me, consult with me. Before verbalizing, I would eletrically answer from their perspective, or at least try to. But then the conscious answer would fall from my mouth -- the horrible, dead words -- and I would feel this wave of disorientation, almost nausea, a sickening realization: I was not this other person, I can't see from their eyes. I will never be able to; I will always been stuck in this one perspective.
This began to happen more and more frequently. It happens about once a day now. My friends will tell you that I'm a terrible player, but when I get into a character as a GM, I do a fair job. This is the perspective that I'm talking about. I can't jump from head to head and see things as they do. I can imagine it, sure, but it's not the same as doing it. Profoundly disappointing, that's what it is.
It's an Art, Smedley
I'm listening to ISIS' Panopticon now. This music is modern art. Just as game design is an art, like painting, sculpture or music. I would have never believed this or even admitted it had I not experienced it for myself.
What function does an art form serve in the viewer/user? To demonstrate an obscure perspective and hopefully ignite a parallel or tangental thought process based on what is presented. A painting that fires some remote, inexplicable place in your guts; a sculpture whose mere form elicits an unbidden tear of joy; a strain of song that grips your throat and tenses your muscles. All deep emotional reactions to an idea presented in an abstract form.
How can a game not fit into this (albiet narrow) definition? I'm not going to exclude any form of game, but I'm the first to admit that I know nothing about board, card or electronic games. Roleplaying games are my home turf, though. And I unreservedly call them an art form.
Whether or not I'm right, and I'm sure there are few willing to argue the point, I feel like I have produced a very strange little piece of artwork. One that requires the reader to wholly participate in its mechanism in order to appreciate the form and discover the emotion behind it.
Revised
It's a new game. I'm not going to lie to you. It's not even backwards compatible. I went through some pretty low points as this realization dawned on me. If I pulled one thread, the whole thing had to be dismantled. I didn't want a hacked together piece of shit. I wanted a tight, streamlined racehorse. So I rewrote the whole damn thing. You might find a few paragraphs in there from the first version, but they only survived the cutting because they hinted at the future.
So, as the expression goes: Burning Wheel is dead, long live Burning Wheel.
The core mechanics are the same -- dice pools, fixed target numbers, number of successes. Character creation is the same -- an intricate point-buy system.
But the systems radiating out from those two core elements have all been substantially refined and refocused. So, take your original Burning Wheel set, put it on your shelf and smile at all the good memories surrounding it. Forget you ever played it. Pick up the revision with fresh eyes and enjoy it for what it is. Some of you will hate it, some of you will love it; most will remain indifferent. That's cool. But do me one small favor: try it. Play the damn game. It may seem ridiculously obvious, but Burning Wheel is meant to be played, not read. When you play it, you're going to be confronted with elements that you just don't like. You've got expectations on "how it should be." Drop the expectations. Look at how the game handles these problems in play -- look at how it solves them and moves on. Try it, you'll see.
I Quit. Oh wait, I can't.
If I had my druthers, I'd take the next six months to a year off and do other things to refresh my brain. Unfortunately, due to the demands of being a self-published title, I can't do that. Therefore, I'm going to use my momentum to get me through GenCon and produce a bunch of additional material for the game. After that, I'm going to give you guys some time to explore and enjoy the game on your own time. The Magic Burner will be out in a year or two. The Adventure Burner will follow shortly on. After that, Burning Wheel will be complete.
One of the many goals for Burning Wheel has been to provide you -- player and GM -- a fantasy roleplaying game as comprehensive as Dungeons and Dragons, Rolemaster or Runequest in a more compact, tighter more fluid form. To get at the heart of the matter -- the violence, the brutality, the joy of discovery and the satisfaction of growth and development. By the time I'm done, you'll have the tools you need to play, to design your own creatures, your own artifacts and technology and how to incorporate it all into setting and the shared imagined space.
All I ask is you play the damn game. On your terms. Just play it.
See you in May,
-Luke
02.27.05
PS Comment carefully here. Snide comments won't be taken too kindly.
What follows is a rather personal look into the last 12 months of work on Burning Wheel. If you're not interested in this side of self-publishing, read no further. But if you like salacious details, by all means read on.
I've been trying to write this essay/letter for the past four days. I've been thinking about it for weeks. Ultimately, the goal is to clear my head and close the book on this chapter of my game design career, while providing a few necessary details "for the kids."
In order to get to the necessary, I've got to plow through the unnecessary. I hope you'll forgive my self-indulgence. I've been writing for "you" for the past year: I'm writing this for me; to clear my head.
I'm sitting in my bedroom, in front of my G4. This is where I write. I've got gloves and a hat on. (Yes, I type in fingerless gloves.) I'm wrapped in a blanket and my unsocked feet are cold. I'm listening to ISIS' Oceanic Remixes through my 10-year old Sony V200 headphones.
Friday night, I stayed up too late finishing Fritz Leiber's Ill Met in Lankhmar. It was very satisfying -- swords, rascally dialogue and vile sorcery. Yesterday, I started re-reading Katherine Dunn's Geek Love. I felt like an abuse survivor discovering that the world is not merely comprised of those who seek you harm and hate -- who knew a novel existed in which there are no sorcerers, swords, machismo, violence, Elves, or epic quests; a book which contains no scholarly essays on medieval laws, no accounts of battles gone wrong and no discussions of primogeniture? I quite literally started to cry as I read Dunn's beautiful prose. At the time, I thought it was the most beautiful written word ever committed to paper. She's an amazing writer, but I think I just needed a break.
Imperfectly Yours
So, it's finished. The complete revision of the Burning Wheel is at the printer. There's still a mountain of work to do, but the hard part is over.
It's not perfect. This is immensely hard for me to admit. In fact, I was in rather low place when one of my roommates grabbed me and shook me: "It's never going to be perfect."
He quoted to me: "Great works of art are never finished, they are merely abandoned."
Ouch. But he was correct. I had done all I could with the resources at my disposal. The game is as good as I can possibly make it. Which is to say, it's imperfect at it's best, but far better than it ever was.
This is the game I set out to make in 1994, in 1998 and again in 2001. I finally did it right, which is, of course, imperfect.
However, it is what it is. The only way I want to impact your expectations is in regards to its imperfection. Other than that -- whether you like it or not, and why -- is utterly up to you. (But I think you'll agree, even if you disagree with the changes, it's better.)
Pressure
Each book in the set is 304 pages. 608 pages of material. The last 10 pages of the Character Burner are indices and character sheets. The last six pages of the Burning Wheel are notes and indices. Everything else is game.
The pressure to produce a perfect product is immense. This was absolutely not the case the first time around. But Burning Wheel's moderate success multiplied the pressure ten-fold.
I want to make you all happy. I want to please you all with the game's excellent and clever mechanics. And I hope you'll understand my saying, I want you all to pleasantly fuck off. It's a bizarre dichotomy. But true and real. I've got to take into account the perspective of the players, but I've also got to maintain my focus as a designer.
The pressure manifested itself in many venues: my drive, my work habits, my "real" life and my health.
Drive: I wrote, edited and published 1000 pages of material in the last 13 months.
Work habits: I worked on Burning Wheel to the exclusion of nearly all else. My daily schedule consisted of 4-6 hours per afternoon on Burning Wheel, 4-6 hours per day at my night job and another 2-4 hours per night on Burning Wheel. That left 8 hours a day for eating, traveling to and from work and sleeping. On the weekends, I would either spend friday and saturday with my girlfriend, or be at a con promoting the game, or be working on the material. Sometimes Dro and I would catch a movie, but then it was home and back to work. Sundays when I wasn't at a con, I ran my own Burning Wheel game at my house (GHQ).
Real life: My girlfriend has been very supportive, as have been my friends. But my gf is in a PHD program and suffering under her own insane pressures. I've been unable to support her to my satisfaction. As for my other friends? I don't see them unless we're gaming. For a New Yorker, I have a very minimal social life.
My health: I won't bore you with the details, nor am I pissing and moaning, but I felt the toll on my body for this year. My teeth, my eyes, my weight, and my hair line. I aged. I felt it. Coupled with my inability to exercise while writing intensely, I fucked myself good. Oh well.
Hallucinations
I've also come to a personal realization about roleplaying this past year; it's not profound: I like to roleplay because I like to be other people. I like to force myself to think in different perspectives.
This hit me as I began to hallucinate. I'm sure I'm exaggerating, but I don't know what else to call it. I would be walking down the street or in my office, lost in deep thought. Someone would talk to me, question me, consult with me. Before verbalizing, I would eletrically answer from their perspective, or at least try to. But then the conscious answer would fall from my mouth -- the horrible, dead words -- and I would feel this wave of disorientation, almost nausea, a sickening realization: I was not this other person, I can't see from their eyes. I will never be able to; I will always been stuck in this one perspective.
This began to happen more and more frequently. It happens about once a day now. My friends will tell you that I'm a terrible player, but when I get into a character as a GM, I do a fair job. This is the perspective that I'm talking about. I can't jump from head to head and see things as they do. I can imagine it, sure, but it's not the same as doing it. Profoundly disappointing, that's what it is.
It's an Art, Smedley
I'm listening to ISIS' Panopticon now. This music is modern art. Just as game design is an art, like painting, sculpture or music. I would have never believed this or even admitted it had I not experienced it for myself.
What function does an art form serve in the viewer/user? To demonstrate an obscure perspective and hopefully ignite a parallel or tangental thought process based on what is presented. A painting that fires some remote, inexplicable place in your guts; a sculpture whose mere form elicits an unbidden tear of joy; a strain of song that grips your throat and tenses your muscles. All deep emotional reactions to an idea presented in an abstract form.
How can a game not fit into this (albiet narrow) definition? I'm not going to exclude any form of game, but I'm the first to admit that I know nothing about board, card or electronic games. Roleplaying games are my home turf, though. And I unreservedly call them an art form.
Whether or not I'm right, and I'm sure there are few willing to argue the point, I feel like I have produced a very strange little piece of artwork. One that requires the reader to wholly participate in its mechanism in order to appreciate the form and discover the emotion behind it.
Revised
It's a new game. I'm not going to lie to you. It's not even backwards compatible. I went through some pretty low points as this realization dawned on me. If I pulled one thread, the whole thing had to be dismantled. I didn't want a hacked together piece of shit. I wanted a tight, streamlined racehorse. So I rewrote the whole damn thing. You might find a few paragraphs in there from the first version, but they only survived the cutting because they hinted at the future.
So, as the expression goes: Burning Wheel is dead, long live Burning Wheel.
The core mechanics are the same -- dice pools, fixed target numbers, number of successes. Character creation is the same -- an intricate point-buy system.
But the systems radiating out from those two core elements have all been substantially refined and refocused. So, take your original Burning Wheel set, put it on your shelf and smile at all the good memories surrounding it. Forget you ever played it. Pick up the revision with fresh eyes and enjoy it for what it is. Some of you will hate it, some of you will love it; most will remain indifferent. That's cool. But do me one small favor: try it. Play the damn game. It may seem ridiculously obvious, but Burning Wheel is meant to be played, not read. When you play it, you're going to be confronted with elements that you just don't like. You've got expectations on "how it should be." Drop the expectations. Look at how the game handles these problems in play -- look at how it solves them and moves on. Try it, you'll see.
I Quit. Oh wait, I can't.
If I had my druthers, I'd take the next six months to a year off and do other things to refresh my brain. Unfortunately, due to the demands of being a self-published title, I can't do that. Therefore, I'm going to use my momentum to get me through GenCon and produce a bunch of additional material for the game. After that, I'm going to give you guys some time to explore and enjoy the game on your own time. The Magic Burner will be out in a year or two. The Adventure Burner will follow shortly on. After that, Burning Wheel will be complete.
One of the many goals for Burning Wheel has been to provide you -- player and GM -- a fantasy roleplaying game as comprehensive as Dungeons and Dragons, Rolemaster or Runequest in a more compact, tighter more fluid form. To get at the heart of the matter -- the violence, the brutality, the joy of discovery and the satisfaction of growth and development. By the time I'm done, you'll have the tools you need to play, to design your own creatures, your own artifacts and technology and how to incorporate it all into setting and the shared imagined space.
All I ask is you play the damn game. On your terms. Just play it.
See you in May,
-Luke
02.27.05
PS Comment carefully here. Snide comments won't be taken too kindly.