Declining Salaries for Writers

This is a very sad blog post on the state of pay for role playing game writers. In particular:

Fifteen years ago, I wrote RPGs for 3 cents a word. In these more modern times, though, the pay rate is... wait, it's still 3 cents a word. Come to think of it, the pay hasn't changed much from the golden age of pulps and early sci-fi. The pay is the same as from the 1950s? What's wrong with this picture?
One argument is 'that is all the market will bear'. Okay, but in that same timeframe, other forms of writing (particularly journalism and non-fiction) moved on to dollar-a-word. Sure, we're in a dip for that sort of writing too, with rates often dropped to half that. But a pair o' quarters per word is still a damn site better than RPGing's 3-cents-per.

The part that makes this discussion so painful is that the quality of writing can really make or break what is fundamentally a book project. This is one place where markets really don't seem to be able to adapt as the low rates often lead to weak product. Maybe this is just a consequence of niche markets?

[OT] Bioware's new Star Wars RPG

Based on a perceptive review by Trollsymth, It seems like the new Star Wars multi-player online game captures the music and atmosphere of Star Wars well. But it focuses on combat as the means to gaining experience. I think that this is a very unfortunate decision as Star Wars has a strong history of using guile in the place of brute force.

I think that this would make for a more interesting game and could have easily been accomplished with goal based experience points. Focusing on killing makes sense for the Sith but Jedi and Rebels would benefit from minimizing casualties.

Castles and Crusades

Mark has been doing a games section on the blog (it's cool and you should check out some of his posts). If we are lucky, he might do a post on Kruzno, eventually.

The Castle Keepers Guide has now been released for Castles and Crusades making the base game system complete. For fans of older style role playing games this is a major milestone, admittedly one that comes late in the day. But it's a good book and has a lot of the "look and feel" of Gary Gygax's classic writing. It's well worth a look.

Old School versus New School RPGs

A very perceptive quote on the difference:

Old School is about saying smart things, New School is about rolling hot dice. They cannot get any more different than that. In Old School you succeed or fail based on your ability to make clever inferences about the game world and/or say things which count as clever within the context of that world. But it's basically a test of the cleverness of the player. New School, on the other hand, is a test to see whether you can roll high. If you roll high, you win. Those are very different games.