Friday, April 28, 2006

Pants adventures can be good for you.

Working for a Gaming company is a bit like being a therapist.

If you're counselling folk for a living, you have to be in counselling yourself- to get all the stuff you hear off your chest.

If you make roleplaying games, then you have to be gaming on a regular basis.

It helps you test what you're making, but it also gets all that creative imagination stuff going. You come up with ideas for new books, cool add ons and great ways to improve what you've already done.

Sometimes it can show you what you might have done wrong, or could be better.

Take 'Fools before Swine'

This is a convention scenario we originally started working on back at the time of the scenario competition. We're so busy at the moment that it's taken us 6 months and a bank holiday weekend to get this knocked into shape. So we sat down to playtest it last week (as our regular Dave session couldn't happen due to illness)

It was funny, and very Warhammer (it's about a man who turns into a pig) but the structure was all wrong. A couple of the clues didn't hang together, and the set up of the NPC's just didn't ring true. It felt contrived.

So we're having to go back to the drawing board on it, do some rewrites and test it again. Somewhat humbling, as we'd all like to beleive everything we do fairly drips with genius, but ultimately good for us.

Just because we are lucky enough to do this for a living, it doesn't mean we're immune from the occasional GM slump. We're human- just like any other gamer out there.

So, lesson learnt, and not a councillor in sight. Told you it's like therapy.

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