Life is Tough, Design Games
Game Designer, Bryan Schuder give us a peak at his RPG creations.
When did you begin playing role-playing games?
I actually started playing tabletop role-playing games in college. Not that I wouldn’t have earlier, but I just didn’t have the opportunity until college. When you are bored, goofing off in the lobby of the dorms, it’s not long before someone gets the idea to try out this whole D&D thing. But, thankfully, I had some experience in various good computer games that were of the role-playing variety: I was mostly a PC gamer in the 90’s, so my computer gaming background was with LucasArts and Sierra adventure games, Neverwinter Nights, Fallout, Dune (the first one not the RTS), Elder Scrolls series, and oddball games like Superhero League of Hoboken and Star Command (SSI 1989). So, when it came to picking up tabletop RPGs in the early 2000’s… it was fairly easy for me on the mechanical side and I quickly picked up the adventuring antics, too.
I cut my teeth on D&D 3.5, like most folks in the early 2000’s, then I was extremely lucky to get invited into a classic Deadlands: Hell on Earth campaign where I played a grumpy ailing chronic Junker. Just imagine Rick from Rick and Morty, and you got a good part of that character. Later I got to play Vampire the Masquerade, Cyberpunk 2020, and even a bit of Shadowrun. After a break, I got a chance to play D&D 4th, then AD&D 2nd and 1st. With a good campaign or two of Pathfinder in the mix. There’s a bunch of other games in the mix throughout. I rarely turned down getting a chance to play a new game. Now I’m running a table at the weekly D&D 5th edition Encounters thing with local game store where I subject poor folks to the custom world in my head.
What has led you to design RPGs?
It really started out as trying to collect all the bits I liked about the various games I played into a single form. Dangerous thoughts there. And this was back before Reddit and other large scale social platforms. The closest thing I had was the Something Awful forums and that place was a mixed bag, and this was back in the early to mid 2000’s! So what started out as a means of trying to get what I wanted at the time, which seemed to be a Fallout Heartbreaker at the time, turned into a hobby of sorts. I’d dabble on and off over the years. It was until my long runs of unemployment that I really dedicated some serious development time to designing RPGs. So… It’s been a mix of false hopes of success and intellectual escapism to keep my mind from going completely insane. 2+ years of unemployment will drive you loony if you don’t have some cheap, involving hobbies.
These days, I just like the design process and creating good things. I’m a Computer Scientist by education and work as a Systems Administrator at the local university library. Designing, engineering, and implementing systems is what I do. I like working on tabletop RPGs because there’s just so much to them. It’s really an interdisciplinary hobby, so a great excuse to play around with all kinds of things. Plus, tabletop gaming in general seems to be my preferred means of social interaction these days. Some people hit the clubs, some people go to sporting events, some people go to the concerts… Me? I dork out at a table with folks and enjoy being an absolute nerd. So… If I can somehow make the experience happen with others through my creations, I’ve done well for myself.
What RPGs have you created? Tell us about them.
D10/0 – A medium-weight, concise rule set designed to be flexible enough and clearly mod-friendly. It started out it’s life as a terrible Fallout heartbreaker, but after some major revisions that coincided with my developing attitude on game design, it has turned into something decent. I decided to keep things concise and straightforward. The resolution mechanic is consistent. Only d10’s and 100’s are used. And the interplay between the various components of the system is kept clear and limited. Simply, I used my knowledge and experience of software design and engineering to try to engineer this system as clean as possible. I even made an Entity-Relationship diagram for it to make sure there weren’t oddball connections.
If there was anything I was going to highlight about it, it is the skill system. I love it, and haven’t seen it quite as it is here, elsewhere. I’ve got an alpha setting to go with it, Saecula Mutata, but it needs some serious work as it was one of my first efforts and also what was stripped from the mechanics during a major revision that spawned the first draft of D10/0.
Just Another Day – My two-page tabletop that was entered into the Two-Page Tabletop Contest a few years back. I was really on the edge of even entering the contest, but it wasn’t until listening to the One Shot Podcast featuring James D’Amato’s Gangland that I decided to give it try. I decided to take inspiration from my failed novella LPS: Just Another Day and turn it into the game. Got into a development trance and within a day got the first draft of Just Another Day, a nano-tech cyberpunk two-page tabletop game. I tried to bring simple resolution mechanics with some risk and danger together to reinforce the setting. Decent feedback from the judges, one judge liked it a lot and used it as a basis of comparison. I was kind of hoping it would be in the running for winning, a number of the other contestants thought so too. It didn’t even get an honorable mention. Oh well. It got me to make the game.
21XX: Fall of the Masters – The Two-Page Tabletop Contest allowed two entries… and the next spark of inspiration came from Mega Man. I wanted to make a game that used d6 dice pools and focused on teamwork… And fighting robots. So, one day, I listened to The Megas and Protomen discography with Adobe Illustrator open and fashioned up 21XX: Fall of the Masters. Judges seemed to like it a bit better in the competition, even though they didn’t know what genre to put it into. Honestly, it was probably too ambitious of a game for the two-page format. But… It has future potential.
G.R.E.B. – The Genetic Reject Employment Bureau. A goofy, strange RPG based on an old web-comic I did in my teens during the webcomic boom of the late 90’s. Simply, it’s the Post World. A post “not quite the apocalypse” world where genetic engineering is common place and for every success there’s a bunch of failures. Players are genetic rejects employed by the government institution to keep them off the street and to get them doing jobs no-one else wants to do. A the missions are NEVER as simple as they seem. I’m really trying various thematic gameplay elements, since I’ve been missing those from a lot of modern games today.
You are offering your games for free, correct? Why?
Yes. Simply? I don’t think anyone would pay money for them. The closest I’ve come to involving money with my creations is post a few on DriveThruRPG as “Pay What you Want”. At this point, I just can’t bring myself to put a price on any of them.
You have to understand, the start of my second stretch of unemployment was absolutely heart-wrenching and soul-destroying for me. Long story short, the terrible state of software development these days has pretty much made me NEVER want to do software development as a primary role to any future job I take. I decided to try to get into anything else, so I tried to see if I had any creative talent that anyone would want to pay me for. Tried writing a novella and submitting it to various publishers. All failures. Tried self-publishing… failure. Tried designing a board game, had a good weekly test group to get major bugs out, even learned how to make fairly professional looking prototypes by hand on a limited budget. I tried every publisher I could figure would be remotely interested. Only one was willing to take a look at it. Sent the prototype, got a rejection saying it was “Not Marketable”. (But considering it was Games Salute and recent state of affairs with them… I kind of laugh to myself about that now.)
Then I tried the tabletop RPG market. I got into various e-mail conversations with some experienced folks in the tabletop RPG industry and frankly… the old school folks are just barely hanging in there. They are making it work, but that’s because they are already in there and know how to work the system. And now with the recent explosion of Indie and Homebrew tabletop RPGs… the market is filled with things that look better than mine and many cost so little.
I don’t know if it’s a curse, karma, bad luck, or the fact they are just not good enough… but I’ve never had any financial success with my creations. So, I just don’t really bother any more. If you play it, great! If you like it enough to share it with others, awesome! Truthfully, an e-mail of commentary or praise is more valuable to me these days. Seriously, you have no idea how much of a trip it was to discover first thing in the morning that someone had made a French interpretation of my game Just Another Day. I was dancing in stride like a fool throughout the house and well into work. So really, if anyone likes my work… Please send me an e-mail with any comments and suggestions. Feedback inspires me to create and further develop more than anything. Because the material is already in my head, I need to see interest elsewhere before I can get it motivated out of there.
So, money wise, I’m just working on getting full-time with the systems department at the university library, so that’ll pay my bills. I can keep my hobby just a hobby. Truthfully, it’s less stressful that way and, if anything, I’ll just go with a “tip jar” type of system if there’s ever a demand for it. Feels fair enough to me.
Do you have any other RPG projects coming up?
Yes, but it’s a long term goal. I’ve been meaning to merge the D10/0 system back with the setting it was split from, Saecula Mutata, to create “The Next Legends of Wiskedjak”, my Post Post-Apoc setting. There’s a few revisions I need to do. One of them is to make 21XX: Fall of the Masters play more with grid movement and using cut out scenery and characters. I need to finish up G.R.E.B., too.
Where can we learn more about you and your games?
My simple website: http://www.bestwithstuff.com/
And more specifically: http://www.bestwithstuff.com/
Join Dicegeeks Newsletter