Ironwood Omnimedia

Sorry for the late entry, but it is a good thing.

My back problems have made things difficult to get any work done because I cannot sit for long periods of time. However, I now have Willie’s laptop for my use. This lets me do my work while laying flat on my back. Very helpful indeed.

This weekend was super productive. I got almost an entire completed, and also finnished the aesthetic layout for the book. The latter is what really has me jazzed. There is this moment when you are working on a project where you feel it click into place. The pieces now seem to show a complete picture. One of the things really holding back development (when I can work) is the flat aesthetics of the book. I knew it needed a style of its own, but creating the elements eluded me. This weekend though it all fell into place. The click I mentioned was more like a sonic boom. It just worked for me in so many ways. It still needs a little nudge here and there. Also, my own feelings aside, it needs to pass inspection and criticism from the rest of the team and the testers. This is the part I really need. No matter how I feel now, it has happened before (and we are all guilty of it in some way) where I could look over it some months later and realize what I was so excited about is actually a tragic monstrosity. So the opinions of others can often tell you what you may tell yourself later on down the line. Being as they are not as close to the project as myself, their insite is really needed. I am happy I have done it, and I am pleased with the result. But I will not allow myself to say this is the final design until then.

It gets submitted later this week. The crews can review it, and if all goes well I should have a copy posted on the next entry.

Its good to be back!

Well, you remember that post a bit back about personal life? Well, aside from back problems my day job has worked me near to death. I was asked to put in a full weekend (by full I mean a 20 hour weekend) and worked two more 12 hour days following.

Needles to say, progress was slim at best. Currently I write in a steno pad longhand while lying on the floor to give my back a chance to heal from both work and fatherly duties. God, I hope this weekend goes better. I’m really filling up the long-hand book, which means double duty when trying to get it down in the computer.

It is nice in one way. It takes me back to the all too recent pre-computer days. I have only owned a PC for about 6 years. So Sagas was origionally begun in long hand in several steno pads, composition books, and such. The thing is, nostalgia is fine, but I don’t really rellish reliving that.

 But, it is what it is. I wish this entry could have been more colorful, but it can’t be. Hopefully I can have something more to tell after this weekend.

I may have mentioned in a previous entry that sections of the chapters are dependant on the further development of other sections. This is the case entirely of the skills chapter, which is usually the first to get started, but the last to call final. In this case we find the development of the Equipment Chapter. This chapter, almost done, relies on one final component of the game to be fleshed out. Equipment is so far the largest chapter of the book. The current page count is 18 without any tables (which will probably jump it by close to another ten). For comparison, the Fantasy Sagas had about 22 pages. This is due to the very simple fact that the modern world is highly dependant on our technology. There is much more equipment and types of it than there ever was in Fantasy Sagas. The final component of this chapter is the computer equipment, and that will require some research. (more…)

It may surprise many people to know that Ironwood is not a full time endeaver. In fact, this labor of love by the development team is  more on the level of personal projects. There is no full time paid staff. Everyone, including myself and co-founder Willie Santana, are royalty paid. We have what most would consider day-jobs. My day-job pays the bills, supports my family, and allows me to develop our products without the dictation and distraction of earning enough money to make the next product. The benifit of this system is that we are not hampered creatively by sales. The downside is that progress is not as fast as what could be if we were able to commit our full time efforts to these projects. At most, lately, I can contribute 15-30 hours per week on a project. Sometimes, outside forces, such as overtime required of my day job, or complications and diztractions in my family and personal life can dwindle these hours even further.

(more…)

I progress on towards being finnished. I see an end. It is not nearly close enough, but I can see it.

I find it surprising to see how quickly the momentum takes on a life of its own. The often horrible monotony of grinding through chapters like the equipment chapter open up fun new things in other chapters for me. I don’t go too far into a tangent though. That is always dangerous. Instead, I dabble my notes and thoughts into a quick doc for later. I add a title like “Tactics_Dynamic Entry”. This helps me place the ideas into further sections.

However, sometimes these tangets beg for some definition. After all, the reason they were jotted into a note file was so I don’t forget that this needs inclusion. So I develop it roughly. This means that I do fully realise the rules, within a certain scope, but do not worry about how the rule is presented. It is only necessary that I understand how it works at this point. This way, I can add my outline for this new concept and begin it properly with strong expectations that I do this in a way that anyone can understand it.

This week’s tanget was about the same said dynamic entry. For those of you unfamiliar with close quarters combat tactics this is what you see on t.v. and movies where groups like a SWAT team storm into a room shouting. People crash through windows and mayham insues. You here the various officers shouting “Get Down! On your Knees! Hands in the Air!” as well as the all too familiar “This is the Police!”.

The tactic, all the shouting, wild fast movement, coming at you from every possible angle, is a well designed tactic meant to cause confusion and to stun the targets inside. Of course, tear gas, breaching charges, stun grenades, etc. are also used. Surprisingly this is tactic is highly effective with or without these instruments. My tangent was to show how to use the rules in the game to reflect dynamic entry.

So I go to my consultants. I point out how I intend to reflect this in an RPG. I explain, and explain, and they offer suggestions, and I revise. This is two-fold. Not only do I want the feedback from those who have done this, but I also want to know if where am I explaining things properly. All this helps for the final inclusion.

There it is now, safely tucked away for the combat chapter (which is the next chapter and should start up this weekend I think). It is my hope that this chapter will really show off some really cool things with the E-RPG system. Personally, I can’t wait to get the combat chapter to the paly testers and see what they think about these tactics and how they work.

This is going to be fun!

As I write this I am reliving this weekends play session. In this session a really exciting firefight emerged. Myself, and one of the testers, Liz, were the two gunmen in the player’s side of the encounter. We faced off against four mercenaries we had trapped in a cement bunker type of building. We were lucky in that there was only one way in or out (though we weren’t sure of that). The unlucky part is that we couldn’t get much of a foothold inside. The mercenaries had some hostages to boot. We didn’t think they would kill them, but again, we weren’t sure.

So getting in was high priority. This is the point where I felt that all of work on developing the rules was going to either show fruit, or turn out to be a big mess. You see, I expect that some players would run in guns blazing. In an RPG you would almost think such a tactic would work. Its dramatic and fun. However, this was the type of play I was most afraid of. It boils the combat down to a high initiative, bigger badder gun type of play. This means, you stat your character high enough and you will win, no matter how badly your actions stack the odds against you. Thankfully this didn’t happen.

When developing the rules for combat for all of E-RPG we wanted a strategic feel to the actions. We didn’t want it to be simply a matter of bigger, better weapons and stats. This had to be a game where player choice makes or breaks the combat, and your stats and weapons only accentuate what you do. The heart of the RPG is playing the role of a character, not the playing up the stats of a character. In Fantasy, your stats play a huge part in how your weapon performs, however, your actions dictate the actual performance level. If you don’t understand how combat works, it doesn’t matter how big and bad you are, you will die fast if your not careful. I was afraid that guns would destroy all of this, despite my best designs for it not to.

So I was real careful. As I have said before, Willie was a soldier. He has seen combat and done things in the service our country that most of us only see in movies and news footage. So to understand that gun control in  combat had to be done correctly meant going to people who had actual experience doing this. Not only did I get his point of view, but I got the point of view of a myriad of sources. I put together everything that collaberated itself and took a look at what made gun combat actual combat rather than a bunch of people simply hurling bullets at eachother.

One thing that was abundantly clear was position. This is a mutli-facetted word when discussing gun combat. Position of your body, position of your base of fire, and position of your enemy/target are all important. So we broke things down.

Positioning of your body basically means how you hold your gun. Are you standing up, down on one knee, down on one knee with the weapon position on a stable object (like a wall or even the edge of a trench or hole), are you prone, are you prone with support. Also, this means how much is exposed. Are you fully exposed, allowing for greater maneuvering of your weapon but increasing your profile as a target, or do you minimize both? This sounds complicated, but actually ballanced out very well, and very smoothly. In the encounter I basically set myself against a wall on one knee, exposing only enough to keep a 90 degree arc firing into on room. Liz set herself along the wall oposit the door opening in the same way. She was able to cover the other side of the room with a mirror image of my arc. My gun was supported only by my knee. This meant I was a small target, but also had a good support of my rifle. This gave me bonuses to hit (small, but measurable) while adding to the target level to hit me. It was a simple “I got to the right side of the door, on one knee and I position myself to see this much of the room” statement. Something we all do in games is describe the action. This description was all the GM needed. It amounted to basically (and I am guessing by my own knowledge of the rules) that I had an extra +3 to fire, and the target level to hit me was 20-3(my size cause I was on one knee versus the standard 5) + 3 for the wall meant that to hit me the attack had to roll a 20 or higher. Needless to say, most of their shots missed. I say most because I was hit, and we’ll come to that soon.

Next we discuss position of my base of fire. In this scenerio I had very little manuevering I could do. But I could more or less control my side of the room. If the room had been a courtyard I would have kept a base of fire to control my field of view. This would have given Liz a chance to move into a position where our enemies were not so well covered. If anyone popped their heads up I would take a shot. She moves through cover, sometimes exposing hereself (but she is moving so that makes her harder to hit). She gets to a flank and we take them out with here ability to fire on a lower target level than I could from my location. This also plays into the position of the targets.

Now, we had messed up. We thought we had an enemy we captured on patrol securely bound and out of the way. We didn’t kill him so we could pump info later. We weren’t so good at securing him as I thought. He snuck up on Liz and knocked her cold. I turned and burried 3 quick rounds at him and he fell dead. Liz was alive, but taking a deep nap. The problem was my control had now slipped. Not only was Liz not able to control her side, but I attacked her attack, freeing my side of the room for a moment. THis allowed them to get a better position on me and I took one in the shoulder. It wasn’t bad, but it was bad enough. I slipped behind cover a bit more and hoped some help would arrive quickly. The other players were already on their way. All thoughts of rushing the room had fled from my mind. One more decent shot would take me down and open up a few wounds. I would probably have bled to death long before help would arrive. Worse, I would have only killed one, maybe. If I was lucky 2. Now, I am hoping the opposite wouldn’t happen and that my enemies wouldn’t rush me.

There is some tuning stil to do I think. Mostly to help the GM run te show. But overal, this was the combat I wanted gun play to be. It is about controlling the fight. Move and fire from secure positions, hold positions, flank, etc. Not big flashy run and kill em all moves here. What was really great was the tension of it all. In our minds the clock was ticking. They would escape out of some unknown back door with the hostages, or they would rush me when Liz was down. I was generally concerned that my character was about to loose his first gun fight in the campaign. I’m not going to go into detail on how we got through this. Needless to say, backup arrived. I ended the session with 3 kills and Liz had 2. At the height of the battle I took out 2 in a pitched bid for entry. I took another round by the way. If it weren’t for some help from a PC with medical training I would have bled to unconsciousness after the second round which gave me 2 wounds and left me with 1 point left to hold onto life with. But we came through in the end, and I, personally, have ahealthy respect for the business of controlling a firefight.

Well, I’m back. Yeah, I know I did the back from Philly thing already. What I actually mean is I’m back online. My PC crapped out on me and nearly cost me all my archived work. I managed to salvage just about everything. It took about four days to try and diagnos, fix, re-diagnoe, then finnally just wipe and start from scratch. That meant backing up about 3 years of PC, then reinstalling those three years including an entire host of apps. Truth be told, I hate computers.

Even with this techno-handicap, I managed to get some work done via the loan of Willie’s laptop. Now I have to get back to about 200 emails and see what has been growing around the net while I was out. I managed to just catch an email from Willie about our Nom for publisher of the year with the Ennie. As soon as I can look into that a bit more closely and see the whats I;ll get you some more insite on that.

So no I have to take the pages written on the laptop and transfer them. Next I have some reformatting. Not as much progress as I would have liked due to having to split my writing time with computer fix-it time. However, I am moderately please with the grinding away of the details of the mechanical chapters (skills, eq, etc). Still some pollish to go. Registered play testers will get their first glimpses of this over the next week or so. I hope.

Anyways, I’m cutting this short. The wife and kids return from Ohio tomorrow and the place is a train wreck (go fig, been on my own for 2 weeks). I’ll be back shortly.

So this has been a very busy time. There is an entire bucketful of things coming down the pipe. Not all of this is directly related to Modern. Therefore, I have opted to not include this entry as solely a development journal for Modern.

There have been some discussions within the Ironwood family discussing some production elements. Digital Pen n Paper has been a big topic of conversation lately. I have had no less then three meetings concerning this, one being a lengthy discussion with our programming team. The meetings have added to my project lists as Matt, our lead programmer, has requested some revisions to the design document. Being as this is a smaller document than modern and requires less resources I have switched gears temporarily to provide the revisions. Those, however, are all but done. With some luck, Matt should have his information by the end of the weekend.

I have also had some talks with James concerning developments of his second adventure, a sequel to Prophecy. This story is shaping up nicely. I am drooling at the prospect of getting this onto my gaming table. The first adventure was a huge hit with my personal gaming group. The new plot developments happening now will take the story even further. The return of some key characters is also exciting. I can’t give away any details, but this is going to be something great!

I also got some play time on Willie’s new campaign. Though I may have some bias as this is another Ironwood project, I have to say that our first game session has got me clamoring for more. Its a shame though that my impending trip to Philly will have to put the campaign on pause for a bit. Its like having to watch the first episode of a great TV. series only to find out it was a season finally and you have to wait a few months to see the next one. Hopefully the wait wont be that long.

Then there are some personal sidetracks. I have had a lot of small fires burning here and there. While digging into some info for modern I stumbled into something that turned one of those small fires into a blazing inferno. So I went back to it, crammed in two night’s work, just about finished it, and put the fire out. This is actually a small collection of creatures. It will be released as a free download for the basic information (descriptions and stats) but I am also leaning towards releasing a larger version with more meta information, artwork, etc. for officially release as a mini-supplement. My long standing commitment to not create a creature book is the only thing in my way. You see, I don’t want to sell something that to me is something that the end user can create to their liking. I hate Monster Books. I would much rather release small downloads of creatures for free. However, this is shaping up into a biggter project. It has much more useful content than I anticipated. It would be shame not to put the rest of the team on board with this. So I figure I can still go with plan A and release what I had intended on being free release stuff for creatures, but if you want more I have to tap into some more talent and that will unfortunately cost us some money we will have to make up in sales of mini-book PDF sales.

The final things on the plate are my treatments of several adventure modules that will be completed once Modern goes to the editor’s desk. The treatments have to be finished so I can get them to our artists. This gives them plenty of time while I complete the writing and design of the adventures and they go to the editors. This way, we get the book back from the editor around the same time as we get the artwork. I personally have 4 adventures coming up. Two for fantasy and two for modern. The first one will release shortly before, or at the same time as modern. Then I will follow it up with the modern adventure, and the modern campaign adventure (this mixes some elements from fantasy into it as well). Last will be the final fantasy adventure which may be released shortly before or at the same time as Sci-Fi.

Believe it or not, there is more, but they have not been a focus. I have done some tentative inroads towards my research into some supplements. This is setting up for a long string of material I can’t wait to focus on when Sci-Fi Sagas is released.

So, there’s a lot. After this weekend I should have a much stronger focus on Modern. I will also get a lot of this done in Philly as well. Upon my return the final beta testing material will go out to Nexus Community members for last bit reviews, opinions, and suggestions. While I hate to predict a release date, I expect within 2-3 months maximum before modern finally hits the shelves

Oh yeah, it may get a new cover too. I designed one, and Willie is also working on his own. I’m on the fence as to which I like better. It may come down to a community decision. 

Ah, the holiday weekend! This is a time for rest, barbeque’s and for fun and drink. Maybe, if you are lucky enough your home is near a coast and you can enjoy the beach, or maybe just a calm weekend of camping out.

Alas, for me, I see oppurtunity to work! I know, it seems silly. It is a holiday. Why then am I not enjoying this time with my family? Well, the answer is that I will happily sacrafice this weekend for a promise of more to come. I have a self imposed deadline to meet to get this product done. I will push myself until I do.

So? was the sacrafice of this holiday worth it? Absolutely. I have finnished the all daunting firearms statistics. This was a bear. Yes, I had all my old notes to fall back on. But again, as I have said in previous entries, I have chosen to start from scratch here.

It was easier this time. I knew where all my research material was located. I also knew the structure of how everything would work together. What was different this time is something I overlooked last time. This was conversion formulas that could determine the recoil of firearms and formulas for finding energy from a bullet. In my last build of the game damage was largely determined by the size of the bullet, and the energy was guestimated based on the effective range of the weapon. I knew this was flawed, but it was close, and much closer than I think most people would have gone with it. So I was happy, and daunted, to find something more concrete to determine the mathmatics that would give us our damage statistic for these weapons.

 Let me tell you, this was no joke! To get an idea of what had to happen I’ll walk you through my steps, but I won’t give away the formulas (not yet anyways).

1. Determine the list of fireams I want, giving credit to popularity, common use, and variety in game.
2. Determine caliber (bullet type) and common load for each bullet.
3. Determine velocity, weight in grains of the bullet, and weight of the weapon (this last is detrimental to the recoil fo the weapon)
4. Next, we calculate the energy of the weapon.
5. Create a table of the ranges of the energy usedby grouping energy in aesculating range (300, 400, 500, etc) between the first and the next.
6. Next calculate diamiter of the shell and create another table much like the energy table.
7. Create base damage die based on the energy table, with modifier. Create a dmage modifier table based on diameter of the round.
8. Combine the results for each firearm. Then adjust this statistic based on range (short ranges mean the round wobbles more and creates more damage to the target).
9. Create a table of modifiers for round variations (full metal jacket, hollow point, etc.)
10. This give us damage. Next we check for recoil by calculating bullet weight in grains, velocity, and weight of the gun. Since gun designs that are developed to reduce recoil are harder to determine statistics on (because they are generally preference) we ignore these for now.
11. We determine the energy forced back on the firer, then we use a forumla of my own creation to determine the recoil modifier.
12. We adjust for clear definition of firearms characteristics that will adjust recoil (short grip for instance).
13. Check all weapons to make sure there is a good enough variety, that there are no clear “best” or “worse” weapons. Clear out any statistical duplicates and best/worse and add new guns in their place.
14. Take a nap.

And there you have it. All of this had to be developed before the weapons could be given their stats. Now that we have all of this, we create spreadsheets that will do the calculations and start plugging in numbers. Never one to put faith in a computer, I checked the calculations. All looks good. Are we done? Nope. Now we submit our stistics to some people I know who have real world experience shooting weapons in combat. Remember that combat fire is much different than target shooting, and game hunting. So we want to see what these soldiers have to say about the weapons we came up with.

So now I only have to wait. Small adjustments can be easily made if there are glaring issues. Of course some criticism will be more about opinion, which is fine.

And so, there you have it. We have now our firearms, and another difficult portion of the book in the done bin. Now on to the next phase.

One last note: Today is Memorial Day. Remember that our troops live and die for our freedoms. You do not need to support the wars they fight. However, you should always support your troops. They put it all on the line for you! Honor that. If you have a problem with the war, tell your congressman. If you know a soldier, or someone who served, thank them. I also challenge you to thank every police, fireman, and serviceman you see (stranger or not) and thank them for doing what they do. They never get enough of that, because almost everyone takes what they do for granted.

Well, I am happy to report that I have finnished yet another chapter in the Modern Sagas Player’s Guidebook. So far, the opening chapters: Introduction, Character Creation, and Skills have now among their ranks Vehicles.

 However, completion is rather misleading. You see, each chapter, completed in of itself, is not really completed until the book in its entirety is completed. So you call a chapter completed only when it has reach this point of development where it is full and complete, yet still lacking in that there is further information that is defined elsewhere. This might sound kinda odd, but it works.

You see, I am quite proud of the feedback I get from the Fantasy Sagas. Even those who may not like the game still share a respect for one single, but ultimately critical, aspect of the book. Hands down I have read comments that cite the books as being well laid out, well written, clear, and concise. This means, to me, that I have done my job. I understand that not everyone will like this game. I understand that the mechanics are not everyone’s cup of tea. The rules are not easy to develope, but to like them or hate them is a matter of personal tastes. However, whether or not the game can be read, and much more, understood, has little to do with personal tastes. Although some rules may be easier to read based on one person’s opinion, making a game readable and easy to understand is something you can strive for on a larger scale. Can someone have an opinion that the game is not readable? Sure. But that may be more of a matter of the reader, not the material, if almost universally the game is regarded as being a well written, well laid out book.

I was able to prevent the book from falling into that horriblezone of ambiguous rules and content by constantly leaving a chapter unfinished to flesh out sections as other parts of the book helped me to define them. You would almost think that because the rules are the exact sam as fantasy that I wouldn’t need to do this, unless I was adding new rules. I’m not. I am determining resolutions using the same rules, but not making new rules. However, writing them so that these resolutions occur as they do is not exactly easy. The difficulty is compounded when you have other sections of the game that could potentially compliment or alter them in some way. So care is given. Care is given to presentation, to flow. Even each simple heading, sub-heading, sub-subheading, bolded type, flavor box, etc. is all carefully crafted to not only make things easy to read, but flow into a natural path of understanding. Each section leads logically into the next.

I can give you a perfect example of how this is done. Using the Fantasy Sagas PGB as an example, look through the book. You first chapters cover all the basics right. Intro -> Character Gen -> Skills. Next people expect equipment and combat. That’s the usual flow, right. That’s because these are more interesting to all players. However, what are we doing right now (if we are reading the book)? We are generating a character. The rules explain concepts of the game, then teach us how a general character is developed around these concepts. Next we flesh out our character with skills. We learn how they work. Also, we are learning more of the depth of our skill resolution system. If we were to do what most books do we would then jump to equipment. Then to combat, then back to more skills (magic and psionics). So we are bouncing around and we are forgetting something very important: our flow has deviated away from how skills work. So we put the magic and psionics right after skills because they are using the same mechanics. So by now we have a really good idea of how skills work in a large variety of ways. We go next to tools for your skills, calling it equipment. Now we have learned skills, how to augment them with tools. Now we need to know what they are good for and why. So now we learn about other game mechanics. This is our Adventuring chapter. Next we get into specialized mechanics in combat. The rest of the book is a bunch of examples (yes your spell appendix is a collection of example spells).

 So maybe combat is more fun and should be closer to the front to catch attention. However, by pushing things into the right places we understand things in greater depth. It reads easier not only because it is digestable, but is made digestable because we gave you the tools to be familiar enough with how everything works. Each page is written this way. Each paragraph is the same.

So, I say that another chapter is done. It still has a long way to go. It is not a draft. It is done. However, by the time you read it, it will not be the same thing I saved to my desktop this weekend.

Hapy Gaming!

Note: as an aside I have left this document un-edited. Not even a spell check. I just wanted to give you all an idea of what James, Courtney, Willie, and Nadine all go through with my writing. Hey, I am a writer. I put thought to paper. I never said anything about being an English major!