No need to apologize. I had two other games where one player did not show up and I let in another con attendee with generics. I was just commenting that only one of my games was not full, and 23 out of 24 seats filled over the course of the con is pretty good by me!

I hope you enjoy Eureka, and if you do let me and the rest of the Fudge community know about it! In fact, just tell every gamer that you meet to go buy it.

I am happy to hear that your games went well. I have also been in that spot that following play testing it is time to scrap and rebuild a project. Kudos to you for recognizing that the game played well, but that the product needs work. That is a tough hurdle to cross with game design IMO.

Congratulations on a great Gen Con and the success of Eureka.

I do need to apologize – I was that missing player. We ended up not getting to Gen Con until that session was over. I did buy a copy of Eureka, so I hope that makes up for it!

As I posted on the Fudge list, the Fudge games I ran at Gen Con went better than I hoped. People who had never tried Fudge – or even heard of it – were willing to try the system out and had fun doing it. As for my project, testing my take on Fudge with strangers gave me some new perspective. As a result, I am retooling the system to be closer to standard Fudge. This will set me back a bit from my original goal of publishing by next summer as I will want to give it another round of Gen Con playtesting before putting it out there.

Best,
Matt

I have to disagree with that. Anyone can be published. You either convince a publisher to carry your work under their label, or you self-publish. That is all it takes to be published. A single freaking copy of your book with a registered ISBN is all it takes.

Publishing is a business, and less and less people are doing it well because of how easy it is to be published. Tell me that you are published and I’ll nod my head politely and say “Good for you!” Prove to me that you are a successful publisher and I will be asking you for tips and advice.

And yes, Eureka is available for retailers to buy through Studio 2 Publishing and soon I expect to be doing a book signing at our FLGS.

Gnome Stew selling out: yup. Actually it was one of the things that bummed me out – there wasn’t a copy to be bought. Which isn’t such a bad thing – I can get one at our FLGS, right?

Lack of dF at the stockists: this really bummed me – I gave my last blue dFs to Wil Wheaton as he’d just picked up Spirit of the Century. So, no biggie – “I’ll just grab some more from… HEY!” I still have a sizeable pile to share with others, but now in just basic black. Idunno – maybe it’s more slimming.

Publishing v. being published: starting to become less of a difference every day IMO. I’m really enjoying the partnership mindset of Game Crafter/Superior Printing and Wowio and working with them both. I’m not saying that the portal-distribution model is going away or is irrelevant, just that it’s losing its appeal for me. For electronic products, there’s no “there” to be taken advantage of beyond individualistic quirks of each portal (ePubs here, flash-driven PDF gateways there, hypertext/IA features support etc etc etc). For physical products, it’s the same hassles as mail-order has been since the 70s or the same crafter-artisan issues you have in dealing with bricks & mortar… The Bits & Mortar idea is interesting, yet fairly early in rolling out with anyone not named Fred being involved.

Making people real: GenCon is great for that. I met up with people who were previously only emails and occasional pixels. Others have had ideas for meeting up to discuss honing our craft (next wed., mind). Running into people you haven’t seen in years. A small amount of chiding of local people that you have to go to a Con in another state to see them rather than at any local events… Good times, good times.

See, that’s what all this is about – it’s people, having fun, sharing pieces of their imaginations with each other. Even when we all have different playing styles, it still can Just Work as long as we keep that in mind.

Sidenote: I have to pick up Now Playing. It has been on my list of games to acquire for far too long now.

Keith – I agree that there is no dichotomy, and I was not suggesting that there was such a thing. Objective and subjective are merely the extreme endpoints of a very long line. A game may favor one over the other, but one does not exclude the existence of the other from a game.

But, I have to admit that I like playing at least somewhat subjectively at times. I’ve had new players join my games and I just hand them an empty character sheet, have them put down a name and occupation, and then we fill in the rest as they use it. For instance, the first time he shoots a gun is when we all decide what he should have for a Gun skill, given who his character is.

Fudge is fluid rather than fractal, and that’s part of it’s strength (the other virtue lies in it’s simplicity and abeyance of mathematical schemes in favor of plain language – much akin to literate programming in an agile environment). Even within an objective system, qualities can be defined and redefined by the players on the fly. The list of skills that could be found in an objective Fudge RPG could simply be the starting point of a subjective description of a character. The key factor tying these things to the core mechanic is the idea of the Ladder of adjectives.

It’s possible to play a highly subjective game within an objective framework through omission. The reverse is not always possible – it’s hard to make a vanilla narrativist structure objective in the same way D&D4 is objective. As such, objective Fudge lends itself more to certain styles of game than others – I’d not run “Get The Girl” diceless with my usual train-game krewe, simply in that there would be a desire to focus more on the interactions and history of Scrapepath rather than the action-plot that’s outlined. Fair enough – Fudge as a system is flexible enough to comfortably accommodate both styles and even more than I’ve not thought of. And that’s the fluidity I’m describing.

I believe the dichotomy between objective and subjective is ultimately false in practice – comparators will be attached to various words and phrases almost at will, with interpretation and judgement coming from GM and players both. The chief difference is how open-ended the skills list is in the “objective game,” with the secondary quality of having smaller lists describe Traits in a more subjective manner – Crafts is more open to interpretation and application than Underwater Basketweaving, for example. The choice of skills and level of detail is shared between GM and players as a function of describing/designing the game they wish to play – even the act of choosing someone else’s ideas is a design choice (feature not bug).

Right now, I’m finding myself drawn to having players answer questions about the character they have in mind rather than handing them a shopping list of Skills. For example, using AD&D’s 9-alignment system, what would your character’s alignment be? Give me 3 things that are “walking the line” of the alignment, 2 key practices or beliefs that illustrate how relates to the worlds, and one “absolute inviolable” that violation would revoke any allegiance to this creed/society. I’m asking 7 elements, structured into 4 groups (Label, Praxis A, Code B, Fundament C). These are objective in that they have a fixed quantity and possible value that can be assigned to any of these elements (A=Fair, B=Good, C=Superb), yet the actual values of ABC are subjectively described by the player in response to an objective set of questions.

[I need to sleep and have dreams of Kaiju now.]

With a subjective system there really is no pre-defined skill of fighting, nor kung-fu or street fighting. The skill really does not exist in the game until you have a player decide that “I want my character to be a fighter.”

That to me is the difference between a subjective and an objective system. With subjective systems you can create new skills, attributes, gifts, and faults all on the fly to meet a character concept. With an objective system you need to design the components first, and then the character concept has to be shaped from that limited selection.

A good objective system will have lots of options so that character creation does not feel limited, but at the same time all of the bits and pieces have been designed to work together. A subjective system has no limits on the options for character creation, but there is no guarantee that the components will work together. Plus with subjective systems you need a higher level of cooperation between the players because two players might have different concepts for the same trait.