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28 May 09 – How Much Planning Do You Need?
I started reading a Kindle book on organic gardening. And I was immediately put off by 1) the repeated sermons on the evils of chemical pesticides (if I've bought the book, I probably don't need to be sold on avoidance of chemicals), and 2) the insistence on planning. I quote:
| The Essential Guide to Organic Gardening: | ...adequately allocate the proper space to your organic vegetable garden. The amount of space you decide to use for your organic vegetable garden must be sufficient, but not in excess; you do not want wasted space or wasted vegetables, because you grew too many. |
On one hand, this makes sense. Don't over- or under-produce, if you can help it.
On the other hand, how on Earth can the beginning gardener know what is "sufficient" or "excess?" Will the book attempt to tell me? What author can possibly tell me how many tomatoes I need?
Should one plan? Sure. But only approximately. Especially in a garden, where so little is under your control. Plan out your exact potato usage over the year, then watch half your potato crop fail.
Why can't we just experiment? Approximate our needs and then go for it? It's not like the average American homeowner is going to starve because their backyard organic garden produced insufficient quantities of cucumbers. And if you have too much, why can't you give some away? I don't think I've ever had trouble giving away food to co-workers and friends.
There are too many variables. Just grab a bit of land, dig in some good soil, plant a few seeds, and water it occasionally. This is my first year with a real vegetable garden, and I've got more lettuce than I can eat growing from a 2'x3' plot.
27 May 09 – Has Star Trek Lost Its Way?
As I mention in this YouTube review, I had a grand time watching the new Star Trek movie. Afterwards, I started thinking about it, and I had second thoughts.
What do you think?
18 May 09 – Hitting the "Pause" Button on Giant Armors
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Those of you familiar with my Giant Armors project may wonder how it's going.
It isn't.
I've been stuck for months. Not with writer's block, exactly. I've known what needs to be done, I've just had no creative juice for it.
It's weird. I know how to sit down and work at writing. I know how to burrow my way out of landslides of doubt and dead ends.
This feels different. I feel like I've outgrown the idea.
We've all done this. We come across an idea we had years ago for some project, and we wonder why we ever wanted to do it. It just seems so...wrong for us now.
I don't know if Giant Armors is wrong for me yet. It feels like an idea half-formed, that needs more gestation. Perhaps I started too early. Perhaps I haven't given it enough attention. However, whenever I give it attention, nothing usable comes.
So, I'm setting it aside. Like a favorite outfit that's out of season, Giant Armors is going in mothballs for a while. I'm giving it about six months before I'll force myself to revisit it.
I just...it frustrates me. I want to be able to slam through whatever problem I have. Win by persistence and dedication. All that great samurai stuff.
Do I need more dedication? I don't know. I just don't know.
I do know the danger of having too many projects going at once. And while I'm now clearing this from my plate (for now), is that just another way for me to do more stuff? Is this just the easier path?
I don't know. I can't process it logically, I can't feel what's right, and my gut isn't leading me in any direction.
So, I'll simplify. And look at it again once I've rested.
14 May 09 – Why Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam Is Worth Watching
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Note: This is the second in my series of articles on each show in the Gundam franchise. I don't have a specific schedule for this; I'm just writing these reviews as I feel like it. The last one was Why You Should Watch Mobile Suit Gundam.
Four years after the broadcast of the original Mobile Suit Gundam (which was not particularly popular during its broadcast), and the increasing popularity thereof thanks to the three movie compilations released afterwards, Sunrise produced Zeta Gundam. It's set 7 years after the end of Mobile Suit Gundam, and introduces a mostly new cast of characters and giant robots. The One Year War is over, and heroes must rise to face new problems.
And the cast of Zeta is one of its best aspects. Nearly every character has a role to play, in illustrating an ideal or pushing another character in some important direction. And this with a very large cast of several dozen characters.
Whereas MSG takes place during the final months of the One Year War between Earth and Zeon, Zeta's primary conflict is a guerilla war. The Earth Federation military has been taken over by a ruthless, Nazi-like military faction called the Titans, which the protagonists are fighting to stop.
This is a bit of a problem, actually. Zeta doesn't have quite as tight of a narrative drive as Mobile Suit Gundam did. In the earlier show, the overall state of the war helped to drive the plot of the story, and often directed the characters' next actions. Because Zeta concerns itself with a series of small military skirmishes, its plot doesn't feel like it's building to a big story climax. While there is very much a big climax, the overall guerilla war—though it escalates—doesn't hold together the way a large war with major military offensives does.
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As a result, Zeta spends more time on character moments. When I think about Zeta, I think about conversations between characters as much as I remember cool mecha action. This show contrasts its characters, and isn't afraid to present characters with whom we only sympathize some of the time. Kamille, the protagonist, is a fascinating study in light and dark: he's impetuous and vain, but absolutely dedicated to ideals of justice. While Amuro spends most of MSG agonizing over his choice of being a pilot, Kamille makes his peace with that choice early on.
A few other characters show up, and this is another example of Zeta's strengths and weaknesses. Char works with the "good guys" now, which is awesome; we get to spend more time with a complex character who has multiple allegiances. But he's now merely an excellent pilot, as opposed to being unquestionably the best pilot alive as he was in MSG. Sure, he's in hiding and doesn't want to show off, but those skills would inevitably appear during life-or-death combat.
So it goes with the re-introduction of Amuro, who joins the cast for a while. He's still a shockingly good pilot, but he suddenly can't make the kinds of kills he could seven years ago.
On the other hand, Amuro's a great example of the strength of the characters. Amuro is world-weary, angry at the Earth Federation, and still uneasy in his relationships. He's an adult, no longer unsure of himself, but still plagued by many of the same emotional problems. It's a fantastic update to the character (much like, say, Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi).
This presages the much darker tone of Zeta. It seems like a solid, more complex sequel to MSG, until about six episodes from the end. Then characters start to die. I won't tell you who or how many, but suffice to say by the end a lot of characters have gone on to the Great Dip In The Sky.
And it wraps up with perhaps the most nihilistic ending I've ever seen in anime. I've seen some really dark endings, but usually there's a ray of hope. Evangelion and Ideon end with quite a bit of hope for the future (well, the final Ideon movie, at least), and even Akira ends with a certain kind of life asserting itself. Zeta ends, er, very much on a downer.
Which explains my initial reaction to the series: tepid appreciation. I felt like it had some great animation and some neat character moments, but that it was just muddled and ended on such a downer.
Until I let time pass.
The more I thought about Zeta, and the more I analyzed its relationships and characters, the more I appreciated it. I realized that the arrogant characters were supposed to be arrogant, and the cold ones were meant to be cold. They were all pushing each other in different directions.
Zeta is a morality play. The action's cool, but ultimately it's about a bunch of flawed humans, doing their best to stop injustice.
A good example: one running gag in the franchise is the word "ikimasu." It means "Here I go," and it's what Amuro yells in MSG whenever he launches in his Gundam. There are many different phrases one could use to announce that one is going out; that's just the one Amuro tended to use. It's become a standard part of Gundam that, whenever the protagonist steps into the role of hero, he starts to use "ikimasu" when launching.
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Late in Zeta, one of the characters dies in Kamille's arms. It's in the middle of a larger conflict, while they're inside a large structure that's about to explode, so Kamille reluctantly has to leave her there. She asks him to finish what they started, and he agrees. She breathes her last, and he stands up, walks to the door, then turns and softly murmurs, "Kamille Bidan. Ikimasu."
It's a beautiful moment, perfectly representing the kind of writing that Zeta achieves on a fairly regular basis.
One other side note: Zeta is amazingly well-animated. It came out 2 years after Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, which established that anime could be well-animated, and they took that lesson to heart.
For example, when the mecha are maneuvering in space, they have several dozen tiny "Vernier thrusters" all over the frame. The animators actually draw each individual thruster blast as the mecha twist and turn during combat. That's the kind of detail you get in this show.
So it looks good, and it has complex characters. And it ages like a fine wine. Sure, it has stretches of bland writing and less-than-stellar animation. But overall, it's a remarkable achievement in the Gundam franchise.
10 May 09 – Six Months of Tabletop RPG Sales
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About six months ago, I started publishing tabletop RPG PDFs under the name Brent P. Newhall's Musaeum of Fantastic Wonders, starting with the short adventure War in the Deep in November 2008 and continuing with the sandbox setting The City of Talon in March 2009. I publish through DriveThruRPG, which takes a percentage of each PDF sale. The PDFs themselves are unrestricted.
I've always been a bit frustrated at the lack of real numbers about publishing PDFs online. How much money do these things make?
Here's how much I've actually made. Each PDF sells for US$5.00; I get $3.25 of that.
Sales
| Product | Number of Sales | Gross Earnings | Net Earnings |
| War in the Deep | 14 | $65.00 | $45.25 |
| The City of Talon | 17 | $75.00 | $48.75 |
| TOTAL | 31 | $140.00 | $91.00 |
Month-by-month for War in the Deep, which was first published in November 2008:
| Month | Number of Sales | Gross Earnings | Net Earnings |
| November 2008 | 4 | $15.00 | $9.75 |
| December 2008 | 5 | $25.00 | $16.25 |
| January 2009 | 4 | $20.00 | $13.00 |
| February 2009 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| March 2009 | 1 | $5.00 | $3.25 |
| April 2009 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| TOTAL | 14 | $65.00 | $45.25 |
Month-by-month for The City of Talon, which was first published in March 2009:
| Month | Number of Sales | Gross Earnings | Net Earnings |
| March 2009 | 11 | $45.00 | $29.25 |
| April 2009 | 6 | $30.00 | $19.50 |
| TOTAL | 17 | $75.00 | $48.75 |
Web Traffic
Total hits for War in the Deep on DriveThruRPG: 3,737.
Unique pageviews for War in the Deep on the Musaeum:
| Source | Pageviews |
| ENWorld.org | 32 |
| Direct | 10 |
| Google searches | 7 |
| RPGBloggers.com | 4 |
| Others | 10 |
| TOTAL | 63 |
The keywords used to find War in the Deep: "heroic tier adventure", "printable d&d counters", "rpg adventure plots", "rpg adventure writing", and "rpg for commercial use"
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Total hits for The City of Talon on DriveThruRPG: 1,734.
Unique pageviews for The City of Talon on the Musaeum:
| Source | Pageviews |
| Google searches | 29 |
| RPGBloggers.com | 14 |
| 11 | |
| Direct access | 8 |
| Others | 24 |
| TOTAL | 86 |
The keywords used to find The City of Talon: "crimes of talon", "brentnewhall", and "role play blogs".
Advertising
None.
Marketing
I described each project here on my blog in a couple of different blog posts. I'm a member of the RPG Bloggers Network, so those posts showed up there.
Analysis
Making just shy of US$100 with no advertising budget is no mean feat. On the other hand, considering the dozens of hours I put into these PDFs, I couldn't exactly make a livable wage off this yet.
The biggest surprise is the 32 pageviews from ENWorld, a huge D&D-oriented site. Upon further investigation, I discovered that ENWorld has a wiki page of 4E 3rd Party Publishers, and somebody kindly added my Musaeum and War in the Deep there. In writing this entry, I added the City of Talon to that page, so hopefully that'll drive some traffic to it.
I find it interesting that the RPG Bloggers network was much more interested in Talon than War in the Deep. This confirms my suspicion that GMs need higher-level creative resources more than they need pre-generated adventures. Note that Talon's made almost as much in 2 months as War in the Deep made in 4 months. However, Talon required far more time to create than War in the Deep did.
Plans
I plan to focus on settings. I'll continue work on my abandoned underground city setting and my floating city in the sky setting. I plan to publish both in the next six months.
However, given the relatively low time investment in writing an adventure, I'll probably publish one more adventure within the next six months. It seems worth it, especially if the adventure's fun to build.
5 May 09 – Seven Lessons Learned from Running a Tabletop RPG with a Big Group
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We can have up to 10 players at my tabletop gaming group. That's a lot of people to manage; most groups max out at 5 or so. While I'm trying to get better at splitting the group up with another GM, I've had times where I've had to run a game wtih 10 players.
A few suggestions:
- Notify the next few players in the turn sequence. When you tell somebody that it's their turn, point to the next person and advise them that they'll be next. They can then use the upcoming few minutes to prepare their next action.
- Enforce turn time limits. Our group is upfront about the fact that, with a large group, we can't wait for minutes on each person's turn. In fact, I keep out a one-minute egg timer, which I use on anyone who isn't ready with their action when their turn starts (myself included).
- Avoid combat. "True" role-playing, in the sense of acting out a role, is actually easier for large groups. The group can act off each other. You don't have to completely eliminate combat, but dropping one or two fights is probably a good idea.
- Make combat quick. With 10 people, two fights can chew up the entire session. On the other hand....
- Scale your enemies. By the time 9 players have taken a whack at a creature, it might be dead without getting the chance to use that one cool life-draining spell. Just beware making it so tough that one fight takes all night.
- Make combat interesting. In a fight with several different kinds of creatures, different players can concentrate on particular enemies.
- Pay special attention to quiet players. It's extremely easy for one or two players to fall through the cracks in a game like this. At least engage them in conversation.
The good news? A big group feels more like a party. A large group can be just as much fun as a small one, especially if big groups are rare. So have fun with it!