The first "real" game I published online was Fast and Dirty (FAD). Originating as a scrappy PDF exported directly from libreoffice, it nevertheless found a small following online in the days of Yahoogroups. The game happened to more or less coincide with the boom in 15mm science fiction which meant there was an audience looking for something that let them use any figures they could buy. 

The inspiration for FAD was very much Stargrunt 2 (SG2), though some aspects were things that I had been mulling over in various games me and my friends had experimented with but which had never been published. I wanted to take a lot of the same elements Stargrunt had (particularly suppression and dealing with casualties) but make them a bit smoother and faster to handle. The end result was a game that didn't really have any specific rules element in common but which clearly pays homage to the concepts of SG2.

One of the key features of FAD is the "Under Fire" mechanic. At the time I was intrigued by suppression mechanics in games but I didn't like how in most games it was an all or nothing affair. The Under Fire rule was one of the first things I wrote down on my notebook and it would remain mostly unchanged in function through 5 editions of the game: A unit that is shot at is always marked Under Fire and is then limited in its ability to move and fire. 

This gave me the result I wanted: Units cannot be shot at without reacting in some manner, but they are never completely immobilised or prevented from acting.

Everything else kind of fell into place around that basic idea. Some elements such as dealing with wounded soldiers, armor rolls being an opposed roll and troop quality affecting weapon range came from SG2, others such as quality determining which units you can shoot at were my own creation. The idea of using 2D6 and picking the highest for combat came from playing the 1916 and 1943 wargame rules (by the War Times Journal) and liking the idea of a single roll determining the amount of damage, but disliking that it was so random.

A few people have asked if the morale check mechanic (rolling 3 dice and counting successes) was borrowed from Chain Reaction (which hit the scene at the same time) but I didn't play Chain Reaction until a few years later. The inspiration for the morale checks came from my experience with the White Wolf role playing games instead. In hindsight morale could probably have been reworked to just use a simpler approach but the idea of unified dice mechanics was not something I was invested in at the time.

One innovation that I was proud of at the time but probably would not have done today is how traits were handled. I got the idea that a particular ability, such as moving through terrain with no penalty, would be more valuable to a strong unit than a weak unit and so all traits were given a cost multiplier. This worked pretty well, but was a bear to manage for army building ("okay so this unit is 37 points times 1.2 times 1.4 times..) and caused weird problems when one player took a lot of traits and the other didn't. 

The game succeeded in carving out a small but surprisingly loyal audience and I still receive an email or two from people every year saying they remember the game or just started playing it again after years of break. Considering how rough those early versions looked, that is pretty amazing. I suspect that the game leaning into the "hard military" vibe which has always been a bit of an underserved niche in sci-fi miniatures probably helped.

In total there were 5 editions of the game. The first is unfortunately lost to time but did feature a fair bit of original artwork by a gentleman who offered to draw up a whole bunch of illustrations for me as a favour. 

The second was a revision of that, featuring a lot of additional rules but unfortunately lacking artwork except the cover picture of the soldier with the katana. 

Third edition saw the help of Steve Green who was a fantastic help in both revising the rules and giving the game a proper layout. this is the "army edition" which featured photos of modern military troops, with photoshop filters over them, since we did not have any proper artwork available. This was also a pretty big overhaul of the game rules.

Fourth edition is the last that was available online and featured a number of additions and changes, as well a host of original new artwork provided by the folks on the Yahoogroup. This is the "power armor" cover.

A fifth edition was released on the Yahoogroup but was not available otherwise. It featured my planned additions to the game, particularly regarding vehicles. 

In the final years of FAD, I struggled with what to do with the game. In particular, I had pondered putting it under an open license but the process seemed rather difficult and I had a hard time justifying spending a lot of time on the game, compared to writing material that I would be able to sell. As I left the rules alone, they mostly fell by the wayside and Yahoogroups would eventually fall to the cold hand of internet decay. Eventually a gentleman reached out and offered to buy the rules from me, which I agreed to.

In a lot of ways, FAD is the game that lays at the foundation of everything else. Without that game and the boost of confidence it brought, it is perhaps doubtful if any of the subsequent games would have ever been created.

I hope 13 is not an unlucky number for Q&As!

Five leagues questions:

Is there an exact list of what enemy abilities count as magic?

The special abilities of the following characters are considered magical: Corrupt Sorcerer, Deranged cultist, Scheming heretic, Craven hex-chanter. 

From the enemy tables the following special abilities are considered magical: Coven of the half-dead, The ascended, War cultists, 

From the expansion: Blood-stench rituals, Wind swept wanderers, Forgotten dead.

You'll notice a few abilities that feel magical in nature but which are not included (usually things to do with fey things or aberrations). 

Exactly when is the reroll from the Guidance spell used?

You must choose to reroll immediately after rolling for one of the rolls listed (hit, proficiency, enemy armour). You cannot wait to see what the effects of any additional rolls turn out to be. 

What counts as targeting for the Fey Reaver special ability?

Any spell that requires sight and any ranged weapon.

How does the Legion of the Swine ability work?

Its a penalty for them, not a bonus. Their crossbow legionaries don't count as nearby troops for other legionaries (but a crossbow legionary can RECEIVE a combat bonus from a nearby ally that is a melee soldier). 

Leagues AND Parsecs questions:

What happens if a modifier makes me roll over 100 or below 01 on the injury table (or another table for that matter)?

Just treat it as the highest / lowest entry on the table. 

Leagues Lore questions:

What exactly does a Congealed strand look like?

A small pellet of some sort of elemental force. Could be gleaming sunlight, a spark of fire, an orb of water and so forth. It can be carried and handled (carefully) but if treated roughly it breaks into its component form. 

Are the Faceless Kingdom humans? 

I intended them to be. Yours may not be.

Were the Faceless Kingdom inspired by the Granbretan?

Not intentionally but I did enjoy the Hawkmoon novels so maybe unconsciously?

Are the Spider-Touched on the Ice-Heart Court list fey?

No, they don't have the Fey trait and are not faeries or goblins. They are forest dwellers who worship spiders and act as agents of the Fey Queen in order to obtain favours or power. They are meant to be humans but you could make them other creatures if you like and have some cool models. 

The idea has become an institution

The rules questions were a bit lighter this week, so I decided I would answer a couple of business and process type of questions that I receive from time to time. These are probably applicable to non-games projects as well. 

How much time do you spend writing per week?

I try to measure by daily word count and do at least 2000 words a day, usually spread over 2 larger projects. Realistically it ends up being more because there's also blog posts, Patreon work and so forth. As I discussed in a recent Upgrade Your Design post, one of the keys to getting a project done is to progress every day (or nearly so). 

Of course sometimes you end up rewriting or throwing out stuff too.

How much do you edit mid-project?

I don't do that a lot because it's easy to get caught up in some detail and I think it is more valuable to take the hatchet to your game once it is reasonably complete. However I do have a habit that every day I will open a project I am working on, go to a random rules section and re-read it, making any tweaks to wordings or make adjustments based on what I have written later. 

How do you avoid getting overwhelmed by a big project?

Break it into manageable portions. Rules writing kind of has this built in because games are presented in distinct chunks: Turn sequence, movement, combat and so forth. "I have to write an entire wargame" is a lot on your plate. "Today I have to write the movement rules" is pretty manageable. To help with this sort of approach, put in the chapter titles up front. 

This bite-sized approach is something I had started doing naturally, but a few books I read recently taught me that it is something a lot of writers use. 

How many projects are too many at once?

That probably just depends on you. For me if I am working on actively developing a game, I get in trouble if I am trying to do more than say 3 things at the same time and 2 is honestly better. Small side ideas don't interfere as much. 

I've tried doing things like scheduling specific days for specific projects and then cycling through in a week but that didn't work at all for me. I think trying to take on too many projects also leads to the issue where you bog down and then you feel terrible because you didn't complete anything.

I have seen you mention "The Suck". What is that?

The Suck is whatever part of a project you hate the most. It might be editing. It might be writing terrain rules. It might be something else. It's the part that is slow and irritating and you don't want to do it and it is where your project is at the most risk for getting abandoned.

It is also the part that you can't really deal with by clever tricks. The Suck is only vulnerable to brute force and discipline: You have to power through it and get it done. I will note that often thinking about The Suck makes it worse. 

Any productivity techniques that can be adapted to game writing?

If you take the stance that game writing is basically applied technical writing, I think there is yeah. Obviously a lot of techniques have to be slightly modified for our purposes, but I think most advice that is given by professional writers will have at least some value. I've personally got a lot of mileage out of Cal Newport's Deep Work. 

Dice are magical little devices. Who would have thought a couple of small plastic cubes could generate that much excitement, tension and drama. They can also be deceptive to the game designer and the play-tester.

Play-testing is of course the crucible where game ideas are hammered out, broken or confirmed but especially with small sample sizes it can be very unpredictable, and most gaming groups will produce a small sample size due to the time constraints involved in setting up and playing a miniatures game. 

Let us say we are testing out a particular type of weapon in a science fiction game. The Super Laser (TM) is intended to be a powerful heavy weapon for attacking tough vehicles but the play-testers report back that it seems to be far too weak for the assigned points value. What happened? 

Well, first and foremost you may of course just have gotten the cost wrong or the stats do need to be tweaked, but what if the luck was awry? How many times does a single unit get to shoot in a normal miniatures battle? I wager 3-5 times in a lot of systems so if we have one unit with the Super Laser, that's how many changes we get to evaluate the effectiveness. Assuming a pretty conventional game system with hit dice and effect rolls how many of those shots hit? Missing three 3+ hit rolls in a row on a D6 is a 1 in 27 chance. Not very likely but also not impossible at all. If I offered 27 donuts and told you one of them was filled with ants you probably wouldn't take a chance on Weasels Donut Surprise Shop (Especially with a Dunkin' up the road).

Of the shots that hit, how were the rolls for effect? What happened on the damage tables? We often pay attention mainly to overall luck (and even then our perceptions are often heavily skewed) but even if a player has perfectly average luck throughout the game, not every roll is equally valuable. Playing a board game session recently, my opponent had a pretty representative mixture of good and bad rolls, except when attacking one particular city where he got three 1's in a row. This city happened to not only be an objective but was also pivotal to continuing the overall advance and thus be able to win the scenario. 

These factors can of course all apply in reverse. The dice can be hot and sometimes even the weakest unit can destroy the enemy elite. 

I hope this helps make it clear that you need to look a bit more closely, if you were present at the play session and can examine exactly what happened. You might even keep notes on a particular unit or character. This can be difficult of course, so trying to get data over a number of games is often more reliable. 

Once you have a grasp on the probabilities involved, you can then start looking at other questions such as how the unit was used. An expensive anti-tank gun that ended up spending the whole battle shooting at infantry is not "earning its keep" and an error in deployment might have stranded a strong assault unit too far from the objectives. 

These factors are much more difficult to control for and again requires more data to work with. It is worth noting that you can still learn something from such a battle. If the super weapon is so expensive in points that the rest of army is now too limited, that may be an indication that things need to be scaled back regardless.

Happy hunting.

Five Parsecs questions:

Do I have to declare all my crew actions before rolling for them?

I had originally intended that you did, but we don't generally do that anywhere else in the game. Go ahead and declare and resolve one at a time.

Exactly when is a Patron lost?

Patrons are lost if you accept the job and then fail the mission. This applies no matter how you earned that Patron.

What counts as a rival of a particular type, f.x. "law enforcement rivals"?

This is left open ended depending on your story. The strict answer for law enforcement is Bounty Hunters, Enforcers and Vigilantes (though you might want to make the last one a fifty fifty chance).

Five Leagues questions:

(Repeat) Does the origin bonus and the bonus for having a skill stack to +3?

Yes.

Weasel Tech questions:

When do swarms from revealed blips act?

They act in the next Swarm Phase (which may be this or next turn), never in the current swarm phase if that is when they were revealed.

Lore questions?

Some folks are really interested in the setting and lore behind the games. If there is interest, I can do a second Q&A with lore questions though it might only be twice a month to avoid overscheduling myself. Let me know if you have lore questions. 

One of the common stumbling blocks of writing a game is that you end up in a sprawling mess. You start out writing a WW2 skirmish game and at the end of it you are writing rules for the divisional supply depots and how to handle hover tanks. How did you get here?

Well, the answer is that you got there gradually because each section builds upon the last. Its difficult to hold 200 pages of game in your head at one time so as you work you will tend to gradually shift things in and out. This is probably not how psychology actually works but to me it always feels like a conveyor belt. We just got done writing the morale rules and now we are on to leadership rules, so whatever section was before morale can get discarded. As a result sections can slowly get further and further from the original objectives as each deviates more and more. 

A common place for this to occur is in the special rules section of your game. This is the place where everything from paratroopers to demolitions goes and is a great place for all manner of over-detailed sub-systems to hide out. If your core rules are all "roll 2D10, apply modifiers and compared to a target number" and then the rules for sabotaging railroads is a dice pool with exploding dice and drawing from a card deck, this is what happened.

With experience you get a feeling for when this starts to happen and a critical reading (or having some serious feedback from someone you trust) helps weed it out. When you are just starting out however, it can be more challenging.

What helped me a lot was to write down my objectives up front. You can even put it in the first chapter of the book if you like, but otherwise a notepad, sticky note or your white board will all do.

These objectives can be about the scale of the game ("platoon level, infantry focused"), mechanical concepts ("dice pool with 3-6 D6s") or broad claims ("Ranged combat is primarily suppressive"). Try not to go overboard with too many: You are really just trying to nail down the 4-6 most important things that will keep the game together. This can easily double as the elevator pitch for the game as well, since this is basically what will end up defining your game.

It can also help to sketch out the list of content in advance. How many "special cases" do you want? Are you going to cover air units? Buildings? Magic? I always try to write the chapter headings first and I'll often fill in some expected sub-chapters in advance to help narrow down what I intend to do. 

When you are going through your project, stop every now and again and review your stated objectives. You can do this at the start of each writing session, at the end of each rules chapter or once a week, whatever seems to work. Compare what you have written lately to the objectives: Are you on track? If you deviated, did you do so for a good reason? Should you go back and rewrite something or make it an optional rule? 

If you find you are constantly bumping up against your objectives, you may have misjudged what kind of game you actually want to write. We will talk about that in a future post.

General questions:

What are your thoughts on the ORC license?

I think it's a cool development, though the value of it will depend mainly on what companies get committed to the project and what rules will go into the "community pool" so to speak. 

I am not sure if it will have a lot of impact on the miniatures gaming scene, where there seems to be less interest in shared game mechanics. I have kicked around putting Squad Hammer under the ORC license to kick things off, since it may be easier than updating and maintaining my own license.

Weasel Tech:

Can you clarify how Favorable mentions work? 

 The way the table works is a bit wonky because it got caught between two versions. Until I update it treat it like this:

Favorable mentions are earned by the squad, not by a specific character. So they are applied as a bonus to any commendation roll you make. 

Leagues / Parsecs general:

How do various "debts" work if I cannot pay them?

Some events can cause you to owe money (outside the normal ship debt in Parsecs). Unless the rules state otherwise, they must be paid as soon as you have the money available.

Parsecs:

Can a forced move, like a Terrifying weapon, force a figure off the table? 

It is not intended to, but I do play it that way. 

If I roll the "Caught off guard" deployment condition can I still roll to seize the initiative?

Yes. You can narrate it as being caught off guard but managing to turn the ambush on the attackers or a heroic scramble to improve your situation. Simply apply both rules as written.

Realistically if you are writing an indie miniatures game you are writing for people that are already veterans of the hobby and know "how it works". I don't think it is a good idea to always take that for granted however. First and foremost it obviously discourages new players from picking up the game. Yes, the prospective new player isn't likely to go to Wargame Vault first instead of just picking up some Warhammer or Bolt Action boxes at the local store but that doesn't mean nobody will.

Second, I think it can encourage poor writing because we get into a habit of relegating more and more features to "how it works". 

Recently I was reading through a set of skirmish rules and realised that at no point did it explain how casualties were actually removed from the unit. It could be implied based on the game it was inspired by, but it never actually clearly stated it. Does that matter? In a game where some figures can have a heavy weapon it matters quite a bit. It also tends to come up when it comes to keeping units out of close combat range (or within it). 

For an example that has become a bit of a catch-phrase with my friends, someone told me about a game that did not actually explain exactly how charging an enemy worked. They sent an email to the writer of the game who replied that you charge in the usual way.

Indeed. 

When you are writing rules try to develop a critical eye for the step by step of the process. You may be surprised to find that there are more steps than you thought and some of them may benefit from being made explicit. 

As an example does it matter who rolls the dice for something? Most of the time it does not and you won't have to say anything but what if the game system features a pool of reroll points that a player can use any time they roll the dice for anything? Now it does matter if I roll for the armour saves or if you do.

A few pain points that I find are easy to miss (and have missed in the past!):

* How are measurements done from figure to figure?

* How exactly does rerolls work?

* How are casualties removed in games with multi-figure units?

* Can I pick any target when I shoot?

* Can figures move through other friendly figures?

* What is stopping me from just shooting at that officer over there? 

* If multiple things are happening at the same time, how do we figure out how they get resolved? 

I am sure you can think of many more when you sit down and look critically at a set of rules. Give it a try. 

As a reminder I get the questions from all sources: Email, discord, facebook and blog comments. I do reword them a bit to fit the blog format and due to the fact that many are questions I have been asked by multiple people. 

If you post your question as a blog comment, I promise I will include it in the next week round up. (unless I skip a week, then itll be the next one after that :) )

General questions:

Do you ever make rules just for yourself that we don't get to see?

On occasion yes and usually for fun and my own enjoyment. I am currently working on a vanity project for myself which is basically 2nd edition 40K, adapted to various 19th century conflicts. 

Should I house rule when I playtest my own rules?

I think this is a bad idea unless you realise something is completely wrong. Play at least a few turns with the rules as you wrote them down, then revise and reset.

Five Parsecs questions:

How does recruiting work if my campaign crew size is not 6?

You substitute the actual crew size you are using for your campaign. Note that this is what you pick at the start, not your current crew. So if you are playing a 5 crew campaign, then you recruit automatically if you have less than 5 crew, instead of 6 as it says in the book. 

K'Erin with boarding sabre. How does the dice work?

Roll twice and pick the best (K'Erin). Then choose if you wish to reroll (Sabre). If you do, you must take the final result.

Is there an official answer to when you should determine the identity of a new rival?

The intent was to roll by the time you are fighting them, but a lot of players prefer rolling when the rival is assigned to you. It works fine either way. 

Five Leagues questions:

If I am backed into a corner and lose the combat but don't die, do I fight again?

Yes. You keep fighting until you die or win (pushing the enemy back). 

All 5X games:

Are enemies aware of my crew if they cant see them?

Yes. Unless an AI rule specifically refers to line of sight, assume the AI is always aware of your crew. You may of course choose to roleplay it a bit more realistically, but in that case you really ought to make it apply both ways. 

So you have written your game and you have gotten some play testers on board. Feedback is coming in, you have incorporated it and now you are ready for something resembling prime time. 

You put your book out there. Maybe its for money, maybe its a freebie. You do a little promotion and eventually someone buys it. People are actually playing it! Now is the time to go see what all these people say. 

You check your email, blog replies and a few forum threads. Most of them are enjoying the game or asking questions. There's some criticisms and you take them on board. Maybe you could have done a rule better in hindsight or you forgot something obvious. Maybe you straight up screwed up. All things to learn from. You keep a note pad with these things so you can work on them later.

Then there's the posts that make you pause:

This guy says the game doesn't have a rule that is absolutely in the book.

That guy says they changed a bunch of the rules and that the game is broken (because they changed those rules).

A third guy says that since the game doesn't do something it was never intended to do, its crap. 

A fourth guy just straight up made up a story about how you play tested the game by kicking bunnies. 

Guy number five says that "he heard" the game is shit, so don't play it. It's clear from the post he never even read it. 

Sixth guy is oddly obsessed that the game does not include a rule for different types of pontoon bridge and is disappointed that you left out such an important factor. 

Guy number seven points out that a rules term sounds like the word for a jihadist terror group and could that be changed? 

What do you do? 

You are a writer, nay a game designer! You can create worlds! You can wield the flaming wrath of the pen!

And you are going to sit your ass right down. 

Look up any established novel writer and they will tell you that the first lesson to learn is to not get into it with critics. You are likely to seem petty and aggressive (and if your self control is lacking you may very well be petty and aggressive) and to an extent, you are invading a space that isn't for you. When someone posts about a game they are expecting to talk to other players, not to have the writer looming over their shoulders. 

Unless you are a huge sales success you are going to trade on your reputation to an extent. The reputation of "googles his own name and then fights people over elf-games" is always going to be worse than the result of some guy who didn't like the game and was grumpy that day.