This month's episode is a long interview with Joshy Roby, who designed several well-received indie games, Sons of Liberty (steampunk, ass-kicking founders of the Constitution) and Full Light, Full Steam (Space 1889 with story mechanics) and has just finished working on the Smallville RPG for Margaret Weis Productions, which should be released any day now. What's cool is that Josh contacted us to do the interview! So somebody is listening. It's also the first time Ryan and I have done an interview at the same time. I thought it went quite well, from that point of view, though Ryan is relegated to an Ed McMahon role for the first half as I don't let him get a word in edgewise (though he takes over for the second part).

There are several interesting issues that came up and I'm open to talking about any of them, so I'll just list them here.

1) Smallville - any fans out there? How would you feel about playing a supers game where the social drama is the priority of the gameplay?

2) Margaret Weis Productions, indie games sleeper cell? With Leverage and now Smallville, MWP, under the hand of line producer Cam Banks, is showing a distinct turn in their design choices to storyish mechanics, but they are doing it in a stealth way, using television licenses and as keeping the rules that organize the narrative in the background. Josh talks about this as an explicit design goal.

3) epic games - in the second half, we talk at some length about Josh's ongoing game design, Agora, which has a premise very similar to the videogame Alpha Centauri. The players play different factions of a ruined post-war galaxy who land on a virgin planet to start anew. They compete to survive, take power of the planet and eventually what's left of the ruined galaxy. The game spans generations. Sounds really cool to me. Does a game of that scale appeal to you?

Or anything else you want to talk about!

Absolutely. The Leverage Design team has leveraged some Evil Hat personnel (pun intended). Namely Ryan Macklin and Rob Donoghue with Design and Art Direction by Fred Hicks.

I'm really psyched for this, thanks for the show/interview!

Full Light, Full Steam is really quite amazing, I keep coming back to it over and over, I think it will be the next thing I run.

Awesome! Can't wait to hear your thoughts.

It's funny, because MountZionRyan is totally psyched about Sons of Liberty while Agora is the one that is really talking to me.

Me too, by the sounds of it - I love that kind of thing (Agora). Actually, of the three topics mentioned, it's the only one that grabs me.

I helped playtest Sons of Liberty, the "real version" showed he listened to our input. (That doesn't mean he did everything I told him to, of course! )

Walkerp and mountzionryan, you guys did a very good job on this interview.

I enjoyed this episode quite a bit, I appreciate Josh's honesty about his previous experience with MWP and Smallville the TV show. Personally, I haven't watched Smallville since midway through first season until I caught part of the two-part Justice episode (which was silly but fun). I also have found previous iterations of the cortex system extremely bland and a horrible fit for emulating Firefly stories, so I have had zero interest in Smallville the RPG, just sounded like "another license to add to the MWP pile".

But this interview has me interested in the game. I am excited about the blend of story-driven mechanics and the desire to make it seamless and invisible. If nothing else, that is a worthy design goal. I cannot say I'll buy Smallville RPG for sure, but due to this interview it went from "shah right" to "if I see it at a con booth or game store, I'll thumb through it".

I think the inherent identity politics about indie vs trad that was spoken to in the interview at length might have been better served if concentrating more on mechanics and the game. Personally, I am less interested in the "MWP is the hotbed of indie designers" meme since it's a bit of navel gazing. I'm much more interested in "MWP wants to create mechanics that support and reinforce play similar to the licensed properties AND give you tools to make your own stories!" That's hawt stuff there.

As for Josh's other games, they're just never appealed to me. I listened to some reviews of Full Light, Full Steam and the description of the scripts mechanic where players hit tags on another PC and throw pieces of paper at them sounded really, well, silly. In my mind's eye, I found it to be something that would disengage me from the role-playing, which is where I derive my fun. I have the PDF because I think it was in the Haiti flood bundle, so one day I may read it through and I might be completely wrong. Sons of Liberty was a game I saw demoed at GenCon '08. This is a very over-the-top kind of game and in my personal gaming experience, the bigger the gonzo, the less interested I am in it (that goes for most games, not just RPGs). I dunno, just feels like a "I'm super witty" contest to me. I am reatively ambivalent about Agora because it sounds a bit more strategic and competitive than I'm interested in. Smallville is his most appealing design so far (to me).

All in all, an enjoyable interview, guys.

Thanks, Orklord. Once again, I really appreciate your thorough and detailed feedback.

I hear your point about getting into the mechanics of the game. We had so much material to cover as it was and I'm not comfortable talking about mechanics unless I've actually read and/or played the game. When I say "not comfortable" I mean my brain can't really get around what the guest is talking about and I'm not super confident about following up. Also, I had just listened to his previous interview he did on The Gamer's Haven (who are these guys?), where he really does go into the game rules in some depth, so that's a good place to go to find out about it on that level.

I totally agree with you about avoiding the identity politics. I feel like we are getting to this happy place where more and more designers and players are creating/looking for "mechanics that support and reinforce play similar to the licensed properties" and "tools to make your own stories" wherever the heck they can find them.

The problem for me as someone looking at this development from a let's say journalistic viewpoint is that I do like to put it into context and identify it in a way that lets listeners quickly be able to put it into context for themselves. So I don't want to hide the fact that there are different philosophies and approaches to design and play that are sometimes ideological and conflicting. But on the other hand, I recognize that labeling and talking about identity politics often helps to prolong the phenomenon.

That's good advice, though, to focus on the mechanics and what they do to fulfill the goals of the designer and the wishes of the players. I'll ponder it. Thanks again for the feedback.

We mentioned the RPG Haven podcast and (finally) played some of walkerp's feedback on the latest ep of Pulp Gamer Out of Character.

Wow! Thanks, Mr. Corley!