Levi: Missed you by seconds
I happened to be up and awake, and from time to compose to submit you had deleted your post (which I thought was a nice conversation started, not ranty at all!) and I didn't have your email, so
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Thing is, I was using "average joe" as a shorthand to mean "someone who I probably don't know; someone who hasn't published a full game nor seems particularly interested in doing so". I looked over my sentence and it seems like I'm ripping on that kind of thing; in fact, I'm trying to encourage these people more to do what they're doing over on Story Games.
Like this Sanglorian guy over here:
http://story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=10700
No idea who he is. No idea what he's worked on before, who he's friends with, or so on. He posted his rules hacks for RBH there, wondering if S-G was the right forum for it. He's the kind of guy I'm talking about when I used that shorthand for "average joe": I mean the everyday gamers like you and me who aren't thinking about/don't care about publishing some full games, but are interested in making the games we do play better (through looking at how to make games in general more fun, how to tweak the games we play, and so on).
I'm kinda wary of the false glamor surrounding folks who publish their games: The deification of the capital-D "(published) Designer" (and not just on S-G; it's on RPGNet, in regular conventions and so on) is a little irritating. I'm more than a little bored of seeing folks who have sold their games being asked for podcast interviews and the like, yet seeing folks like Judd, Jason Corley, Eric Provost, you or Willow (all whose actual play reports and table advice for GMs and players have contributed a lot to the RPG discussion culture) get overlooked. Yet folks like them are the ones who are really pragmatically and realistically improving our hobby. Design Theory discussions, and talk about How to Market Your Game can be interesting, but ultimately it's divorced from the act of throwing dice and telling stories with friends.
I'm trying to support those 'average joe's more over at Story Games, by basically kicking game design (and here I mean your conceit, "game design FOR publishing") and marketing discussion to the curb. But instead of "the curb", it's sort of an overfill area in a shape of a small new forum.
(posted this first, now going back to address your original response)
I hope that makes a little sense: Because I want to support, encourage, and personally talk to *Average Joe*, the person who doesn't identify as a Game Designer, and hear his (lightsaber rules/questions on how to make CoC scaries/ideas for how to get players more into their characters/side rules for play applicable to any RPG/etc).
The design-to-publish stuff (traditionally called "game design")? Not really interested in it as much, and my interest in seeing that discussion over at S-G has been declining recently, which is why I'm trying to push it off of S-G into its own forum. Kicking it to the ghetto (albeit a pretty one), depending on how you look at it.
-Andy
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