Marketplace GMs on Elthos Mythos Machine

I had a problem with the business model of the Elthos RPG Mythos Machine that for a long time stumped me. But I think I, with the help of my friend C.D. (I don't know if he would wish to be named here, so ... C.D. will do) have licked it.

The setup is this. I want to create a platform that offers an RPG Framework for Settings creators. I want them to be able to create their own Worlds as RPGs, and offer them to others to buy at a price they set, and with my platform getting a modest commission of 12%. Purchasers can obtain a copy through the Mythos Machine, and play the World with their friends, modifying the things of that World however they wish. To this end I created a Worlds Marketplace.

When you first create an account on the Mythos Machine you come in as a Player. This allows you to create Characters in the Worlds that GMs have made available. Presumably you've been invited by one of your friends to play a character in their World. They sent you a link to the Mythos Machine, you create a free account, find their World, and begin creating your Character there. You select the class and race you want to play, depending on what your GM has made available to players as part of their world, purchase your character's armors, weapons, equipment with the money your character starts out with, and select your skills, and maybe you add some background information about your Character, their personality, traits, etc, and perhaps add an image to represent them... and voila, you're ready to play. The Mythos Machine handles all the math of figuring out things like your Armor Class and Attack Level and so forth according to the Elthos RPG rules. The rules are available on DriveThruRPG or on the Website. And so, you can now play in your friend's World. You can even keep an ongoing history of your Character's adventures through the Mythos Machine.

One day you decide you want to run a Campaign. Before I changed the business model this week it was the case that you needed to upgrade to a Basic GM. This gives you the ability to create your own World in the Mythos Machine. You can create as many of your own Races, Classes, Weapons, Armors, Cultures, Places and Campaigns as you wish. It's a very expansive system. This costs a measly $2.99 / month. You can also as Basic GM purchase Worlds from the Worlds Marketplace. So you create a World and it's great. You and your friends have a blast, and now you have a new idea for another World... totally different than the last one.

At this point you might want to upgrade to Premium GM. This allows you to create as many Worlds as you wish. It also allows you to create Shared Worlds that you can work on with other GMs whom you invite to that World. It also allows you to create "Packaged Worlds" which can be sold in the Worlds Marketplace at a price you set. So lets say you have some cool World ideas, and you think other GMs would like to take them for a spin. You spent a few weeks slinging your ideas together, set a price of $5, and then let your friends know it's up on the Marketplace. They buy it, and tell some of their friends, and so you wind up making, oh, who knows, let's say you sell 20 of them and make $100. Over time, maybe word gets out that you have a cool world there, and you sell 100. Who knows? Anyway, as Premium GM you can set up shop and sell your Worlds, as many as you like, for whatever price you think their worth (minimum price is $3 to cover Stripe Transaction fees, and prevent that all-sucking race to the bottom that happens with PWYW systems).

So the problem was that there was no way for GMs to purchase Worlds unless they joined as Basic GMs. It seems like a inhibiting factor, right? So the solution: Marketplace GMs. This tier is also free, except it allows you to purchase Worlds from the Worlds Marketplace and play them with your friends. You can create new places, and adventures in these worlds, but you can not add or modify the Things (Weapons, Armors, etc) within it. So it's pretty much a very basic setup for GMs to try out the system without having to sign up for the subscription service. I think this works out well. Premium GMs can offer their Worlds, and Marketplace GMs can purchase them at the base cost without a subscription fee.

That's all been programmed and is current in test at https://test.mm.elthos.com

What do you think of this solution?

Also, please feel free to give it a spin and let me know how it works for ya. You can copy a final draft of the Elthos RPG Rules book from the website once you've created an account on the Mythos Machine.  Thanks!

Ok, that's the story. Have fun. :)

Elthos RPG - Meta Game - Round 4 (Cont)

These are the completed set for Round 4, including the complete Celestial Island Map as of the end of Round 4. Tonight, if all goes well, we will play Round 5. But before we begin, to help prep my players for the Dawn Age, wherein they will be creating their Races and Cultures, I will read a little bit of the introduction to Troy: An Epic Tale of Rage, Deception, and Destruction, by Ben Hubbard. This will, hopefully, help set their minds on the next range of goals... how to think about creating cultures, and what kinds of elements therein they may wish to consider. I will also, if there is time, provide a brief tidbit from Plato's Republic, Book VIII.

Elthos RPG - Meta Game - Round 4

We have completed Round 4 of the Primordial Age and these are the Celestial Island results thus far ...

With the help of my very awesome play testers we were also able to resolve one of the thorny issues that had been stabbing me in the side all along ... how to remove GM bias from the playing out of the Seeds of Destiny.  The problem was that during the regular games the GMs who play their own regions of the Shared World with their own Players would have either had an interest in seeing the Seeds of Destiny in their domains be successful, or unsuccessful (as the Elkron-Players gain a large Kismet reward for successful Seeds of Destiny in the "Outer Game").  By randomizing the Seeds of Destiny rewards to any of the Elkron that resolved the issue in a neat way that does not remove the flavor and eliminates the potential GM bias.  Voila.  Brilliant solution, my play testers.  Thank you!

I am writing up the rules and modifying them as we play to adjust according to actual experience with the game, but so far 90% of the rules remain intact and it's being a heck of a lot of fun.  Stay tuned, please.

Improvisational Game Theater - Thoughts

I originally wrote about Improvisational Game Theater on my blog in 2006. I subsequently wrote a number of posts, either as comments or supplemental explanations of why I think IGT is likely to become "a thing" in relation to Professional Gamemastering.

There have been a lot of GMs that have come to the Professional Gamemaster Society wanting to make a living doing Pro-GMing.  Their idea, as has been mine, is that it would be absolutely fantastic if we could turn our favorite hobby into a career somehow.  Like artists and musicians, and other performing artists, we'd like to do what we love for a living.

Now a number of people have pointed out that the economics of Professional Gamemastering do not seem to work all that well, especially at the small scale of local tabletop RPG games with a handful of people, and it's hampered a lot of potential Pro-GMs because we don't see a road from here ($) to there ($$$).  For most, not only is it hard to imagine how to make any money at all Gamemastering, but the the notion of making substantial money seems a pipe dream and beyond the realm of possibility.

I do not think so.

Again, and for the umpteenth time, the answer is in Professionally run Improvisational Game Theater.  In 2006 I sketched out a modality by which I would do it for my own world of Elthos.  Since then, I've not had the ability to sling it together because I have other work under the umbrella of the Elthos Project to tend to first.  And of course, it goes without saying, again, as usual, I am the worlds greatest slow poke, so please don't rush me.  Nothing good comes from rushing.  Of course, in the meantime, there have been a number of enterprising people who have raced ahead of me and produced variations on the IGT concept, and some quite successfully.  Critical Roll comes to mind as an excellent example.  Kudos and congratulations to all of those fine people!  They're doing a great job, and I'm thoroughly impressed, even while being jealous and annoyed that I'm such a super-slow-poke at all of this. But I digress.

At any rate, I want to talk about this again because I read a post by RPGPundit who is railing in his own way against one aspect of Improvisational Game Theater. His gripe is that what people are watching it for is entertainment, like watching a Soap Opera, or Serial TV Show, or something like that, and is largely divorced from the actual game of D&D. A large percent of the people who are watching IGT on twitch are not watching it because they play RPGs, or even intend do to so... they are watching it because they are interested in the Characters being played and their stories. And yes, very much like like people who watch Soap Operas.  And it annoys him.  Ok, my guess is that he's annoyed for certain reasons, though he doesn't quite elaborate on what those reason are exactly, and I'm not going to speculate about that. And this post is not a rebuttal to his point.  I agree with him completely.  I simply don't share in his angst about it.

The reason why is because, as I've made the case to the Professional Gamemaster Society before, this kind of viewership is exactly what is required for Professional Gamemasters to make real money Gamemastering.

No, it is not the same thing exactly as standard table top role playing.  I know, it isn't.  And the reason why is because with a generalized audience which includes a large number of non-role payers, the story and character development that would go on in a good IGT game is what that audience would be most interested in.  Random Character deaths would, in all likelihood, irk them, especially if the randomness was too extreme, and/or their favorite Characters get killed by a random (read stupid) die roll.  Nor would they be likely to be very into the rules, or watching the usual D&Dish rules banter, or much of the OCC activity that usually attends most tabletop role playing game sessions.  What they would be looking for, instead, is a compelling story where the results of the actions of the characters is both interesting and meaningful within the context of the World being played.

Improvisational Game Theater, in my opinion, will evolve into one of the major forms of entertainment of the 21st century.  It's taking time getting there, and even the best of the current efforts have self-limiting flaws in their implementations, but as everyone can see... progress in the direction of successful IGT is being made.

Personally, as soon as my other project work is complete, I hope to join these efforts with my own attempts at this thing.  I believe that those who can really pull this off will be at the center of the entertainment world in due time.  And really, I think it is just a matter of time.  People are already doing some great things.  And audiences are already being primed for this through the activities of shows like Critical Role.  Everything is slowly moving in the direction of a fusion of entertainment and gaming.  And no matter how much RPGPundit gripes that it's not real D&D ... it will nevertheless become an enormously rich, diverse and fabulous form of entertainment, and sustain many awesome career arcs for Professional GMs of the future.

Elthos RPG - Dry Patch Update

Ok it's been a while since I posted here so I want to just put a quick note up to let folks following me here know that yup, yup I'm still working on Elthos and making progress (albeit back to museum speed since I got my new job).  I haven't been posting much about progress because I'm on a dry patch in terms of "oh that's interesting" stuff to say on it.  I've been busy for days updating the Core Rules Book to make it finally ... er ... well Final. 

The good thing is that I hadn't looked at it for six months and so I got a chance to read it fresh.  Up until now I've been snow blind on it and every time I read it I was like "Ok I can't read this sentence any more times... sheesh" and so I wound up skimming it and never really got a solid edit in from the "Well how does this actually read" point of view.

Now that I'm reading it fresh, I must say... wow.  It was pretty sucky!  haha!  But yeah, there's a few crucial spots where after a series of edits I had trimmed things down to the point where it was like ok I accidentally took out the key information that you'd have wanted in that spot.  Man!  So yeah, now I'm working on it and fixing it so that it's lucid enough to use as a rules book.  My overriding objective before was to Keep It As Short As Possible.  I figured a simple rules system should prove its simplicity by being as short as possible.  Which is probably true.  But ... when I started the Elthos RPG "One Die System" in 2007 it probably was among the lighter weight rules systems... but by now, nope it's not anymore.  Other people have come out with even more light weight systems.  On the other hand my goal with it was not to create "A light weight RPG" but rather to distill the former Elthos Prime System (from 1978) down to it's absolutely simplest form without losing the core mechanics.   So it's medium weight.  And no, I didn't need to make the rules book As Short As Possible.

That said, I'm still keeping it the same page count.  I'm just revising text so that the necessary information is there, and it reads nicely, and is even a little bit entertaining and hopefully useful in terms of advice on how to run the thing.

Anyway, working on it, but there's nothing much to show yet.  I'll of course let people know when the rules are actually Finito!

Thanks, and Game On! 

The Meta Game - Round 2

This is something I am creating. I call it the Meta Game. It's goal is to create a shared world for GMs where the backstory is created by a handful of people who play The Gods, and create the World. It starts with the Primordial Age in which the Gods create the Terrains (we are in Round 2 of the Primordial Age now). Then goes on to the Dawn Age where they create Races, Cultures, Dynasties and Seeds of Destiny which are Quests upon which the Elkron (Gods) wager for Kismet (the energy they use to create the World). After the Elkron have used up as much Kismet as they are willing to, the Age of Heroes is played by dropping the Meta Game and each GM goes into their own region of the World to play it as a regular Campaign with other players... the goals of which are to complete the Seeds of Destiny Quests so whichever Elkron created them can gain back a large amount of Kismet, and therefore have a chance of winning the End of Ages ... which is The God War.

Rules will be forthcoming.

Here's some images of the Map as it stands thus far:

The completed Map

Primordial Age - Round 2

Stay Tuned.

#Elthos #MythosMachine #WorldBuilding #Gamemastering #Cartography

The Elthos Meta Game - Proto-Test

A quick report on my most recent (and current) game experiment ...

We played the first Elthos Meta-Game last night. It's a competitive/collaborative World Building game in which GMs play the Gods. It's intended to be a wrapper game around a regular RPG via which the God's actions create the world's terrain, races, cultures and dynasties... forming the back story of the regular campaign.

Here's the starting board, and then the board after the first round of the Primordial Age.

It was totally fun. :)

Elthos Meta Game - Map Images

Below are a few detail shots of the Meta-Game Map thus far. The hexes are 100 miles across, so those mountains are actually mountain ranges. The Celestial Island is about 3600 miles in diameter. The hexes shown are those that our Elkron-Players have already used Kismet to create terrain on. So far so good!

On to the images...

Elthos Meta Game - Map of the Celestial Island

This grid map shows the locations of the 12 Planetary Elkron Thrones.

So far so good.  I'm very pleased with the way things are going.  I have written up 11 pages of rules for the Meta Game (aka God Game), and am working on refining them.  In addition I have a couple of spreadsheets that help do the Kismet Point number crunching for the game. 

If all goes well I will package this up and send it along to the community.

As always, don't be surprised if it takes me a while.  You know what an incredible slow poke I am!  haha.