I have a lot of ideas – ideas for games, ideas for adventures, ideas for fiction – so when it comes time to choose, I sometimes have problems. What should I work on? How should I do it? Who is it for?
This is easy in with my home group – whom I call the Ottawa Warband, since its inception was with the Viking adventure that led to the creation of Kiss My Axe: Thirteen Warriors and an Angel of Death. With the Warband, I can have them vote. I give them the kinds of games that are banging around in my skull, and they vote on which one they want to play: majority rules. So far, this has not cause any problem. The biggest problem is that I regularly change up my games (always chasing the bright shiny object).

When it comes time to release games to the public, I am faced with the same problem but lacking a clear solution. I can’t really get the public to vote. The one mechanism that is available for that – Kickstarter – is really its own beast. I suppose I could try a Kickstarter that offered a choice of games, but that’s going to run into problems as people might be willing to pay for an RPG mash-up of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and James Cameron’s Aliens but not for a military special operations RPG.
So here I am, getting a game ready for release (once Nefertiti Overdrive is delivered) and honestly uncertain if this is the game on which I should be spending my time. It’s not just the system, it is also going to be a collection of adventures. The investment is only time – I’m using stock art I have from the Spec Ops line of SEP products and I’m doing the layout myself – but this is also the flagship for a new enterprise and business approach, so picking the wrong game could be a problem.
Still, it’s always a gamble, and I understand there is no way I’ll be making mad cash in this industry.
More on this new approach later.
You can find out more about Kiss My Axe: Thirteen Warriors and an Angel of Death here.
You can hear some of the adventures of the Ottawa Warband here.
You can read about Heinlein’s Starship Troopers at Wikipedia.