Thinking About Feedback

Freebie: FIREDROP- Quick N' Dirty Orbital Warfare

This month’s main article is a bit more off-the-cuff than usual since I’m a bit behind the ball due to continued life wildness. I’m starting a new local gig here to help better support my wife and I that’s been a whole process in itself! I hope you enjoy the freebie this month though. It’s not a TTRPG but a dice-rolling wargame I made while waiting in the server queue just hoping to get in and actually play Helldivers 2. - Christian

Recently, stingraydm made pixel art version of the Tacticians of Ahm starter adventure battlemaps using Pokemon sprites/textures and shared them via discord!

The last few folks have been a bit of a trying mental time for me when it comes to Tacticians of Ahm. I put in a massive amount of work for the game’s first monthly update, released it, and then watched as a portion of the game’s small discord server spiraled from bits of feedback into an, at times, downright mean-spirited critique. I went from putting in the work, being happy with the update, to then being totally mentally downtrodden, all because of a small handful of people (truly just 1 to 3 folks, all told) harping on the small elements I’d missed or bits that are, as it says in the document, still work in progress and haven’t had their entire design perfected yet. I went from hyped about the project to just wanting to abandon it.

It’s well known that its the negative comments that always get to us. You can see sizeable sales and lots of positive or neutral interactions with a project but then one or two negative comments can totally blindside you, mentally and emotionally.

For me, it led to speaking with several other creators and with my wife and trying to find a path forward. I had created a discord for Tacticians of Ahm as a means of starting to build a community for the game, one where folks could discuss characters, post homebrew options, and find more players to play virtually, but in a short time, it had turned into a weird haven for a few rules-lawyer-like players to cyclically and harshly critique a few pieces of the still work-in-progress game.

At first, I thought what I needed was to give these folks a guideline for what helpful feedback looks like (since giving feedback is a skill not many players have, typically only being cultivated in creative workshop-type settings). What I cooked up was, I think, a good guide to feedback, at least for what helps me the most as a creator:

Useful Feedback comes from at-the-table (virtual play included) play experiences focused on what you enjoyed or did not enjoy, what made sense right away or what was confusing, and what you'd like to see more of broadly in the future. Providing alternate solutions, mechanics, etc. is almost never helpful. Doubling down on a piece of feedback is also never helpful.

• "This aspect of the game appeals to me. I'd love to see more of it!"

• "I really didn't understand how this worked. I found the wording confusing."

• "We stuck to the rules as written for this part of the adventure, and it was super difficult. We thought maybe we were doing something wrong."

Not Useful Feedback is focused on things that are corrected or re-written later in the development process (like small editing suggestions, proofreading, etc.), offers unsolicited "solutions" to perceived problems within the game, and digs back into a topic already discussed and noted previously (especially when there has been no development time to even correct or change the game since that feedback was given).

• "It says 'two pip' here when it should say 'two pips.'"

• "This mechanic is a mess. Here is a list of specific examples of how it's used inconsistently in the rulebook."

• "This is the same feedback I gave hours/days ago, but I am going to give it again."

• "You say this, and yet you did this. You should do this instead."

• "I want the game to be like this instead of what it is now."

Ultimately, the most important feedback you can give is exactly the type I requested initially in the ⁠feedback form which is:

"While post-reading impressions can be helpful at times, the highest quality feedback for game designers comes after you bring the game to your table. Post-play feedback will always be prioritized as it best showcases how the text translated to a final game experience.

"How you felt and what aspect made you feel that way is some of the most important feedback I can receive and helps me tweak my design as development continues. There is no need to provide alternate solutions, new mechanics, etc."

I posted this, notified everyone on the server, and hoped it would be the tonal change the server needed. But it wasn’t, and it became clear that while some folks simply weren’t interested in giving better feedback and weren’t used to being in a space with the actual creator of the media they are engaging with. It also just wasn’t something I needed at all in the way it was being given. Initial feedback, even if helpful, was buried in big discussions in an ephermal text chat. There was not a good way for me to track and use that feedback going forward unless I engage with it on a daily, consistent basis (which often made wading through the murky waters of bad, demoralizing feedback along with it).

In the end, I really had to look at what I was looking for out of both player feedback but the Tacticians of Ahm discord server. For feedback, I wanted to know how people were feeling after reading or much better yet playing the game (in both the good and bad ways), but I didn’t need much more than that (and certainly didn’t need those points to be something focused on as part of a group discussion, which just tended to demoralize me without adding anything useful to the actual feedback). For the discord, I wanted a place that players can come and organize play sessions for the game and share content they’ve made for their own tables.

After making changes to feedback (pushing it entirely to Google Forms) and re-focusing the discord on organizing play and sharing homebrew, things have already been much better, both in terms of my stress/morale around the project and around the actual uses of the server. We’ve gotten cool new enemies, some wonderful pixel art battlemaps (see the image above), and more, all while increasing the use of the feedback forms that I can actually work through as I build towards the next update.

So when it comes to feedback, discords, and any kind of player outreach, my recommendation (harshly learned through my own mistakes) is to have a focused purpose for each thing you do in those arenas and whenever something is not serving that purpose, remove it or rework it. You don’t need to take player feedback. You don’t need to have a discord server. You don’t need to read the comments. But if you do, be sure to do so with a clear intent because if you don’t, the harm may outweight the help.

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NOW FUNDING

Tacticians of Ahm’s first monthly update is out now! With it comes the early access version of the new starter adventure, Early Graduation, which puts your Tacticians in their final weeks of their time at the Academy when chaos erupts during a field day of final exams! Plus, the game includes a new one-page quick reference guide for players to bring to the table to help with any rules questions that may arise during play. The digital tools (both the downloadable and link-accessible versions) have been updated to include the new battlemaps and region map from the starter adventure as well!

You can get the digital early access rulebook and starter adventure PLUS all future monthly updates for just $20 USD! Check it out HERE!

HOME - A Mech x Kaiju Mapmaking TTRPG still has a little over a week left in its successful Kickstarter campaign! I am editing this one, and it’s very much in my personal wheelhouse despite being pretty unlike a lot of projects I’ve worked on in the past. Collaborative mapmaking, narrative focus, and fast/sharp play. Fans of games like Beak, Feather and Bone will love this one.

The Shrike by Leo Hunt and Silverarm Press has over two weeks left on its really successful Kickstart campaign as well! I edited this book and at 70,000+ words, it’s my biggest editing project by far! I really enjoyed working on this book, and it’s only getting better with all the art and layout.

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FREEBIE: FIREDROP

In FIREDROP, you play as a Soldier dropped from low orbit to fight the hordes of superflea’s infesting the planet. Each mission will be unique, with its own objectives, Siphonapterian nests, and extraction point. Your job is to complete the objective and, if you can, extract with your life intact. To aid you in battle, you will have a number of clone reinforcements available upon your death as well as high impact firepower like sentries, orbital bombardments, and more.

You can download the full digital version for free HERE!

FIREDROP is a 28-page, half-letter, black and white zine hex and dice wargame. It’s something fairly new for me, but it’s been a lot of fun to make and really fun to playtest over the last week. And yes, it is heavily inspired by Helldivers 2! I started making it while I was waiting to get into the game’s overloaded servers to play!

If you’d like a PRINT copy of FIREDROP, pre-orders are up now!

Additionally, the game is also available digitally (as a paid purchase) on Itch.io HERE.

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MORE COOL STUFF

If you are a voting SFWA member, I submitted Corpo Culture Killed My Dog for the 2023 Games category and I’d love your vote! If you’d like to check it out and grab a complimentary copy, you can head over to the SFWA member forums and find it HERE!

The TTRPG space has very little in the way of proper journalists and several of those folks were recently laid off as part of the continued media landscape enshittification. In the wake of that news, Lin Codega, Rowan Zeoli, and Chase Carter have launched a new, worker-owned TTRPG site: Rascal. Check it out HERE!

The Panic Table just launched their new Mission Control series, interviewing creators in the Mothership/TTRPG indie design space. The first episode with Joel Hines is up now, and it’s great! I am also featured in a future episode that I’m very excited for y’all to see. Check it out!

Marco of Spicy Tuna RPG interviewed me about Tacticians of Ahm and some of the design ideas behind it for one of the latest editions of his newsletter. Check it out!

Ever since I watched the latest People Make Games video about a massive trend of murder-mystery-like games coming out of China, I’ve been dying to play one.

Quinns, from People Make Games and Shut up and Sit Down fame, also just launched a new TTRPG review channel that I’m excited about! I’ve gotten to play a few sessions of DCC with Quinns in the past, and he’s a fun dude, plus his channel actually has opinions and isn’t just another flip-through-the-book type channel which has me more excited than anything else.

Waco made a new Mothership animation, and this one even has its own new class!

The Winner’s Edition of the 2023 Meaties, my annual TTRPG stuff I liked zine, finally went out to the winners this week! I printed 10 copies of a full-color variant of the original zine, meant to act as the “trophy” for winners, signed and numbered them, and mailed them out! If you missed the zine and would like to check it out, it’s available for free HERE (and its easy to print your own at home)!

The Isle Play-By-Blog continues over on Tumblr! Medon survived a deadly cave eel attack and is now descending even deeper into the caverns beneath the Isle! Check it out HERE!

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