“The abominable old bap Russell duly returned my manuscript with an economic note in the third person, the whole in a considerably understamped envelope.”
Samuel Beckett
From Beckett’s Letters by Gabriel Josipovici The rejection letter, with or without understamped envelope, is an indignity often heaped upon the prospective rules writer. It can be a hard lesson to learn that others will not venture their hard-earned cash in publishing the product of your labours and fruit of your genius. Since we are a hobby for would-be Napoleons, it is perhaps not surprising that such a Waterloo moment can be crushing. I wonder how many perfectly serviceable sets never make it past the author and his immediate friends for fear of such rejection. Even if you can persuade someone to print your rules, the trials of the writer do not end there. For certain, he will not be retiring to a life of luxury anytime soon on the back of the profits from sales. Speaking as someone with over 20 sets in publication at one time or another, I assure you that there is no money in rules writing. All the money in this hobby goes on miniatures and the wherewithal to paint them. The humble scribe seldom sees the glitter of cold hard cash. Even the advent of the £20 hardback rulebook does not mean great income for the writer. I’m guessing that Osprey have done their numbers carefully with their Fields of Glory (FoG) ancients rules, but, I suspect, can only turn a profit from selling army list books in tiny sub-divisions of the period. Compare their books to the DBMM tomes from Caliver Books, which, granted, don’t have the artwork, but do have a truly awesome number of entries per book. Even the FoG system will not be paying the author’s bills. If you want a second income don’t write games, get a night-shift job at Tesco. If you’re not writing for money, then surely you can write for fame? Not a bit of it! Name recognition for authors isn’t that great. Phil Barker, Chris Peers and Rick Priestly can be fairly sure of a name check amongst most gamers, but I doubt any of us could name the authors of even a quarter of the rules we own without checking the covers. And you can forget about face recognition. As a hobby we train our cameras on little toy soldiers and their environs, but authors remain faceless, I have no idea what Phil Baker and Chris Peers look like, and only a vague image of Rick Priestly, due to his appearances in White Dwarf and other GW material. As fame and fortune are elusive, surely the adulation of players for your creation will be enough. Sadly on the whole we are pretty bad at saying we like something and pretty good at finding fault. I don’t think this is just a wargamers thing, or even just an English / Anglo-Saxon thing. People just like moaning. Sometimes queries can be valid, we can all improve the way we get our rules across to the readership. Sometimes players create situations in a game we hadn’t imagined. Sometimes we get things just plain wrong. Most working drafts for my games will go through at least 20 versions, albeit with mostly minor alterations after the first 3 or 4. It really is easy to leave a redundant sentence in final version that has slipped through from an earlier effort. Our own failings aside, I reckon brickbats to plaudits from the author’s public are in a ratio of 20:1. So why write a set of rules? Well, I write rules for myself and to play games with my friends. That some people also want to play my games is a bonus. If you have a set of rules you want to share with the wider gaming public, then get them DTP’d and PDF’d and give them away through the internet. If you want to cover your production costs and, maybe, buy yourself a couple of beers, try to sell your game through sites like Wargames Vault. I am currently playtesting my latest addition to the VSF genre, Astronef. The basic structure of the game can be described as a “bomber stream” game, although the transports shot from a planet carry Land Ironclads and troops not bombs. The “attacker” has to get his transports and escort craft across the length of the table, entering at one end and exiting at the other, whilst the “defender” has to prevent them or at least inflict sufficient damage to make the landing difficult (if you are playing the game in conjunction with Land Ironclads and Aeronef). The defender has various different craft types – Astronef, fighters fired from the planet, Iron Moons (“space stations”) solar-sailers and Cavourite-powered nef – each with their own movement and firing abilities (and restrictions). The basic concept seems sound but the devil is in the detail, particularly in the relative strengths of the different craft types. Matthew Hartley
April 2009 |
