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GMS Magazine

Roleplaying and board games with reviews, podcasts, videos and interviews

Why I am stepping away from WOTC for a bit.

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I have been thinking about this for a long time and how to voice it without sounding angry, condescending or even biased. But also because I didn’t want to give the wrong explanation by accident. I didn’t want to miscommunicate. So here it goes.

Yes, it is to do with Mike Mearls at WOTC.

Firstly, I believe Mike Mearls did something horrible and gave his support to some disgusting people and thus, by proxy, hurting a ton of other folx in the process. I know some people don’t think there is enough evidence, but the evidence I have seen is enough to make me believe it. You don’t? That’s your call. This is mine. Suck it up if you have to.

I believe getting him put aside was the right thing to do. And putting him aside was enough consequence for me to believe he had done something the company thought was potentially libellous or disastrous because otherwise, a corporation like HASBRO doesn’t admit to responsibility even if it is by action and not words. If you disagree, refer to the previous paragraph.

Now… believe in second chances. I believe in redemption. I believe people can learn and can get better and realise they have fucked up and must do better.

I want to believe that Mearls can do that. I am even prepared to believe he has. Benefit of the doubt and all.

However (there is always one of those) I can’t and won’t believe in redemption without actions and reparations.

And I haven’t seen enough of that.

Yes, I have seen an inspiring WOTC that has done a lot better in terms of game design, publishing, diversity and representation in the last few years. I have seen some of their personnel being vocal about things I am very aligned to.

And now I have seen them bringing back someone who has not earned his redemption through action.

I haven’t heard anything from WOTC about how they have addressed the accusations of sharing information. I haven’t heard anything from Mearls about how he is sorry, he made a mistake…. Not even an attempt.

I am trying to weigh in everything. Even some conspiracy theories that I have found amusing, but I am going to keep as logical as I can.

I reckon Mearls has been reinstated because of some contractual obligation because they haven’t found anything that would technically made him a legal liability, just a PR one. And I reckon that WOTC finds the loss of business that may come from it acceptable. I reckon, by what I hear from some people (no, I will not cite my sources) that his colleagues won’t be happy about having him back.

So I can imagine that things at WOTC are going to be tense for a bit.

What worries me, truth be told, is not that Mearls is back. It is that he is back without any attempt from WOTC to do any restorative action or provide with any reason for us to believe that he won’t be a danger to critics of his friends and/or actions anymore.

There is nothing that WOTC that says “we have put measures in place to make sure the data we have from people is not passed around”. Or “we have done extensive training to address potential issues that could arise based on our customer’s complains”.

Nothing.

Which makes WOTC a dangerous company. Because I have no reason to believe that this won’t happen again.

Also, they haven’t addressed the damage that all of this did.

They haven’t gone to Zak’s victims, to pundit’s victims and given them the same platform to develop and have an input as those two abusers had. There has been ZERO restorative action from WOTC.

So I am going to withdraw some of my support from WOTC for the time being.

Am I turning my back on the company? No. I am going to keep playing D&D with my Friday group because it is what we play. I am going to keep buying the books as they become available in Spain because I want to support my local store.

I am going to keep buying D&D because I love D&D. More than most know.

But I will not be reviewing and recommending their products. I won’t be making The Role Factor based on the topics around D&D I had in mind.

At least not for the time being.

When I feel that it is safe to have Mearls there. When I see that WOTC is doing something, anything, to give a sense of safety, I will come back to them.

And I look forward to that day.

But, right now, I need to see a bit more goodwill from WOTC.

Music in my early RPGs

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Today I was listening to Cinemix at work. For those of you who don’t know, Cinemix is an online radio station that plays soundtracks from movies and some series. All-day. You can get a premium account to get rid of the advertising but it doesn’t have a lot of advertising in any event.

Anyway, sometimes I have it in the background.

Often it happens that, before I notice, I have an enormous feeling of nostalgia. A sense of yearning for the days when I used to play Dark Sun or any other AD&D game with my friends some 25 years ago. I am overflowed with memories of me in my bedroom, setting my Amiga computer to render a complex 3D image created in Lightwave, reading or writing an adventure, memorising the monster manual or using a very rustic drawing tablet (God it was expensive!) to create vector clipart from the illustrations in the monster manual.

Those were some of the happiest moments of my early 20s.

And I am thinking about how much I used to enjoy going to the cinema and how much I used to enjoy soundtracks. If I liked the score, I would probably go to the cinema once more just to listen to it and, then, shoot to the record shop like a rocket and buy the CD. It would happen also when I played a game on my computer, a wonderful Amiga machine. The music would always stand out.

The funny thing is that even though I am aware of my love for music and I use sound and music a lot when I run my games – DnD or any other – I had never really associated music with the happy memories I have from that time of my life.

Music meant as much to me as RPGs but in a parallel way. They didn’t seem to mix or even complement each other.

And yet, today I am not sure I would be able to remember happy memories from my RPG years without also bringing happy memories of sounds to my head.

And I am OK with that.

Flowscape 1.5 review. Perfect illustration tool for your RPGs

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Flowscape 1.5 is a landscape generation software that allows you to create amazing looking images with minimum effort and knowledge for an unbeatable price.

I discovered Flowscape recently when it was still on its 1.2 version of the software. It could already do some absolutely amazing stuff and I bought it on sight when I watched the demo videos.

At the time I paid 12$ that now have been reduced to 10$, which is even more amazing, because I would gladly pay 25$ or 30$ for this piece of software. It is THAT good.

Flowscape is based on the Unity render engine and it works in real time. Unity is a free render engine with some years under its belt that has been used by amateurs and professionals alike to create all sorts of applications and games.

Although it is not as powerful as some commercially available engines, like the Unreal engine, the fact is that it offers a fantastic performance for a freebie.

Now, Flowscape might not be an obvious tool for the RPG world, but the fact is that with a very good amount of buildings, stones, landscape tools, light, plants, animals… and a fantastically easy to use interface, it is the perfect tool to create some images to illustrate our adventures and games in just a few seconds.

No… I am not exaggerating. You can create good looking illustrations in seconds.

Flowscape uses a mix of procedural and set 3d models to create the environments. Procedural stones, twigs, branches, trees, bushes and shrubs can provide with a natural looking environment, whereas more than 50 models of houses, towers, market booths and objects can provide with more than enough inspiration to create towns, hamlets and markets.

Take a look at your creation from the top and you have an absolutely fantastic map. Make a very high resolution render export and you can print it to your hearts content with textures, shadows, reflections…

Seriously, take a look at this video and see for yourself. The video is in real-time and absolutely nothing has been altered.

“I made money with my project”

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Kinda funny but not funny but funny nevertheless story in as much as it is a facepalm sort of moment.

I was in a seminar a few days ago about small publishers. We were five publishers with more or less experience on our stride and all of us with different backgrounds.

We have all used crowdfunding and we have had successes to some degree. One of the, the moderator, always does extremely well in his campaigns. The last one he got nearly 18.000€ and the current one has surpassed that amount.

You might think that is not a huge amount of money, but, trust me, for a market like the Spanish, we are talking big money here. The Spanish market is very,very small.

Anyway… during the talk, the publisher with more books and time than any of us starts to talk about making money with crowdfundings and that that is why they have seldom used them, though they use pre-sales campaigns. “You are the one who has made more money than anyone else… but… I bet, at the end, you haven’t made any money from crowdfundings”.

“Oh…” the guy responds with a cheeky smile “you would be wrong”.

It transpires that out of the 18k campaign he made 1000€ that he used to buy an Xbox One and treat his wife to a coat.

“Erm….” My friend says “but does that include paying yourself for the translation and layout work you did for the game?”

“Oh no!” the other guy responds, smile now off his face – “That is not an expense I consider when doing my crowdfundings”.

“Ah, then you have lost money in that campaign”.

“Well… I don’t do this for the money anyway”.

AHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FUCKINGSHITTYSHITSHITTINGSHITS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry.. sorry…. I’m OK.

ARRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FURFUCKSSAKESAMILIONFUCKINGTIMES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok… Better now… sorry.

I get that you don’t expect to get paid for the work you do in a project. I don’t either. But don’t tell me that ending with a 7% money to spend from a 18kproject is “making money”.

No!!! That is not making money because you didn’t the thousands that translating and layout cost!

One thing is that you expect to recover that money from sales of the book later on, but that doesn’t mean you are in the black. You are in the red.

Say it! It’s OK! But don’t tell me that, because you ended up with pocket money that you can afford because you work as an industrial engineer with a huge salary and do this on the side is “making money”.

For those of us who want to make a living out of publishing RPGs in such a small market, making 1000€ from a project is a fantasy. Goodness knows it will take me months after the project ends to see some profit because all the money –ALL THE FUCKING MONEY – goes to produce the book. All of it.

And no… I don’t get paid for doing anything other than waiting for the book to go into distribution to hope and get a percentage of what is sold for myself.

You know, as much as I adore the crowdfunding model and how many new cool games we are seeing because of that, I wish sometimes those projects were restricted to “no, you have to pay everyone in the project. Even yourself. If you are not, then you are not asking for enough money and we will not approve your project”.

Or something like that, I don’t know.

Anyway… rant over.

You don’t owe me anything

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To think my readers owe me anything, or my viewers or listeners, is something I just don’t get. Why should you have to do anything for me?

There are reasons why I feel it is important for me to say that you owe me nothing. A few days ago, an aspiring YouTube personality in Spain gave up doing video reviews. I am not going to mention their name or the name of the channel. I don’t see the point and I am not writing this article to bring them any grief, but to vent and try to address something that could become a trend.

The reasons given were that, essentially, there is not enough public recognition of the work they do. There aren’t enough comments in the videos, enough likes or thumbs up or even enough visualisations. Creating the videos takes time and it makes him feel inadequate when there are no reactions to his videos. He also complained that publishers don’t promote the reviews of their own products and used the only book I have published in Spain so far as an example. Never mind that he has made more reviews of more products by other publishers. He decided to focus on the only book published by a publisher that hasn’t really taken off yet. It strikes me of attacking the weak, but hey… whatever.

According to this person, this happened after a talk with their therapist. That leads me to believe that the anxiety behind the lack of recognition is partly a mental health issue. Thus, I totally support their decision to stop. If what you do is bringing you health problems, stopping is the right thing to do and I can only hope they get better and can come back.

The point is, though, that this person expects reactions from the audience. They expect the audience to express that they like, or dislike their work. And if the audience doesn’t react, well, that is bad for him. It is the audience’s fault he feels like he feels.

Well… no. But I will go into that later.

Later on, about one week later, another, more prominent reviewer, producer, youtuber, whatever person, this time better known at an international level (in this instance I will not mention his name because I will not bring attention to anyone who thinks political correctness is bad and rather keep being a misogynistic asshole) said “There is literally nothing more irritating than creating content to help people and them not sharing it”.

Really? Nothing at all? Wow… what a truly wondrous life you must lead.

He goes on to say “Hours of work for a like. No re-tweets, no sharing on their page, nothing.” And “Spending hours creating content for no pay isn’t worth it if people don’t appreciate the effort.”

And you know what? Bullshit.

Dear readers, viewers, listeners: You owe me NOTHING. You owe any media person, regardless of how big or small, NOTHING.

You don’t owe me a retweet. You don’t owe me a mention. You don’t owe me a thanks. You don’t owe a like. You don’t owe me a comment.

You owe me NOTHING.

Don’t get me wrong, it feels amazing when someone interacts with you and they say they like what you do. I genuinely love and appreciate it when people like my videos, make comments and say hello.

Recognition tastes very, very sweet and I love it.

But I do not expect it. Ever.

Since I started my blog in 2010 and to create videos and podcasts in 2011 I have spent more than 20000$ in equipment alone. Cameras, lights, computers, software, microphones, cables and wires… I have spent, literally, thousands of hours recording and editing videos and podcasts and writing and publishing reviews.

That is all beside the time I have spent organising panels for conventions and the money I have spent going to some of those conventions and recording videos at Spiel. Also, to that we should add the cost of maintaining a website.

And for that you owe me nothing.

I do all of that because I want to. I absolutely love ever second of it (well… not every second, sometimes is very hard, but never mind that) and I do because I want to EARN your recognition, not because I deserve it just for the mere fact that I put content out there.

If my videos don’t inspire you to press like, make a comment or subscribe to my channel, that is MY fault, not yours. It is my duty – and responsibility – to create content you will want to interact with.

If I don’t get interaction or recognition, it is time for me to think what I am doing right, what I am doing wrong and improve.

If people spend hours doing production, reviews or anything because they want recognition, cool. I have no issues with that. I do this because I love it and I love the gaming crowd, warts and all. And I don’t expect everyone to be like me.

But I do not expect anything in return. And I will keep doing this because I like it. Because I want to and because I can.

And if you join me, I will welcome you with open arms.

And if you don’t join me, that’s OK. I am still here for you if you want me.