Introduction:

Our design philosophy at 2WS is to provide content rich resources. This means that we'll emphasize material that makes the gamemaster's job easier, and provides the player with more opportunities to individuate their characters.

In essence, if you're a gamemaster our books should do as much "grunt work" as possible for you so that you can do the fun and exciting work of developing adventures, worlds, and campaigns. While my core product is a campaign setting, I design it such that you can port the elements of the setting into a wide variety of campaigns.

Steve Peterson has taken some away from designing to answer some questions on his company, the RPG industry, and d20. It should be noted that he has taken the short amount of time to answer my questions. Steve is one of those guys, I would love to game with. He does not hold back on his opinions or thoughts on where he thinks things are going.

I appreciate his time and efforts in this interview. Thanks Steve!

Q. Can you tell us about yourself?

Steve: First, it’s an honor to be asked for this interview. I spent most of my life in Los Angeles so that’s still home to me. After high school I joined the army and spent 4 years cleaning things. Since escaping I’ve been in college; currently I’m working on a PhD in philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey and should be finished in the next year. I started playing D&D back in 1978 or 1979, can’t remember which. I remember having to wait for the Player’s Handbook and DMG to come out though. I also remember having this line map that the players get after defeating the Hall of the Fire Giant King and having to fill in the tunnels with my own encounters. I had to call on some creatures from the Runes of Doom to fill that out; my group was a bunch of power-gamers from day one!

Q. Can you tell us about the Arduin d20 adventure you wrote?

Steve: Since it belongs to Emperor’s Choice right now I suspect I can’t say a lot about content. I will say I set it in Hell House because Hell House is a very, very cool name. David Hargrave had a talent for coming up with good names and using the right word. While writing the scenario it surprised me to see how sparse his creature and spell descriptions were. I always had such vivid images of them in my mind but many of the descriptions include no more than a couple lines (including stats!). Frankly, I think one can convey quite a bit of flavor about a monster or spell with just a few sentences; you just want to hit the highlights. I included about 20 pages of conversions in the scenario so if Emperor’s Choice eventually puts it up as a free download readers should have plenty of material they can extract from the module for other purposes.

Q. You have stated "I want to see something good. I want to see something that comes together in the right way and interests me. I want to see someone take a tired old haunted house story and make it sing." What do you mean by that? How are you making this come about in your products?

Craig: See Steve’s other columns here.

Steve: In specific, The Shining is just a haunted house story; what makes it a memorable one? When Stephen King is at the top of his game he characterizes as good as the very best writers and this was one of the times where he was at the top of his game. When Kubrick did the film adaptation he made it an entirely different story, but in doing so developed the character of the Overlook Hotel to such an extent that it became memorable. We’re drawn into a story long before we find out about the gimmicks that people talk about. The Sixth Sense and The Others enthralled me for 90 minutes before the “twist” so I don’t think the twists make great stories. It’s all the little details. It’s the camera work and the way the creator draws us into the psychology of the characters. One of my favorite King novels is Pet Sematary and the reason it worked so well for me was that I understood perfectly why the protagonist did the things he did, even while knowing all along that doing those things would lead to horrible consequences.

Anyway, you’ve got to get the names right. You’ve got to get the sentences to have the right rhythm. You’ve got to build a little suspense, a little “I want to read the next section.” I think simple word choice has a lot to do with this. In a game product I also think oblique descriptions can make the reading quite a bit more interesting. We fall into the trap of writing a textbook or history book when we do game writing. Matt Forbeck has this great little anecdote on his website where one of his first employers (Games Workshop I think) pointed out that a lot of people buy game books just to read them, so you better make the reading interesting.

I try to do this in my books by including some humor every now and then (typically using it to replace a section that was boring me a bit), making certain that the creature, or prestige class, or ability looks cool in my head when I visualize it, and by writing sparse descriptions. Instead of listing off the vital attributes and providing a detailed description of a creature I’ll go with something abstract like:

“Usually I like the feel of my axe when it cuts into a target, but not this time. It made this awful crackling crunch sound as it broke through the thing’s chitin followed by a muffled squissshh. I thought that was bad enough, but when I pulled the axe free it went ‘schhhluck’.”

And that’s all the description I include for the insect scion. The game stats already give a picture of the monster. Also, like a book, you want to give enough of a hint to get the reader’s imagination flowing but you want to let their imagination fill in all the awful details; they’ll do a much better job than you and, who knows, they might think I’m the one who made it look so cool when they’re the ones who did all the work!

Q. Referring to your column "On Being a Mean Gamemaster", it looks like you had a lot of fun GMing back in the old days. Why do you think things have changed so much now?

Steve: Nothing to do with the rules certainly. Part of it now is that my old group is spread out over the U.S. and so when we play we have to do so online. Also, there is something fun about being a mean gamemaster and playing in a game where the GM lets you royally screw up. Perhaps it makes the victories that much sweeter or just makes you feel like you’ve got some true freedom (the freedom to whack yourself). I’m actually moving back towards the mean GM mode; probably has to do with making up lots of monsters and villains. I had a theory that I started going soft because I was grading so many poorly written undergraduate papers but it’s probably something more simple like age. One thing about being a mean GM; it’s all about letting the players whack out your scenario or even the entire campaign, whether the whack-out comes because they botch horribly or figure out a great trick and succeed magnificently. All of my most enjoyable games have come about from the players “breaking” the planned scenario in one of these ways. If the players piss off the dragonlord they were supposed to ally with let them; then turn the campaign into one where the dragonlord chases them around the world with special action teams.

Q. Do you have any good Gamma World stories? ;-)

Steve: Hmmm, ya see, I always had power-gamers so Gamma World worked really nice as an AD&D monster manual for me. Even high level fighters decked out in magic items pause when facing a torc-grenade launching hover tank with a 300 hp/round force field. I played a Metamorphosis Alpha game way back when and enjoyed that, then tried Gamma World but couldn’t quite get into it. I think it was a technical problem. When playing GW I naturally modeled it after Mad Max and the Road Warrior; but in those movies the adventuring area is spread out all over the place. You’ve got large tracts of empty space separating the encounter areas which left my players (and me) a little lost on the direction of the game.

In MA the players are stuck in this ship so they have to run into the encounters; moreover, the space is small enough that I can pretty much have the whole thing mapped out in advance so the players can have a pure exploration goal; that’s hard in GW since the players can go anywhere and there’s no way I can map out the whole world in advance. I think the exploration aspect is a lot of fun but you need a lot of pre-written material (or an excellent talent with ad lib adventures) for that to work its best. There’s a chance we’ll get to a point with the various d20 material that one can run an exploration themed campaign really well. After MA we played Aftermath for a time; that’s a pretty gritty game but had a number of fun bits. I set that one in an Escape from New York setting but I screwed up and gave the players access to a secret escape route. I think it helps a game if you can keep your players to a fairly small region, one that you can fully develop. At least for a time.

Q. Can you tell us of your background in the gaming industry?

Steve: Well, I got two contributor’s copies of Relics and Rituals and about $14 for my write-up of Felton’s Red (a kind of potion for horses). That’s the extent of my professional work prior to now. Unprofessionally there’s still a copy of some Amber rules for GURPS floating around the internet that I did. I treated use of Trump and Pattern as skills which makes sense but ends up with the result that everyone can easily be masters of those abilities and that doesn’t match well with the books. I think one could keep the making-sense part while kicking up the cost by assigning a social cost to the abilities, something like 50 points of social ranks to convince Dworkin or whoever to teach you the innermost secrets.

Q. Can you tell us about your game design experience?

Steve: Again, nothing professional here. My first experience was setting up some origin rules for Champions, had things like mutants, radiation accidents, aliens, replicants, special training, and so on. Essentially it was adding races to Champions and that made for a nice change of pace from the completely free form game that Champions normally is. A while later I started in on making my own games. The second iteration of the Second World campaign used a wholly home-grown system that was good enough to carry the campaign for some 8 months or so. Making high level opponents became a bit of a burden so we switched off. I’d like to put that system up on the site and release it under the OGL.

I then did a system where you’d build a character by picking 3 to 4 special abilities; each of them fit on a 3x5 card. It’s kind of a fun and convenient idea but doesn’t really help the GM; ultimately it looks a lot like a class and level system anyway. Then I started work on another original system and that’s up on the site right now as the Bayes System (what an awful name!) I’ll continue work on that because I think it has promise but it’s more of a lifetime project. I hope to have something workable out of that in a few years and it should appeal to the more simulationist gamer. What I’d like is a game where the player never has to drop out of character, where every decision he makes for his character can be done from the character’s perspective without worrying about things like story and balance.

Q. What are your views on the current state of the RPG industry?

Steve: For RPGs it’s probably pretty healthy. People might complain about how tough the market is or how its flooded but compared to what? Try getting something published that made back its investment 4 years ago. Frankly it’ll probably be tougher for old-timers who used to be able to sell 80 pages of B-grade flavor-text and 16 pages of crunchy bits. Some publishers are still trying to do this…

Q. What types of games does Second World Simulations

Steve: I’ll be doing a bit of everything. My first book in pdf format (“Bodies and Souls”) is a collection of templates customized for easy use by both the gamemaster and the player; I pulled the insect scion quote above from that. My first print book is called “Masters of Arms” and focuses on a collection of weapons specialists in the form of prestige classes; here I essentially try to create a bunch of martial arts styles focused around different weapons. Most martial arts books for most systems emphasize unarmed combat because that’s what we have in the real world; but all my players fought with weapons so I always wanted something like martial arts but using swords and so on.

My second print book is a big sourcebook (“The Second World Sourcebook”) for playing in a multi-genre setting; I pretty much just throw a bunch of different material into that one including quasi-super-powered prestige classes, a system for using social and political power in a game, rules for moving characters back and forth between a d20 Modern game and standard d20 game, and miscellaneous stuff to fill out the setting. Working for myself I can do pretty much anything I want, including trying stuff that other companies might feel more reticent regarding. I’ll have a sourcebook with three different magic systems coming out next year and I’d like to try out a book on flying tanks for the d20 system, but I’ll have to think about that one. Multi-genre will be my main focus; stuff that involves popping back and forth across worlds or to places with wildly different physics.

Q. How long has Second World Simulation been operating? Who works for the company? What do you do for the company?

Steve: I started writing my various products for the d20 system last August. I planned to have the first release out some time ago but failed to realize how much lead-time you need for a product. You should have the cover illustration at least 5 months before the release date for instance. Anyway, I hire freelancers to do all the art and have some outside playtesters but everything else I handle myself. Perhaps not the best way to go but it keeps overhead way down. My primary concern is editing but I have to self-edit my philosophy papers and dissertation anyway so I have a bit of practice.

Q. What makes your games special?

Steve: What’s going to make someone like the material will lurk in the details. Little stuff like the way I describe a room, city, person, monster, or spell, how I utilize the mechanical benefits of a martial maneuver in order to help the player better visualize the action his character performs. When you perform the Three-Fold Strike maneuver it’s got to feel like you’re really whacking something. I introduce a fair bit of new mechanics that stretch the rules and allow you to do unusual things with your game while still fitting nicely within the existing structure. I also like to include a balance of flavor text and crunch, typically about 20/80, because crunch is the stuff I need to run a game but flavor text is the stuff that makes me want to use it.

Q. What impact do you feel the Internet has had on the RPG industry?

Steve: The fan support it provides probably makes the biggest difference. A number of games with smaller followings still live because they have fans willing to share material over the Internet. For bigger games it just gets better, so long as the publisher has a fan-site friendly policy.

Q. Do you feel that the Internet will play a bigger part in the Gaming industry in the future? If so, how?

Steve: It’ll just get bigger and bigger. While online play will never replace face-to-face play, having game sessions available at any time of the week, supporting any game you might like, would really help keep people involved in RPGs. It allows them to stay involved after they’ve moved, or just find a game when they happen to have some free time. Currently none of the online tabletops are very satisfying; I’ve been using OpenRPG with one of my old friends and I’d have to say it’s the most adequate program available but still something of a chore to use.

The other big concern is the potential for electronic books to become pretty normal. I like to have a book to carry around and read in awkward places. But, if an electronics company produced an e-book reader the size of the PHB, that opened to two LCD screens, each the size of an 8.5x11 inch page, and this had enough battery power to last several hours, then I’d probably start preferring e-books loaded into that device to lugging around 30 kg of paper. It would give me everything a paper book does and probably a lot more since you could store little notes in the text and call up multiple books pretty easily. I assume a device like that is just a matter of time, maybe ten years even. The possibility of that kind of thing makes me a bit scared for retailers and traditional print publishers. I know some people say it’ll never happen, we’ll always prefer paper to electronic. I’m just describing the device that would make *me* stop preferring paper to digital; and it doesn’t look that far away; and I generally assume that I’m not that unusual in my preferences.

Game retailers can still survive off TCGs, minis games, and the various hardware you need to support the hobby but there will be a need to rethink business strategies. Occasionally I suspect that WotC’s attempt to move into the miniatures industry is in anticipation of the eventual decline of the printed product market.

Craig: Steve’s got an interesting point. What do you think? Email me and I will post the results.

Q. Do you feel that the Internet will play a part in the development of your future gaming projects? If so, how?

Steve: Other than the potential major changes mentioned above the Internet still serves as the best conduit between the manufacturer and his customer. It’s how I keep people informed of upcoming products and provide additional material to help them use stuff they’ve already purchased. I plan on being primarily a print manufacturer though; e-books aren’t anywhere near as nice as printed books yet.

Q. Do you feel it is important to publish free material for your products?

Steve: Free material is a good way to advertise. People can come and look at the free material and, if they like it, might want to check out the for-pay stuff it’s meant to support. Setting up password protected areas of the site is a bit annoying so I’ll likely just open up any free content to all comers. When the Second World Sourcebook comes out I’ll have a 48 page or so scenario to go with it, in addition to previews and miscellaneous downloads or columns just for entertainment.

Q. What do you think of the d20 concept?

Steve: The *d20* concept is quite a bit different from the OGL concept and since you’ve asked a question about that later I’ll hold off. The d20 logo trick is great for WotC since it precludes an alternate logo with just the restrictions of the OGL from accomplishing the same goal. Since the d20/OGL are so tied together though I’ll hold off for a second on fully answering this question.

Q. From your column(s) Wandering Damage, it almost seems like you have a love-hate relation with the d20 system. Read them here.

Steve: You could say I had a love-hate relationship with AD&D Second Edition but not really with the d20 system. I think it’s one of the best systems ever made; up there with the Hero System, Ars Magica’s system, and much of the stuff written by Robin Laws. It does so many things right that it’d be more fruitful for me to just list the bits I’m not so fond of. 1) Why’d it keep the d4!?!? Nasty little creature that. (Okay, that’s not entirely serious…) 2) The magic system is fine and some of the subtle bits like relabeling memorization to preparation actually works. It’s not my favorite picture of how magic works but we’ll see plenty of alternatives in the future and, in fact, we already have. I’m not fond of the evocation, invocation, conjuration categorization method though; I don’t feel like much of a specialist wizard if I specialize in one of those. I’d rather see something based on elemental energies or something akin to what they did in the psionics book. Both of those are pretty minor quibbles. I don’t have any real problem with hit points, or their picture of hit points, or armor class making you harder to hit. Having played most of my games in systems that have armor reduce damage I’ve come to the conclusion that damage reduction is just as clunky; then you need called shot rules and if you include those you need to give dragons unrealistically high dexterity, and so on.

A more serious issue is that the gamemaster has to tailor a scenario to his players’ class levels; there’s a big power level movement in the course of a character’s career and you can’t run low level players through high level modules or vice versa. You don’t have this problem in a game like Call of Cthulhu; there you can pretty much run any module off the shelf for any group of players. This increases the usability of published scenarios. Also, if you’re setting up a campaign and you want to plop a high level dungeon off in the forest you need to make sure that during the game the players don’t go there too early; that’s a bit too much meta-intervention to feel right.

On the other hand, the power level increase isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. In the Wheel of Time the heroes start out pretty weak then gain significant powers over the course of the books; they can defeat a Fade later on while they couldn’t in the first book. It’s fun to build your character up to heroic proportions, that helps extend the life of a campaign, and long-lasting campaigns are the ones you’ll remember a few years from now.

This is one of those things you just can’t reconcile very well in a single game system (though I think there might be a solution out there somewhere). I prefer the more stable power level a bit; after all, it’s less work for the gamemaster and that’s generally been my job. However, my players seem to prefer the d20 way (go figure!) and they outnumber me.

Q. What do you think of the OGL?

Steve: This is tremendous. I think a publisher does their customers a disservice now if they don’t release their game under an open gaming license of some sort since that drastically increases the chance the customer has of seeing a variety of support materials for the product. By releasing your system under an OGL (doesn’t need to be d20 remember) you make it possible for someone else to publish a printed product, or for a fan to put together a pdf and actually sell it for a small fee. This gives fans an incentive to put in a bit of extra work and make the product more presentable; they’ll even get something for it.

I’ve got a collection of scores of roleplaying games and systems, many of them I wanted to play. Now leave out the d20 and D&D products. Of those scores perhaps half a dozen actually have modules, perhaps two or three have naval rules, mass combat rules, and so on. Only Shadowrun and White Wolf have city sourcebooks. Only Rolemaster as far as I know had an herbs supplement. I (as a customer) get all of this and much more from d20; and I’d have a significantly better chance of getting it from GURPS or Champions or Storyteller or the Icon system if they went open content.

Q. How does OGL help your product lines? Your company?

Steve: It’s huge; it gives me access to a large enough customer base that I might sell enough products to make the whole thing pay off and…

Q. Do you ever expect to make a living at writing RPGs or was it just a labor of love?

Steve: I don’t require much to make a living; I’m quite willing to spend 80 hours a week working at this; and the OGL gives access to that big customer base so yes, I do expect to make a living doing this. The precise method might change over time but I plan to do this until I’m confined to a bed; and by then we’ll probably have voice activated computers so I’ll be able to keep going anyway :)

Craig: Steve must be one of those independently wealthy guys ;-)

Q. What do you think of using .pdf format to publish rulesbooks, supplements etc?

Steve: I’ll discuss this from the customer perspective. I’ve bought a bunch of pdf products; probably somewhere between 10 and 20. I like the shorter ones since I usually print them on my home printer and that seems a bit more feasible. I think I’ll try taking a CD filled with the stuff I bought down to Kinko’s, print a bunch of them out and get them bound. That might make a real difference but it’s a bit of a hassle. If I had the choice between a pdf version and a print version at twice the price I’d buy the print version all the time. However, the pdf’s are a great way to get products that might not justify a full print run from the publisher.

Q. Can you give us some background on your own personal campaign(s)?

Steve: Um, I’m at 8 pages already so perhaps I should be brief regarding this (I think I’m going to fail at that). I started with D&D (power-gaming of course). I’ve bounced around in a lot of systems but I’ll give a little chronology of the systems that turned into big campaigns. Tried Villains and Vigilantes but it wasn’t quite right then Champions came along and that grabbed me and my players for a long time. We did the standard Champions-geek stuff, ridiculous multipowers and elemental controls, powers all based on another power that was always on, a lot of characters that looked suspiciously like X-men and who fought a lot of bad-guys who looked suspiciously like Sentinels. I ran a big game extrapolated off the James Bond 007 rules; that was the first big multi-genre game I ran. I had an extended sequence of mini-campaigns where I’d translate the characters into another game system and run their characters through scenarios in this other setting, then come back and do it again for yet another setting. That ended up with all the players becoming gods so we called it the god-campaign and it’s probably one of our most memorable ones.

We did another long Champions game after that one; I allowed players to make money and take equipment in this one so we had lots of superheroes carrying around FN-FAL’s (for some reason the best rifle in a wide variety of game systems). It was a pretty gritty game for Champions and somehow over ten player characters managed to get killed— that was back when I had the mean GM thing down pat. We did Torg and that was truly cool but lacked staying power. The play and character construction was really fun but the supplements weren’t nearly as good as the core rules (with the exception of the ultra-cool Tharkhold supplement). I also think the lack of strong character development rules hurt the longevity of that game. The blue and red d20 that came with the game is still one of my favorite dice though.

We had a couple long Shadowrun games after that; in one the players all decided to start poor; the initiation ritual to the gang involved beating up someone in another gang to get a baseball bat. In one encounter I gave them a slightly crooked rifle (+1 or so to target number for attacks). When you start poor a crooked rifle is pretty impressive. The players spent an awful lot of time in the sewers in that game… After that the Amber games started and I ran a bunch of those using a variety of systems, typically systems I designed, though I did go the diceless route a couple times. Diceless was a lot of work for me and I like the gambling, dice-rolling, game part of roleplaying too much to give it up. After that I set up the Second World. I had various games set in the Second World for a while. Mixed in with all that is a variety of other stuff.

Early D&D had a 50th level campaign with Darth Vader as the head bad guy! I think publishers should remember that part of their market is 14-16 and just likes to have fun. In later D&D I ran a Dark Sun game and a couple Birthright games; I liked those settings and it’s a bit unfortunate that fragmenting the audience that way doesn’t work out for WotC. I’d imagine those sorts of products can work out okay for a smaller d20 publisher though.

Q. Where do you run your games?

Steve: Mostly just around the house; in the past one of my players owned a video store so we’d play in the back room; it had easy access to a convenience store making it an ideal place to run a game.

Q. Can you tell us about a favorite moment or incident that occurred?

Steve: The ‘a’ part is really important here. I’ll tell you the favorite mean-GM thing I ever did since it was so horribly unfair. It was a Champions game and one of the players played one of those flying-brick-martial artists that always pulverized things with move-through attacks. I put some Vulture Lions (giants vulture headed lions from the Elric books) down in front of him and he gears up the move-through. I think he had been beating the snot out of my bad guys for a bit so when he swoops in for the move-through I have the Vulture Lion Aikido throw him into the ground. Oddly enough the player didn’t throw dice at me or anything.

Q. What was your most humorous convention or role-playing moment?

Steve: I described this briefly in one of my Wandering Damage columns but I got to put it here. One of my players (the one who couldn’t leave a Deck of Many Things alone) got access to a book with weird spells in it. So he learns these spells and, over the course of several adventures, tries them out. One of the spells allowed him to destroy any object by tapping it with his finger long enough; he almost used that to destroy an incredibly powerful artifact but in a rare burst of common sense decided not to (I might be wrong about this; he might have done it anyway but teleported away at the last moment). One spell involved holding his hands in a certain way with the thumbs and forefingers pressed together; if he did this right everything in a small cone would get sucked into some nether dimension. The group wound up stuck in a Motel 6 with a room full of incriminating evidence so he decides to use the vortex spell and remove the stuff. Well, he fails the check (I think I rolled for him and it came up really bad) so I suggest that perhaps if he changes the way he’s holding his hands it might work. At this point he looks directly at me, wags his finger, and says “I know you Steve. You’re evil. If I do that I’ll summon a demon lord.” Well, he had me pegged; how could I be so positively transparent!? He proceeds to do it anyway. The vortex reverses, spews a demon lord into the room, and the demon bats the player through the wall of the motel out over Interstate 10 where an eastbound tractor-trailer promptly smashes into him. He had an adamantium skeleton so he was right as rain after his skin grew back.

Craig: Steve starts off thanking me for the interview. Honestly, I think it should be the other way around. Steve has some very interesting comments on the industry and gaming companies. I enjoyed reading his columns and it was a factor in asking him for an interview. I will be keeping my eye on what Steve does in the future. Now, I could just convince him to write some Gamma World/Metamorphosis Alpha material ;-)

Some products offered by Second World Simulations are released under the d20 System License version 1.0. 'd20 System' and the d20 System logo are Trademarks owned by Wizards of the Coast and are used with permission.

The mention of or reference to any company or product on these pages is not a challenge to the trademark or copyright concerned. Second World Simulations, The Second World Campaign Sourcebook, and the Second World Simulations banner and logo are trademarks of Steven Palmer Peterson.

D20 and Gamma World are Registered Trademarks of WotC/TSR, Inc. All rights etc. Resevered. Any use of WotC/TSR's copyrighted material or trademarks in this page/interview should not be viewed as a challenge to those copyrights or trademarks.