Fred Hicks interview - part two - Cleveland RPG

((The following is the conclusion to my two-part interview with rpg-developer, Fred Hicks.))

Christopher: Ok, so you knew this was coming… tell us a bit about the upcoming Dresden Files RPG, based on Jim Butcher‘s excellent series of novels. Excitement over the game has been building in the RPG-community for some time now. How did the project come to you?

Fred: Well, I know Jim from way back -- before he got all published and such. So it came to us in exactly the opposite direction you might expect -- and not directly from Jim, not at first.

We had published the Fate 2.0 rules for free, and it had gotten some notice, garnering a couple awards at an early manifestation of the Indie RPG Awards. Jim's *agent* turns out to be a gamer as well, and she contacted Jim, saying something to the effect of "Lots of folks are asking us about the RPG rights. Don't you know some award-winning RPG designer friends you'd be most comfortable with for this?"

Turns out he did, and he was.

More shocking perhaps was that our wives said "Yes, go do that!" And so the impetus to turn Evil Hat from a source of free stuff and convention gaming into a commercial publisher happened.

We've been spending the intervening years trying to BECOME the company that's able to take on the job -- we sort of jumped the gun on letting the world know about this, from that perspective. As a company, we're just about now what we needed to be when Jim first contacted us.

Christopher: What sorts of things can we expect to see make the transition from the novels to the RPG?

Fred: Plenty! Part of what's taken us a while is getting the setting and system to live in concert with each other. Reading over the novels, there's really been two things that really came home for us, and we're building a lot of the system around them.

The first is the idea that "if the monster got its hands on me, I was dead." Combat in the "Dresdenverse" is crazy, scary, and deadly. It should happen fast and leave you panting at the end. And your best defense against the deadly things is *don't get hit by them in the first place*. We're pretty confident we've tweaked things to the point where this is the experience in the game.

The second -- and maybe the most important -- is the perspective that monsters get power, while mortals get free will. So in the game, the more powerful you are, the less free will you have to exercise -- in a very palpable way, as it affects the amount of fate points you get as a character. And this should extend to all sorts of power when it comes down to it -- Marcone, without any supernatural powers, is still a very powerful individual, and that would be reflected in the system. The more power you have, the harder of a time you have resisting the call of your intrinsic nature.

But in terms of the novel's *trappings*, you'll see all sorts of stuff. We'll have a rogues' gallery that covers ten novels, a bestiary of the same territory, an overview of the politics of the supernatural world, an exploration of occult Chicago by Kenneth Hite, and more.

Reproduce the experience of the novels as close as we can without sacrificing the fun of playing a game.

Christopher: What has the relationship between Evil Hat and Jim Butcher been like, during the design process?

Fred: Trusting. Jim's let us run free for a lot of the time -- which is a combination of him having very little time to do things other than write novels and having front-loaded most of the concerns about whether or not he could trust the designers when he chose us as the folks to do the job. He'll be getting approval power over the final result, and we've been able to grill him about some setting particulars, but we're trying to make sure the game builds from what's already out there as much as possible. Most of the stuff that isn't already out there is stuff Jim intends to use in the future novels, so that's territory where we tread most carefully.

Christopher: You’ve spoken before on the Dresden Files RPG website about how your approach to gathering the artwork for the game has differed from that of previous games. How so?

Fred: Well, there were no "previous games" at the time I did it. Flush with excitement from getting the license, I went out and got the art first thing, before we even had the first chunk of text drafted, because I thought that was the right way to go. It was a rookie mistake. If I'd let it ride for a bit, I would've seen the changing shape of things, the eventual success of Evil Hat around Spirit of the Century, and our ability ultimately to produce a color book instead of black and white. By the point I realized we could go color, I had a big swath of black and white art on my hands. That said, it gave me a lot of experience on how to do art direction properly, and all of that art can still be used in the product, so it's not a loss. It's just not the way that I think things *should* be done unless you've got a publication art budget that can afford to "waste" some of the images you've gotten done.

Christopher: One of the chief concerns that fans have voiced is how Fate will handle the implementation of an open-ended magic system. Have their been any particular challenges in adapting Fate to the task?

Fred: In the Dresdenverse, magic's not quite as open-ended as folks think it is, though maybe they're using that term to describe "something where you make up your own spells". That's not quite the same as "open-ended" the way I'd use it (as a synonym for "anything is possible").

There are plenty of restrictions and symbologies you need to build. Nearly any spell you might want to put together -- thaumaturgically speaking, at least -- is gonna have some kind of back-story to it. You need hair and blood from the target -- how did you get it? Your potion requires gold dust, but your rent is due. These things are going to matter when you're putting together your spell. We'll let you fast-forward past that stuff if it's boring to you, too, but the best way to construct a powerful thaumaturgy is to build a good story around it.

On the evocation side, yes, there's a bunch of stuff you can do, but it's all short-term effects. That's a limiter. So is the fact that if you bite off more power than you can chew, you'll get hit with some monster backlash -- burning up your health, ravaging the surrounding architecture, etc.

Because Fate is an interesting mix of system crunch and free-ish story-telling, I think you'll find that it fits together with the ideas of Dresden Files spellcraft pretty well. And the way we integrate the same limitations Harry and other spellcasters experience in the novels into the system should lend it some significant verisimilitude.

That said, have there been challenges? Heck yes. The Spellcraft chapter itself has had about four different versions over the last couple years, and it's driven each writer (of which I am one) who's tried to take it on to the brink of insanity. The series is huge, and accommodating the spellcraft thinkery Jim puts into all of them -- driven, in his case, by narrative convenience -- in a way that creates a truly workable system has been thirsty work. But we've rounded the last bend on this one, at last, and are working on putting in the final touches and "outliers."

Christopher: Being that the Dresden Files novel-series is still “in-progress,“ so to speak, are there plans for future supplements and/or content-updates to the game?

Fred: Strictly speaking, our contract only covers making the game itself, not supplements, but we might look in that direction down the road. But honestly, if we do our job right and let the reader see under the hood so they can understand how the engine works, the game won't *need* supplements. You'll go out, pick up the new novel, read about some new monstrous creature, and know how to stat it in about 5 or 10 minutes. In a very real way, we want to enable each new novel to *be* the supplement, inherently. And we'll keep our forums and blogs active so we can share ideas on how to do that as the material keeps coming out. Jim has at least another decade of Dresden Files novels in him, if not more, so we'll be kept plenty busy, there.

I want to thank Mr. Hicks for granting me this interview, as I said in part one it’s been a dream of mine for some time.

An inspiring example of huge phenomena originating from humble beginnings, Evil Hat is a small company that has made some truly great and influential contributions both to the hobby and to the rpg-community at large. The Fate system is one that truly embraces the “character-as-story-element” method of rules-and-system design. A player-character’s abilities are drawn directly from his or her experiences and background, and this is a crucial part of character generation. In Spirit of the Century, for example, character creation becomes a game-session unto itself. Each player contributes in some way to each PC in a group character-stat-and-history creation meeting that is, in my humble opinion, as much fun as any adventure. For those familiar with GNS theory, Fate is a brilliant fulfillment of the Narrativist method of game-design, but with more than enough crunch-potential to satisfy even the most dyed-in-the-wool Gamist. Put simply, as a GM you set your own crunch-level for a given campaign, (or even, as a player, for your individual character,) and the sky’s the limit.

But, then that’s really what has defined the philosophy of Evil Hat for as long as I’ve been following them; Give the players what they want. The guiding intent seems to be to craft games that contain more than enough flavor, texture and history to get players’ creative juices flowing, but that simultaneously never loses sight of making sure that the end result is a game that will be fun to play for campaigns of any length from single-evening one-shots to sagas that span years. It’s often been said that; “you can’t keep everybody happy.” While that is ultimately true, I think that Evil Hat’s products are one of the best arguments to the contrary in the entire medium of hobby games.

Following on the heels of the company’s amazing creations thus far, there are many more tremendous products on the way. Products such as The Dresden Files RPG, Chad Underkoffler’s Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies, and Paul Tevis’ A Penny for My Thoughts, just to name a few.

The gaming community is fortunate indeed to have a group like Evil Hat among us.

On behalf of Examiner.com, I wish Mr. Hicks and all of the folks at Evil Hat the very best.

For more info: Visit Evil Hat Productions. And buy lots of their products, damn you! You'll never regret it!