New Avatar Home & Thoughts on Distribution
Avatar has a new home. Instead of doing the thing I did with the Afraid hack and just editing and expanding the blog post constantly, I've utilized the AMAZING NEW TECHNOLOGY available with Wordpress (to which I am quickly becoming a convert) and posted my working draft on a separate page connected to my new/other blog. I'll post notes about updates here, but the text will reside over there.
I've reworked the text from the beginning up through "Choosing Greater Dharma Paths," hopefully making it clearer how I expect groups to come together and decide on a premise and primary characters. Greater Dharma Paths still need more explanation, but I'm gonna wait until I explain Dharma Paths in general, I think. Comments and suggestions are welcome, either here or on the page where the draft is housed.
In general, I was just talking to Thomas about how I'm not convinced by PDFs as a way to distribute free indie RPGs anymore. I think they are a great way to distribute content that you intend people to print out, but not great for content you want people to read and respond to. People will read a webpage or blog post or forum post even if it's several pages long. Most people will not bother downloading and reading a PDF, unless they are really interested. And I suspect that games which actually get read are more likely to be played or at least to influence people's thinking about games.
So I think I may do the Zak Arntson thing for a while and post all my games primarily as HTML documents (webpages). If the Avatar game and Afraid hacks can see as much play as Shadows has over the years, that would be cool.
I've reworked the text from the beginning up through "Choosing Greater Dharma Paths," hopefully making it clearer how I expect groups to come together and decide on a premise and primary characters. Greater Dharma Paths still need more explanation, but I'm gonna wait until I explain Dharma Paths in general, I think. Comments and suggestions are welcome, either here or on the page where the draft is housed.
In general, I was just talking to Thomas about how I'm not convinced by PDFs as a way to distribute free indie RPGs anymore. I think they are a great way to distribute content that you intend people to print out, but not great for content you want people to read and respond to. People will read a webpage or blog post or forum post even if it's several pages long. Most people will not bother downloading and reading a PDF, unless they are really interested. And I suspect that games which actually get read are more likely to be played or at least to influence people's thinking about games.
So I think I may do the Zak Arntson thing for a while and post all my games primarily as HTML documents (webpages). If the Avatar game and Afraid hacks can see as much play as Shadows has over the years, that would be cool.
posted by Jonathan Walton at 1:15 PM
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