One nice thing about the Workshop, at least from my point of view, is the large degree of creative freedom I have as a designer. Pretty much any project I feel will make a good game I can go ahead and work on, and how I handle it is largely up to me.

Over the years there have been exceptions, though. I've always had a yen to do a game entitled MAMELON,: The Storming of the Kamchatka Lunette, but it was booed and hissed disgracefully everytime I suggested it. For those of you low-lifes who think warfare started about the time the Germans bolted extra plates of face-hardened armor to the front of Panzer IIIs, the Mamelon was the key position in the Russian fortifications around Sevatopol during the Crimean War.

Actually, although the Allies referred to the work as the Mamelon, that was the name of the hill on which the fortification was located; the correct name of the work itself was the Kamchatka Lunette (so named because it was constructed by men of the Kamchatka infantry regiment). Anyway, that is one title which will never make the production schedule.

Another thing I wanted to do was to use the picture located here for the cover of the artillery rules booklet in TACFORCE, but again no dice. Not in keeping with the serious nature of the game, you know. So instead, it gets stuck in the pages of The Grenadier. The photo, by the way, is of Captain (then Lieutenant - TACFORCE has been a long time a-birthing) Jeff Jore, one of the many people who advised me on the game. The photo itself illustrates the aggressive spirit displayed by the U.S. Army forward observers. It takes real guts to go into combat armed with a bayonet and a pellet gun.

Actually, the limits on my freedom are as much self imposed as anything else. I would not really have gone through with either of these schemes if anyone had been silly enough to agree to the idea - at least recently. There was a time years ago when all would have, but times do change, it seems. At the last Origins, I got involved in a conversation at the Guild beer-bust with one of the fellows from Marshall Enterprises on this subject. He was upset that the big companies tended to play it safe on game subjects and it always fell to the smaller companies to take the chances. To a large extent, this is true.

The larger companies, among whose ranks the Workshop seems to have found itself, don't tend to jump into new subject areas until a smaller firm has tested the water. The same thing is generally true of new game mechanics, although this generalization doesn't seem to apply to us and probably never will. I don't seem to be able to design games except from the bottom up, probably because the system design is what intrigues me most.

I admit to having harbored some unkind thoughts about the "big guys" at one time due to their reluctance to take risks, a behavior I attributed to corporate greed. Having looked at things from both sides, I have, not surprisingly, revised my thinking. It isn't greed (at least in most cases) that causes the larger companies to play it safe - it's a growing burden of responsibility. When the only employees of a company are its owners, taking chances is easy; you're only gambling with your own money and everybody involved has a say in what's done. When a dozen or more employees depend upon your decisions to put food on their tables, things start changing.

Fortunately, this is by and large a good thing. For one thing, the "big guys", including AH and SPI, really aren't that big. Neither of them has so much market power that they can ignore their responsibilities to their customers and get away with it for long. If they do, or if we do, sooner or later the show will close. The main effects of this conservatism at the top are two-fold. First, it helps us designers from becoming too self-indulgent. The Crimean War is a hobby of mine, but that is no reason to foist it off on you. Second, it leaves room for new companies to get started. Whether or not they survive after that is largely a function of how good a product they turn out and how hard they're willing to work at it.

Two Types of Companies

So how do you tell the new companies that will make it from those who probably won't? I have a system which, although not foolproof, at least makes sense to me. You get a feeling from certain games or lines of games.

With one sort of company, you get the feeling that the purpose of the outfit is to become a "successful game company". Their products are geared toward what they perceive the gaming public wants rather than what the owners may be personally interested in. There is an obvious effort to give the impression (and provide the reality) of a smoothlyrunning professional firm. Rand Games was like this. This sort of company probably won't make it.

The second type of newcomer company is the type that obviously is publishing a game because the guys that did it really wanted to do it. They loved doing it and put everything they had into doing it. The game may be rough around the edges in terms of graphics and packaging, it may have some rules problems or clumsy mechanics, but there's always that feeling of interest and excitement with the subject that shines through. This type of company probably will make it, because the guys doing it want to keep doing it, and they will work harder learning their craft and put up with more trouble and lean times just to keep doing what they enjoy which is designing.

Our genesis was something like that, and so that may influence my thinking. But when you think about it, that's how AH started, and SPI, and TSR. Two outfits to watch now are Discovery Games (Source of the Nile) and Jack Radey's Peoples' War Games (Korsun Pocket). Both show real promise.

Well, this has been sort of rambling, but it started with design and it ended with design, so I suppose it's okay.