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Wyrmworks Publishing What is excellence in tabletop role playing games? Welcome to Gaining Advantage. Wyrmworks Publishing Welcome to Gaining Advantage. We are using tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons to help you make people's lives better. So, now I want you to think—who has created fantasy miniatures to represent Down syndrome or cerebral palsy, any other disability besides amputation, growth deficiency, or the need for a wheelchair or there's none as far as I know, maybe a Blind Monk. So what year is it? It's 2022. Seems like it's time for some more representation on our hex grids. This fall, we're launching a Kickstarter with a wide variety of disability representation. Now art and sculpting is expensive, because we want to respectfully compensate our artists, which ends up raising the cost of the miniatures. And so players who depend on disability checks don't have much disposable income. And so we want to keep cost down as much as possible while still making the project viable, which creates an opportunity for some of you. Wyrmworks Publishing So now imagine this. You design a character, maybe it's based on yourself, or a friend or a family member with their permission, of course, or just an idea that you have. We create a stat block, full color art, full color 3D sculpt. And when once the Kickstarter campaign finishes, you get a voucher for one of each physical miniature, including the one that you designed, and the collection of STL files so that you can 3D print copies for your players and friends and family. And then that figure gets included in the Kickstarter, which means that 1000s of people all over the world will be using your character in their games. Isn't that cool? All right, now, when we launch the Kickstarter, that tier is going to be $600 so that we can make sure to compensate everybody and cover the costs. But until the end of June, which just a few more days, depending on when you're catching this episode, it's just $550, because we want to be able to lower the overall cost, keep the cost of the minis down by covering some of that overhead in advance. Now if you're catching this after at the end of June, we might extend just a little bit longer with a slightly higher price tag. We really need to give our artists enough time before the campaign which is why the early cut off. So if you're interested, if you're capable of supporting us in that way and supporting this campaign you can go to mini.inclusiverpg.com for details, and that link is in the show notes. Now let's get to our interview.Wyrmworks Publishing The tabletop role playing game space is growing exponentially. There's diesen stuff that you hear a lot about. And then great stuff that you've never heard of. So how do you find the truly excellent. Today we welcome New York Times best selling and award winning author and Game Designer Matt Forbeck to talk about the Diana Jones Award. Welcome, Matt. Matt Forbeck Hey, thanks for having me on. Wyrmworks Publishing So what would you like us to know about you personally, specifically speaking to the tabletop role playing game crowd?Matt Forbeck Oh, that's a good question. Well, you know, I've been at this for many years, I started gaming went to my first Gen Con over 40 years ago now. I think this is my 41st coming up.Matt Forbeck So this has been a passion of mine for a long time. I've been involved in community for a long time, and I've made it my profession for a long time too. When I was in college, I started out working for a number of different gaming companies putting Mayfair, Iron Crown, Grenadier Models, and such. And then moved on to work for Games Workshop then did a bunch of freelancing. I ran a company called Pinnacle Entertainment Group. I was one of the founders of that, where we did Deadlands, a Brave New World, and a bunch of other games. And most of the time these days, I, well since that I've been doing freelancing again. Most of the time these days. I write novels and video games. But recently, I've also kept my hand in doing tabletop games over the years, but at a much more reduced level, right maybe a quarter of my time. However, that changed last year because I'm working on the Marvel tabletop role playing game, as well as doing Shotguns and Sorcery which is we did a role playing game from the Cypher system. And we're doing a fifth edition version right now that's based upon some novels I wrote.Wyrmworks Publishing Cool. Well, it's gotta be great to turn something that you wrote, a novel into, into a game. Matt Forbeck Oh, yeah, it's fun. I mean, honestly, this actually started as a third edition sourcebook when I was coming up with a system entirely in the first place. When I was doing the worldbuilding and everything actually sold it to Mongoose Publishing as a D20 setting. And then my wife became pregnant with quadruplets back in 2000…2001. So that kind of threw everything into the backburner for awhile. The kids are all healthy and happy and 20 years old, which is kind of crazy, but getting older beats the alternative, I always say.Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah, absolutely. All right. So tell us about your work with the Diana Jones Award.Matt Forbeck Yeah, it's an interesting thing. I mean, to outsiders, it probably seems, well, especially people come to it fresh like, oh, this established and well thought of award that people really appreciate. But you know, I was there at the beginning. It was actually James Wallis who started it. James is a fantastic game designer. He did the Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Alas, Vegas. Once Upon a Time, which was a great storytelling card game. James was one of the original storytelling, tabletop game designers, right? I mean, he did a lot of the original stuff that inspires people to this day, but he also somehow wound up with a trip a pub trivia trophy that had been constructed from the remains of a burnt up copy of the Indiana Jones roleplaying game that had been encased in a Plexiglas pyramid, right. And apparently the guys at TSR UK when they had shut the place down and burned up a bunch of this stuff and somebody had scooped up few of the pieces and made a trophy out of it for whatever reason and then they used to compete with Games Workshop over the years and at one point or another it fell into James's hands and he's like, Well, I got this trophy. I should make a We should make an award to go with it. Give it to people. So it became this traveling trophy that we had for 20 years and we actually lost it last year, got lost in the mail from Canada to Indianapolis so sadly it's gone; we're gonna have a new one prepared this year. But the Diana Jones award as its original idea was to recognize excellence in gaming, and we try to do that every year. You know, some people think we do a good job some people think we stumble occasionally. And we also don't really restrain ourselves to one particular type of thing. So as far as we're concerned, as long as it's excellent and related to tabletop games, we're willing to consider it so some years it's a designer like Peter Adkison or Jordan Wiseman or Eric Lang some years it's a game like Starcrossed or, you know, dozens of others that we looked at. Sometimes it's an event, right? We honor Gen Con. One year we honored Irish gaming convention charity auctions, which seems kind of odd, but it was something that the majority of us thought were doing great. We wanted to recognize that. So it's kind of grown into its own thing over the years. And it's taken 20 years now it's been to this point. So if you keep doing something over and over, it becomes a ritual. Right? And that's really what has become for us. at GenCon. It started out as my 33rd birthday party at Gen Con 20-some years ago, and that was the year that George Bush gave all the Americans $300 tax rebates and my birthday happen to fall on the Saturday of Gen Con that year, I'm like, You know what, I'm gonna buy all my friends beer, and we're gonna have some beer and pretzels. And we're gonna have a party. And we did that on Saturday night. And then James showed up and said, Would you mind if we give out the award at your party this year? I said, No, it sounds like a fantastic idea.Matt Forbeck And it was such a great time that all the people showed up said you have to do this every year. So we've been doing it for now 20-some years and the first time I pitched in for all the beer and whatever I think Shane Hensley, who was my partner at Pinnacle, in those days, pitched in for a barrel as well. And nowadays, I just pass around a hat and say alright, who's in for chipping in for the beer, buy for friends? Basically, give out drink tickets, and it's open to all gaming industry. professionals. So if you're somebody who is interested in doing games or has been doing games at a professional level, you're more than welcome to join us. Just contact me at [email protected] and we'll see if I can get you on the invitation list. And we hold it every Wednesday night before Gen Con, Gen Con Eve as we like to call it, and basically it's at a bar in Indianapolis, and we sit around and talk to our friends and catch up with each other and then stop for about 20 minutes to hand out an award and and go back to all that. So we don't take ourselves too seriously. But on the other hand over the years, we've realized that other people have taken it seriously, and maybe we should start doing that too. So recently, we founded the Diana Jones Award Foundation. So we actually just recently became a nonprofit organization that's filing for a 501(c)3 status so it will be an official charity. One of the reasons we're doing that is because last year we launched this thing called the emerging emerging designer. program, where we actually reach out to game designers. We try to get people to nominate game designers who have only been at it for like three years or less and are doing amazing stuff. And a lot of times we're in that situation you're maybe just starting out, you don't know how to network with people, you don't know how to get your stuff published. You don't know how to get the broader community. So we actually try to focus a spotlight on a small slate of the nominees of the finalists for the emerging designer program, usually four or five people and then the top person by our votes we actually bring out to Gen Con it's essentially a Gen Con scholarship. And so we fly them out to Gen Con put them up in a free hotel room and give them a food bonus for the week. So they eat too other there. So ideally, it doesn't matter if you're wealthy or poor or whatever else we're treating you the same. It's we try to reach into marginalized communities. We try to make a very distinct effort for that because over the years most game designers tended to be people like me, which are white straight cis male, right? And we want to we've been very delighted to see the diversity and inclusiveness growing in the industry. And we want to try to encourage that. So encouraging that the emerging designer level where we have a lot of people coming from communities that have traditionally not been part of tabletop gaming, but it's really grown in that last 10-15 years. We think we're, we're hopefully we hope we're trying to help out with that. Right. And we've been pretty excited about the success so far. Although, last year being a pandemic year was kind of tricky. This year is going to be the first full on Gen Con theoretically, even though we're still in a pandemic. And we'll see how it goes. But we're pretty excited about it.Wyrmworks Publishing Cool. So how have you seen lives changed because of your work?Matt Forbeck As the Diana Jones? Well, I think the people who get the award will often say this is the most meaningful award I've ever gotten. Right? And, you know, I can't put those words in their mouths and I'm flattered that they would think so. But I think the reason is because it's an award given out to somebody by their peers, not by a vote, not by a public flogging of hey, go vote for me on this website. That that kind of stuff. It's not publicly done. Up until recently, it was a secret cabal of game designers and over the years, a number of us have outed ourselves. I think about half of us are are public about it now. Because again, we realized that, you know, maybe a secret cabal wasn't the most inclusive and kinda way to go about things and to showing people who we were, what we were doing was probably a better way of doing. So. There's still some of us who don't want to add their names above because they don't want to get hassled about it and they want to have people lobbying them for the award. But, you know, for somebody to get an award and say, you know, this isn't just like a popularity award right? This is something where people sat down debated this, thought about the coolest things in gaming, then turned around and said this is the coolest thing in gaming. Honestly, getting a nomination is a pretty amazing accomplishment, period. And then to win it. A lot of people were like, well, this really does mean something to me. As a traveling trophy, it sits on their mantle or wherever the hell they want to put it for about a year. And then they bring it to Gen Con to be handed off to the next person. And we've established traditions over the years where the person who had it last year is able to come to the show. They get to be the person to hand it to the next person, right. So physically transfer the award from one person to another and it's really been kind of amazing to see these traditions just grow up around it. We started out it was not something that any of us had planned. And we took it seriously but not, you know, not to the point where we were precious about it, right? We took the debate seriously, we meant it, but we also were like this is fun and we're doing it as friends and we'll see how it goes. But so to see people really get excited about that and feel strong about it was I think it reflected back to us that we should take it more seriously and that's probably where the emerging designer program came from. And we're hoping the emerging designer program helps people out. It's a very young program at the moment so it's hard to tell if it's doing a whole lot of good but you know, I think bringing new people out to Gen Con which is the premier show in the industry and and showing them around and giving them a leg up is always a good thing.Wyrmworks Publishing Awesome. Yeah, that's so great. I know so many people that are you know, they just struggle to…they're talented people. And you know, there's there's so much talent and but there's there's also, you know, look on DMs Guild or DriveThru or you know, or something like that. And it's just, there's so much there and how do you how do you sort through it how do you how do you get your name, you know, to float to the top or whatever. So, yeah, and it's oftentimes it's a lot more about marketing than it is about quality.Matt Forbeck So that's, that's always the challenge. And honestly, from my point of view, this is something that people did for me just naturally when I was growing up. I I was privileged, more than your average person in the sense that I grew up in southern Wisconsin, which is where Gen Con and TSR the original publishers of Dungeons & Dragons started. So I was able to just have my dad drive me to Gen Con and drop me off and then pick me up in the evening when I was 13 years old. Right? So I've been doing this since I was a pretty young kid. And not everybody is going to have that kind of an advantage, right? Very few people are going to have the kind of advantage. So we're trying to expand that out to where we can bring more people in. And as we actually as we raise more funding, we're hoping to bring more of those designers out so eventually maybe we'll be able to bring out the entire slate of finalists as opposed to just the quote unquote winner, right? Because, you know, we'd like to have it be, you know, we'd like to do as much good as we possibly can. And you know, we're going to start passing the hat around a little bit more strongly these days with that in mind.Wyrmworks Publishing Cool, great idea. All right, so you just rescued a djinn from the hands of an efreeti and it offers you three wishes to achieve your goals to make the world better. What do you wish for?Matt Forbeck Oh, I mean world peace, end hunger and man, I got some people I would like to eliminate, but I'm not going to get into that. (Laughter)Matt Forbeck Yeah, from a gaming point. of view, what I'd like to do is just you know, from the point of view of the Diana Jones Award, what I'd like to do is have people be excited about games and games and being as inclusive and welcoming as possible. Right. I do think that one of the great powers of games tabletop games is to sit around the table with other people especially conventions that you've never met before and strike up immediate friendships and have amazing memorable encounters that you can't have in any other way. Right? Or it just facilitates that. I mean, I've got people I've met at conventions I've known 30-40 years later, that I still talk to and catch up with and I would like to have everybody have that kind of experience to be able to share in that. So I don't know how I'd express that to the djinn because they're tricky bastards and they are always trying to make that get you hung up on things but hopefully we would get the djinn to sit down and play with us and they would actually get on board and feel enthusiastic about it as well.Wyrmworks Publishing There you go. All right. So what what one message would you like to give gamers who are looking for a better tabletop experience? Matt Forbeck You know, I think the best thing you can do for games is to figure out how to play them and then make sure that everybody at the table is having fun, right? And there's a lot of different ways to do that. Sometimes it's figuring out ahead of time, like what kind of games you all want to play. Are you interested in doing just card games? I mean, hell even if you're just playing poker, or you know, pinochle, or whatever, my family plays speed solitaire like crazy which we actually break fingers I think sometimes. So whatever you're playing, it's really just an excuse to get together with other people. Right? And hopefully have an enjoyable experience. But if you're playing games, where not everybody is having a good time or if you're running a game, specifically to disrupt and annoy or anger people, you're doing it wrong in my opinion, right? As long as everybody at the table is having fun. That doesn't mean they're all winning. They need to have a good experience whether they're winning or losing, then you're doing a great thing and that's what I really want to see more of.Wyrmworks Publishing Yeah, that's a really good point. A lot of people feel pressured to be a good GM and you know, you hear about the Matt Mercer effect and all that kind of stuff and and ya know, if you're having fun,Matt Forbeck No, I mean, Matt's a great guy. He does, you know, but what he's doing is, is art at a different level, right? He's doing performative art to show on YouTube to show people all these great, great amazing storytellers they have, but you don't have to replicate that. I mean, as long as you just get together with your friends or whoever, and you have an enjoyable time for three to four hours on an evening where you join us. What else do we need out of life? Right? Enjoy yourself!Wyrmworks Publishing Absolutely. All right. So what one message would you like to give gamers who are looking to improve the tabletop experience?Matt Forbeck I would say, you know, think about what you're doing, go into it mindfully. And you know, try to figure out who you want at your table, who is going to make it the most enjoyable experience, not just for you, but for everybody at the table and try to figure out what kind of games you want to play with them. And you know, there's a lot of great tools nowadays too. They have these safety tools for role playing games. If you're doing those, I recommend doing stuff like the X Card or whatever else, or just have a talk with your friends. It doesn't have to be formal, but people need to have the power to basically stick up their hand and say, Whoa, I don't want to go here without any repercussions, right for whatever reason, and everybody's got their own reasons for these things. So don't push them The people if you're hoping to spring something on people ask them ahead of time or you know, figure out ahead of time if it's going to be a good surprise or if it's going to send them screaming into the corner. If there's a chance is going to send them screaming into the corner, don't do it, right? This is their day off. They're having fun. Nobody most people aren't doing this for money. They're doing this for entertainment. And if it causes them to flip out and never want to see you again, I don't think that's a good result for anybody. Right? And again, try to do something that's inclusive, that's fun that everybody at the table can enjoy. And you know, that doesn't mean it has to be like all happy joy joy. I mean, sometimes horror adventures or you know, if you're playing Fiasco these things can be really heart wrenching, whatever, but again, know where people's boundaries are. Know where you can try to keep away from them, right? Don't nudge up to them like some edgelord, just say, Look, we're gonna have this game and as long as everybody knows what they're going into, and you stick to what everybody expects, I think that's a great thing. Just establish expectations early.Wyrmworks Publishing Alright, so what projects are you working on now that you can talk about?Matt Forbeck Well, I'm just about to ship to press the Shotguns and Sorcery 5e edition we have a if you go to backerkit or just Forbeck.com shotguns and sorcery, something like that. You can actually get on the preorder which is going to press I think next week, so hurry if you're interested in that. I'm also working on the Marvel tabletop role playing game. We had a playtest edition come out in April and we're going to be releasing some new updates to that in the near future which hasn't been publicly announced yet, but will be very soon. And you'll see what we're doing. We're that's going to have a new game coming out a full 350-some page, hardcover rulebook, 320 pages, I think is what we're aiming at in 2023. I'm also working I did a bunch of writing for a game called Hard West 2 which is a table… video game that's coming out later this year. And I'm currently are also writing later today more dialogue for Warhammer 40,000 tactics, which is a role tabletop, I'm sorry, a mobile game that people can play on their phones or their iPads or whatever, and it's a lot of fun so they just make me do all the dialog and I get to write orcs this week, which is just tons of fun.Wyrmworks Publishing Cool. All right, so we'll have all your contact information in our show notes. But where's the one best place you'd like people to start to learn more about you or to contact you?Matt Forbeck The easiest thing is to go to forbeck.com f o r b e c k .com. You can also find me on Twitter @mforbeck. And you know if you really need to reach out to me you can email me at [email protected]. I'm always happy to answer questions and help people. Wyrmworks Publishing Alright, thanks. Matt Forbeck But also if you're talking about the Diana Jones Award go to DianaJonesaward.org. And you can find out more about that. We just announced the nominees for the award this year and we're gonna be giving out the award on August 3. So shortly after that, you should be able to figure out who won as well.Wyrmworks Publishing All right. So, Matt, thanks so much for coming on the show and everyone check out those links in the show notes. Matt Forbeck Thanks for having me.Wyrmworks Publishing Now, just a reminder: when we have people available, we also include a segment on this show called, Playing the Other, where people with disabilities, neurodiversity, and mental illness come and talk about their experiences and how their lived experiences relate to game. And it's also a chance for creators—if you're a role playing game creator or something else, an artist or something and you want to tell people about some of the cool stuff you've made. We'd be happy to feature that and put some links in there for you. If you'd like to be a guest on that segment, just go to Wyrmworkspublishing.com/contact. Wyrmworks Publishing And also we want to let you know this summer at our Patreon there is a we're releasing a four part adventure and while normally our our free stuff is more for the slightly higher levels, we're going to make this available to all patrons just to celebrate the summer and to prepare for some of the projects that we have coming up. And so we're going to make the four part adventure available to all of our patrons throughout the summer, releasing one part of it each month. And we're gonna have some other real big announcements coming soon. And so I invite you to check out the link in our show notes to the Patreon as well. Now if you see this show being helpful, if you're watching this on YouTube hit that like button. If you'd like to see more, subscribe. If you know people who need to hear this, please pass it on to them. Send them that link. And if you, like me, think that everyone needs to hear this, pass it on your social media friends. Go into your favorite podcast area and hit those ratings and give us those five star reviews to help more people find it thanks to the algorithm. So thanks so much for your time and we will close with this question. What would make your tabletop experience more excellent?Transcribed by https://otter.ai