Pathfinder: Re-Skinning the Bard so People Will Play it

I don’t really have anything against the bard, but I do believe he is the least-played character class of them all. In my experience, the better you are at one thing (like multiplying damage on a charge) the more likely it is that you will be played as a character class. It also helps if your game mechanics set you up to look dramatic or cool while you’re doing your thing (like shapeshifting, backstabbing, or blasting away the undead with a firmly presented holy symbol).

Most bards do NOT look like this. This image was created by Jason Engle.

In short, bards do everything pretty well, but seldom as well as the classes built to fulfill those critical roles, and their non-traditional adventurer activities (playing music, singing, poetry) relegate them to enjoying very little love at the gaming table.

I have a partial solution that I’m sure has occurred to many of you out there—I edited the bard in a number of ways to give him a new flavour that is less care-free performer and more hardened marine.

Here are my sweeping changes.

• Change the name of the Bard class to Soldier, Warlord, Adventurer or something else that speaks of experience, wisdom, and/or command.
• Naturally, replace the word “bard” throughout with your chosen class name.
• Instead of activating his/her spells and abilities through song, make it Rhetoric, Command, Inspiration, or something else that speaks to the force of will and charisma that we’re looking for.
• Replace the names of abilities wherever they no longer fit with your theme. Bardic Knowledge becomes Well-Traveled. Bardic Performance becomes Command. Countersong becomes Shout, Distraction becomes order, and so on.

Simple, but I can’t leave all the work to you. Here’s an alternate class and role description for your new bard-based character class.

Officer

The failed tactics of an ancient army, the secret lore and customs of a cabal of prickly wizards, and the best way to crack a safe, a prisoner, or a whip; all of these are well-known to the officer. Typically educated, formally or not, the officer has forgotten more mundane and archaic lore than most learn in their lifetimes, and she uses this knowledge to outmanoeuvre her enemies, get into places she doesn’t belong, and get out with ever more valuable experiences. Comfortable in armour and well-trained with a variety of weaponry, she is nonetheless an able spellcaster, and she has learned to empower her commands in ways that have profound effects on her audience. For the officer, every day brings new challenges, adventures, and rewards, and she is more than equipped to claim the treasures of each.

Role: Experienced well beyond her years, the officer’s versatility as a combatant, dungeoneer, or party leader are her greatest strengths. A deep skill pool allows her to train to fulfill many party roles, from diplomat to assassin. A capable support combatant, she is most effective away from the front lines where she can weaken her enemies while empowering her allies with knowledge, magic, and her potent command abilities.

What do you think? Have you found bards woefully underplayed over your gaming career? Would you play a warlord, soldier, or officer in a pathfinder campaign? Let me know in a comment below. 

Living the Gamer Lifestyle. Well, sort of.

WARNING: this is gonna be a bit of a ramble. If you are a gamer and you don’t mind some tangential information about the author, I think you’ll find value in my experiences.

Background Information

After over four years at the same so-so job—you know the kind, where you’re comfortable, but not being challenged and/or not really learning much—I was laid off in late September. With a sudden influx of spare time and a “powerful need to eat” (motivation), I decided to make a change in my career. It is time to focus on my love of games and storytelling, and there may have been no better time in history to do so. Finally, I know of no medium that create as rich a shared experience as video games and pen-and-paper roleplaying games, so they seem a logical place to focus my efforts.

I’m a Canadian gamer living in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and my 10-year goal is to open my own development house, but not before having three major PnP publishing credits to my name. This blog post chronicles what are my first major steps in achieving those goals.

The Jobhunt

With five years of writing, editing, and small team management behind me, I felt as though I had hit a sweet spot where few jobs in my writing-related fields (communications, marketing, corporate, or technical) were out of reach. With some care and attention, I figured I could land a communications position with a reputable gaming company, and work my way sideways and /or up to more creative endeavours from there.

Two months later, I have a long list of application packages to many game companies, most of them in the United States, and my only solid game-related prospect right now is a term testing position with BioWare. More on that later. For now, the jobhunt experience has taught me a few things.

• I am not really qualified for even the entry-level jobs in gaming that I’m looking to kick-start my hopes and dreams—game story writer, level designer, game designer, associate producer, etc. I have most (if not all) of the soft skills, but only a handful of the hard skills, and no amazing demonstrable demos/prototypes to make up for my lack.
• With the economy how it is, companies are having difficulty justifying bringing in foreign talent, unless it’s for a truly unique skillset. I don’t really fit that bill.
• Passion for games and strong communications skills (reading and writing) are requirements for success, but far from enough on their own.
• Video games represent an enormous, growing industry. Jobs here are highly desirable, and the field is rather competitive.
• Canada is the third most prolific games producing-country in the world, after the United States and Japan, with the UK fourth. Over 40% of Canada’s game development is located in British Columbia.

My conclusion? I probably need formal training to enter the gaming market in a meaningful fashion, either on-the-job or in a classroom setting. Let’s talk about my inroads in both.

BioWare

In case you don’t know, BioWare is a triple-A video game developer with hundreds of employees across their multi-national offices. I’m more than a little proud that the organization was started by local (Edmonton) medical doctors out of a basement in the mid 90s, and that they make some of the richest story-focused experiences you will find anywhere—their mandate from day one. This is an extremely gratifying success story for an aspiring creative type like me.

Mass Effect 2. One of my all-time favourite games, and two of my favourite characters (Tali and Mordin). Tali's adorable, especially when courted, and I love Mordin's speech patterns and outlook.

I am fortunate to have made friends with a handful of Biowarians—some of my favourite people to share a drink or a pen-and-paper gaming table with. With their help I have put forth strong applications for a couple of positions, and I want to focus on the one that seems most fruitful right now—a term tester position on their upcoming Dragon Age II.

BioWare employs many term testers in what appears to be rotational service that lasts from three months to a year (if you’re good), and they regularly send out callouts for additional terms to join their ranks. Without going into the details, I can share a few things about this application process.

• Having someone who trusts and likes you putting your application into the right hands is almost certainly better than not.
• Large companies move slowly, so be prepared to wait for good things. I applied for the term tester position over a month ago, took a written test a week later, and had a phone interview last week (three weeks after the written test). I hope (but do not expect) to hear from them again soon. And while I’m just guessing here, I suspect hiring a term tester requires less approval and time than any other position in an organization like Bioware’s.
• The written test was actually hand-written. Penmanship still counts in this day-and-age, a fact that had me extremely worried as I scribbled my answers.
• The testing process and phone interview are short, and thoroughly enjoyable if you are a gamer who is truly interested in what makes games good. Know what you like, why you feel that way, and communicate those feelings succinctly.

By all reports, term testers work a good deal of overtime and earn a relatively low wage (which the overtime will help mitigate). My friends at the company have done a good job managing my expectations—only a few term testers move on to bigger and better things—but I am looking forward to the learning/networking opportunities and experiencing firsthand an important aspect of game development.

Cross your fingers for me.

The Art Institute of Vancouver and the Vancouver Film School

Let me start by saying that, by all accounts, you don’t have to go to school to learn game design (much like you don’t have to go to school to learn to be a writer), but for many people the structure, focus, and relationships born of post-secondary education yield results. I believe it is the best path for me to earn broad experience in the field.

Unfortunately for me, short of taking a four-year Bachelor of Computer Science degree (and changing who I am), my local options for game design are limited to experimentation with the editors that are becoming more and more common in games these days. To that end, I looked west to British Columbia and found the Art Institute of Vancouver (Ai).

I should point out that you can find negative reviews of every post-secondary school out there, and the two I looked at most closely are no exception. This makes choosing a school to invest money and time into very difficult. More on that in my conclusions, below.

Ai

At the time of this writing, the Art Institute of Vancouver’s Game Art and Design curriculum covers a full range of game design principles including classes in writing, art, animation, design theory, and a large practical component where student teams create game prototypes. The program costs nearly $40,000 in tuition, and requires about $500 (Can) in books and materials. I was told that tuition will go up sometime soon.

I attended an open house held by Ai in Edmonton, and after expressing interest in the program I was promptly contacted by extremely helpful people from their enrolment and student financial services departments. Ai does an excellent job of selling themselves, and is more attentive than I would have ever expected from a post-secondary institution. The application fee was $150, and I was accepted in about 10 days after providing my college transcripts, fees, and other documentation.

I was set to attend until I discovered some troubling accounts of Ai exaggerating their success records, with specific examples from the Game Art and Design program pressuring their staff to deem a graduate working as a software retail clerk as “successful.” I have higher hopes for my very expensive and time-intensive education, so I started searching around for another institute. I didn’t have to look far before finding the Vancouver Film School (VFS).

VFS

The Game Design program at VFS offers a similar curriculum to the Ai program, but by all accounts it is much more intensive, with 30-hour weeks (in-class), and an expected 15-20+ hours of homework on top of that, which translates into one solid year of schoolwork (rather than the nearly two years for similar certification from Ai). The program has a strong practical component as well, with teams building game prototypes for the last six months of the program to present to industry professionals on scheduled “Industry Night(s)”. The costs are a little under $33,000 for the year, which includes all materials. They accept students 3-4 times a year, 30 students at a time, so competition is strong. As of this writing I am competing for one of the last open spaces in 2011.

UPDATE: I’ve been accepted, so it is officially decision time.

The application fee was $200, and I needed to include two work-relationship/personal references, other documentation, and (most enjoyably) a four-page game idea précis. If I want to officially have them hold my seat in the program, I need to provide a “probably non-refundable” 5% deposit of the entire cost, which comes to $1612.

VFS offers a shorter overall program with a similar curriculum for less money. They only have campuses in and around Vancouver (where Ai is spread throughout the United States), and there seems to be a great deal of success coming out of the program, including some notable talent working at (you guessed it) BioWare.

I read a half-dozen reviews, crunched the numbers, asked advice, spoke to advisors, reviewed my goals, and contacted one of the VFS alumni, a game designer named Grayson Scantlebury to ask him a million questions. (Thanks, Gray).

In short, I’m hoping to get in to the Game Design program at VFS for the reasons outlined above and also because my needs and priorities have changed. Both programs claim a 75%+ graduate success rate (with the online reports of unhappy students vehemently contradicting those numbers), but the actual success rate for me is unimportant—I am determined to graduate at the top of my class with a knockout demo reel to ensure I’m in that employed bracket. Later, after 5-8 years of experience in a variety of industry roles, I intend to open my own development house. I expect to have to work hard (and live a bit of a lean lifestyle) to achieve my goals, but I have no doubt it will be worth it. Ya gotta believe.

Here are some conclusions or thoughts I took away from this experience.

• Time and cost are strong influencers, but trust makes just about anything possible (or not). I see more success coming from VFS and less of an investment in time and money for identical certification. Finally, VFS is an accredited institution with a 20-year history (not including my chosen program, of course, but it’s nice to know that they aren’t new to this).
• You have to take reviews with a grain of salt—you will always find someone willing to complain about a given institution, and you won’t always find someone who loves it. Your best bet is to do your research and find out which program will drive/allow you to succeed.
• No education guarantees success, Don’t expect to just graduate and get a job.
• As with most things, you’ll probably get out what you put into your post secondary education. Attitude matters. Relationships matter. Grades may or may not matter, but being able to demonstrate your talent most assuredly does.
• Game design is a relatively new discipline, and is hard to define. Game design may not officially be broken up into sub-disciplines of art, level design, audio, story, etc., but game designers tend to specialize, anyway. A good game designer will have a strong grasp on each sub-discipline, too.
• Game designers are not idea people. They have ideas, but so does everyone else in industry.

I just started playing Flower (PS3), and it is beautiful both to look at and play. A welcome change of pace from the relative meat grinders of Reach or Black Ops.

In Other News, Great Jobs in the PnP Gaming Industry

Wizards of the Coast and Paizo are hiring people with the writing, editing, and creative gamer skillset. Rare opportunities, people. Apply, apply, apply!

WotC Book Editor job.

Paizo Pathfinder Developer job.

And do I really need to tell you about Paizo's RPG Superstar Contest? I thought not.

The Gamer Lifestyle Program

With a sudden influx of spare time, a semi-established blogsite, and more than one product idea (and a lot of completed work) on my hands, I figured it was time to finally take the plunge and get serious about living the Gamer Lifestyle. Heard of it?

Gamer Lifestyle is an online program created by Yax (formerly of www.dungeonmastering.com) and Johnn Four (of www.roleplayingtips.com) to help gamers mould their love of PnP gaming and creativity into a steady source of income. The program is designed to allow someone with a job, kids, and a hobby to be a successful gamer/entrepreneur starting from zero at week one and ending up (at week 20) with one (or more) quality products online and selling.

Essentially, the program is a detailed checklist of activities supported by lots of written material and advice from the founders and other program members, and I have little doubt that completing each activity would guarantee success. The trick (for me) is consistent motivation, but Johnn and Yax have strategies for that as well.

Livin’ the Dream

It’s ridiculous, but at brunch a couple of days ago, a former co-worker told me he thought I was living the dream in relation to all of my future plans. Maybe I will be before long—I can’t think of a better career than being instrumental in the creation of shared experiences for millions of people—but for now I’m happy just to be taking the steps towards that one at a time.

Did you make it to the end? Were you informed, or at least somewhat entertained? Got any advice? Let me know in a comment below.

Thanks for reading.