A brother-at-arms enters the chat
Fellow RPG promoter Craig Shipman is spreading the word of awesome RPGs in a big way
Hey Craig! Can you introduce yourself by telling us who you are, what you do in the RPG space and where people can find your work?
I am the one-person show behind the brand Third Floor Wars. Under that banner, I produce the interview podcast Tabletop Talk, broadcast live on Twitch, and create videos on YouTube. Since the lockdowns, I have been focused more on tabletop roleplaying than other tabletop hobbies. You will see me cover board games and miniature games, but the pandemic reignited my love of RPGs.
The Tabletop Talk podcast is where I interview creators in the tabletop gaming space. I focus on HOW and WHY they create as much as WHAT they create. I uncover their process, inspirations, and methods for creating the games we love. Many of my guests are small publishers and creators, but I’ve also interviewed industry legends.
Before we go on, I am a huge fan of your work. Your channel is a goldmine of great reviews and advice. Your love of the hobby is infectious and I am thrilled to be interviewed by you!
The podcast is on all the podcasting platforms:
https://anchor.fm/thirdfloorwars
The YouTube channel has tips, tricks, and the archive of our actual live plays:
https://www.youtube.com/@ThirdFloorWars
The Twitch channel hosts all of our live actual play of great games like Forbidden Lands, Mothership, Deadlands, Call of Cthulhu, Fear Itself, Webworld, and many others.
https://www.twitch.tv/thirdfloorwars
I am humbled that you would even recognize my channel. Thanks, Craig! So, I have a confession: I only recently discovered your podcast when I was searching for interviews with Robert Schwalb (Shadow of the Demon Lord, Shadow of the Weird Wizard, et al). And when I saw the list of interviews, I was absolutely floored by the quality of your guests. Just tons of creators whose works I’ve reviewed and admired over the years, none of whom I would have ever thought to approach for an interview myself. (But then again, this whole interview thing is new for me.) Then when I started listening to these interviews, it was immediately apparent that you have a natural talent for them. The quality of the questions, the pacing, all those subtle skills that require work to develop. Do you have a background in radio or journalism or work experience that has helped you develop those interviewing skills? What’s your backstory?
My podcast has been around for a few years. In the beginning, it focused on miniature gaming. As my interests migrated to RPGs, my content migrated too. Last year was the most significant growth year for the podcast, so you are not the only one that is just now finding me.
Robert was a joy to interview. His love of the hobby and his place in its history is indisputable.
I am still amazed at how generous creators in the RPG sphere are with their time. John Harper (Blades in the Dark) and Dennis Detwiller (Delta Green and MtG) joined early as guests when my show was tiny. There was no chance their appearance would generate any awareness or sales, yet they, and many others, made the time to come on. That was an act of pure kindness on their part.
I love that you like my interview style. I don’t have a background in journalism or broadcasting. I have an exceedingly dull backdrop in operations, corporate management, and client relations. When kind people show appreciation for my interviewing style, I am flattered. If you listen to earlier episodes and compare them to recent ones, I hope you can see my approach evolve and improve.
The best advice I can give to interviewers is to listen. I listen to other people ask guests questions. The guest drops an interesting tidbit or opinion, and the interviewer rolls right on to the next question on their sheet. My wife has watched me scream during an interview, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHERE IS THE FOLLOW-UP QUESTION? STOP!! THE INTERVIEW JUST GOT INTERESTING” It drives me to madness. Listen to your guests and follow them to wherever the conversation goes and you will discover easy paths back that tie it all together.
I send my guests call sheets covering the logistics of coming on the show and a high-level breakdown of what subjects I want to cover. I explain the sooner the interviewing stops and the conversation starts, the better.
I start the same way – I get the creator’s origin story as a gamer. I frame the question to elicit a story instead a dry when-and-where response. I want the guest to return to the time the hobby was given to them. If we can transport back there, I can often hear facts, thoughts, and emotions that we now see in their work and career as a maker. It’s not uncommon for me to tie back to their origin story when we are knee-deep talking about their creative process.
Oddly enough, the same skill is vital as a player or GM. If you are not listening, absorbing, and reacting in play, you are cheating your other players and yourself. If all I am thinking about is what my character (or NPC) will do next when other players are acting, it’s a missed opportunity. 90% of great play in an RPG is learning to react more than acting.
What if the GM is NOT running the game world but, instead, showing the world reacting to the player’s actions? The players’ choices become consequential, and seeing the world react to their agency makes it real and lived in. The same is true when a player reacts to other players, or the world framed by the GM.
Wow, I got off track. My work interviewing potential new hires, managing clients, managing teams, and managing my leadership helped hone my listening skills. You don’t want to make the conversation about you in any of those situations. You want to absorb and uncover what they want and need – which is often different than what they say. I will miss the clues if I don’t listen carefully.
The interview format for the podcast came from my returning to the RPG hobby after a two-decade hiatus. Seismic changes happened while I was away, and I used the podcast to learn how we got from Basic D&D, GURPS, and Hero System to the lush landscape of games available to us now. How did we go from finding other players hidden in their basements to watching big-budget animated shows retelling stories from actual play?
I am fascinated by the creative process. We often attribute creativity to talent, but it discredits hard work, practice, mistakes, learning, decision-making, sweat, and tears that go into making games or art. Creating is personal, and I like to peel back the layers to learn that process from each of my guests. Hundreds of shows talk about WHAT they make; I want to talk about HOW and WHY they make it.
That’s a tremendous answer. Now there’s pressure for me to actually conduct this interview with competence. I guess I walked into that one. But let’s go ahead and take a page out of the Craig Shipman School of Interviewing. What’s the story of how you found tabletop roleplaying games?
I was 15 and in Waldenbooks. That gives you an idea of how old I am.
I saw the cover of a collection of Robert E. Howard Conan stories and bought it on a whim. Conan was my gateway to finding fiction beyond Tolkien and Robin Hood. Next, I started devouring Marvel Comic’s Conan the Barbarian comics.
Soon after, I saw a red box with a Larry Elmore dragon in the same Waldenbooks. I read the back and thought playing a fantasy game would be fun. I took it home, and it was unlike any game I’d owned: no board, no pieces, and weird dice. I had to color in the numbers with a white crayon.
After reading the books, I talked my little brother and some of his friends into playing. I will never forget the famous Carrion Crawler, which started many first adventures for a generation of gamers.
I found some of the ideas in that edition of D&D odd. Why couldn’t I be a dwarf Sorcerer or an elf Fighter? My next purchase was GURPS. There I found a system that gave the players and me more freedom. No race as class, point-based character creation, more options and flexibility, and rules I could scale.
I played all through high school and into college, then stopped around 1994 as I took my BA into the world and started my career.
Fast forward to the COVID lockdowns. I was an avid miniature gamer, and Third Floor Wars was focused on battle reports and content for miniature games like Malifaux by Wyrd. My hobby outlet was closed along with the rest of the world. Luckily, I had good memories of playing RPGs and started to Google what was out there now, twenty-five years later.
Wow.
It was overwhelming what the hobby had become since I played in the 90s. I bought the Fantasy Flight Star Wars Edge of Empire book and couldn’t believe how far the hobby had changed - for the better! That led to me finding amazing games like Blades in the Dark, Savage Worlds, Forbidden Lands, and more.
As my focus moved from miniature games to playing and running roleplaying games again, the direction of the channel and podcast followed. I started interviewing RPG creators to try and fill in the gap of what happened while I was away.
Yeah, I’ve noticed a lot of your interviewees as well have that Break between discovering RPGs and then re-discovering them a couple of decades later, myself included. Some stalwarts never have that break, of course! But hey, let’s face it. A lot of people who drifted away back then eventually returned to the hobby because of the gargantuan marketing efforts of the one big company that very recently has earned the vitriolic hatred of many. What are your thoughts on Wizards of the Coast?
Look at you, coming in fast with a hot topic!
If you’ve read Shannon Appelcline’s amazing book series, Designers & Dragons, you’ll have the definitive work on the history of TSR and Wizards. If you’ve NOT read them, fix that soon! Shannon is a gift to our hobby.
Wizards saved Dungeon & Dragons. TSR was within months of closing when Wizard took their Magic money and bought them out of love and nostalgia. It was well known that D&D was loved and played by many in the Wizard Headquarters. From there, we saw unprecedented growth in D&D. That game is the flagship of the entire industry. As it gets more popular, more people find the hobby. Some of them explore and find other games – many that are much better than the dragon game.
I understand the argument that D&D sucks up all the oxygen in the room and crowds out other games. The data tells a different story. It isn’t a coincidence that more games are made now than ever before, and the sales of D&D are also at all-time highs.
Wizard’s merger with Hasbro changed the landscape. We see Magic starting to show cracks after three decades of insane popularity. The unrelenting release schedule and expense may be at a breaking point.
In 2021, Wizards of the Coast generated $1.3 billion (with a “B”) in revenue. This accounted for 72% of Hasbro’s TOTAL operating profits that year. Chris Cocks (former head of WotC) is now the CEO of Hasbro. People talk about Hasbro running Wizards, but it looks like Wizards now runs Hasbro.
All of this said I don’t play their games. I loved Magic, and its longevity speaks for itself. D&D doesn’t give me the experience I want at the table, but that doesn’t make it a bad game. It’s not the game for me.
I hope Wizards survives this and remains strong. They are a magnet for new people finding our hobby. How they roll out One D&D is more critical than before the OGL circus.
That was the long answer. The short answer: I hope Wizards succeeds and D&D continues to attract new people to the table. I also have no interest in playing their games.
In a way you and I both sort of toil at the exit ramp of D&D, trying to catch GMs and players emerging from that ecosystem who are ready to try something new. But of course it’s an uphill battle to reach them en masse. If you had a magic wand, what kind of changes would you make to the RPG hobby right now, if any?
That is a huge question. I’d love to see more creators making a living off making games. Many of the innovative designers in the hobby can only do it in their free time. I imagine what we would see if they made enough money to do create full-time.
How do we make it happen - without the wand? One way is proving to the world there are better games than D&D. You do a great job of that, and it is a major focus for Third Floor Wars. We’ve only played D&D once on my channel and that was a setting made by a third party.
Another way – and many people won’t like this answer – is charging more for RPG content. Dollar-for-dollar there is NO better gaming value than RPGs. Typically one person buys a book for $50 or less, and that can become years of play for five or six people. Compare that to video games. Board games are getting more expensive, yet we see most RPGs selling for the same prices as 15 years ago. We get too much value for our money, and we should pay more. This is when most of your audience stops reading to write me a nasty email.
I’ve seen this underpricing problem in the video game industry, where a game in, say, 1993 would cost $60. Fast forward 30 years later and a new video game still costs $60. Studios are only just now starting to charge $80, as well as lean hard into the DLC shenanigans (charging extra for smaller bits of DownLoadable Content). But yes, I agree with charging more for all the hard work that creators are putting out there. You’ve been absorbing the genius of many creators for a while now. Do you have anything of your own design brewing right now?
The short answer is “no.” I am fueled by being creative and exercising it in many ways – none of them being game design. My passion for the creative process is a driver for the podcast interviews. I find the process messy, full of mistakes, long segments of nothing capped by furious moments of inspiration. When I interview creators, I focus on how they navigate the path from the initial idea to the finished product. The hardest stage in any creative endeavor is finishing—the people who know how to make it all the way fascinate me.
I love to play guitar, paint miniatures, and paint oil on canvas. Lately, I’ve been trying to learn digital art and graphic design. The channel gave me the opportunity to learn to edit videos, make introductions in After Effects, and do sound design.
I’m learning a lot about game design as I talk to all these creators, but it’s not called to me…. Yet.
Your After Effects skills are pretty impressive, btw. I saw an awesome intro to one of your actual plays on your YouTube channel. Okay, so I can’t even count the number of amazing creators you’ve interviewed who I recognize and greatly admire. And you’ve spoken to each of them in depth about their creative process. So even if you’re not working on a game yourself, surely you’ve gleaned some nuggets of universal wisdom about making RPGs. Are there any of those that you can share?
I notice some common themes as I interview my creative guests. Here are a few:
1. Coming up with ideas is the easy part. The hard work is knowing which idea to develop and working through the iteration process. The most significant piece is finishing the project. That is what differentiates many creators.
2. Always listen to your playtesters when they identify a problem. In most cases, they are great at finding issues in your design. Do not listen to their suggestions for “fixing” the issues. In most cases, they are terrible at fixing.
3. Often, one small change, addition, or cut from the design at the end of the iteration process makes it all come together. It is essential to let go or try new ideas, however small, because that can be the final change that makes the design work.
4. It may sound silly, but if you’re making a game, never lose sight that it should be fun. If you discover during playtesting that the fun is gone, it is time to take a hard look at what you’re making.
5. If you are making games, it is critical that you play other games. I often hear an idea from a video game or board game that inspired someone’s RPG design. If you are not taking time to play games, you can forget why you are making them.
I’ve found it interesting what some people define as “fun” versus what other people swear is “fun.” There are many different camps in the RPG world that have their own idea of fun, but I especially like to hear from people who have read many dozens or hundreds of games. What factors make an RPG fun for you?
The key part of your question is “for you.” Fun is personal and can vary from player to player and table to table. For me, I need a few things in a game for me to find it “fun”.
1. I need to find the world compelling. Why is it interesting? What are the characters expected to want, need, and do? Is it familiar while also upending some common tropes?
2. I want the core book to outline how the game is played. Not just the mechanics – what is the tone, atmosphere, and types of stories that can emerge from the game?
3. More than anything, I need the mechanics to support 1 and 2 above and not get in the way. If this is a horror game set in the future with characters who are pirates, the mechanics should support that. When I need the mechanics, they enhance play without taking me out of play.
From the sound of it, you like games that have been in the oven for a while. No zine-length or one-page games for you?
The question hints at a common misconception of small zine or one-page games.
You can convey a compelling world with clear expectations for the characters in a few paragraphs. Some think lore makes a setting compelling – I don’t see it this way. I enjoy lore, but it is not required. I look at small zines like Primal Quest, Lasers and Feelings, Honey Heist, Butter Princess, Hedge, or Webworld. They all offer compelling settings, unfamiliar takes on familiar genres, and clear direction for the characters – all in a few paragraphs or pages versus several chapters.
It doesn’t take a chapter to communicate how the game is played. Plot hooks can do that in a few sentences. I don’t need complicated or deep mechanics; I only need mechanics that support how the game is played. Look at Honey Heist or Lasers and Feelings. One-page games with mechanics that are perfect for each game. The mechanics inform and support the play.
I love big games, too – Forbidden Lands has a ton of lore between all the books. It isn’t why I find Ravensland a compelling setting. Its draw comes from the unexpected take on fantasy held up by mechanics that support the type of game it strives to.
Point well taken. I’ve certainly seen my fair share of 400-page books that don’t deliver a compelling setting or connect setting to mechanics. I want to circle back to your role as a content creator. You maintain a YouTube channel as well as a podcast: what are some of the pros and cons of producing a podcast as compared to making YouTube content? I ask this from a place of knowing a bit about YouTube content creation, but nothing about podcasting.
The podcast is different in many ways. Without the video element, you have much fewer technical concerns. Podcasts allow a longer form of show. My actual plays are 2-3 hours long, which is NOT conducive to working the algorithm for YouTube.
More importantly, it is two different audiences. You have some overlap, but I recommend that creators put their content out on both platforms. Many of your videos would make great pod content, and you’d find a new audience releasing the audio of your videos to a podcast.
Audio quality is more critical in podcasts; most listeners use headphones.
Both forms push you to publish consistently to get noticed.
I’m definitely tempted. I’d have to sort of engineer my scripts to not refer to visual elements in order for that to work, I think. What kind of things are you hoping to accomplish this year with your channel and podcast?
The overall goal of both is to provide entertainment, resources for players/GMs, and help grow tabletop gaming as a hobby. I can do that by continuing to grow. My audience is small in the overall scheme of things but I am seeing steady and sustained growth in the videos and podcast.
I am lucky to have a career that I like and allows me to take care of my family and enjoy my hobbies. I don’t want to make a living as a content creator so the original goals I set remain.
People joining the Patreon and leaving comments while sharing my stuff tells me I am working in the right direction.
Great interview - looking forward to checking out Craig's Tabletop Talk podcast!