For May, Geek Native’s patrons voted FGG Games the winner of the RPG Publisher Spotlight. We’ve been lucky to get lots of time with FGG’s head designer Don Eccles.
The Spotlight for July is open. The winner announcement will be a few days late due to UK Games Expo overlapping with the start of the month, though.
In this interview with Don, we’ll chat about particularly innovative game systems, AI, and there’s even the chance to suggest what ‘FGG’ could stand for!
Who are FGG Games?
FGG Games does have a great meet the team page. However, I do like to start these Spotlight interviews about asking about the origins of the company, and so that’s where I started again this time.
Who are FGG Games? Do the letters FGG stand for anything?
FGG Games, LLC is technically a general publishing company. Although our primary product is RPGs and gaming supplements, we also publish a selection of fiction and non-fiction works from time to time.
When I first envisioned starting a game company back in the 1980s, almost all of them had three-letter abbreviations (FGU, GDW, SPI, TSR, WEG, etc.), and so I devised FGG, which was to have stood for “[Freaking] Good Games”. However, by the time I was ready to actually start my business in 2023, Frog God Games had already come along and are known to many today as FGG. I didn’t want to mislead the public but I didn’t want to give up my pre-chosen abbreviation, so I change it to “FGG Games” where FGG doesn’t actually stand for anything.
However, we are open to suggestions from the public for what it should stand for, serious or humorous as the case may be.
How did you all get together to form FGG?
I formed FGG in 2023 for a variety of reasons, initially just to publish Ascalon. We tell that story in the book’s Forward, but I have been playing RPGs since the original blue box edition of D&D back in the 70s, along with a plethora of other systems. During the past several decades I had toyed with writing my own rule set, but it wasn’t until I had the time to do so that I made it happen. Additionally, I’ve written both fiction and non-fiction over the years and this gives me the chance to kill two rocs with one stone golem, so to speak. I’m fortunate to have a small group of willing playtest volunteers and a stable of independent contractor artists to support both of these goals.
Different without AI
I also almost always ask about what a publisher wants to be known for. The answers aren’t always straightforward, and here it was clear that Don had strong views on AI.
A bit later, we’ll talk about FGG’s Four Play™, and I think we’ll have a good idea of whether people or AIs have the best ideas by then.
What do you want FGG Games to be known for?
There are two answers to this question, big and small. The big answer is that we want to give customers a product that will be somewhat different from others on the marketplace, both past and present.
All RPGs grew out of a combination of tabletop historical miniature and chit-based wargame simulations, and while they’ve evolved into their own entities now, many use the same old d20 or d100 based mechanics and Tolkien based fantasy tropes, along with unitary hit points, character classes and so on; additionally, older RPGs were male-dominated and focused on combat. We wanted to ditch as many of those as we could while still retaining a playable structure that gives participants a choice between a simple, fast game or a more complex, slower game, as well as the ability to move between them at will; we also wanted the game to work with both traditional dungeon crashers and non-violent social builders.
The small answer is that we want to stake out a position as a game company that never has, does not, and never will use AI in any form for anything in our products. All our text is written by humans, and all our art is produced by humans whom we pay for their work. We also of course do not produce anything requiring permission from an OGL, though that controversy is so 2023 nowadays. The AI controversy will also subside in time, I believe, which is why I call it a small issue. You can only regurgitate the same ingredients that an AI is fed with so many times before the output becomes stale and unpalatable, and we think the world will eventually realize that.
Chris Cocks, Hasbro’s big boss, seems to be pretty confident AI will impact RPGs in a big way and I keep on reading about people who found AIs to be acceptable GMs. Do you see no future there, either?
I haven’t seen any of his speeches, but I have yet to see any AI-generated adventures or RPGs that have wowed players or game masters with their brilliance.
No matter how much content you feed an LLM, it is still only capable of producing a mashup of its ingested material. Not only that, but LLMs were originally built to pass the Turing Test by mimicking human speech, and that’s where they shine. But they don’t have upper-level thinking processes (we would say Forebrain in the Four Play™ world) and can’t analyze what they produce to say “Is this fun? Is this good? Is this new?” except by comparing it to what others have said about it.
They lack true creativity, and while some people like seeing the same thing over and over, it’s our belief at FGG Games, LLC that original and creative content will always stick in the mind more than something that is just a copy of a copy, as a Gucci handbag is more valuable than a knockoff. Would you rather eat a steak that a chef made personally for you, or would your rather eat a slurry of a bunch of steaks (some good, some bad, some indifferent) that were put into a Cuisinart and poured into a bowl? We think it’s the former for most of the game public.
While we have no experience with AI GMs, and we understand there is a sizable audience of players that plain do not have access to a gaming group even remotely, our contention is that AIs are too quick to turn sycophantic, as we’ve seen in the cases where they makes up things that aren’t true just to please the person querying them, and what sort of game experience will that be for a player, who isn’t really challenged? In our view, adventures exist to challenge players and build skill, not put them in echo chambers. This might not be a popular point of view, but as Henry Clay said, “I’d rather be right than President.” All of that is from the value point of view; there are ethical issues involved in using AI to create content at the expense of artists and writers concerning copyright and fair use; our position is squarely in the camp of creators and not the camp of hash slingers. These issues are currently being discussed in several lawsuits and we wait to see how they will come out, likely several years from now.
Finally, we want to state that our focus is on giving the public something we think is new and valuable in its own right and not on attempting to create endless revenue streams. This is why the core Four Play™ book contains not one, but two versions of the rules: Basic, where the emphasis is on simplicity and speed by limiting character options and combat complexity, and Advanced, where the emphasis is on giving the players more options for their characters and combat complexity at the cost of slowing down action resolution and record keeping.
From a financial viewpoint, it would have made more sense to separate them into two volumes so as to double up on sales, but it was more important to us to let the players and GM examine both rule sets and decide for themselves which one to use, even switching from one to the other and back again if they so choose. That’s one of the core motivations here at FGG Games, LLC: giving the public better content rather than simply more of it. We await the public’s verdict on whether we have achieved that goal or not.
FGG make different games
There aren’t many FGG Games products on DriveThruRPG, but we’re soon about to find out that they stand out as being very different.
FGG’s own site talks about forthcoming games such as Space Station Zebra, The Bounders Club and Hyperspeed vs. Impervion.
Which sort of game in terms of stye and mood does the setting The City of Ascalon fit?
The City Of Ascalon fits very well into games which value historical realism. Loren created an outstanding work in that regard, mixing quite a bit of reality into a setting which also has room for things like magic and fantasy to be added as needed if at all, as spelled out in the various sidebars among its pages. It is much more a product for those running a game than it is for players, though there is still a good amount of background material for players who want to create a PC that fits naturally into the environment, especially in games where things like social status are important. It is less about dungeon crawling and more about urban adventures, whether those revolve around physical action or political intrigue.
I’m very curious about Four Play. The blurb says that pattern-matching replaces math with dice. How does that work?
Most RPGs work on what I call a red-line system, which is to say you roll a die (typically d20) and try to obtain a number that’s either higher or lower than a given target value. Every other number on one side of that red-line is a success and everything on the other side is a failure. Various factors in the game add or subtract from the number rolled, and those modifiers are often buried in charts or tables where it becomes a chore to look them up all the time, particularly when more than one apply. These things combined mean there is a fair amount of math to be performed, and the modifiers may make some tasks effectively impossible.
Four Play, by contrast, is a dice pool system where there is only one success value (the number 4) but there are multiple ways to score a success. This can be a die that rolls a natural 4, or it can be a combination of other dice—a 3 and a 1 paired make a 4, as do a 2 and a 2, or a 2 and a 1 and a 1, or even a 1 and a 1 and a 1 and a 1. Dice rolls are never totaled, so there is no math involved beyond counting up the number of sets you’ve made from your groups. Thus, all a player has to do after rolling is seek those patterns, set the dice involved aside, and determine the number of successes.
Given that a typical dice pool usually contains dice with different sets of sides, it’s obvious that the dice size (in die sides) affects the odds of scoring multiple successes—smaller dice tend to create more successes, larger create fewer successes, making the most valuable die in the game the d4.
The rules spell out when and how given dice are assigned their sides, but the salient point here is that making tasks easier or harder is very simply done by increasing or decreasing the die sides from the default for a given roll. Is that wall hard to climb? Change 4 of your d8s to d12s. Your chance of success is lower, but it’s still not impossible unless the number of successes required is higher than the total dice you roll (and that would be true regardless of the die size).
No math, no fuss. Play testers have cited this, along with the visceral sensation of rolling handfuls of dice instead of a single die, as one of the factors they most enjoy about the game.
I also note that characters with an emphasis on “Physical”, “Mental” and “Social” replace classes but that there’s a fourth type too, and that’s “Anti-Social”. I’m trying to work out what an Anti-Social character does!
What you refer to aren’t really classes, they are what is known as proclivities. As far as I know, no other RPG uses that concept. Briefly, proclivities incorporate the idea that people in life tend to gravitate naturally towards certain types of activities in life even if they aren’t directly related to their profession.
For example, people who are naturally attracted to one sort of physical activity like athletics are also often attracted to similar things like mountain climbing, hiking, martial arts and so on. Other people are naturally predisposed towards intellectual endeavors, or social situations, or (in the case of Anti-Social proclivities), the whole “born to be bad” lifestyle.
Every character chooses a proclivity at start, and when undertaking an action in that proclivity’s area they are awarded extra dice for their pool, which helps increase the chance of success.
In Four Play, we refer to classes or professions as packages, which are grouped under the proclivities they work best with—but they aren’t required. A Soldier package is listed as Physical because a character who chooses the Physical proclivity will do best in it since soldiers tend to be proficient in physical tasks, but a character could be a Soldier even if they chose one of other proclivities. A Mental soldier would be more of a tactician or strategist in outlook, a Social solider might be a police officer wanting to keep the peace, and an Anti-Social soldier would be a mob enforcer or pirate or something. Though it wasn’t designed that way, it occurred to me much much later in the game’s construction process that the proclivities sort of map to the original four D&D character classes (Physical = fighter, Mental = magic-user, Social = cleric, Anti-Social = thief). This was not conscious but may have been subconsciously driven.
These are pretty dramatic alternatives to approaches readers will be more familiar with. Are there any other ways FGG Games’ books and systems differ from those of others in the shops?
Yes, several. The Four Play™ rulebook includes a section of Designer’s Notes that goes into great detail on the changes, but to summarize: we tried to challenge as many of the current RPG tropes as possible without changing them so much the system would be unplayable, as some RPGs are.
For example, we don’t use attributes or personal stats at all (Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, etc.), yet there is a way to build a character that has the capabilities a player wants; we’ve ditched the traditional hit point mechanic and replaced it with a damage system that makes it easy to tell how injuries affect a character’s performance without using math and endless modfiers; our dice pool system is built on an inverted pyramid as discussed above [or below, depending how you layout the questions on the blog]; and we’ve elevated the d4 to a postion of prominence, which is also a change from most systems where it’s often denigrated (“this dagger only does 1d4 damage, hah!”).
We’ve also created a magic system that walks a middle ground between 1E’s “you can have as many buffs as you want at a time” and 5E’s “you can only concentrate on one buff at a time” rules. The character can have multiple buffs but not infinite and the player can decide how conservative or aggressive they want to be with those resources. There are many others, but these are the highlights.
One more point about how Four Play™ differs from most other RPGs: we don’t have generic spells that many casters share, like “Light” or “Fly.” Instead, any domain that needs a light-casting spell has one tailored to its own overarching idea. One tied to a starry domain summons an area filled with twinkling points of light, one tied to a solar domain summons a blazing ball, one tied to nature summons an ignis fatuus of marsh gas that illuminates an area. One spell that allows aerial travel has the caster grow feathered wings, while another one uses psycholkinetic power to lift the practitioner into the air and move them around.
Each one has a technical aspect that makes it different in some way from the others, and this not only provides variety, it ties a player’s choices for their characters so they feel the visible and tangible effects of spell casting more easily. It also means there’s not one specific way to deteat each spell, as what will affect phyiscal wings won’t affect psychokinesis. This makes strategy in dealing with spellcasters more complex and (we feel) more entertaining.
Four Play is also on Amazon. What’s that process been like and do you have any tips for other publishers?
It’s been very good for the most part. They do a pretty nice job of making the upload process simple if you have all your material ready, which is to say your manuscript in the proper format, your cover art all ready to go, etc. They check the internal margins for artwork and let you know if some element has slipped outside the usable space, so that’s handy.
It’s a bit of a pain to have to do it twice if you are selling both hardcover and softcover, or thrice if you’re selling Kindle too, but it’s worth it in the long run.
The downside of Amazon is they take a huge cut of the retail price for printing and distribution, so depending on your printing costs (which are based on size, paper stock, color vs. BW, etc.) you might walk away with 25% or even less of the retail price as your cut. However, they save you the headaches of having to make multiple separate printing or distribution deals with third parties, so you have to evaluate your business goals and see if that will be a good fit for you or not. It is for FGG Games, LLC for now, so we plan to continue there as well as with DriveThru RPG and the other sites where we upload material.
What’s next for FFG Games?
We’ve received input from many players about some typos we missed and some questions about the rules themselves, so we are currently putting together an errata and FAQ which will be released for free on all the online sites when it’s complied.
After that we are switching to non-fiction for a book about the history of the cable television industry (due in mid-June), but then we return to gaming for what we are currently calling The Big Book of Packages. Four Play™ is a multigenre RPG which can be used for other things than generic fantasy, and the Big Book of Packages will cover at least two dozen other options, from sci-fi and steampunk to superhero and intelligent animals. Some of it will be homages to older RPGs and some will be completely new, but there will be copious notes on converting characters from one genre to another. We think gamers will love it.
Thank you, Don!
FGG Games
- FGG Games’ website.
- FGG Games on Facebook.
- FGG Games on LinkedIn.
- FGG Games on Amazon.
- FGG Games on DriveThruRPG.
