Bad Axe Games e-View | Echoes #1

The premier issue of Echoes from the Wyrd starts off a long line of e-views with Bad Axe Games and we’re lucky enough to have Benjamin Durbin, the founder of the company, answering the questions for us. What’s an e-view? It’s nearly an interview it’s nearly a questionnaire but it’s actually somewhere in between. GameWyrd’s questions will be in strange blue and Bad Axe Games’ replies are in bad ass black.

1) Do you see Bad Axe Games offering a primarily new style of supplement to the marketplace or simply a better quality of supplement to the roleplaying industry?

At the moment we’re focusing on the Heroes of High Favor line, which I think would fall under your “quality” heading. We have good production values for a first-time publisher, so in that respect I think it’s higher quality. Of course, I could make a good case for the Heroes of High Favor line as a new “style” of supplement as well. It has a very narrow focus, it’s aimed directly at players, it has a lot of crunch and little useless fluff, it’s mostly Open Content and all of the OGC is very clearly marked.

Hmmm… I may have just suggested that high quality IS a new style. Perhaps when I started the company (which was behind the scenes and quite some time ago, though we seem to have only been on the radar a month or two!) that was true. I honestly don’t think the quality was there among the smaller publishers, but that has really changed. There is a lot of really good stuff out there for players– and as I am a player myself, I am quite happy.

Certainly there’s such a thing as a “low quality style.” We can all spot bad RPG stuff on the rack, even at a distance.

2) You’re getting paid for it now. How has turning professional effected your view on the hobby? This question has a catch; surely you’re required to cross from being an amateur enthusiast to being a professional if you’re serious about keeping Bad Axe Games in the RPG industry but by the same token doesn’t this transition remove you, to a degree, from the core of hobbyists you’ve set out to write books for?

I’m getting paid for it? Well, in theory, perhaps. This is no pot of gold.

Turning “pro” hasn’t really changed my view of the hobby at all; I certainly don’t agree that being a professional removes you from the core of hobbyists. In fact, I said exactly that in the initial press releases I sent out when I announced the company. Just to paraphrase that sentiment, I don’t think you have to keep the two identities seperate at all, and if either of them is diminished at all, the product suffers. I can be a huge game geek and yet maintain professional standards as a publisher. If you are not playing the game on a regular basis, you’ve lost your credibility as a writer.

Of course, all of this means that I don’t necessarily have the free time to put out five books a month. I cherish my game time, even when it cuts into my writing / editing / managing a company time. I suspect that by the time I reach the point where I am publishing enough titles that I start to really notice the money side of this business, I’ll have given up on playing.

And basically, I won’t let that happen.

3) The internet’s full of free prestige classes. Why do you think people will pay for more?

I’ll answer first as a player and then address the question as a publisher. First off, I like books. I like the feel of them. I like the art. I like having a bookshelf (or, on game day, a bookbag) full of them. I don’t like carrying around sloppy print-outs of web pages or PDFs. And having something in a book lends it a legitimacy with the DM and the rest of the group that, “I saw this on the net!” just doesn’t have.

To answer as a publisher, I’ll say simply this: The internet is not the end-all of my customer base– granted, it is an important subset of them, but a subset nevertheless. But more to the point, I don’t really have to wonder over whether or why people will buy them, the proof is in the sales: People DO still buy books, my books among others… and they still buy magazines… and newspapers… On the one hand you might say, “Well, but Joe Gamer is most likely an internet-savvy fella,” but on the other hand I could counter with, “But he’s also very likely to be a reader, and a lover of books.”

4) Do you think Bad Axe Games would have a chance of success without popular fan sites like ENWorld and Mortality?

It would be more difficult and more costly. But just to reiterate the above point, the internet isn’t everything. I have an excellent fulfillment agreement with Osseum. They picked me up based on the quality of the work, and they will sell me into distribution channels based on the quality of the work.

However, I would like to point out that I probably would never have bothered to start up the company without ENworld. I write a rather popular “Wulf’s Story Hour” there which is really just a fictionalized account of a game I play in. Without a doubt, it was the support and encouragement I get from regular readers and posters to that thread that convinced me to start writing “professionally.”

5) How would you address concerns that supplements with extra rules and game mechanics serve only to foster greater levels of dependence from new and novice GMs?

I don’t agree with the premise in the first place. How does a novice mature into an expert, except through exposure to the work of others? It strikes me a bit as suggesting that too math, physics, and chemistry textbooks foster a level of dependence from novice rocket scientists.

Without that library of supplements, the novice GM can’t ever reach that point where he says, “I could do better than this.”

6) If a young company was to enter the industry to much acclaim and obvious potential but yet clearly using Bad Axe Game material without credit how would you respond to the situation?

At the very least I would expect them to be compliant with the terms of the Open Game License, where our contribution is cemented in the copyright notice. Obviously, if they are breaking the law, we’d pursue legal action.

7) Where do you see Bad Axe Games going after the Heroes of High Favor line?

We have a lot of adventures to get to, campaign-length stuff– and we’d like to do a world to set them in, of course. Some d20 Modern stuff on the horizon; some GM resources. But always, always just concentrating on what we think is fun.

8) What would you do if the OGL was closed, revoked or otherwise removed? Would it spell the end of the company?

The OGL _can’t_ be closed, revoked, or otherwise removed. You have suggested a legal impossibility.

Now, the d20 System Trademark License could be revoked, which would simply mean that we’d stop putting a d20 logo on our work. Whether or not Bad Axe would continue beyond that would be entirely up to the longevity of Dungeons and Dragons. As long as other companies continue to support it, and as long as we keep playing it, we’ll be interested in supporting the community as well.

9) The industry is seeing something in the way of a series of consolidation. Games Workshop bought Sabertooth, Mystic Eye and Thunderhead Games merged, Green Ronin and Paradigm Concepts introduced the OGL Interlock. Would you protect the independence of Bad Axe Games or welcome the right suitor?

I’d probably end up preserving our independence, simply because I wouldn’t expect any “big” publisher to respect the contributor contract we’ve developed. If a major publisher was willing to preserve the copyrights (which we reserve to the original creator, not to Bad Axe) and the royalty rate, then it might work. That’s highly unlikely, because most publishers want to own the material outright, and they don’t particularly want to pay for it.

It’s a sad situation that so many folks are desperate to break into the RPG industry– writers and artists alike– that they will sell their creations for peanuts. One of the reasons for my own decision to start Bad Axe Games was to avoid selling out that way. Ryan Dancey had mentioned in an online rant somewhere that RPG creators couldn’t make a living until they stopped selling their work so cheaply, and I really took that to heart.

10) Bad Axe Games is a rather groovy name; a nice play on words. Where did it come from?

I was struggling to come up with a professional sounding name that would inspire confidence in the company, something blue-blood, “Mucky Muck Press” or somesuch. I sent Andrew Hale (one of my partners and the creative talent driving the line look with his illustrations) a list of possible names along those lines. He basically rejected everything and responded back with those three simple words: BAD AXE GAMES.

That settled that! It _is_ pretty groovy, isn’t it? Total 180 from where I thought I wanted to be, but it speaks about the company, the kind of products we want to produce. The same can be said of the “splatter” beneath our company logo. It was a late edition to the Axe logo, but it’s evocative of the kind of stuff we’re about.

(GameWyrd notes – We’re in the Out of the Box section now. A couple of unusual questions for which we expect unusual answers!)

11) You’re trapped in a dimension similar to ours expect that there’s no concept of roleplaying games at all. By magical means you’ve an unlimited supply of core rules and they come to you entirely free. Can you think of a way to use them to make a living? If so, how?

Didn’t Gary Gygax perform this same stunt? If Gygax can introduce the concept to our world, certainly I can do the same elsewhere– but with the advantage of hindsight, of course! No deals with flaky partners or ball-busting harridans.

12) Rather than finding a healthy mug of coffee waiting for you when you wake up in the morning you discover a glowing portal. Do you step through it? If so, why?

You can’t seriously be asking this question of a D&D fan. :)

Of course I’d go through! I pity the man who stands between me and that door. That’s what adventurers are supposed to do, right? Step through the portal, mess around with the mysterious altar, drink from the glowing pool…

In the real world, such doors are rare– those opportunities we take that burn the bridges behind us. Sometimes we take them and we regret it; sometimes we turn aside and regret _that_. When such opportunities come up, I’d rather learn from the experience and perhaps regret what happened, than be left with the regret and the wonder of what _could_ have been.