Wargamer had the pleasure of welcoming indie tabletop wargame designer Joe McCullough - best known as the author of Frostgrave, though his list of publications is considerably longer - for a live AMA in our Discord community last week. With his most famous wargame recently reaching its tenth anniversary, he had a lot to say about the reality of designing games - and why he isn't champing at the bit to make Frostgrave third edition.
McCullough published the original Frostgrave in 2015. It's a narrative heavy game in which players control wizards and their hirelings as they explore a ruined, magical city in search of treasure. The emphasis is on exploration, story-rich scenarios, and campaigns, not direct conflict, and - while the game is supported by a full line of miniatures - it is written assuming that players will use any miniatures they want to play with.
Frostgrave was extremely successful from the day it released, but McCullough says that "I clearly didn't get some things right" in the original draft. He clarifies: "they weren't wrong in the sense that they didn't work, they were wrong in the sense that they were pointing the game in a direction I didn't want it to go".
By way of example, he uses the experience points system. "In first edition you got experience points for killing the enemy wizard". "I didn't think - which I should have - 'this is the list of rewards, this is going to drive player actions'". It made the game more directly confrontational and less scenario based than he wanted.
Which is why, in 2020's second edition of the game, there's no XP for killing enemy wizards: "you might kill the wizard, but that's because he's annoying you, not because he's worth points", McCullough jokes. "I understood my own game so much better than I did when I first wrote it", he reflects.
Second edition wasn't a top to bottom overhaul, but it did let McCullough fix many small mechanical problems, "boring spells", magic items that people never played with - a whole list of little faults that had accumulated over time. "Now we're five years on from second edition and people do ask me 'When's third edition coming?'" he says. The answer? "When I've come up with enough mistakes, things I really want to change in second edition."
He acknowledges that a third edition is, in one sense, inevitable. "New editions can be necessary in order to keep a game alive", he says - financially. "No matter how many supplements I write, that rulebook is still going to be the main money maker of the entire series". He says it's not something he appreciated before he became a designer. "In general, every supplement sells slightly less than the one that came before it…", and while individual supplements might buck the trend, "Generally the only way to reset that line to a higher height is a new edition".
So, will there be a third edition? "Yeah, probably some day - but I'm not in any hurry to do it because I am mostly happy with the game as it stands now", McCullough says. And there's another reason he's reluctant: "Writing new editions is really boring", he laments. "Generally it's not a creative endeavor, it's an editorial endeavor, [saying] 'Oh, I got this wrong, I need to change it' instead of going 'What wild new monsters can I create?'" He adds: "I'd much rather create something wholly new than go back and be tweaking things."
McCullough can see ways to refine Frostgrave further, but he's not convinced the changes would be the best for the game. "I've reached this point where there are things that, if I wrote Frostgrave now, I would do differently", he says. But implementing them as changes in a new edition would "make fundamental changes to the game overall… I don't think it would make the game better enough to invalidate all of the material I've already written".
He gives a simple example: "If I were to write Frostgrave now, every figure would have slightly lower armor than it does". Lower armor "Means more dice rolls in the game would be damaging… and thus more of your outcomes lead to a thing happening instead of nothing happening". He says "I know in my heart that's better game design", but to implement that - and all the other fine-tuning tweaks he has in mind - in third edition would mean making all of the old supplements unusable without a lengthy errata.
It's not just Frostgrave, either. Both the scifi Stargrave and piratical Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago use the same core engine. "You can literally pull monsters out of any of them and stick'em in the other ones", McCullough says - and that's how he wants to keep it.
To catch our next AMA live - and put your questions to our next guest - make sure you join the Wargamer Discord community to be notified.
If you like Frostgrave or indie wargames with low model counts and a lot of narrative, check The Grim and The Dark, a new documentary exploring the grimdark gaming scene, hosted by Napoleon Dynamite actor Jon Heder. I thoroughly enjoyed it - you can check out my review to learn more about it.