Good luck with whatever you're doing next, Matt.

Graham

As one of the folks who co-invented the RPG "endgame," Matt, it's cool to see you wrap up Chimera when you felt like it had run its course. Shoot or give up the gun, one might say :) Thanks for being an inspiration, both as a game designer and a graphic designer, and for being one of my favorite ornery internet people! I definitely plan on emailing you some Nine Worlds or 44 play reports in the future.

Rock on.

I don't know what all this back-slapping is about.

I for one don't want to see this happen at all. It sucks, in fact. I'm gonna stand here fuming for a bit being sad.

Thanks everyone. I'm getting lots of questions. To answer some common ones:

1) No, I do not have plans to license my games to anyone. I prefer to own my work, and oversee control of how it gets published. I respect people like Clinton Nixon who release works in creative commons, for example. It's just not what I want to do with my "kids."

2) Yes, this means all publications cease everywhere. No books, no PDFs. Lots of people are urging me to just make them available as PDFs somewhere, or even POD books on Lulu. Currently, that's not what I want to do. I may change my mind once other issues resolve.

3) There are no more Nine Worlds books in stock. It's out of print. I don't have plans to reprint it again.

4) I am not abandoning the hobby of RPGs, and definitely not my many good friends I've met in this hobby. In fact, I hope this will free me up some so I can play more often locally. And, I'll still participate some online. I really like this hobby a lot!

5) I don't have any plans to do layout work for other publishers right now. That is a really great creative outlet, and I miss that part. But it's also a royal pain in the tuckus to work on other people's dime. Actually, more like other people's penny.

WHA?

Count me among those confused...

I can understand not wanting to manage print runs and sales and blah blah bullshit.... But not even LuLu or straight .pdf?

That just baffles. Feels like some kind of contrived "punk" statement.

I mean, your work and all but... yeah... count me as someone who thinks you're a damn fool.

Good luck anyway.

Jesse

Jesse,

I'm not Matt, but let me tell you, sometimes as a publisher or author or whatever you need to slow down, back up, or take a break. And other times you need to be done. And if you need the second, trying to do the first is just asking for pain. Elsewise, like Pacino, they will just pull you back in.

Matt,

Good luck. I still think the setting of Nine Worlds is probably the most awesome-sauce graphic-novelesque setting produced in RPGs in years and years.

Well, all the best to you Matt.

Dust Devils will still have a place with me as the game that got me excited about gaming again after years of not caring. I hope the future is fruitful for you.

Cheers
Malcolm

I'd always been curious about Nine Worlds and now I'm really sad.

Anyone who wants to see my copy of Dust Devils will now have to wear gloves before they get to touch it.

The only part that I don't really *get* is removing the PDFs from circulation. That's deliberate forcing of the OOP status for games that we tend to assume pretty much never go OOP.

Unless it's an artistic/political point you're trying to get across, Matt, in which case that's the point I'm not getting (and that I probably don't agree with).

You're basically saying: people who might be interested in these books, screw you. You should have bought them before I closed shop, suck it up.

There are other options than releasing stuff as free content. If you really are adverse to free money coming to your pocket (leaving pdfs on IPR does not require any effort, AFAIK) you can leave them there (or on RPGnow, or whatever) with a zero dollar cost. You retain copyright, nobody can take your stuff and run with it, but people who, two or three years from now, will read about the history of indie games and are curious about one of the 'fathers' of the 'scene' (Dust Devils) will still be able to read it without paying with their firstborn for a used copy, or downloading an illegal pdf.

...but whatever, I'm ranting now :)

Despite all, thank you and good luck.

Hey Matt, thanks for the games and good luck with whatever you do next!

Sorry to see you close up shop Matt, but I wish you the best of luck in the future. One of my favorite actual play experiences was playing Dust Devils.

I was looking forward to some of your upcoming titles, such as 44. Here's hoping for a comeback someday. ;)

Good luck, Matt. Thanks for the games.

Matt,

You know I love you no matter what path you choose.

Posted By: JesseWHA?

That just baffles. Feels like some kind of contrived "punk" statement.

Jesse,
Let me offer you not one, but both of my erect middle digits. Have some respect and quit whining.

-Luke

Matt,

That game of Nine Worlds I played with you, Paul Czege, Danielle Lewon, and John Harper will stay with me forever. Thank you.

--Paul

Matt,

Good luck, man. I've always respected the hell out of you, and wish you the best of luck in your future master plans.

As a side note, we just started up a Nine Worlds campaign, as we're having a blast.

- Ryan

Well, now I'm going to buy it (like, this minute, actually)... but I still think you're nuts not to put it onto Lulu indefinitely.

Okay, so now everyone is scrambling to pick up 44, Dust Devils and Nine Worlds. I know why this is happening. This is because I eyed 44 among my stacks of new books at GenCon and thought "hmmm, well, the final one will be out soon." Low and behold! You even talked me out of buying a copy of the ashcan!

Cya around and thanks for adding so significantly to the hobby,
- Don

@Brand: true, and despite my tone I (or anyone but Matt) certainly don't have any right to ask for anything. He can do whatever he wants and that's his prerogative, and as you say part of the beauty of something being creator owned.

I just think that what Matt's chosen to do is counterproductive and I don't agree with it. That's *my* prerogative, and a completely separate matter :)
(or, in the words you used, it sucks :) )

Posted By: rafialHey, as long as there are PDFs and BitTorrent, I'm sure Matt's games will always be available...

Because, when someone doesn't want to sell you something stealing it from them is the appropriate response. How could you even consider this an appropriate response to the situation?

Hey man, I'll look forward to seeing you more often across the table and less often across the dealer's hall.

Thanks for giving us the tools for this.

James

Mr. Snyder, thank you so much! I really enjoy Dust Devils and although I own but never got to played Nine Worlds, several of my friends enjoyed the hell out of it and talked fondly about it. I also want to thank you for organizing Forgecon in the past as well as the Ashcan Front. I look forward to seeing you in the future! Good luck my friend!

Teh suck! I was hoping to see 44 at some point.

But, best wishes to you, sir. I look forward to seeing you at the next Forge Midwest. :)

Posted By: Brand_RobinsHe owns the games and he owes no one fucking anything.

But that flies in the face of my ME-centric view of the universe. Clearly, Matt owed it to me to wait until I had purchased my copy of Nine Worlds

I'm hoping this is all just a mad publicity ploy.

I had hoped to get my hands on 44 as well, but thanks for Daedalus, NW and DD, Matt. We changed our game session yesterday in the light of this announcement and played a game of Dust Devils instead. And it was good :)

DD was the first "indie" game I bought, as PDF in 2003, and eventually led me to a place they called The Forge. The thing basically saved my life as a story gamer.

Per

Posted By: WillH

Posted By: rafialHey, as long as there are PDFs and BitTorrent, I'm sure Matt's games will always be available...

Because, when someone doesn't want to sell you something stealing it from them is the appropriate response. How could you even consider this an appropriate response to the situation?

C'mon, you don't want to suggest that archeology is stealing, do you? (No disrespect Matt, but that's part of making history.)

Hey Matt;

I would like to know... Why?

You're under no obligation to tell me a damn thing. Nor will I take it amiss if it's none of my business, or be bothered if the answer isn't a thing of great clarity.

But, hell, I suspect there's something that would be worth learning, right here. So I'm asking. And, yeah, I'm asking in public, because it's not just me that might benefit from the learnin', should you want to be forthcoming. That doesn't mean there's any need for you to answer in public.

Only thing that changes is the owners died long time ago.
...and now there is none who remember them.

Sorry, I've got a lot of Polaris in my mind these days, could not resist. :)

There are lots of reasons why an artist might want to withdraw access to a work. The very connection between audience and provider that leads to questions fueled by entitlement could be reason enough (note, not all questions here are fueled by entitlement and not all entitlement is bad or unreasonable).

In the case of art as system, the artist may want to emotionally disconnect. Having a system, means supporting the system. Supporting the system means staying connected. You could outsource support, but there is effort and a looming question of proper representation. The feeling of do it right or not at all is difficult to abandon.

I can understand the desire for closure. But I guess what I'm saying there are plenty of perfectly valid reasons for anyone to do anything. Maybe it's extremely personal. Maybe it's not. That's Matt's decision. I don't think pressure is fair. I'm just happy for what I have for as long as I can have it.

I'm confused by the (thankfully few) people that seem to think that what Matt Snyder is doing is "counter productive" or something along those lines.

What exactly is it hurting?

He's a guy that's made some games that people have grooved on. He's decided for whatever reason he's done with it and he doesn't feel like having his games still available. What's the big deal?

Why doesn't he want them available on Lulu? *shrug* Maybe he doesn't feel like having people constantly trying to track him down and request/ask/demand new product be made; maybe he wants to close the door on this particular part of rpgs and actually have the door _shut_; maybe he doesn't feel like cruising forums and reading people say stuff like, "it's a good enough game but it's basically dead"; maybe he doesn't feel like people offering up suggestions on new errata/suggestions for revising his game; and maybe he just wants to go back to being a "gamer" and not always having the niggling little pressure in the back of his head that he should be doing "work" of some sort on a game, since he's a "designer".

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: SquidLord</cite><blockquote><p> And while I don't think we<em>deserve</em>a reason, I<em>do</em>think it's in the best interest of the community, especially the community of creators and potential creators in the audience on SG, that Matt explain his thinking on the matter. In not doing so, it would seem he begs more questions that are troubling from a consumer point-of-view.</p><p>That's bad for everyone.</p></blockquote>

How does his decision have _anything_ to do with the "community" of creators and potential creators? He's decided he's done. What, because he's decided to quit, all of a sudden other people are going to decide not to design rpgs? What kind of "troubling questions" are going to be asked by a consumer, other than "why can't I buy this game I'm curious about"?

Consumers in general don't give a crap about stuff; if they can't get what they immediately want, they'll simply get something else. A few of them might turn to theft, but the majority of them will simply shrug and run off to make another "sell me" thread and not give a second thought.

And I _really_ don't see how Matt's decision to stop producing games or making them available is "bad for everyone". Nine Worlds is a groovy game. It's the only game of his that I'm familiar with and the only one that's caught my interest. I don't think the small press/indy side of rpgs has suffered because his other games didn't catch my attention, and I doubt that Chimera Creative ceasing to offer its games will cause Evil Hat, Wicked Brewing, and all the others out there to suddenly shut down in solidarity or something.

RPGs are about playing Invisible Barbie. Matt says he's going to be playing Invisible Barbie with folks more, and I think that's a fine thing. As far as I know, being an rpg designer isn't like joining the mob.

Posted By: SquidLordWhy would someone object to an essentially free trickle of funds coming into their pockets for the next several years, even if it's the princely sum needed to buy a mocha latte at the localPlanethartsonce a month? Where's the margin in doing otherwise?

Because it is not decorous for someone to ask for something that they do not want.

Who's the 'someone' in your statement, Jason? (I'm not snarky, I don't understand).

You rock Matt! I've learned a lot from you. Thanks!

Posted By: AndyBut it's not going to stop people from getting their hands on and playing the game. It's just going to stop them from doing it in a way where Matt gets compensated, that's all.

I can imagine something else it might be doing as well, it might be absolving Matt of responsibility over them. Matt has requested that the Chimera Creative forum at The Forge be shut down. Matt's a really good guy from what I can tell with my limited contact with him here and elsewhere on the Internet, and that plus the shutting down of the forum lead me to believe that Matt feels a responsibility to provide support for people who purchase and wish to play games he created. If he's not looking to provide that support, then it could be that's why he doesn't want to sell those games. Even as PDFs.

However, that's just one guess, and if I sat here long enough, I could probably come up with an infinite number of reasons for his decisions. As could any of you. So, please, no bullshit about how his decisions were wrong, or irrational. Or about how his silence on this issue is bad for the community or troubling for consumers. Seriously, be grateful for what you have.

EDIT: Crikey, but I used the word Matt a lot in that first paragraph. I also feel fucking stupid talking about you Matt as if you aren't even in this thread with us. I mean, you're shutting down Chimera Creative, not dying. My dream of one day playing with you, the guy who introduced me to the Western (Unforgiven is incredible (seriously, I was transfixed right up until the end of the credits) and those Leone films are really good too), is still alive and well.

You could easily have disappeared from the web and saved yourself the grief of reading this thread, Matt.

Unless what you really wanted to hear was a chorus of voices saying, "No, don't!"

And he stopped an endless stream of, "Where can I get Dust Devils/Nine Worlds?" threads that will probably come anyway but now we can just link them to this.

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: Judd</cite>And he stopped an endless stream of, "Where can I get Dust Devils/Nine Worlds?" threads that will probably come anyway but now we can just link them to this.</blockquote>

But that won't help with the "hey will anyone sell me their copy of Nine Worlds?" threads.

So once again, I am not Matt.

However, I've done some writing in the past and I have a little story.

Once upon a time I wrote some books for a game (an evil trad game full of evil, if you are wondering). I won an award, I was a golden boy. Then fashions and trends in RPGs shifted, as they do from time to time, and suddenly I was the devil. I was accused of being a child molester (seriously, not as a random flame), of deliberately trying to ruin the game and the company, and a million other things. At the same time the company, for reasons having nothing to do with me, was in some lean times. So they refused to pay me for work owed. When I insisted and pointed out I had lawyers in the family, they dragged their feet, flamed me online, and insinuated to the fan forums that I was hurting the company.

This, you can probably guess, didn't make me do leaping jumps of fucking joy. So I stopped writing for the game or working with the company. My mistake was that I didn't really quit, I said "no more for now." And I stayed on the fan forum, and I kept answering questions from folks about stuff I'd written. And for six fucking months solid I got hatemail in my inbox every day. (Seen Vincent's hate mail? Like that but less funny.) And for a year I'd get occasional querries from the company about if I would do some more work for them. And sometimes I almost agreed. Once I did agree, and then the project got shitcaned after I'd written 25,000 words for it, and of course I didn't get paid.

For that whole time I was irritable, I was edgy, I was a pain in the ass online. I didn't write a thing worth shit for the whole year because my energy was being sucked away by this thing I'd done and that was now a fucking albatross around my fucking neck. People from the community owned my ass because I wasn't letting go, they talked like the deserved something and I fucking let that get at me.

So then I fucking quit. I quit playing the game. I quit writing for the game. I quit talking to people about the game online. I quit talking to the company in any way. I fucking quit, full fucking stop.

In a single day, once I let go and closed down everything, I felt better about myself. In a month I was writing good shit again. In a year I was doing some of the best work I ever did. Two years later I was able to play the game again without bitterness.

Now, obviously some of this is all about the trad-game evil (yay, I'm a real story gamer talking about the trad game evil!) -- but some of it is not. When you create things into a community and are part of that community the desires of the community, the desire to support your work, the desire to help and talk with folks in the community about what you created is fucking MASSIVE. And sometimes its fucking wonderful, like taking a hit of cocain. And sometimes its fucking terrible, like taking a hit of cocain. And sometimes to get off it, you have to go cold fucking turkey.

No, keeping another hit in a drawer in the basement where it will be "hassle free" doesn't fucking work. You quit, you just quit. You don't keep a hit in the drawer in case, you don't keep a book up on Lulu because it won't cause you hassle. In this situation, it will. And saying "no it won't, I don't see why it would" doesn't mean that it won't, it just shows that you're not in a position to get it.

Is that's whats up with Matt? No fucking clue. Could be, could be something else. And it and all the others are rational, emotionally healthy reasons. Just because our life experience hasn't put us in a place to understand it, doesn't mean its fake punk, irrational, disrespectful, or anything like that. It just means that they're Matt's reasons and not ours.

Hey, Squiddie:

Contrary to what some people tell you, indie game creators may, from time to time, make decisions which aren't about the bottom line. Like, for instance, the decision to spend their time and money in producing a role-playing game, rather than starting a trans-pacific investing corporation, which generally yields more cash.

Which may be so, but when it costs nothing to have the work out there and to choose to not support it, merely to keep it in inventories and accessible, then it's not a question about the bottom line. It's a long, long way from questions about the bottom line. The latte's a pleasant extra. What it is becomes an issue of "why do you feel the necessity of cutting off the people who think your work is worth looking at?" In a sense, it's a weak slap at those who come in later but have interest and motivation to examine the work. It says to them, "too bad, you missed it when the piece was live and now I can't be bothered with you."

Seriously, in the Olden Days, when it cost actual money to move and print physical products and to maintain fora for cash, when your fandom couldn't be self-supporting when you as creator moved on, it made perfect sense to let things go out of print and be inaccessible. But those days aren't today and particularly in the indie RPG world, there's wide awareness of how little investment it takes to make an object effectively immortal: none. Throw it up on Archive.org, leave a free web page somewhere explaining that you're no longer providing support for the product and have moved on as a creator and, out of appreciation for the fact that someone would look for it, link to a forum where discussion can be found with other people who have interest, and then proceed to move on with your life having satisfied both yourself and the community of people who think enough of something you've made with your own hands to experience it.

That's really what confuses me here, and no amount of decrying me as seeming entitled as others have done in this thread changes the fact that I simply do not understand why someone who has produced a piece of work that they care about and that others care about and could care about in the future wants to deliberately take it off the table, when leaving it there with benign negligence costs them nothing in money, time, or reputation and removing it gains them nothing at all. I don't understand and so I ask, for explication and for understanding.

At heart in many ways I'm an archivist and librarian. The world has lost a lot of what many might consider epherma which, nevertheless, indicated things about what people thought and enjoyed and valued. When the digital world began to take form, I was pleased and gladdened, because I thought that it would become easier and cheaper to capture not only epherma but things of even more import. When people deliberately choose to avoid joining that movement, when they deliberately act to remove things which are of historical import (and, believe it or not, in the field of interactive game design Dust Devils is a creation of historical import, just as Bliss Stage is), I want to know why. I don't think I'm entitled to, I just want to. I am entitled to the question.

Matt is under no compulsion to answer. But it'd be good to, if only so his audience, the people who do care about his work and it's accessibility, consumers and fellow travellers, have some sense of why this particular choice has been made.

@JD: Agreed. The simple solution would be to charge nothing.

Sure Gregor, but this it teh intarnets, it's made for arguing.
And porn. Never forget porn.