Interview: Robert Howard of P&PG

You asked for it, so we’re giving it to you. Interviews. Starting this month RPGX is going to start bringing you more interviews with game developers, writers, directors, editors and authors. Anyone you ever wanted to talk to in the gaming industry has made our list. We chased down and bugged everyone we could find.

This month I wrote an article called: Is There Anybody Out There? The Internet's Top 10 "Gamer Finder" Sites In which I named http://www.penandpapergames.com/ as the number one registry on the internet. Shortly after making the decision of making them “#1” I decided that I would also interview the man responsible for the site’s success. After talking with Mr. Robert Howard, I found him to be a very real sort of gamer / developer. Below is the interview I had with Mr. Howard in which I discovered just how much we had in common as gamers, site founders, and visionaries for the future of gaming.

What first gave you the idea to provide this type of player registry?
When I was “growing up,” the way to find players and games was to go down to the local comic book or hobby shop and tack something up on the bulletin board. Another tactic was to hover around the roleplaying section in the local bookstore for hours browsing books. It was a very time consuming and often unfruitful process.

The web opens up a vast new arena for connecting with people, or social networking if you will--which just happens to be all the rage at the moment. Unfortunately, what I found was that the tools that were out there were kludgy or ill-suited to the task. Finding someone on the WotC forums involved paging through hundreds of pages of posts. Like any enterprising developer—and a gamer that wanted to use these tools myaself—I thought, this can be done so much better, and I know how to do it.

Has it personally helped you locate other players for you own games?
Ironically, by the time that I got the site up and running, my gaming group was pretty solid and I wasn’t looking for any more players. It wasn’t until a year later after I moved to Seattle that I finally had a chance to give it a spin myself. It took under two weeks for me to put a group together from scratch, and I was impressed by how well matched my players and I were.

Did you ever think it would grow as big as it has?
I hoped it would. I felt that I had the best tools available on the web, but even the slickest interface wouldn’t mean anything to someone if they couldn’t find other players to game with. I actually think it will grow a whole lot larger as the word continues to spread about the community we’ve built.

What future plans do you have for improving on the site?
My to-do list of features that I would like to add is extensive. I have literally pages and pages of ideas. Currently though, our main focus is on enhancing the Player Registry and creating more tools for both individual gaming groups and local gaming communities. To this end, we’re actually going to have a pretty major addition to the site in the near future that is going to add a lot of new social-networking type functionality, including the ability for members to carve out a section of the website for their own private or public gaming groups. I’m very excited about it, and I think it is going to be a big boon for our members.

Do you currently or would you consider networking with other sites on a more direct basis to widen the scope of your site or to offer more services?
I think there are a lot of crosspollination opportunities out there for P&PG and other sites. To give an example, I recently ran across a play-by-post (PBP) website that has some amazing tools for PBP gaming. They also have a “game finder” section specifically for their site. My feeling is, why not widen the exposure their PBP games get by bringing in a feed of the games looking for players into the P&PG database. This would help both sites. We’d be able to help our members find more options for online games, and they would be able to reach a wider audience. By the same token, I think we could offer a lot to the publisher websites who would like to provide their members with a great tool for finding other people who play the same game in their area.

What interests do you have outside of role playing?
Well, I have a wonderful wife and two-year old who occupy a lot of my time and attention, and running the P&PG website takes up a fair chunk itself. I’ve actually always been interested in martial arts. When I moved to Seattle, I decided to take it up again, and I joined a phenomenal dojo studying Chito-Ryu style karate. Top that off with a strong passion for computers and fantasy/sci-fi fiction.

Where does the strongest following of the site seem to come from geographically?
The largest group of players registered in a single area would be Dallas/Fort Worth, followed closely by a few others like California and New York.

Would you say that is because P&P gaming is more popular in that area or for some other reason? Dallas is a unique story. While DFW definitely has a large concentration of roleplayers, it is also where the Pen & Paper Games website got its start. When I was first starting the site, I reached out to the Dallas RPG Group organizer, Ron Pyatt, to try to see if he could help spread the word in the Dallas community. He had been looking for a long time for something better than Meetup.com that would be more tailored to the RPG community. Don’t get me wrong, Meetup.com is good at what it does, but their focus is on a larger community in general. Ron even loved the limited prototype that I had built, so we collaborated on merging his group with the larger PnPG community. So, the very first members to join were all brought in en masse from the DFW RPG group.

Have you noticed a particular age group that is attracted to the registry (or P&P gaming)? Most come in somewhere close to my age, between 26 and 35. What really surprised me was that our oldest member is ninety-eight years old. Can you believe that? Our second oldest is eighty-eight. I hope that when I’m that age I am still spry enough to whip it up with the younger folks for a good ole’ jaunt of PnP! Anyway, I’m a report building kind of guy, so I whipped up a quick chart showing our age bracket breakdown if you’re interested.


Allot of people enjoy play by post gaming, does you site currently support an area for this type of playing? Absolutely! We have a number of currently running play-by-post games going on right now, and in fact, we recently added a new integrated forum dice roller to help facilitate online play.

How easy is it to gain access to these types of games and how would you say they differ from P&P style gaming? The play-by-post section is open to all visitors to checkout. Most of the current running games are probably full, but any member is free to request to start their own game on the forums. All they need to do is send an email to gm@penandpapergames.com or send an IM from their account to Farcaster to get it set up.

As to their differences, play-by-post (PBP) games generally focus on social interactions over strategic play, simply because resolving combat can take a lot of time when strung over a long series of posts. Probably one of the most attractive elements of PBP games to me is that the medium encourages more descriptive language from the players and game master instead of simply rolling the dice and announcing the result. In the interest of full disclosure though, I have never personally played or run a PBP game. I prefer the face to face nature of table-top gaming.

Do you currently attend conventions in (or out) of your area?
Since my move about a year ago, I have not yet attended any major conventions. I have gone to one of the mini-conventions that the Seattle D&D Group sponsors, which was a lot of fun. Pen & Paper Games has been pleased to help sponsor several RPG conventions recently though, including NOLACon in New Orleans and TempleCon in Providence, Rhode Island. Sadly, I couldn’t attend personally, however.

Would P&PG be interested in making an appearance at some con's to help boost it's visibility. (Possibly with RPGX as a joint effort?) I’d love to. Just ping me with the details. I’ve actually been looking for an excuse to come back down to Dallas – Seattleites have no concept of good Tex-Mex and I’m dying for some fajitas!

As an aside, Pen & Paper Games is also happy to help promote conventions, big or small, by getting the word out to our members when there are conventions coming up in their area. Organizers interested in a co-sponsorship opportunity should email us at gm@penandpapergames.com.

Best estimate: How many people would you expect to be on the registry by the end of 2008. These things are really difficult to estimate. Currently we have over three thousand player profiles, and if things were to continue at their current place, we’d probably have somewhere around five thousand by the end of the year. However, often these things tend to snowball as the word starts to get out. And honestly, I think this is going to be a break-out year for Pen & Paper Games. Even in the first few months of 2008, our community forums have been exploding with activity way beyond my expectations.

Do you work in the games industry full time or do you have a day job like the rest of us geeks? In real live, I’m a mild mannered reporter. Well, not exactly mild mannered. And, I’m technically a “report developer.” Not to get too technical, but I am a database developer for a major telecommunications company.

How long have you been playing pen/paper (and other) type games?
I got my first introduction to roleplaying games at about ten years old. Ever heard of Bard’s Tale? I used to play that game for hours—or even days at a time—on my Commodore 64. It opened me up to a whole new world of gaming. I enjoyed it so much; it was actually my step-father who suggested I should check out Dungeons and Dragons. So, around twelve, I picked up the old “Red Box Set,” and began my lifelong addiction. I’ve been playing now for somewhere around twenty years.

What is your favorite game / genre?
I’m very partial to fantasy, and Dungeons and Dragons in particular. It’s where I got my start, and where I am most comfortable weaving interesting stories for my players. I occasionally enjoy a jaunt into other genres, but I always end up returning to my favorite standby.

What advice do you have for RPGX or any other person out there trying to be successful at creating something useful and unique to the gaming industry or Internet? I have to admit that it feels a bit strange to be asked that question. I don’t count myself amongst the greats. Nor do I see myself as particularly savvy when it comes to things like marketing or strategizing. What I did have is an idea on how it could be done better. I think that in the vast expanse of the internet, innovation is the key. If you do the same thing every one else is doing, its difficult to stand out in the crowd. This is particularly true if you’re an upstart like P&PG without the benefit of thousands of advertising dollars.

Second, the old adage, “If you build it, they will come,” is bunk when it comes to the web. You can’t just put up a site and wait for your audience to find you. P&PG has spent a grand total of perhaps a couple hundred dollars or so on advertising over the past year and a half, but we have spent a lot of time networking with other sites and gaming communities to help get the word out there. This has been critical in helping build the community.

I had a great time working with Mr. Howard an have started discussing the possibility of adding him on to the RPGX crew as a casual writer. Keep an eye on the site for more works by this person here at RPGX.

Is There Anybody Out There? The Internet's Top 10 "Gamer Finder" Sites

If your anything like me your gaming hobby consists of allot more than on line internet gaming.” You probably play some table top games, maybe some CCG’s and a fair amount of pen and paper games as well. That’s good. That makes you a well rounded gamer, or someone who is trying entirely too hard. (Just like me.) Well whatever your motivations are for playing all those games, we all share something in common. At some point we will need to reach out to a new gamer. Maybe you just broke off a friendship, relationship, moved away from the old neighborhood, or just want someone new to join the group. Finding other gamers in a new area can be a little daunting.

Back in the good old days a gamer or GM’s only option was to either hang around college campuses (which might be illegal depending how old you are) or stalking the shadows of your local hobby and game shop. While the latter seems like a fairly obvious choice it does have some problems. For starters, they are at a game shop. It’s pretty likely they are there to buy materials for the game group they are already in. Usually if a group isn’t shopping for a new player you might just be wasting your time. Many game groups (like mine) are tight knit. Outsiders have to be screened by every member and twice by the GM. Second, most gamers like myself tend to be shy. Now granted the trend may have changed a bit since I started playing, but in general gamers have never been the typical cool-guys. As such we tend to be a little withdrawn and not very enthusiastic about starting conversations up with complete strangers. Of course there are exceptions to these rules of thumb, so don’t go flaming me. Do what works for you.

Now while previously these were our only options, a great dandy invention has changed the face of gaming forever. Yes pants… No, idiot. I’m talking about the internet. The internet has made the world a smaller place and more accessible than ever. The internet is an easy way to buy pizza, catch a virus, order a bride, and yes… find other geeks to play our games with.

Where might on go to find such a person you might ask? Well typically we used to hang out in gamer forums, chat rooms, and even in the war rooms of our favorite online games (I found many a play tester on the Diablo chat board.) I even used to spend a great deal of time locating gamers in the old “Wheel of Time” chat room. However, in those days finding a gamer with same interest (and region as myself) were pretty hit and miss. These day, the only way to find a gamer of the same cloth as yourself… On Line Gamer Finders. I know sounds corny. But more and more people have started to create them.

An online gamer finder is a database of registered gamers usually sorted by region and interest. Finding a gamer (in most cases) is as easy as putting in your zip code, entering a genre and you will be given a list of other gamers in your travel radius. It’s that easy. Of course different sites do it better than others, so to make your life even easier I have compiled a list of the top 10 sites for you to find other gamers. Of course you will bring them back to RPGX to actually get some games together… won’t you?

1) Pen and Paper Games (http://www.penandpapergames.com)
This is my number one choice for finding gamers of all kinds. This site is run by Robert A. Howard and has been around for a little over 1 year. In that time frame it has grown to be the second largest data base for gamers not only around the United States, but in a few other countries as well. Anyone who signs up on this site (via a forum) will answer a series of game prefrence questions, location details (Which aren’t actually revealed to anyone searching you other than zip code) as well as some standard profile questions. Once finished a player can either manually search the player database for players within a certain proximity or be notified by e-mail when other players register within a certain travel distance. The site also serves as a gaming board and standard forum which enjoys a large amount of use. If you donate towards helping the site, the user is rewarded with special board features and access to the Pen and Paper Games war chest which features many invaluable tools, scenarios and other goodies to be used in various different games. If this is the SECOND largest database on the net, why did it get first you might ask? 2 reasons: First of all ease of communication. This site beat out the #2 pick because of it‘s forums. They are easily accessed, used, and maintained by the owner frequently. Second, find times. While my number 2 pick actually has a bigger data base the load times between the two are staggering. This could possibly be due to the list population sizes, but I doubt it. Something about the web design just feels tighter and less lazy. Pen and Paper Games is the stress-less solution to finding gamers near and far away from you. (Be sure to check out my other article this month where I get a one on one interview with the creator (and GM) of this fantastic site.

2)Access Denied (http://www.access denied.net)
Another great gamer finder site that almost took the number one spot right out from under Pen and Paper games. While it falls #2 on the list, don’t let that fool you into thinking that it lacks in features. Access Denied actually boasts a larger data base and a much longer run on the internet. But keep in mind that this registry spans more than one country. It may boast more total gamers registered, but are they in your area? Well, surprisingly YES. We ran searches for all 50 states and never turned up less than 25 gamers in our zip codes. Which suggests that there are actually more registered gamers on the data base than what the homepage is boasting. How easy was the site to use? Click search, enter in some info and click submit. Yep that easy… so how did the other site beat them out? The answer is speed and features. We tried to set up a new profile which proved to be a little more lengthy of a process (about 1000 more questions to answer) and searching the data base was a little more of a chore. Also, visiting the site really gives you a feeling of a more worn-in environment. A few less features and a lacking newsletter put this site behind P&PG by just a hair. Also not to mention that the site is actually affiliated with another bigger site that does the same thing. But don’t let that fool you, this monster is not to be reckoned with.

3)Nearby Gamers (http://www.nearby gamers.com)
This is a relatively new site on the net. Going back a little ways in the sites history reveals that it originally started off as another project by the site owner. The data base hasn’t had a great deal of time to grow but has a significant amount of features that I feel will propel this site ahead of the pack in the near future. I placed this site in the number three spot for it’s unlimited potential. The site’s core functions off of a type of Google map tool. On this map players may register a pin mark on the map where they can fill in some bits about themselves, a tag about what games they play, and even a profile picture. The site also sports some mini forums, that while not especially organized make a great IM board for gamers to post a bit about the games they are running. Searching gamers proves to be a little difficult at first, but after learning how the board works becomes easier. The whole site functions on tags. These are like key words that the engine searches for. Based on these tags the search function will return compatible gamers. As I said the site is still under development, but my ultimate reason for awarding this as the number three spot are because of the improvements I have already been told about by the web developer to come this year. In the near future NBG will have a function that allows a webmaster to integrate the game finder into their own page on their own site. Bloggers, webmasters, and homepage jockeys all around will be able to connect themselves and their personal pages directly to the tool and allow people to search for other gamers via their page. A great way to bring traffic to any gaming community as well as the NBG site itself.

4) RPG Registry (http://www.rpgregistry.com)
Let’s talk about commercialization a bit. The higher you can get your ranking on a search engine the more visible you are. The more visible you are the more users you have. The more users you have the more your site can grow and become useful. When you Google the words “RPG finder” or “Gamer Finder” this is the site you will get. Highly commercialized and widely used, the guys that own this site own allot of space on the net. While this site sports more features than all the sites on this list combined including, downloads, registries, rpg stores, character sheets, free campaigns, and much more I have knocked this down to my fourth favorite game place on the net. There is a point when a browser can be overloaded. While the tools on this site are fantastic and the uses for them unlimited, I can only take a limited number of ads. While even RPGX itself sports a few ads, it’s nothing like this. From page to page users are bombarded with not only affiliate ads, but ads for the site that you are already on. A great site for anyone with a pop up blocker or ultra high speed, but if you still live in the world of dial-up pass this one up.

5) SJ Gamer Finder (http://www.sjgames.com/gamer finder)
This site is proof that something can be great almost to the point of perfection, but still be completely useless to those who don’t use a specific product. Enter the SJ gamer finder. From here on in gamer finders will become decidedly more narrowed down. All the features of this board are great. Easy to use, accurate, large data bases, fast, tons of options. The problem… it’s only good for you if you play an SJ game. Now of course there is always the off chance that you will contact someone who is into another brand of gaming you are in (let’s be realistic) but you don’t have the option to search by this. Now this isn’t without understanding. It is in fact SJ games “gamer finder” we are talking about. Of course they want to promote their own product. But it would be a show of good faith in their gamers if they also offered options for other peoples games to be searchable fields. After all their products should be good enough to attract some attention from those other gamers. After all they did think to check SJ games for their D&D game.

6)Board Game Geek (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/users.php)
Easy to use and similar to P&PG in it’s design. But solely for finding other board gamers. A little limiting when making a search for that new party member.

7)Wiz Kids (http://www.wizkidsgames.com/usersearch.asp)
This search probably has the biggest data base of all but our number 2 pick. Unfortunately it can only be used to find other gamers playing WizKid games and tournaments.

8)(http://ps3mods.blogspot.com/2007/01/find-other-ps3-gamers.html)
This site (lacking a title) is operating under the same idea as NBG. It works almost as well. The only things holding it back are: A) The site limits itself by targeting only PS3 players, which is fine but we typically find each other on Playstaion Home Online. B) A small data base and a lack of features make your options very limited.

9)White Wolf (http://www.white-wolf.com)
There is such a thing as too spread out. While White Wolf does have a small game finder that isn’t narrowed down to just their games, it is hardly useable at most times. Instead White Wolf relies on their vast network to bring players together. By basically blog-rolling all the indi sites that worship them together White-Wolf uses this tactic to bring gamers closer together. However in the process you may end up doing more surfing that what you would have by stopping somewhere else. But in the long run, it is an interesting way to meet new gamers and sometimes the actual writers of the games as they spend a significant amount of time on the forums and their “blog-roles.”

10) RPG Gamer Finder (http://www.rpggamefinder.com)
This site comes in dead last for now as it has not opened yet. The site is currently shrouded in mystery. It was put up nearly 6 months about without any change. I only bring it up to draw attention so that we may watch it as it grow. Judging by the description at the bottom of their page, they feel they will have something new to offer us. Hopefully they will read this article and learn a thing or two about what real gamers want.