By the way, this is the URL for MJ’s Article

Dak: And you truly believe that playing a good aligned character is absolutely necessary?

MJ: Oh, not at all. I’ve played quite a few alignments, and characters in games in which alignment is not an issue. But I do think that characters with clear moral and ethical commitments are better as characters, build trusting relationships with each other more readily and more realistically, and fare better in most game settings. I also think that it’s a mistake to believe evil characters are somehow easier to play, and that the referee is doing something wrong if his players think so.

Dak: Is alignment important in Multiverser?

MJ: Yes and no. There is a simple three-category system like alignment for gods and religions, and there are effects of this on religion-based magic; but player characters do not need to commit to one position as long as they avoid the use of such magic. They can still use arcane magic, unrelated to gods or powers in the personalized sense, as well as psionic abilities. If you are aligned, it has certain advantages and disadvantages; conversely, there are advantages and disadvantages of being uncommitted

Dak: Are the gods the same in all the verses?

MJ: Oh, it’s much more complicated than that. Let’s put it this way: if a player character or NPC verser has a relationship with any deity, that deity can be reached as easily as any other from whatever world he enters. But some worlds have gods who are specifically interested in that world, and there may be two gods using the same name in different worlds. But the gods aren’t really in the universes at all; they’re in the supernatural realm, and interact with the worlds from there.

Dak: Well, getting off that sometimes ‘touchy’ subject…..

“This is the concept of Multiverser. The Creator of all things could not express his infinite variety in a single universe, so He created many universes, separate but interconnected, the Multiverse.”

From Valdron’s homepage.

Dak: The concept is that there are an infinite number of worlds in the Multiverse correct?

MJ: E. R. Jones and I argued this quite a bit. I’ve always maintained that there are an inconceivably large but finite number of worlds, but since they will never be exhausted by human creativity and comprehension, the difference is moot.

Dak: Just how far are you as designers willing to take this?

MJ: Multiverser asserts that any world is part of the Multiverse, whether found in books, comics, movies, television, video games, other role playing games, or the minds of referees and players. “There is no fiction” is one of our axioms–every imagined world exists somewhere, and can be visited by the verser.

Dak: And how is the second book of worlds coming along?

MJ: The Second Book of Worlds was supposed to go into final edit this week, but we ran out of the first printing of the rules and first worlds, and had to refocus our resources to get the second printing going., so it’s been delayed, hopefully not for too long.

Dak: How did you meet the co creator, E.R. Jones?

MJ: My wife met him, running games at a local donut shop. He went to high school with one of her friends, and she thought we would get along well. Neither of us really believed her, but we got together, and enjoyed some good gaming sessions before he started running me in his prototype Multiverser game, and then asked me to help form it into a workable game.

Dak: Has development of Multiverser remained more on the hobby side? Or is there more business involved now?

MJ: At this point, I’m not sure I would know the difference. Valdron Inc and Multiverser form a full-time (if poorly compensated) job for me, with quite a few hours put in by a couple of others. But it still requires a lot of creativity. I guess it’s a bit like asking a popular musician whether music is still fun.

Dak: That’s good to hear…except for the poorly compensated part…

MJ: Yes, that’s the part my wife likes least.

Dak: With so many companies researching and developing their own games just to watch them fail what makes you think Multiverser will succeed?

MJ: We did something very different, and as far as I know we’re the first to do it successfully, to make it possible for player characters to move into absolutely any kind of game world without losing their identity or bending the world to fit the game, even to move into other games. No one’s ever done that before, as far as we know, at least not successfully. Maybe we won’t succeed, but it’s encouraging: last summer someone nominated the game in his five choices for an RPG Hall of Fame, someone who I only know because he bought a copy and asked me some questions about it.

You want a copy of Multiverser? Buy one from Valdron Inc.

Dak: I have looked at a good deal of the small look you give at the Multiverser on Valdron’s website and while searching one term in particular caught my eye. The concept of Scriff is how the Versers travel the Multiverse. Is this derived at all from your time travel theories?

MJ: Actually, the time travel theories are almost entirely mine, and the Scriff concept was part of the game when I first heard of it. A guy named Richard Lutz named it; originally, it was just an amorphous substance that was part of Mr. Jones’ basic idea.

For those of you who love time travel in the movies here are some examples of Mark’s theories in practice. They made my head hurt.

Dak: Well if its not derived from your theories how do your theories correlate with the Multiverser?

MJ: The time travel material is primarily relegated to the last appendix. It’s something for referees to use to solve time problems when players create them by using time travel skills, or when he wants to run a world in which time travel is part of the story. It isn’t integral to the game, unless the referee does a lot of time travel stuff.

Dak: How much have you lent to the creation of Multiverser?

MJ: Oh, quite a bit, actually. I added the bod bias area; before that, skills like weaponless combat weren’t covered very well. I clarified that technology was more than just sci-fi stuff, but included swords and fire and wheels. I hammered out the specifics of the skill and combat resolution system, framed the entire bias structure for what skills were at which levels and intensities, and much more. I also typed every word of the text, wrote most of it from our discussions. Certainly none of this was without agreement, but I was in many ways the detail man, and in a lot of ways I took good but ill-defined ideas and made them concrete and functional.

The Bias Concept.

“There are four bias areas: technological, called tech, psionic, called psi, magical, called mag, and body, called bod. Each world has a level and an intensity for each bias area.”

Dak: Would you recommend devoting your life to creating a game?

MJ: No. I’m a particularly creative person–I’ve been a composer and musician of some skill, dabbled in short stories and longer works, and created board games before I had ever heard of role playing. I think that creative people are driven to create, and do poorly outside of creative endeavors in some ways; but creativity is a hard road, which will drive you to despair, because success is difficult to achieve, and difficult to define. Our artists, Jim Denaxas and Bill Kozak, are animators about to launch their first animated series, and I can see the same frustrations in them that I’ve known in many of my endeavors.

Here is the link for the up and coming Cartoon by Multiverse artists Jim Denaxas and Bill Kozak.

Dak: I have noticed as of late, many gaming companies (i.e. TAR, PEG, etc) are testing online distribution in hopes of avoiding printing costs. Is there hope in the industry for this?

MJ: Electronic distribution has problems of its own. We’ve balked at releasing a CD-ROM version of the game several times–although it’s cheaper to produce than a book, it’s simple to duplicate. I think that the big companies are hoping that they can hook people with free core rules and then sell them supplements; but I don’t think D&D 3 will be available that way.

Dak: So there will not be any Multiverser PDF’s available anytime soon?

MJ: I don’t see it. Besides, Multiverser is the kind of game for which the referee refers to the rules during the game–look up a skill or table, check how different options work, figure out the probability of success of some crazy idea the player suggests. Most people aren’t able to easily access computer files during a game, and don’t want to print out 570 pages of text on their home printers.

Dak: So I take it that you don’t see laptops or PC’s replacing Dice and Pen and Paper anytime soon?

MJ: I know a lot of players who are very attached to dice, and won’t surrender them for electronic random number generation, which is never really random. I might use a computer–I’ve run games from the computer for my kids–but for most people, that’s still several years away at least. And besides, my 14-year-old runs games over lunch at school. Try doing that from a home computer.

Dak: Well that is about it from me. Any thoughts before the interview comes to a close?

MJ: Final thoughts? Well, I suppose I’m glad I didn’t know how tough this would be when I started back around ‘92; I might not have done it. Now I’m so invested in it that it would be foolish to give up. Someone once said that a lot of people failed because they didn’t know how close they were to success when they gave up. “To persevere is to succeed.” That thought has often kept me going.

Dak: A thought to live by.