Five Questions for One for Five’s Paul Dylan

Paul Dylan spending “quality time” with his two daughters

If you haven’t seen Paul Dylan’s web site, One for Five, you’re missing out.  He covers a sizable number of sports gaming territory including Strat-O-Matic baseball and APBA Soccer.  He’ll also touch on general baseball and soccer topics as well as tabletop sports game issues when they are interesting and relevant.

Paul obviously isn’t a zealot in the sports tabletop gaming wars. He sees value in what games give him pleasure.  Currently, Paul is replaying the 1953 Dodgers using Strat-o-Matic and has recently simulated the 2012 Championship Final using the APBA Soccer Game.

The APBA Blog:  Give us a little background on you. How did you get involved in sports tabletop gaming?

Paul Dylan: First of all, let me say thank you for being interested enough to ask these questions.  As you know, I’ve been a fan of The APBA Blog since I first discovered APBA Soccer and started looking for a community of other players.  It’s a pleasure and an honor to have been asked to do this interview.

When I was seven, my school district had an invention contest and I made up a baseball game that involved a spinner on the pitcher’s mound.  One of the judges was from a toy company (Mattel, I think) and a couple years later I came across a game that looked suspiciously like the game I had invented for the contest.  I vowed then and there to invent the best baseball game ever.

At age 10 I invented a baseball game that was played with a deck of playing cards.  I loved it and I played thousands of games, keeping meticulous records. It was a simple game, though, and I always felt like it could be so much better, but I just lacked the skills to make it so.

Of course, every year I got the new Street and Smith’s and the Sporting News baseball annuals, and I studied every word of that Strat-o-Matic ad that ran in each magazine, but my family didn’t have money for stuff like board games.

I ordered my first Strat-o-Matic set when I was in college, but didn’t get really hooked until about a year after college graduation, when I first tried to stop drinking and needed a diversion in the evenings.  The sobriety didn’t stick that first time around, but the love of tabletop-sports did.

That was more than 10 years ago, but today I am sober (19 months now) and I’ve used tabletop gaming and the website specifically as an important tool in my recovery.  I occasionally do write about the process of recovery from alcoholism and offer up my experiences sometimes in a kind of raw way, and, without fail, the feedback I get from those posts is tremendous.

It doesn’t surprise me anymore, but at first I was really surprised at how many of us that have taken to this hobby have struggled with addiction or otherwise had someone else’s struggle affect our lives.  As always, though, this community continues to inspire and encourage me with its collective strength and hope.

TAB:  I enjoy your website, One for Five.   I find something fun and different every time I visit.  You’re either writing about Strat-O-Matic, APBA Soccer or just baseball and soccer in general.  What do you see as the “mission” behind your site?

Paul:  Mission number one is just to provide the kind of site that I would like to visit.  To me, more than anything, this means a site that offers current news about the hobby, as well as – and even more importantly – compelling stories about the games, the sports, the history and the people that are so interesting to us hobbyists that we sit with pen and paper or at our computers for hundreds of hours a year reliving, replaying, and imagining new universes for them.

I think that because I don’t have ulterior motivations – I’m not selling anything, and I don’t allow advertisements on the site – I have the opportunity to just write the stuff I want to read from my honest perspective and hopefully others will be as interested as I am.  As far as I can tell, there isn’t another site quite like oneforfive.com.  The APBA Blog is probably the most analogous site, but the main difference is that The APBA Blog is much more focused.  That’s what all the “how to blog” articles in the world tell you to do, so that’s probably why you’re so much more successful at this than me!

TAB:  What’s your quick review of the APBA Soccer game as it stands now?  I saw you did a review of the pre-play 2012 Champions set between Chelsea and Bayern Munich.  The move to make that a free download had to be a good marketing move on APBA’s part, no?  What improvements need to happen before the next release?

Quick review:

• The initial release was poorly managed (this seems to be a common theme with the APBA Game Company – see also: the initial rollout of the new website, but I digress), but to the company’s credit, most of the initial bugs of the game have been ironed out in the newer card sets, so you have to throw out most of what you find online when reading the early reviews of the game

• It is a very fun game to play once you get the game flow down and work out a good way to flip charts.  I say that because there are a lot of charts and until I photocopied most of them onto 2 regular 8.5″x11″ pages, I could really see how all the chart flipping could be an annoyance.

• If you like cards & dice, there isn’t another soccer game on the market that does the job as well as APBA Soccer.  It has it’s flaws (to be discussed momentarily), but it’s the best C&D soccer game there is.

• The game fills a mid-level realism niche that I was desperately looking for.  The gold standard in soccer realism is a game by Time Travel Games called “Classic Soccer,” but Classic Soccer was too much game for me.  I was looking for a more streamlined game that gave me player cards, a full game experience (ie, not a highlights game) and a complete set of reasonably accurate stats.

• The number one complaint about the game is the lack of individual defense ratings on player cards.  A number of us tinkering with the game have come up with homebrew rules that some of us really like.  I’d encourage others to tinker or to get on the Delphi Forums to see what innovations are popping up.

I follow Major League Soccer here in the US.  I’m a huge fan and watch as much as I can.  After playing the 2010 set and now getting a bunch of games done with the 2011 set, I can tell you there is a significant – exponential, even – improvement in the 2011 cards over the 2010 cards.  Not only do the players and teams seem to have more accurate ratings to my eye, but the player result numbers seem to give a better depiction of player styles (eg I seem to notice that defensive midfielders have more PRN results in the 30s than a holding mid, for instance).
If this evolution just from one year to the next is any indication, I have a good feeling about the future of the game.

TAB:  You have really been one of the champions of the APBA Soccer Game while still being open about its initial flaws.  You have organized one of the first known leagues in existence.  The APBA Company has to like that kind of exposure for its relatively new product, right? 

Paul:  I hope so, I don’t know.  I’ve spoken with John Herson personally just once, when I called him.  He graciously granted me a long and forthright interview, but I never published it on the site because the timing wasn’t right.  The APBA Blog had just published an interview with him, and I didn’t feel there was enough new or juicy information in mine that was worth another whole interview being published online.

TAB:  Finally just to stir the pot, what prompted you to choose Strat-O-Matic over APBA Baseball?

Paul:  It wasn’t a conscious decision – meaning I never weighed the pros and cons of the two games against each other.  I may have heard of APBA by the time I bought my first Strat-o-Matic baseball set, but Strat was the game that I had pined for as a kid reading those Street & Smith’s baseball guides.  I ordered my first APBA Baseball set just today, actually, just to give the game a try and see what I may have been missing.  I have so many Strat sets now, however, that I bet I could never buy another card set again and still be set for life.  So it isn’t likely that I’ll be jumping ship to the APBA side, but you never know.

Thanks to Paul Dylan for doing the interview.  His website is Oneforfive.com and you can find him on Twitter @heyblue.