Fub-log

With August now over, it’s time for the last catch-up for RPGaDAY!

#29: Evolve
I think RPGs as a field are evolving, in quick spurts followed by slower growth. Every so often, something comes along that shifts perceptions of what RPGs are, should or could be. And while not every change fills me with excitement, I’m pretty sure someone, somewhere, is getting all fired up about it.
The first shift that I saw (consciously) was the OGL: Wizards of the Coast basically open-sourcing the basic rules of the 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. Suddenly, everyone could make an RPG or even a smaller ‘plug-in’ for a very large body of existing work. And a lot of people did — not all of the resulting ‘glut’ was good, but it did enable a few experiments and launched quite a few game lines.
And now it’s an accepted practice to describe the design of your ruleset and to make that available to anyone who wants to use it in their own game. It’s not like game rules are copyrightable anyway, but having this as an accepted practice makes it possible to try out new RPGs without having to learn new rulesets. If you know how the playbook construction of Apocalypse World works, then you can play any ‘Powered by the Apocalypse’ game without too many troubles.
I think that has also made it a lot easier to experiment with all kinds of games: the rigorous testing of the rulesets has already been done, so the designer can concentrate on genre and tone. For pretty much every genre, there is a PbtA game — maybe not quite to your taste, but you can easily mix and match because the underlying rules are similar!
And this variety means people who do not like fantasy or the way D&D does it, can try out a few things and find the game that’s right for them. And who knows, maybe they will design their own game at a point in the future, meaning an even more richer landscape of RPGs!

#30: Connection
Playing RPGs has allowed me to make some of the strongest connections as an adult.
It’s hard to make new friends as an adult: it’s almost impossible to just ‘hang out’, since everyone is under the obligations of work and family. But finding a group that ‘clicks’ allows for a rapid accumulation of shared experiences (even if those experiences are in-game). I’ve had some bad experiences gaming with people I don’t know, so I’m hesitant to just jump into any game with anybody. But if you sort-of know some people that you think are cool, then gaming is certainly a good way to get to know each other better.

#31: Last
Last…
read: Robotech: A Macross Saga RPG. It wasn’t good, unfortunately.
purchase: Fate Accessibility Toolkit. Making gaming more accessible to everyone who is not an able-bodied cisgendered heterosexual white man is the most important push for RPGs into the future.
session: Blades in the Dark. Our crew of drugdealers have transformed into a crew of strong-arm thieves — but the ill-advised plans remain!

#26: Idea
All RPG games are about something, but most of them are bad at communicating what it is that the characters do, and how that affects their world(s). You should look at the XP mechanisms: what character behaviour is rewarded? D&D says it’s about roleplaying and exploration, but the XP systems tell you that it’s killing things is what you will be doing. You’ve seen me use the term “murder-hobo” a few times, and it’s no coincidence that this mode of play is strongly associated with D&D.
What the game is about is seldomly communicated clearly. Which is why I really like the introduction to Blades in the Dark, because it is quite explicit in the goal of the game:

We play to find out if the fledgling crew can thrive amidst the teeming threats of rival gangs, powerful noble families, vengeful ghosts, the Bluecoats of the City Watch, and the siren song of the scoundrels’ own vices.

This tells you everything you need to know to play a scoundrel in BitD: this is the kind of stories you’ll be creating, right on the first page. It gives a very clear vision of the Idea of the RPG. Having this vision so clear makes it easier to design systems that support that kind of play, which is why BitD has a very tight system. And as a player, it’s also really easy if this idea appeals to you, too!

27: Suspense
It’s hard for me to feel suspense during a session, since I always have some kind of detachment from my character. I’m not a method-actor — it’s more like I have a mental model of the character, and examine that to decide how the character would react in a given situation. I am certainly not my character, so my character might be in suspense, but I hardly am.
And most RPGs make it hard for a character to die, because players hate losing a character that they have invested so much into. So even during fights, there is very little suspense. Yes, there are RPGs where characters drop like flies, such as Dungeon Crawl Classic’s funnel adventures, but there a character can be made in minutes, and you’re not supposed to feel any attachment to the character until they have survived their first adventure.

#28: Love
Romance can be a powerful motivator, but the transient nature of most character groups (see: murder-hobo) does not really make it easy for a character to develop a strong attachment to an NPC. Games that have a more political side, where characters have their own bases that they can return to easily, then a long-term relationship becomes more feasible.
My characters rarely have romantic entanglements, but that one time in Astrid’s Amber Campaign, where my character was flirting with the crown princess of a Shadow who was actually betrothed to someone else, I really enjoyed it. Maybe I should take a look at the games that are on my ‘to do’-list and see if I can introduce an aspect of romance in there.

#25: Calamity
Calamities feature heavily in RPGs: if you’re going to have an epic adventure, better make the stakes big, right?

In the ‘murder-hobo’ mode of adventuring, it could be argued that the adventuring party is the calamity: monsters are just going about their business, getting by in their various ways, and then this party shows up and starts indiscriminately killing everyone. Especially if the adventure features tribes of sentients (like goblins and orcs), this has gotten a (deservedly) bad aftertaste of colonialism and racism. (POCGamer has a good overview of colonialism in D&D.)

There is another mode of adventuring, where the party is part of established society, but a group of evil-doers are preparing to overthrow the status quo in some kind of calamitous way, and (often) going about this in a ruthless, haphazardly way. This means that the characters are not the movers and shakers in the setting: they are merely reacting to what the ‘evil’ group is doing. One could argue that the group are the actual protagonists, and the party are simply antagonists that try to prevent something from happening. It’s interesting to see that almost all ‘evil’ groups are indeed, actively evil and ruthless, casting the adventuring party as the agents of good and reason. I’ve hardly ever seen a scenario where the group scheming to overthrow the status quo are actually trying to make things better for everyone — overthrowing an oppressive regime, for instance.

And then there are the natural disasters. Mostly these happened in the past, and serve to explain why a town or castle is abandoned — often as a prelude for the ‘monstrous’ species to make their home there, before the adventuring party goes in and kills ’em all… I don’t think I’ve ever seen a natural calamity occur ‘in-game’. Would it be fun to play a group of adventurers trying to evacuate a bunch of people out of a village, in time before the volcano erupts? There might be a Ryuutama scenario in there somewhere, with some hard choices as to what you can take with you and what you have to leave behind to become prey to the lava…

I’m sorry for lagging behind so much, but that new Zelda game is not going to play itself!

#22: Lost
This makes me think of rupertdaily, an erstwhile friend, whom I introduced to RPGs and who died eight years ago. Through an auction, I got all of his Rolemaster stuff — Rolemaster being his first RPG (as it was mine, four years before I met him). I’ll never get to play with him again, which sometimes feels like a lost opportunity.

#23: Surprise!!!
Ambushes are a big part of combat in RPGs. One way to make sure you survive insurmountable odds is to even the odds a bit by getting the drop on the opposition! Often, this means that the group doing the surprising gets to make their attacks before the other side can get their attacks in. And from then on, it’s just the usual initiative rounds.
The most interesting rule for initiative I’ve ever seen is in the Genesys ruleset (which is also used in the FFG Star Wars games), where you roll for a different skill depending on whether you expect a fight to break out, or not. I’ve never seen that anywhere, and I’m not so sure it makes sense: wouldn’t you expect the fight to continue after the first round, and thus react with the other stat in case of an ambush?

#24: Triumph
To me, a good session is when the characters have some kind of triumph. This doesn’t have to mean that everything goes their way (in fact, I’d argue that the fiction generated is more interesting when that does not happen), but some succesfull skill checks or a turn of the story is part of what keeps me coming back to a game. I want to feel like my character is making a difference, as if it matters what they are doing, and that they are succeeding in making progress, in whatever big or small way.
If I’d want an endless, hopeless slog without any ray of light, I’d go to my job. 😉

As a reminder, here’s the list of prompts!