Usually we keep any mention of the Wider TTRPG Discourse to the Discussions section of the Weekend Update, but there’s an exception to everything. Supposedly Matt Colville said some things on a stream earlier this week? I’m sure he did, the man’s got a lot to talk about, he’s got a Kickstarter going on that I’m sure Aaron will talk more about in January’s Crowdfunding Carnival. Of course then the topic got sucked into the ouroboros of social media, starting with Twitter’s rotting alive husk, and do you think anyone is providing any links to said stream? No, of course not. Doesn’t matter, though, because The Discourse spins on, and its latest incarnation is, broadly, this:

Reviewing a game after reading it versus reviewing a game after playing it.

Oh. Oh wow. Are… are we The Discourse?

Alright, real talk, this is a thing and has been a thing for a long time and will continue to be A Thing long after it’s the topic de la semaine, but it’s making the rounds and it’s rare that what we’d link in the Update is about, however distantly, us. We review games all the time! Sometimes we review games we’ve read. Sometimes we review games we’ve played. Sometimes we review games we’ve read, eventually go play them, and then swing back around for another crack at it. Sometimes we just play them, and that is the review. Now, I could hop into the witness stand and purely defend what we do here, but that’s boring, and besides there’s a good chance that if you’re reading this I’m preaching to the choir. Instead, what I’d like to do is examine Reviewing A Game As A Product and Reviewing A Game As An Experience.

And then, yeah, engage in a little social commentary, because why not, everyone’s doing it.

Reviewing A Game As A Product 

The Reddit incarnation of this discourse actually links to a pretty neat post which I think is worth a look because it draws a line between reviewers as examiners/QA of a product and actual players as the end users of a product.

Personally I like the TTRPG Book As Cookbook analogy because I also happen to like reading cookbooks, and for pretty much the same reason: even if it’s not something I’m going to play/make any time soon, it gets my brain whirring a bit about possibilities. That’s one of the enjoyable aspects of reading RPGs in the first place, even if you’re not reviewing them. It’s not a perfect analogy, obviously; a published recipe almost certainly got workshopped and made and eaten by the person writing it, whereas with a game you might have no idea what degree of playtesting was done. Recipes also don’t tend to make allowances for someone other than the person who picked it out dumping a pound of paprika in all of a sudden, or getting feedback from whoever it is getting fed to while they’re eating but also while you’re still making it, and they also don’t have a step for Do Whatever You Want, It’s Your Recipe Now, Improv!

That being said: ‘just’ reading an RPG is like reading a recipe with an eye towards technical aspects: you can’t strictly tell what it’ll taste like, but there’s still a lot of good information you can glean. You can talk about art and layout and editing and basic ease of understanding to a degree that won’t much be changed by playing the game. As for mechanics, if you’re familiar with recipes in general and the ingredients involved you can talk a lot about what’s going on. Is there anything new and exciting being done? You can use what similarly-designed recipes tasted like as a basis for comparison, and posit on what alterations might do for the experience.  What makes you want to play it, and why would you recommend at least taking a look at it to others?

So, how do you trust a reviewer who hasn’t played a game? Because I’d also like to think I’m writing this for both sides of the discourse, how do you establish that trust? If you yourself want to review a game, how do you get good?

Well the secret to success is honestly the same one for improving your ability to play games, run games, or design games: consume more media. The more games a reviewer has read (and, yes, played) then the broader and deeper their experience is with what works, and how things work, and how things will work. Not for nothing, but we just got the happy anniversary message for CHG’s 7th year, and I was writing with the Mad Adventurers Society for two years before that. Between our three regulars and the various folk we’ve been blessed to have had to write and play with us, there are decades of experience reading, running, playing, and even designing tabletop roleplaying games behind what we do. I don’t think you need to be anywhere near as crazy as we are to have been at this so long in order to establish trust, but the point remains: consume more media, and you become more media literate.

There’s also the fact that vibe-check level stuff of ‘hey, this is cool’ and ‘hey, this is maybe not so cool’ don’t take all that much. While I respect dedication to the craft, you don’t actually need to eat the tuna salad jello or a chocolate covered banana dipped in spicy mustard to know that the recipe you’re reading is a daft idea, and we don’t need to have played Power Rangers to know that it’s a little weird that they included rules for your Rangers getting tetanus. If you want examples of us going ‘hey, this is cool’ I invite you to search the ‘review’ and ‘opinion’ tags. That last one is important, though, because everyone needs to remember that this is all quite subjective. What works for one reader or group may not work out at all for a different reader or group. In my opinion the point of reviews in the first place, at least when they’re not right on the game’s page, is simply to prove to a consumer of that review that the subject matter is worth taking a further look at. Not that different from talking about games around the table or on a discord server, really.

Oh, there’s one more aspect of reviewing a game as a product that might be important – sometimes you’re going to read something, and you’re going to know that whatever else you have to say on the matter, you’re going to need to play it to truly get it. A great example of that happening to us is Cowboy Bebop, which we did in fact go play after Aaron reviewed it. Speaking of which, it’s right about time for-

Reviewing A Game As An Experience

The fact is that, aside from lyric games which lean heavily into the games-as-art section of the industry’s venn diagram, most games are meant to be played. By yourself or with a group, for a single session or for a years-long campaign, on a table digital or physical, doesn’t matter – the intent of the designer is that it gets played by someone somewhere somehow, and that necessarily shapes the course of design. You may enjoy collecting them, you may enjoy reading them (and the writers should make sure you can), but the goal is table time. So, what does playing a game and then reviewing it offer that just reviewing it as a product can’t?

To go back to the cookbook, you can talk about what it tasted like. You can discuss the experience of actually making it, you can point out that the prep time estimate was completely and ridiculously incorrect. You can, and this might be the most important, say whether or not you’d like to make it again. 

Playtesting PLANET FIST told me the base mechanics behind FIST would work great, and further made it clear that getting blasted into nano-flavored chunky salsa in PF itself would be a positive experience. Actually playing DIE told us that it was one of the deepest, most meaningful experiences we’d ever had at the table. Star Trek Adventures told us that we didn’t care about how slow advancement was and we loved our Supporting characters as much if not more than the main ones. Playing taught us that there were some things about Eclipse Phase that were frustrating once you got it to the table, and that Cowboy Bebop actually sings pretty well once it’s playing (you’ll be hearing that soon). We learned that Torchbearer gets you old school vibes without wargaming cruft, that Burning Wheel is challenging by design but could use a bit more advice, and that we’d play The Veil again but probably do things a little differently. Every Solitaire Storytelling and Adventure Log had something to teach us that we might never have come across if we didn’t actually play some darn games.

These are lessons and knowledge that we couldn’t pass on to readers by simply reading the game ourselves, and so the strength of reviewing as an experience is as obvious as the weakness of reviewing as a product. However, reviewing a game through the lens of actually having played it does introduce its own weakness, although it comes in the form of a caveat: it is even more subjective than reviewing a game by reading it.

Actually playing a game introduces an entire host of factors that cannot be replicated in any way. Who was running it? Who was playing it? What’s the table dynamic like? What were the characters like? What choices were made? How did the dice roll? How was everyone feeling on that particular day?

When I went on to help playtest PLANET CIS I wound up playing with someone else who’d playtested PLANET FIST, and our time on Sixaura down to which stats we struggled with was completely different. You might play Eclipse Phase or Torchbearer or Burning Wheel or The Veil and have completely different experiences than we did. When I was writing about Star Trek Adventures I pointed out that I was deeply underwhelmed by how much Threat was generated during play, but go listen to or watch other actual plays of the game and there’s Threat flying about all over the place. Plus, many STA groups will make the objectively wrong choice, and not have a Klingon Ship’s Counselor (Lower Decks even proves me right on this one in Season 4). You can’t replicate Aaron, Aki, Geni, and myself building DIE characters together nor Geni emotionally bodying the GM during the final conflict. We couldn’t even replicate those circumstances and moments ourselves, and I know that for a fact because we pretty much tried, and that doesn’t even count how different things went with a different group during the beach weekend!

Does that mean that actual play reviews aren’t useful, or less useful? Stars, no, that would be the craziest of takes. But again: this is all subjective, these are all opinions, and while some might explain even an actual play review as an attempt to convince you to spend money, in my own heart of hearts both kinds of reviews could be translated as ‘hey, here’s this thing, I think you’ll like it.’

Conclusions and Commentary

Alright, now it’s time for the soapbox. It’s a two-parter.

First, and specifically about small and indie creators, it is becoming increasingly hard for a game that doesn’t have a megacorp behind it to let potential players know it exists. Time, also, is precious, and at least around here nobody is making a living reviewing elf games. I have a full time job and two children, there is only so much time and if I had to play a full campaign of everything to gain permission to even type a blurb about a game then nothing would ever get written. That means fewer eyes getting to see those games, and there are so many examples where that would be a shame. Even one person finding out about a game can make a difference, even if it’s only to that one person, and a review can even simply serve to tell a creator that their efforts have been seen. If reviewing a game as a product, covering it on a technical level, is what can be deployed to make that a little easier, so be it. Then you play what you can, and so much the better.

(There is also, to be honest, a freedom in knowing we’ll never make even a part of a living off of this, and having no desire to do so. I think some outfits may have a stronger temptation to fall into this next trap if rent is on the line.)

Second, I’m willing to bet that part of the issue that sparked this iteration of the discourse is content creators/reviewers on the tubes and the toks and what not. Even if I shake off the mantle of old man, I’m willing to bet more serious money that the source is negative reviews regardless of medium. The sad fact of the matter is that the creators of the dark art of algorithmancy care most of all about clicks, and like using the Force the swifter and easier way to gain clicks is through anger and hatred. “The Dragon Game Is Dead!!!!”, “This Game Ruined My Group’s Night”, “Why Indie Games Suck”, they get people clicking, either because they too hate whatever it is you’re hating on or because they like it and get riled up. How much more galling must it be, for a negative review of your game to have no actual play experience behind it? A lot!

I’m not going to change the course of society, here, but I can’t resist the urge to make a plea – if you’re going to review a game as an experience, and especially if you’re going to review a game as a product, don’t waste your time or your audience’s by doing so just to dunk on something. Don’t read or watch something just because it has a clickbaity hate title. We haven’t always succeeded, we’ve committed some algorithmic sins of our own over the years, but this is why we try to make sure that the lion’s share of what we’re writing and talking about is things we genuinely enjoy and want to share with others.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be critical and point out where things don’t work, or discuss things you don’t personally like and why, or investigate bad game design to learn from it. I’m saying that, just like a designer needs to answer the question of why they are making the game in the first place, a reviewer needs to answer why they’re reviewing it. I know what mine is.

Hey, here’s this thing, I think you’ll like it.