This is my eighth year of writing for Cannibal Halfling Gaming. On one hand, everything I’ve done here has blown up beyond my wildest expectations; the quantity, quality, and audience of my writing are all better than I could have imagined back in 2016 when I asked Seamus to join his project. At the same time, though, the journey often comes with the feeling that we still aren’t doing anything of the scale or ambition to be worthwhile. Some of this is just imposter syndrome, to be clear. Some of it, though, is borne from frustrations that come with being a content creator for a niche hobby and insisting on using the written word to do it.

As Seamus spoke about recently in The Trouble With Reviewing RPGs, there are limits to what we can do on our budget of approximately nothing; we both have full-time jobs and writing for a site like this must be fun and/or fulfilling even before it is useful if we’re to continue doing it. At the same time, there are things we have to say, and having no budget also means we aren’t beholden to anyone. Things are changing, though; we’re changing. When I wrote that very first article about PbtA I was 29 years old; I’m 36 now. That is a huge step away from the core audience of tabletop RPGs, and as our entire millennial generation now sits above the first standard deviation of age for a gamer we need to think long and hard about our continued relevance (or inevitable descent into grognardism).

Despite advancing age, growing children, and busier careers, we do still have things to say about these games we love. And after over seven years of seeing the market change, I like to think I have a worthwhile perspective on the whole thing. At the same time, a lot of the laser focus on reviews and game material often misses the point. A role-playing game is a bit of alchemy between game documents and the group using them, where the brew changes with every additional session. We can review games, we can attempt to critique them on reaching their intended purposes, and we can reflect on our own subjective play experiences. What we can say about any game as a whole, though, requires all three.

My 2023 in gaming provides two illustrative experiences which have very different things to say about the relationship between player, game, and reviewer. First, we’ve been playing Legend of the Five Rings this year. The campaign has been fantastic, the GM has been both fastidious in tracking all of the characters in our court drama as well as immensely creative in his prep and improv. It is one of the group’s best long-running campaigns. I begin with this because I also can’t stand the game. It has brute-force worldbuilding that befits the trading card game it started as, horrifically deterministic social mechanics that we wholesale abandoned after trying to use them, and an approach to character building that so irked me that my experiences with the game inspired The Maximalist Fallacy. Combine that with a dice mechanic that’s even more nakedly designed for selling dice than Genesys and I don’t think I’ve been as annoyed at a game since the last time I played Exalted.

And that’s kind of my point. This campaign has been fantastic, I love how my character has developed. I will never play Legend of the Five Rings again. These two things aren’t mutually exclusive, obviously, but this is probably one of the most illustrative games for it in my personal history. When we played FFG Star Wars I was lukewarm on first read but came around on the system. When we played Exalted and Shadowrun, the games being barely playable was recognized by everyone at the table and became part of the campaign’s, er, charm. With L5R though? Everything works well enough. I just don’t like the world and think the social mechanics deserved to die back in the 90s and be replaced by something actually useful.

In contrast, sort of, was Cyberpunk Red. Like L5R, the campaign we’ve been playing in Cyberpunk Red has been great. The flip side, here, is how I’ve thought about the system. My thoughts on Red have continued to evolve as I’ve run the Jumpstart Kit, reviewed the core rules, run a campaign, and now finally am a player. Some of what I observe with the system hasn’t changed, but other parts certainly have. The most common criticism leveled at Cyberpunk Red (save the layout, which is a bit unfair when you consider where D&D is at in that respect) is about combat, and how combat has changed from Cyberpunk 2020. I think across most things, an easy response to observations about the game is ‘this isn’t Cyberpunk 2020’. That said, my opinion on the combat changed after being a player, especially under a GM who runs a lot more combat than I tend to. Cyberpunk Red combat is different than 2020, for sure, but I’ve come to appreciate how it expands the space in which a combat exists without giving up much of the tension that existed in 2020. Both Cyberpunk games are best run by GMs who have attention to detail; Seamus made the combats interesting not by gun porn but by adding things like having the characters have to roll out of bed unarmored, or use theatrical lighting to aid in their escape, or have a man-to-man (more accurately, clown-to-clown – Ed.) judo fight in a collapsing circus tent (yes, circus tent). Giving the tension of combat more space is a different design goal than lethality, and it makes more sense on a transmedia level where this game coexists next to Cyberpunk 2077, another game with significantly less lethality than Cyberpunk 2020. Different isn’t bad, and I’ve been more able to appreciate that with more direct experience.

Beyond home group play, the most effective (but most intensive) way of actually experiencing a game, I have had a lot to reflect on this year when it comes to reviewing games and what we can actually say about a game from just reading it. My overriding opinion on this is one that many people don’t like hearing, but I do believe it’s true: Most games don’t have anything to them that you can’t just pick up from reading. This is borne from experience, decades of reading and playing games, but also from opinion, the opinion that the sort of details of individual game options, abilities, spells and other singular bits of tech just don’t really matter. When reviewing Shadowrun, it matters to discuss Edge and how its role has expanded in Sixth World; that’s a massive change to the underlying mechanics of the game. Talking about individual spells or adept abilities, though? Meh. There are too many of them, and if you’re the type of person who has opinions at that granular level, you don’t need my review anyway (and you already decided you hated Sixth World, because that’s what most existing Shadowrun players did).

The games that are more than the sum of their parts also jump off the page in that way. That’s what happened with DIE. On first read it becomes clear that the game is trying to do something very different, and you aren’t exactly sure how it’s going to work. That’s why the very first thing we did with DIE, before attempting a review or anything else, was the Actual Play. Even compared to Cowboy Bebop, another game where I conceded that I didn’t know it would work as well as it read, DIE has more going on than reading it implies. As we discovered after more play and more consideration that swings both positive and negative, but there was certainly something there to dig into.

Cowboy Bebop, in contrast, did not end up surprising. Our Actual Play for the game will come out soon, but after running it a few times I’m fairly satisfied that it runs the way I thought it would. There were some annoyances (naming all the approaches after musical genres is much more confusing in play than it is in the book), and I could stand to test some of the campaign-arc mechanics a little more, but despite playing very differently than many games it still managed to present itself effectively upon reading.

I generally find that those who truly have trouble with my reviews, beyond the ossified neckbeards who loathe dissenting opinions, are those who are looking for something very different in how they judge RPGs. I’ve been gaming for a long time, and I consider a lot of styles of play, especially the wargame/physics-engine type of game that is now fifty years old, to be essentially a solved problem. We don’t wonder what’s missing from D&D, we know what’s missing from D&D. The tension between detail and ease of play is well understood, and for the most part every game within that paradigm has its own approach to threading that needle. This isn’t to say that games can’t improve, and there have been incremental improvements in the trad space recently (sometimes big ones). But when Reddit hosts semi-frequent threads on ‘Which is better, 1d20 or 3d6’, you can be excused for thinking that the majority of the readership isn’t particularly interested in the long view.

This is where I worry about my age coloring opinions. It’s easy to characterize Fifth Edition D&D as an ‘Eternal September’ moment; we haven’t had as large an influx of new players into the hobby since the 1980s. And, after the Red Box came out in 1981, all of the wargamers were treating that as an ‘Eternal September’ moment (other than the fact that ‘Eternal September’ would be coined over a decade later, but I digress). The thing is, though (and I’m saying this as much for myself as any reader), we can’t treat growth as a bad thing. The 5e dam is finally breaking, and in the rest of the hobby we need to think about what it means to be positioned to grow. You can sit in your corner and bemoan ‘kids these days’, but no one is going to buy your games if that’s what you’re doing the loudest.

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Ultimately, what I want to say about RPGs is how they’re going to grow and change. That doesn’t mean wasting much wordcount on a specific spell list, or the more different ways you can break a new game. That playstyle has existed since 1974 and guess what, it isn’t changing. It does mean talking about new editions of old games, especially games like Twilight:2000 or Paranoia where the designers are trying to re-interrogate a design that is old enough to have a mortgage. It does mean talking about licensed games, where the relationship between tabletop RPGs and other media is continually evolving (and not always for the better). It of course means talking about new stuff, games which are really trying something different.

It also means critiquing games as an entity. Games can be art, sure, but that may not matter if players see things differently from the designer, or if only thirty people ever see your game. Talking about play and genre requires talking about more than one game to understand how players actually engage, not just with rules but with tropes and storylines as well. Reviews tend not to be critique not because of what the reviewer does to prepare for them, but because games don’t exist in a vacuum. I discussed the macro differences between RPGs and bicycles this year, but there’s one big similarity: they are both the means to an end, they are tools to achieve an experience. Just like how the chainstay length of my Black Mountain Cycles La Cabra isn’t going to create an experience, neither will the hit point count of my Cyberpunk Red character. What I’ll remember will be the Vermont woods and the feeling of a bike laden with camping gear…or the visceral experience of single combat in a collapsing circus tent. And for both RPGs and bicycles, there is never a ‘best’ tool for the job, only things that are done well and poorly. The difference, though, is that while bicycles exist in a world of physics and materials science, RPGs are limited only by imagination. I have about as much interest interrogating the nuances of dice pool statistics as I do comparing 420 and 430 millimeter bicycle chainstays. Someone can be that nerd, but in both cases it isn’t me. On a higher level, though, games are growing, not only in audience but in scope. As commentators we need to both make clear how big the world of games already is and has been, as well as observe and identify how much bigger it’s becoming. This does mean I risk getting left behind; we all do as we grow older and our own preferences crystallize. But as long as we’re aware of that, as long as we’re willing to embrace change, I don’t think any of us will run out of things to say about RPGs.

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