It’s another new year, and I am once again asking, in one form or another, the same question I’ve asked myself in January for several years now: Why am I here? Why do I want to be here, writing about roleplaying games? Now, I’m not asking this question because the spark is gone or it feels futile (it does some of the time, but hell if that’s going to stop me). Instead, I’m checking in on myself. What am I trying to do? Am I succeeding in that?

This year, I’m also asking: Why are you here? I don’t necessarily mean at this site specifically, but why are you reading about RPGs online? More specifically, why are you reading RPG reviews? I know for a fact that the reason many go to read reviews is not exactly aligned with the reason I write them, and that’s likely why I felt the need to discuss the intent of RPG reviews.

Let’s set the stage a bit. Hundreds of games are being released every month if not every week, and no one is going to be able to read them all. If you’ve already heard about a game (hell, if I’ve already heard about a game most of the time), it’s probably already sold enough copies to prove out some basic competence (no hype train in the world will forgive a lack of basic competence). And indeed, when I think back to all the games I’ve reviewed, even ones I strongly disliked, they were all at least competent.

If we can presume competence from a game, then we’re really looking into matters of taste. How is this game using mechanics? How does this game reflect its genre? Am I playing this game from a more narrative or a more mechanical perspective? But here’s where it gets complicated. There is a yawning gap between explaining the fundamentals of a game and actually digging into what the game does. While playing a game can help bridge the gap, it is neither necessary nor even the best way to do so. But, regardless of how you intend to frame a game and evaluate its merits, you need to start by deciding what question you want answered. As a reader, you likely know what question you’re trying to answer, but as a writer, I have a decision to make.

Should you buy this game?

We’ve discussed the many ways to approach the RPG hobby before; you can be a reader or a collector or a player, but both reader and collector are easier and frankly more common. And because of that, the question of ‘should you buy this game’ is a place where reviews can get trapped. What makes this trap worse, of course, is that at the end of the day the goal of marketing a game is to get it purchased. Not played, not interpreted, not even read, just purchased. As such, there’s a huge market for people who will say positive and credible things about games in order to market them. Does it matter how the game plays? Not particularly. Does it matter how it reads? Maybe. Does it matter how it looks? Yeah, especially if you’re on YouTube. In order to review a game to make someone buy it, all you really need to do is show the audience that it’s pretty, that it has some interesting ideas or themes, and that it would look slick as hell on a coffee table.

To be clear, these ‘unboxing’ style reviews are the type that most angry posters on r/RPG are complaining about when they’re complaining about reviewing games without playing them. They are not being marketed to. To be blunt, this is intentional. RPG discourse has been synonymous with flame wars for decades, and when it comes to marketing, you don’t want to pay people to have strong opinions. That way lies madness. That does mean that the majority of high quality reviews come from people who just review things because they’re interested in doing so. It also tends to mean the most insightful reviews will never, ever make any money.

Should you play this game?

The RPG hobby is focused around play because we’re talking about games; a game is most valuable in play even if it has value outside of it as well. But when it comes to writing a useful review recommending games to play, that’s more difficult than it sounds. For one thing, games fit into a group’s play experience, not create it. That means that unless you play like me and prefer mechanical engagement, narrative engagement, and minimal combat, none of my play recommendations are going to matter for you. I like Twilight:2000 not because the combat is particularly well designed (it is, mind you), but because the violence level is such that if you care about your characters in play the first combat will scare the living crap out of you. That is an awesome thing in a game to me, but it will also make virtually every D&D player in the world unhappy. Cyberpunk Red is another example of play style differences, because it immediately divided the entire Cyberpunk fandom into those who loved how refined and forgiving the mechanics were (and play Red) and those who loathed the absence of chaos that they saw as a fundamental part of the game (and stick with 2020). My only personal claim to reviewing and assessing these games any better than anyone else is that I’ve played both and see both sides of the argument.

As far as new games, it’s hard to make a recommendation that you play them unless the game is doing something new that the reviewer thinks you really should check out. The frank truth is that, no matter what game I’m reviewing, the reader will either a) have more fun with less work with a game that they already know how to play or b) derive entertainment from novelty and is going to go read the game anyway unless I say it’s garbage. To the degree that I have ever gotten someone to play a game that they wouldn’t have otherwise, it’s either because they had never heard of it before seeing it on this website or it’s because I made a very specific claim about what the game actually does.

What does this game do?

What a game actually does is where I try to aim essentially all of my reviews. This is where many will say you need to have played the game to make an accurate assessment of what the game does, but that’s not true in most cases and in the cases it is you can either figure it out from reading or not bother reviewing the game. And let me be clear about not bothering to review a game: Any game complex enough that reviewing its maximalist bird’s nest of character options is a prerequisite to giving the game a fair shake is a no from me. First of all, as I’ve said in the past, I don’t think they’re designed that well and I don’t think the type of play that a super option-heavy system encourages is really best suited for RPGs. And do keep in mind I’m talking about options, not lists: Burning Wheel has lists, it has altogether too many skills and lifepaths but they’re lists that form singular mechanics. Exalted has options, and the correct recommendation for the vast majority of gamers can be gleaned after reading a single charm tree: “That’s a no for me.” If the fun of a game comes solely from delineated combat or quantitative optimization of character options, it would be better as a skirmish game and is likely worse off as an RPG.

Clearly, given one example I’ve already mentioned, there are big, chunky RPGs that are worthy of the form and still can’t be adequately reviewed without understanding them through play. That’s true, and it’s why I didn’t review Burning Wheel before playing it. But those games are the exception rather than the rule, and the number of games you need to play or run before you get a good idea of what you’re reading is, while not “small”, hardly unattainable. I’ve played and/or ran somewhere between 60 and 80 multi-session games (and at least that many one-shots), and very, very little in the hobby will truly surprise me at that number. Part of this is simply the sort of thinking you need to do to answer the question ‘what does this game do’. Dice mechanics, sure, but what you’re looking at is what levers players are being given to pull, what levers GMs are being given to pull, and then what happens when those are all being pulled at the same time. In terms of the mechanics, that’s math, but in terms of what the math does that’s play experience, and preferably play experience with a lot of games that are in the same general orbit. How else would you know what differences are actually important?

What a game does is where you inevitably have to cross from evaluating a game to commentating about it. I’ve now made it clear on two occasions how strongly I dislike the Fallout RPG, but at the same time I don’t doubt most groups would be able to have fun with it, potential messes with the ammo rules notwithstanding. Still, as much as the game is serviceable I still stand behind my vitriol; it’s a cynically made license vehicle that adds nothing to the hobby. But that viewpoint isn’t going to come from how it uses the 2d20 mechanics or how balanced the stat blocks are. In my view, at least, the crux of a review is really going to come down to why the game matters, why it’s important.

Why is this game important?

In a way, asking why a game is important probably explains why I keep self-flagellating with all the licensed game reviews. Licensed games continue to be one of the most significant opportunities to open the gates of the hobby to new people, and they pretty much all miss the mark. You have big extravaganzas like Avatar Legends which, in addition to being middling or passable games at best, fail to actually translate their momentum into something bigger. You have smaller games like Cowboy Bebop which are new and innovative, but honestly miss in terms of having widespread appeal (as much as the game could be an excellent companion piece, it’s just too different). As much as I keep shaking my head at all these licensed games, they still make a very easy case for what their significance could be.

Cannibal Halfling Gaming started in December of 2016. During our first year, Blades in the Dark was released. Blades in the Dark did something that up until that point I had only seen retrospectively: It kicked off a new wave of RPG designs. That said, it’s much easier to see these things retrospectively; none of us ever reviewed Blades in the Dark, even after playing it a bit with our main group.

I don’t mean to say that I’m even trying to identify the next big thing in RPGs when I’m considering a game’s importance as part of a review. But I am looking for new things, different things. I keep looking for games that do something I haven’t done before, and that’s hard to find. I make no apologies about playing and enjoying Mork Borg and Mothership, but they’re both solid examples of games which do very little new. They do what they do very well, but they are firmly entrenched in derivations of games from the past.

And that brings up the other consideration of this whole to-do about ‘importance’. What, really, is important about any of these games? Does there need to be more going on than something that’s well put together and fun to play with your friends? After all, the vast majority of this hobby is Dungeons and Dragons, and it seems lost on most people that there’s much if anything to talk about around all the other games out there that no one really plays. While I’m clearly being hyperbolic, this is probably one of the main issues with the hobby that drives me: We’d have a lot more gamers if people understood how broad the hobby could be. In a lot of ways, that is starting to happen, and I’m trying to push that boulder up that hill just as hard as anyone else. So that shows what games are important to me: Games that let more people in. Yes, that means games with licenses that hold recognizable appeal. It also means games that are defined by something other than lining up rooms of ‘monsters’ to murder in order to gain XP so you can murder more ‘monsters’ more efficiently. And it also means games that let you play in ways that perhaps you didn’t know you could play.

We missed Blades in the Dark, we aren’t prophets in this space. That said, I know what’s important to me in games. It’s important to me to see designers taking new approaches and trying new things. It’s important to me to see games which are engaging new fans and engaging them in new ways. And, admittedly, it’s important to me to see games which I want to play, but especially if I didn’t know I wanted to play them before they existed. It’s why I find new weird narrative games important, as well as interesting licenses. It’s why I can’t find it in myself to give a damn about insular, complex games, especially when their fanbase howls at any nod towards accessibility (looking at you, Shadowrun). And it’s why I’ll always be perpetually conflicted about Dungeons and Dragons. It is the large, shining gate into this hobby, and it’s also an ouroboros, both the setting and mechanics defined by constant rumination and re-digestion. In reading about the new rulebook trio that’s still in the process of release as of this writing, I know that they will drive the hobby, at least for the next few years. But at this point, the only thing of importance to those who steer the D&D ship is money, and as a reviewer that’s not a game I’m going to play.

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Intent in writing was something that was in theory taught to us in middle school and high school English class, though after nearly 15 years of writing professionally I have to say it wasn’t taught very well. We’re told to know our audience and to craft our thesis statement, but the intent of writing assignments is usually to get a good grade. The intent of an RPG review, at least in my mind, is to tell the reader if the game is going to fit into the time they spend with games, whether that be time spent reading, playing, or prepping. Because I can’t know the preferences and biases of every reader I instead have to know the preferences and biases of myself, know if the game is meant for me and if it’s going to work for me. In some places, I can identify good work while not having any interest in the game. In others, I can find a game that was pointed right at me but missed the mark. But no matter how things line up, once you get to the bottom of the article all you end up getting is my perspective. That means my intent, ultimately, is to take my time, my experience, my opinions, and my ability to communicate, and turn all of those things into something interesting, useful, and maybe even fun. It’s not simple, there’s no formula. But if games keep on inspiring me to crank out essays, and people keep reading them, then maybe my intent is better aligned than I thought.

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