The thing that separates the TTRPG hobby from most others is commitment. The oft-stated platonic ideal of TTRPG gameplay, the long-running campaign, requires you and three to five other people to carve out time on at least a monthly (and preferably more frequent) basis for possibly years in order to play through a game of typical length. Although one-shots certainly exist, as well as con games where you need only bring yourself, fact is that if we talk about how mainstream RPGs are designed, the campaign is how they’re meant to be used. While every hobby improves with time and experience, your bicycle doesn’t care how often you ride it, your skis don’t care how many times you make it to a mountain each winter. Traditional RPGs, typified by D&D but including the vast majority of games published from a sales basis, have entire chapters of rules which are only applicable if you’re playing the game over an extended period of time.

While we’ve talked about the differences between playing games and reading games in the past, that campaign commitment makes a massive difference in how you choose to engage with any given game. As such, what I tend to find among my friends and acquaintances in the hobby is not only that many (most?) of us buy more games than we intend to play, we often end up returning to games that have been on our shelves for years and have already seen hours upon hours of play. With that in mind, I’d like to explore this thought process of which games are actually being brought to the table. For those of us running long campaigns, what games are you choosing? And how, if at all, is the campaign building process linked to the games you’re buying or have recently bought?

Campaign conservatism

Even simply observing buying patterns the hobby appears quite conservative. If it’s all old games that are driving purchases, that effect is likely to be amplified when it comes to what games groups are actually playing; even if a purchase is made with the intent to play, there are other dynamics that come into effect. Within groups, as an example, switching games isn’t necessarily going to happen unless the whole group is on board. If this is keeping swathes of the hobby playing D&D, it’s likely to occur across most mainstream game lines as well. I’ve seen this taking place recently with the release of WFRP 5th Edition. As far as new editions go, WFRP 5e is a relatively incremental step over 4th, and from what I’ve read most of the changes are improvements. Even with those two caveats, though, groups playing 4e aren’t necessarily taking the leap. While small changes may make a new edition more palatable, small changes also may discourage groups from switching as the current version is likely good enough.

If anything, the rate at which groups are switching games is likely overestimated. If your group has found ‘their game’ and is happy to keep playing it, then engaging in the question of switching likely just doesn’t happen. This also means broader social media and discursive engagement is also likely not happening, as there’d be limited utility: If you’ve found the game you want to play and keep playing, then talking to strangers about game design on the internet would have to be its own activity with its own set of incentives. I don’t think I’m being particularly controversial when I say the incentive to engage in RPG discourse online is notably weaker than the incentive to play games. It’s an important consideration, though: When we see social media discourse about new games, how much does that actually reflect the player base?

Social media and the real world

If you are discussing RPGs online writ large, that is to say you’re not on a game-specific forum or subreddit, you’re generally engaging with people who view the hobby as a broader collective as opposed to people who see communities around games and groups of games as more discrete and non-overlapping. You’re also, therefore, engaging with people who are interested in what this collective looks like and how it’s changing. This is important to consider when looking back at your gaming shelf because, in general at least, the segment of the hobby which engages in social media discourse doesn’t necessarily look anything like the hobby in aggregate.

One benchmark, perhaps cliche but broadly easy to prove, is what proportion of hobby discourse is coming from game designers. While I don’t have an exact number, I’d venture that a majority of highly engaged online discourse is coming from game designers, or at least gamers with a minimum of one published product out in the aether. Now, with tens of millions of gamers in North America, it becomes fairly easy to see that the vast majority of gamers are not designers, and just to cover all bases the vast majority of gamers aren’t scholars, critics, or APers either. The point here is less stating what any of these classes of high-engagement individuals do or don’t do, but more that they serve only as indicators for what others who are also fairly high-engagement get out of it.

My observations, though, still apply to high-engagement gamers. Hell, as a high-engagement gamer I can observe how much slower I play games than buy them, and more importantly what the likelihood is that a newly acquired game is even going to make it into my to-play queue. If you are highly engaged in the hobby you want to keep up on what’s going on and what’s changing, and you’re constantly on the lookout for new ideas and new games that will change (and hopefully improve) your play. So while yes, there is a degree of conservatism or reticence, and possibly a large one if your entire group isn’t all swimming in online discourse, there’s also the fact that many things you buy don’t hold up to your campaign standards.

New games face a lot of contradictory demands from the audience. They have to be different enough and interesting enough to differentiate themselves from older (likely more popular) alternatives. At the same time they have to be accessible enough and familiar enough that learning the rules isn’t a huge lift. They have to both support the group and GM with procedures and pre-written material while not demanding that the first purchase be a massive and expensive one. Given that and given the challenge of satisficing, it makes sense that, on average, new games are looking to draw in readers. Readers are less demanding; they want something new and interesting to think about and aren’t as concerned about whether or not the game will make it to the table. For licensed games, it goes further still and even reading the game can be secondary to whether the game is a collectible object (especially a rare collectible object when it comes to whale buyers). And this isn’t even addressing the delicate reality that many games are nowhere as good as their Kickstarter campaigns would have you think; turns out you can be a shit designer and still have enough money to hire Launch Oracle.

I’m trying to be very clear, though, I don’t think the push towards a crowdfunding audience or a reading audience makes games worse. I do think it makes games harder to bring to the table, especially if you’re not already fully invested in a game’s shtick (and assuming that shtick is campaign-length). But ultimately, even if it is in service of running other, different games, reading new games is still going to change what you bring to your table.

Everything still changes

The peculiarity of RPGs over other games is how seemingly little impact the published ‘game’ has on the table experience. Now, there are games that demand you approach them as a cohesive, unitary experience; the DIE RPG and Seven-Part Pact are two recent examples which fall into this category. At the same time, most good generic systems disclaim being a complete game; as I’ve recently gotten back into prepping GURPS I can say confidently there is no single game within the Basic Set. While the OSR is more explicit about this, it’s true across all playstyles: the more you read and the more you play, even short games, the more ideas you will then integrate into your continuing play.

As I noted, I’m prepping GURPS again. It just so happens the setting I’m writing is heavily influenced by Electric Bastionland; there are likely elements of that game, spark tables and map-writing procedures, that I will adapt directly. I’m not playing Electric Bastionland, but the fact that I have played Electric Bastionland before is going to enrich this future game. The same thing happens across a ruleset, be that the early D&D of the OSR or PbtA of some indie segments. Playing multiple games using the same skeleton helps inform how you play additional games.

To that end, it seems there’s perhaps a different question to ask when looking at your gaming shelf besides “are you ever going to play all of those games?” Reading and play are both ways to expand your thinking about games, and every time you plan a new campaign, in a new system or not, all of those thoughts and considerations from your reading will make their way into your planning. The question ends up being simply if you’re having the experiences you want to have. It is worth considering; there are thousands of gamers out there who have found their game and disconnected from the acquisitive loop associated with RPGs. At the same time, if you don’t even want to play a game you’ve read, there are some hard questions to ask about how it’s going to influence the games you do want to play.

All taken together, I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing that sections of your gaming shelf won’t come to the table. The important thing, though, is what you want to do with those games. This is one reason the indie scene has had both a lot of pushback against the notion of the ‘campaign’ being an RPG platonic ideal, and also why solo gaming has been ascendant for so long (first as standalone games and then as rules considerations for other, more flexible games). There are two considerations any gamer needs to make about comparing the games on their shelf with games they can play. First, are you missing opportunities to play? I personally think every gamer (and/or every group) needs to dedicate at least a little time to changing things up. I know my group has benefitted immensely from our annual gaming weekend where we just play one-shots; even if they aren’t always new, they always change the pace from our campaigns and give us something to think about. It’s also here where I can say that if you haven’t at least tried a solo game, you should. It’s not the same as a typical group outing and you may not like it…but you may. At the very least don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it.

The second consideration is how your RPG buying habits line up with your RPG playing habits. If you’re like me, and you really do intend to play most of the games you buy (but buy at a rate faster than you play), consider slowing down. There’s a huge amount of FOMO (deliberately) generated by crowdfunding, but fact is that if the game comes to fruition, it will be available later in a playable form. Annoyance at paying a bit more or only getting a PDF is nothing compared to looking at a crowdfunded game you paid $80 for which, after receiving it, you don’t even think you want. I admittedly purchase a game with the specific intent to play it then and there very rarely, but when I do it’s typically available, typically a reasonable price, and I don’t even have to look at a bunch of confusing campaign tiers to do it.

It’s always a good time to be a bit more mindful of how RPG purchases turn into actual games. Mindfulness may not change your behavior; if you’ve got a comfortable disposable income and games are your primary hobby, go off. That said, purchases do not directly translate into gameplay, and that’s an important consideration when we’re thinking about what we do want to play. To the degree that I do encourage all of you to try games you haven’t before, it’s more so that you all know what’s out there. Ultimately this is a hobby, it’s supposed to be fun. When you’re thinking about how new games impact your fun, though, it’s instructive to look at whether that impact comes from buying, reading, or actually playing.

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