A roleplaying game is an event where players take on agreed-upon roles within an agreed-upon premise to accomplish an agreed-upon objective. Those roles make it roleplaying (somewhat tautological, I know), and both the objective and the premise make it a game. That objective and that premise are defined in combination by the players of the game and the ruleset they have chosen, and that objective and that premise are more foundational to assessing a roleplaying game than either the players or the ruleset.
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System Hack: Dreadship playtest report
We’ve gone and done it! Just like I threatened, last weekend I had a chance to test run Dreadship at our group’s gaming weekend. The game was certainly fun; I ran Gradient Descent in one-shot mode, with the players as artifact hunters trying to get a big score and retire. As far as Dreadship is concerned, though, the playtest revealed a few things about the game’s workings. Thanks to both my own evaluation and feedback from my players, I know what I’d do differently in the future.
This is one of the first playtests that I’ve run, so I also learned a lot about the process. Most importantly, seeing the process in action is likely to make it easier for me to test new rules and games in the future. So with that all said, how did mashing up Mothership with a Jenga tower actually work?
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Crowdfunding Carnival: October, 2026
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for October! I have to admit, autumn snuck up on me and I’m not quite in spooky season mode yet. That’s ok, because we have a wide range of games that designers are trying to bring to life, no necromancy required! Want to be a dinosaur? Roadtrip to Oregon? Have the gods try to ruin your life? We’ve got you covered. And if you are already in the Halloween mood, there are a few horror games snuck in there as well.
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Losing the tracks on railroading
An interesting thing I’ve noticed in the last few years is that another RPG term has been experiencing linguistic drift. I talked about this a little in the context of the term ‘heartbreaker’ a while back, and now the term that we’re seeing shift is ‘railroading’. At first I was thinking about this in terms of linguistic precision (and as such risking becoming an old man yelling at a metaphorical cloud), but the more I thought about it the more interesting I realized the implications were of the drift. When a term becomes broader, it means more is falling under that term’s umbrella; that’s perhaps obvious. But when the term is derisive, like railroading is, the cultural onus to push more game behaviors (or more specifically GMing behaviors) under the umbrella says something about how the culture is evolving.
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Out of the shelf and onto the table
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.
Continue reading Out of the shelf and onto the tableSystem Hack: Dreadship
There’s an old axiom, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. Even in creative pursuits this still sometimes comes to pass, where the only way to press forward on multiple ideas is to combine them into a single much wilder idea. Such was my solution to a constraint presented by my gaming group’s annual “Beach Weekend”, our excursion to Delaware to play RPGs and drink beer for three days straight that’s been going on (mostly) uninterrupted since 2012. We are blessed with numerous members who want to GM, especially when it comes to the event that consistently produces some of our most memorable one-shot games. This year there were six interested GMs, meaning that our typical slots (one slot each day and night for each of the three gaming days) were going to one person apiece. I would get a single slot this year, whereas in previous years I could usually finagle two (and sometimes got as many as four, which may have been too many). This is not a problem, except that I always have more ideas for games than I have time to run them. As we were planning, I was trying to choose between games. Do I run a game with a neat module I’ve been wanting to try, like Mothership? Or do I go for a high-concept one-shot that we really wouldn’t be able to play online, like the Jenga-tower horror game Dread? And then, of course, I thought to myself “wait a minute…”
Continue reading System Hack: DreadshipCrowdfunding Carnival: September, 2026
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for September! Even though I didn’t get the summer off, I can sympathize with not wanting to go back to school as we head towards Labor Day here in the states. Turns out a lot of game designers weren’t ready to say goodbye to summer either, because the post-GenCon wave is still crashing! Even more major campaigns are kicking off, including at least one which will force me to update my Million Dollar crowdfunding dataset. Outside of the majors, though, we have more indies coming out of the woodwork and continuing to build momentum across the con season. First, though, let’s take a look at those majors. Who’s the newest member of the million dollar club?
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The Data on Million-Plus RPG Crowdfunding Campaigns
Crowdfunding began to change the RPG world in 2012, when Monte Cook Games campaigned Numenera. At the time Monte Cook was best known for his work at Wizards of the Coast, and a new game with new mechanics in an unfamiliar science-fantasy setting was not what one would call a sure bet. On Kickstarter, though, the project gathered more than half a million dollars and made it clear that the DIY financing opportunities presented by crowdfunding were very real and very useful. Fourteen years later, crowdfunding is both an enabling technology for hundreds if not thousands of creators and is the way many RPG creators are able to get their games made at all.
Like most of the hobby, all crowdfunding is not created equal. In 2016 the first RPG Kickstarter crested a million dollars, and then in 2024 the first RPG Kickstarter exceeded ten million dollars. While Numenera went on to have a long sales cycle after its crowdfunding, more and more companies are building their revenue around Kickstarter; many crowdfunded games will earn 80% or more of their revenue from crowdfunding and provide little to no sales tail (what I call the “Kickstarter Thud”). And these two phenomena are encroaching on each other, with new creators often leveraging massive YouTube audiences into equally massive crowdfunding campaigns which then melt into the hobby with little fanfare.
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How do we pitch new games?
I have been working on a setting for a future campaign for a few months now. It’s perhaps not that far outside of existing conceits, but it’s still different; enough so that I’ve been puzzling about what and how much information to give my players. Luckily I have a few touchstones; the idea that got me writing was a Dying Earth setting, but one that was kind of an unholy mashup of Electric Bastionland and Mutant Crawl Classics, with Caves of Qud providing additional inspiration. Having those four references, two TTRPGs, one video game, and a fantasy subgenre typified by Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe, means that when it comes time to pitch my group I will have things to point to, and ideas about what sort of characters to play and story to create. While every setting is going to have its own difficulty level, there’s almost always going to be something that you can point to; after all, where did your ideas come from?
There is something larger going on, though. The hobby is strongly focused on fantasy, but more specifically a certain fantasy lens which has been ground into shape by Dungeons and Dragons itself over the last fifty years. Other games exist, but a large swathe of them orbit around D&D. Other genres exist, but with precious few exceptions they simply don’t get to be included in the mass market conversation that happens in Actual Play streaming and D&D Youtube. The broader hobby, especially second order products like Actual Play and other tie-ins (both media and not), does not seem to know what to do with games and stories other than the D&D monomyth.
Continue reading How do we pitch new games?Crowdfunding Carnival: August, 2026
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for August! It’s after GenCon, and as is expected, the announcements flowed heavy from this con. A lot of the announcements were for D&D, and they weren’t necessarily positive, unless you’re really excited about marketing tie-ins. The movement from the rest of the industry, though, gives me reason to be optimistic.
Fact is, announcing a game in or around GenCon is a gamble, especially because GenCon is historically linked with D&D. In 2024, few were daring to make big announcements for fear they’d get swallowed up in the hype for the then-upcoming 5.5e rulebooks. Now, though, a lot of companies are being bolder, and that’s even before WotC decided to turn to the dark side with Universes Beyond.
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