All posts by Aaron Marks

Gaming for nearly twenty-five years and writing about it for over fifteen, I've always had a strong desire to find different and interesting things in the hobby. In addition to my writing at Cannibal Halfling Gaming, you can follow me on Bluesky at @levelonewonk.bsky.social and read my fiction and personal reflections at newwonkmedia.com.
Articles, Level One Wonk

Hobby Economics: RPGs and Bicycles

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Recently Wizards of the Coast has been in the news as Hasbro laid off 1,100 people, including numerous Wizards employees. In addition to the typical bad rap a company gets from firing that many people right before Christmas the Hasbro layoffs, especially those which affected Wizards, have made a lot of people ask questions. Wizards is a bright spot on Hasbro’s balance sheet, especially in light of the recent sale of the eOne film and TV business which highlighted the weakness of the company’s entertainment division. Despite their performance, Hasbro opted to lay off people responsible for some of their greatest successes, including most of the team responsible for working with Larian on the hit video game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Although I can’t comment on the wisdom of Hasbro’s particular headcount decisions, I can say that when RPGs meet money, good things don’t usually happen. Indeed, Hasbro’s reported tabletop gaming revenue in one quarter of 2023 was $290 million, or 50% larger than the entire tabletop RPG industry for the whole year of 2022. By that math, Magic: the Gathering alone is roughly six times larger than every TTRPG combined on a revenue basis. Ouch.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Advancement for GURPS

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As longtime readers of this site may be aware, I have a long history with GURPS. GURPS was the first game I GMed for what is still my primary gaming group, and I GMed GURPS for the majority of all games that I ran from 2006 until 2014. In the intervening decade I moved away from the system because my own interests changed; I began seeking out specific experiences and different approaches to game design. Some of my favorite games and game systems from the last decade, systems as diverse as Twilight:2000, Electric Bastionland, and Apocalypse World, all share the common property of being designed for a specific circumstance. In other words, all of these games could be considered the antithesis of GURPS at least as far as design goals are concerned.

That said, my affection for GURPS and generic game systems in general has never completely waned. Beyond that, when it comes to a more simulative approach to gaming, to times when you want to know how to make a very wide range of situations relevant, GURPS is still king. I cannot think of a better game for bringing verisimilitude and consistency to a very wide set of characters and circumstances. However, as much as I hold a lot of affection for GURPS, there are still some things I’d want to change if I were to return to the system. For this System Hack or two (or three?) I’m going to look at GURPS and look at things which haven’t gotten as much revision and research as the tech level system, or the frightening number of weapons, or the comprehensive and extremely math-heavy solar creation templates of GURPS Space. No, I’m going to be talking about things that have received a lot of attention since GURPS Fourth Edition was released in 2005. Spotlight management. Player-driven goals. And today, advancement.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: December, 2023

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Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for December! Well, folks, we made it. It’s nearly the end of 2023, and the holiday season is now upon us. It’s time to look back on the year, look forward to the next, and light lights to guard against the darkness of winter.

It’s also time for statistics! This year as part of Crowdfunding Carnival, I went into the archives and did retrospectives of the Kickstarter Wonk articles from 2018, the start of the series. With over 100 campaigns reviewed, I was able to collect some interesting data and reflect on the nature of RPG Kickstarters based both on trends within the sample as well as some reflection on what was included in my sample and what was not. While I don’t think anything I learned is particularly earth-shattering, it’s always nice to get a little quantitative nugget among the highly qualitative world of writing about games.

First, though, let’s talk about what’s campaigning now. The holiday season is when you want to finish, not start your campaigns, but there are at least a few that are worth highlighting.

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Articles, Editorial

Paranoia The Core Book Review

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It shocked me to learn that it has been six years since I last reviewed an edition of Paranoia; back in 2017 I did a System Split comparison between Paranoia Red Clearance Edition and Paranoia XP, two editions of the game which had significant mechanical departures from each other. At the time, my conclusion was that while Red Clearance Edition was a better game, XP was the better Paranoia. Apparently someone over at Mongoose read my review, because the new edition of Paranoia (called The Perfect Edition while on Kickstarter) takes my conclusions to an unsettling tee: the slicker rules are kept, the setting is rolled back to more reflect a throughline from the older editions, and the cards, which worked way better in theory than in practice, were removed. The result is remarkably close to a version using Red Clearance Edition rules with XP-style fluff, and (unsurprisingly) it turns out that yes, I really do like the version of the game made seemingly in direct response to my critiques. That all said, the new edition of Paranoia is still an edition of Paranoia made in 2023, and that alone has gotten me thinking about this. So let’s set aside the goofy clearance warnings, fake redactions, and admonishments to self-terminate, and talk about how Paranoia, any Paranoia, actually fits into the gaming landscape here in the roaring 2020s.

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Articles, Editorial

Give us more devastating games

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What do you do?

The call to action within a tabletop RPG implies freedom. When all is said and done, when the cards are down, the GM asks the players ‘what do you do?’ and they go forth as they see fit. Not bound by rules or procedures, only by their imagination of the game world; the rules are there to help explain what happens, not to limit what can be done. This is the siren’s song of the roleplaying game, the freedom to do, and to be, whatever and whoever you want. There are many roads to a roleplaying game, and most traditional games (and many popular non-traditional ones) are built around this question. There is another question, though, that a game can ask, and for me, games which ask this second question have been the ones providing the most affecting, engrossing experiences.

How do you feel?

While games don’t literally ask this question outright (with a few exceptions), it is the key to another layer of character development, of narrative, even of mere in-game consequences. Once a game makes you think about how your character is feeling, you’re inhabiting that character on a whole other level. The problem with this should essentially go without saying: Rules can’t make you feel things. Game procedures can’t make you feel things. If a game wants to make you feel things, and more specifically feel the things your character would feel, the designer has to be a lot more inventive in how they go about this task than they would be, say, determining the probability that you hit a target with an arrow. But there are designers who have succeeded in this, delivering gut punches, heart wrenching decisions, and a sprinkling of light trauma. To them, I have only one thing to say: I want more of it.

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Articles, Editorial

Shared Fantasy Review

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The era of the RPG historian started in the 21st century, but that’s not when the RPG history has its roots. In the last decade or so, Jon Peterson, Shannon Appelcline and Ben Riggs, among others, have released volumes about how the tabletop RPG came to be. Though the RPG historians of today have different writing styles and research approaches, they share the perspective of being twenty-first century gamers looking back into the twentieth century through the lens of the hobby’s accumulated history, theory, and perspective. It is the very limitation of this twenty-first century perspective that illuminates the value of the few scholarly texts written about tabletop gaming in the time of its ascendancy. That’s why today I want to discuss Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: November, 2023

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Happy day after Halloween! Whether you had too many pumpkin beers, too much candy, or just stayed up too late doing the Monster Mash, it’s time for a little…post-holiday drop, let’s say. Luckily for you, I had no Halloween plans other than finding and cataloging some really phenomenal crowdfunding campaigns to help you start your November. On the big game side we have Southeast Asian tactics, dystopian game shows, and Ninja Turtles. On the indie side, Halloween is clearly sticking around with some witches, ghosts, cute cultists, and a big freaking multiverse to tie it all together.

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Articles, Table Fiction

Table Fiction: DIE: Lenny’s Halloween Party Pt 2

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When the football players show up, it’s clear Lenny’s Halloween Party will be a success. That doesn’t mean everything will go smoothly, though, and especially not for Donnie. Be sure to read part 1 if you haven’t already, and then check out DIE on Cannibal Halfling Radio for another story. If you’re more interested in commentary than characters, though, be sure to check out Seamus’s In-Depth Review.

[Content Warning: This section of the story contains some mild sexual content, and casual homophobia like any of you who went to high school in 2003 probably heard regularly.]

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Articles, Table Fiction

Table Fiction: DIE: Lenny’s Halloween Party Pt 1

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This past weekend, Seamus treated our shared gaming group to a full run of the ‘Reunited’ scenario for the DIE RPG. While you may have heard me run DIE on Cannibal Halfling Radio, the scenario I ran was an adaptation of both Reunited and the one-shot rules, and was significantly shorter than Reunited. When all was said and done, we played for roughly ten hours of some of the most exhausting, emotionally draining, and rewarding gaming I’ve ever done. As often occurs with emotionally involved games, several of us had gnawing itches to engage more with our characters; this included me. My character, Donnie, became the Fear Knight, and had to engage with the fear he had for the future and how it was shaped by his past. Although the character creation in DIE takes some time to let you build the high school version of your character, I needed more. Less than a week after the game concluded, I started writing, and the resulting short story is the product of my post-game rumination. This is Lenny’s Halloween Party, and it stars all of our player characters as they navigate the opportunity to throw a real high school party on Halloween night of their senior year.

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Articles, Editorial

On Modules

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My gaming group consists of roughly 10 adults, each able to commit to any given gaming session only when the vagaries of their schedule allows. We run two campaigns at a time, taking into account the availability of two GMs and whichever player has a character who is a ‘hinge’ to the upcoming session. Sometimes, we cannot get a session of either campaign together but still have 3 or 4 players. In the last year or so, I’ve finally acknowledged that the only effective way to pull out some quick gaming when such an attendance squeeze arises is to pick a backup system and pull out a module.

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