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

Stardew Valley’s Closed World

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Stardew Valley returned to the video game consciousness in a big way recently with the release of its 1.6 update. This update includes new content, rebalancing, and generally significant improvements and changes to the game that most thought unlikely after the 1.5 update due to designer Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone shifting his focus to his next game, Haunted Chocolatier. Needless to say the scope of the update was a very pleasant surprise, and many players, myself included, dove back in.

I’ve put a number of hours into a new playthrough of Stardew Valley, having previously put the game down after the 1.5 update. Compared to my last two playthroughs I’ve taken more time to consider the design of the game and what it can teach us about tabletop games. Much like the last time I analyzed a video game like this, No Man’s Sky, the intent is not to imply that the gameplay loops would make much sense at the tabletop; Stardew Valley’s most tactile elements, like its combat and fishing, belong firmly in the digital realm. Instead I’d say there’s a lot to learn about how Stardew Valley presents a world and the avenues by which a player can interact with that world. This world design is, in some ways at least, the opposite of No Man’s Sky. Stardew Valley presents a ‘closed world’ where the avenues of interaction are finite and presented from the beginning, and that mode of world design can teach some lessons to tabletop RPGs, either to designers or GMs.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: April, 2024

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Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for April! As you business types know the first quarter is over, and it’s time to kick things up! More realistically, ZineQuest is over and PAX East is recently in the rearview, meaning that the first set of product announcements in the tabletop gaming world have kicked off in earnest. Commercial con season runs from roughly PAX East to GenCon in August, so we’re in the height of major announcements and the crowdfunding campaigns which accompany them. As such, we have four major glorified pre-orders campaigns that you can check out. Beyond that there’s still a lot of momentum in the indie space, at least somewhere down in there. Sifting through the weird porn minis and 5e “supplements”, I’ve picked out five indie campaigns that are worth checking out and, quite possibly, worth a pledge as well.

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Articles, Editorial

Black Sword Hack and the evolving OSR

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The Old School Renaissance is a microcosm within the RPG world. Although many (including myself) refer to the OSR as a whole, cohesive thing, the reality is that the movement is more the result of at least half a dozen origins that random-walked into game preferences which, to an outsider, look similar. The broad preference towards the genre establishment of Dungeons and Dragons (or at least Appendix N, if not the system itself) bounds the definitions we work with; other retroclones and revivals like Cepheus and RuneQuest aren’t included, even if they too are ‘old school’. No, the main thing that all vectors of the OSR have in common is that they are trying to recreate the time when the roleplaying game was new. And when RPGs were new, either literally or in the eyes of the designer, the new thing that they first touched was (almost always) D&D.

All OSR games are aiming for either D&D as it was, D&D as it could be, or D&D as it was supposed to be. D&D as it was is simple; Old School Essentials is a straight-up retroclone and proves that ‘Basic D&D without shitty layout and shitty editing’ is a winning recipe. It’s the best known and best selling retroclone, but the retroclone camp of the OSR is arguably the oldest (to the degree that OSR is a label we can trace it back to OSRIC). D&D as it could be is where we start getting a lot of the distillations; the rules in early editions were such a mess you barely used any of them, so clearly one could write a game only using those few rules we could actually make work. This is where Into the Odd comes in, this is arguably where The Black Hack comes in, and, if rules were in any way supposed to be primary in the game, this might be where Mork Borg would come in. This example shows setting and tone are a different topic here than ‘game’. D&D as it was supposed to be is a tough one, and there aren’t many games that really aim for this mark. Whitehack is the one that comes to mind for me, taking the length and complexity of the original booklets and turning that into something much more flexible and consistent.

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Articles, Editorial

Daggerheart Preview

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Earlier this month, Darrington Press released the free playtest version of Daggerheart, their traditional fantasy RPG meant to go toe-to-toe with D&D. First with Pathfinder but now also with entries from MCDM and Kobold Press, we’re getting an awful lot of D&D-alikes, thanks to last year’s saga with the OGL. It’s now clear that a corporate game is a liability, so anyone making a livelihood in the gaming space is clearing out of the Halls of Hasbro. What makes Daggerheart, the entry from the Critical Role folks so special? I downloaded it for free, for one thing. In all seriousness Daggerheart is entering the public eye a little earlier than the MCDM RPG or Tales of the Valiant, both of which are currently fulfilling crowdfunding and doing any additional playtesting either contained to backers or within their own teams. The public playtest process is a great way to get a lot of feedback, and it’s worked well in the past; both 5e and the second edition of Pathfinder went through public playtesting.

It’s also caused some grief already. Darrington is somewhat in the crosshairs, between the moderate reception to their first game Candela Obscura and the relatively polarized fanbase that Critical Role has created by being the biggest voice in the room. Seems like a perfect time for someone like me to come in. I’m not the most impartial judge, given my growing disinterest in D&D or its cousins over the last five years, but I do understand what these games are trying to do. To that end, Daggerheart seems to have what it takes to grow a fanbase. It just needs to solve a few niggling issues with its own relationship to narrative mechanics first.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Using Playing Cards

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Welcome to another System Hack! Way back when I gave an intro to how to use dice and dice statistics in your game designs. This is in some ways a sequel to that article, but given the design assumptions of RPGs it also plays a very different tune. We use dice in RPGs because large swathes of our game mechanics are predicated on the probability of something happening. Success, failure, or something in between is determined by odds that reflect the internal consistency of the setting. This, like so many norms in gaming, comes from wargames and isn’t particularly necessary in many game designs. We have gotten through the checkpoint of ‘you don’t have to use dice’ but the result has been, merely, diceless games. What if we play differently, and steal a deck of cards from the poker set instead of stealing dice from Monopoly?

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: March, 2024

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Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for March! We do have a bit of ZineQuest drop when it comes to crowdfunding in the late winter and early spring, but that doesn’t mean people are stopping. There are eight campaigns we’re going to discuss today, in addition to looking back to March of 2019. Of particular note is Backerkit; the up and coming platform is still contributing campaigns at a steady trickle, including one major and two indie campaigns this month. That’s more than can be said of any of the other platforms we began investigating when this series shifted from Kickstarter Wonk to Crowdfunding Carnival, at least unless you expand your scope to include 5e shovelware and oddly pornographic mini models. Nonetheless, the Kickstarter/Backerkit crowdfunding world that we live in is getting us some big supplements, dragon riders, the Gilded Age, and a superhero retroclone. Let’s take a look.

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Articles, Editorial

Wildsea Review

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In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve often thrown shade on the archetypal ‘dungeon fantasy’ setting. Cemented by Tolkien, popularized by Dungeons and Dragons, copied by everyone, the typical western medieval pastiche with dwarves and elves (and sometimes orcs and halflings) has so permeated fantasy fiction that we often give it a pass; it’s transcended cliché to become a trope. I’m still sick of it. That said, my experiences with settings that try to be aggressively ‘not’ the norm often fall into the trap of painting a new overlay on old tropes, falling into fantasy same-old same-old because there wasn’t enough worldbuilding done. I have, though, found a game with a setting so intensely its own thing (and so intensely weird as a result) that I backed it on Kickstarter, read it, and then made sure to play it before really collecting my thoughts.

The gorgeous book and art catches your eye, but what makes Wildsea unique in its worldbuilding vision is that there’s follow-through. The concept is outlandish: The world has been overrun by a veritable forest of massive trees, and your characters ‘sail’ across it on a ship that’s essentially a giant chainsaw. From this base concept comes many of the underlying setting assumptions, and they help the world feel cohesive even though it, at a high level, works very differently from our world. In an ocean of wood fire is catastrophic, so there is taboo against open flame. That affects how things are cooked, which in turn affects culture around food. The ‘spits’, settlements above the treetops, are threatened by the constantly growing and shifting flora, so impermanence is, once again, reflected through the whole culture. The game sticks the landing on creating something new by thinking through the core concept they present.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: ZineQuest 2024

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It’s February, and that means it’s still ZineQuest! We saw a large number of zines in the first round of Crowdfunding Carnival at the beginning of the month, but there are more, oh so many more. I’ve brought together a whole second round of zines to make sure that everyone who wasn’t live in the first week of the month still has a chance to be highlighted.

In addition to the zines, I’m continuing with our Crowdfunding Carnival five year retrospective, which was just a bit too much in the first week with all the zines to go through. I’ve disappointed myself by not starting ZineQuest coverage in its first year, but there were still a number of campaigns and a fair amount to say about them.

But first, the zines. I’ve, in theory, strived to be more selective among the zine wilds; there are over 200 zine projects live now and I can’t possibly cover them all. So for today I’ve brought 40 more zines to the front. These have all caught my attention and, in a few cases, I’ve thrown some money at them. Like before we have three categories, dividing the zines into standalone games, supplements, and zines which are entirely system-agnostic.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: GURPS Disadvantages

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Welcome back to System Hack! For our second installment of hacking GURPS, we’re going to take a look at the banes of the system’s existence; they’re listed in a separate chapter from the boons. That’s right, we’re looking at disadvantages. GURPS character creation has each player build their character from a set number of character points, which are used to buy attributes, skills, and advantages. There’s also the ability to get points back by reducing attribute values or taking disadvantages. In the case of GURPS, where the quantity and scope of disadvantages is so broad, it takes an eagle eyed GM to make sure that each disadvantage is ‘worth’ the point cost (for advantages players tend to do that themselves, isn’t that weird?). This is generally done by enforcing the disadvantage at the table, making disadvantages in play a lesson in negative reinforcement. To make things even more complicated, some disadvantages aren’t really disadvantages at all. Things like dark secrets and enemies swing the spotlight directly at a character, producing a positive value to the player that isn’t reflected by the negative point value.

While limiting the number and point value of disadvantages in your GURPS game is always prudent, there are other methods out there to make them work without giving any players unfair advantages or feeling like you’re punishing them every time they need to make a self-control roll. After talking a bit about one of the inherent flaws of advantage/disadvantage type systems, I’m going to discuss little hacks to improve the utilization of two common disadvantage mechanics in GURPS: frequency of appearance and self-control rolls.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: February, 2024

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Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for February! Uh oh…it’s February already? You know what that means…ZineQuest! This month I (mostly) put the big games aside and look at all the different zine campaigns that are coming up thanks to Kickstarter’s ZineQuest event. ZineQuest is now in its fifth year, and after some hiccups over the last two pertaining to both blockchains and scheduling, everything appears to be full speed ahead. Of course, this is a Kickstarter-specific event, and there is also a companion event, Zine Month. We’ll have coverage of some of those campaigns later on, but as these campaigns are all on Kickstarter, they’re all ZineQuest campaigns.

And as far as the great Zine agglomeration goes, Kickstarter is the place to be. Last I checked there over over 150 campaigns with the Zine Quest tag applied, and I’ve been able to pull out just about half of those as interesting little nuggets worth your attention. As that number is almost certainly going to increase, we’re going to have a second go-around of Crowdfunding Carnival in a couple weeks (that’s also where the five-year retrospective is going to go, in a slightly different form because it’ll be talking about ZineQuest from five years ago). For now though, check out a whole bunch of zines, as well as a couple more traditional big campaigns that happen to be running in February.

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