Category Archives: Editorial

Reviews, opinions, and whatever else strikes our fancy!

Articles, Editorial

Getting Out of the GM Chair

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The online gaming group that (in part) gave birth to Cannibal Halfling Gaming works on a rotating roster of gamemasters and campaigns. The typical  arrangement is that two campaigns are being run by two different GMs, trading off our weekly slot so that we can maximize the number of games we play, give GMs a rest between sessions, and get back into thing quickly if we have to scratch a week. Exactly who those two GMs are also changes; in terms of first session to last session most campaigns last about a year, with perhaps 15-20 sessions, and many GMs then step down to let another step up.

This last July, I wrapped up a game of Cyberpunk RED that had lasted three and a half years with 42 sessions.

Depending on how you count things (because Aaron built a DIE-shaped trap door into a Burned Over campaign, cheeky bugger that he is), Cyberpunk RED: The Alleyway ran alongside/outlasted 2-3 other campaigns. Unsurprisingly, I’m no longer in the GM seat for that group. It will likely be a few years before I return to the GMing chair in that group, actually, and that’s okay! However, after a few weeks I realized that, for the first time in maybe a decade… I wasn’t running anything for anyone.

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Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Premise Matters

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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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Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Losing the tracks on railroading

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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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Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Out of the shelf and onto the table

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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.

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Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

It’s still all old games

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It’s a Tuesday night. The Steve Jackson Games forums have over 220 active users right now, and Mongoose Publishing’s forums have nearly 600. While sandwiched between a few anime-styled games, DriveThruRPG’s top sellers are heavily represented by vintage properties. Their top 10 is split between four anime games (Fabula Ultima, two Twilight Sword books, and ‘The Legend of Heroes’) and six systems with original publication dates between 1977 and 1987 (Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, Traveller, and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay). While the anime part may be a bit new, the overall trend is not: Legacy properties being shepherded by Mongoose, Cubicle 7, and Arc Dream consistently jump to the top of sales charts, essentially every time a new supplement is released. Even if these companies aren’t doing WotC numbers, they’re consistently Tier 3 or maybe even better in the RPG world, on the success of old games. Calling these nostalgia plays may be technically true, but it misses the point; we’re in a world where fandom-creating Mothership is able to generate a little less than $1.5 million once in a Kickstarter, but Mongoose Publishing, mostly on the weight of a space game ten years older than I am, generates enough revenue year after year to securely buy the building their office is located in. Old games are built differently, and it begs the question: Is there something older games are actually doing better for their audiences, or are newer games simply being starved of new blood?

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Articles, Editorial

Twilight Sword: Filtering reactions to D&D through video games

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Most fantasy RPGs are a reaction to D&D in one way or another. This has likely been true for some time; while games like RuneQuest have had time to evolve and develop their own base principles, many of them, especially ones as old as RuneQuest, were very much about being either in alignment with or in opposition to what D&D did when they were first released. Given D&D’s current market share, this has become more nakedly true in the bestselling entries in the fantasy genre; Tales of the Valiant, Draw Steel, and Daggerheart are all essentially versions of the D&D formula and none of them purport to offer a different sort of game than D&D beyond differing priority rankings for things like narrative development, tactical combat, or power level.

A new trend I’ve observed is typified by game designers taking a different tack to how they ‘react’ to D&D, and this is generally one filtered through other media. Break, Fabula Ultima, and Twilight Sword are all versions of this to one extent or another. While these games all differ from each other, hidden in each is a similar underlying thesis: In order to make tabletop roleplaying more accessible, this game is derived from the most accessible D&D derivative, the fantasy RPG video game. The fact that these are all more from a JRPG lens likely has to do with legacy as well as differentiation; the first Final Fantasy outsold its licensed D&D contemporary Pool of Radiance by about 50%, and the gap only got wider. Final Fantasy VII outsold Baldur’s Gate, its licensed D&D contemporary, by about fivefold (and that’s only to 2005, not including any of the remakes or re-releases of either). Even if Baldur’s Gate III and the recent explosion in popularity for D&D have shifted this narrative, there’s no question that through the 90s, the JRPG reigned supreme when it came to sales volume and cultural impact.

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Articles, Editorial

Umdaar: Fate’s Best, Maybe Last, Worked Example

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For over twenty years, Fate has been a pillar in indie gaming. From its newsgroup origins in 2003 through its Kickstarter breakout in 2013 and on to today, Fate’s clever design and extensive modularity have kept it relevant to mechanics nerds and rules hackers and inspired designers and players alike. That said, Fate is a design for hackers above all others, and the popularity of systems as granular and mechanical as Fate has waned in favor of frameworks with fewer moving parts. Even Evil Hat Productions, publisher of Fate, is spending more development resources on publishing games like Apocalypse Keys and Blades in the Dark than it is on the Fate ecosystem. And it’s this context into which Umdaar bursts onto the scene.

Masters of Umdaar was originally published back in 2015 as one of the settings in Fate Worlds: Worlds Rise Up. In that original format, the setting was intended to use Fate Accelerated rules and allow for semi-random generation of character species and monsters to fit into its ‘planetary romance’ setting which read like a beautiful car crash of Star Wars and He-Man. The new Umdaar is much, much more than that original entry. Clocking in at over 450 pages and now using the more traditional skills-based Fate Core framework, Umdaar has evolved from a small setting guide to a full-fledged game, complete with its own set of completely new frameworks employing Fate’s usual building blocks of Aspects, Stunts, and Extras. Both the volume of content and number of new structures not seen (or only vaguely alluded to) in Fate Condensed or Fate Core is what solidifies Umdaar’s role in the Fate line-up: Fate’s current and primary worked example.

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Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Shifting Matters: More TTRPG/Bicycle Comparisons

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As readers of the site know, I’m a cyclist in addition to a gamer. I spend at least as much if not more time riding and working on my bikes as I do playing, reading, and writing about RPGs, and riding my bike is an integral part of how I get around and interact with my community. I’ve even written about RPGs and bicycles before, though in that article I was speaking more to how the economics and business models of the hobbies compare. There are also comparisons to be made about how one actually rides a bike compared to how they play a game, and while this analogy is imperfect it can provide some insight to how we both play games and engage in games discourse.

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Articles, Editorial

Extra! Five years of Weekend Update

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In 2021 after a year of pandemic and quarantine, Seamus and I developed a novel way to mitigate the site’s burnout-induced publication schedule contraction: Weekend Update. Launched in April of that year, Weekend Update was a way to ensure something went up on the site every week, regardless of how little either of us wanted to write. It was also a way and a reason to check up on the basic pulse of the hobby regularly, making sure we knew what was getting released and what people were talking about. Even if no one read these posts it would be a useful tool for us, but as it turns out, we’re not the only ones who benefit from taking the pulse of the hobby on a weekly basis. While they definitely have a shelf life, the Weekend Updates still manage to capture a good chunk of readers, with the occasional news story popping off just like the normal articles do.

Putting together Weekend Updates has given me a fairly particular perspective on what is newsworthy in the RPG hobby versus what is just noise. This is an important consideration for any news outlet, but in small hobbies you’re dealing with a much smaller volume of happenings compared to even a modest local newspaper or TV channel. When you compare what we then choose to report on versus other consistent news outlets (and I’ll get to that particular chestnut later), we tend to report many fewer things because there’s a big part of hobby news that we, well, don’t consider news. After all is said and done, we don’t even have news stories in every Weekend Update, and our choice to be more selective has helped me understand why there isn’t (and likely won’t be) a truly dedicated news outlet in our small hobby space.

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Articles, Editorial

Critical Role for All of Us: Finding Practical Tools in the Monolith

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Well, it happened: I got hooked into arguably the most gaming table in the community. And…it’s kind of hard to write about.

Let’s be honest: at this point, Critical Role has long since left behind the status of “home game” and is more a monolithic cultural force. We here at Cannibal Halfling Gaming have a let’s-call-it complicated relationship to both D&D (and Hasbro). I won’t speak for anyone else, but I enjoy D&D but have never actually seen anyone play it “out of the box” with no alterations. Every iteration of it I have seen has changed the rules to some extent, and there are systems that do the parts that I enjoy a better way. But I really can’t ignore the cultural significance that it holds and Critical Role timed itself well, riding the then newly-released 5th edition and captured the zeitgeist. And yet, for all that I couldn’t ignore the memes and an animated series being released I never actually sat down to watch it. There was just so much both with lore and a sheer crushing number of hours that made sitting down to catch up on a campaign seemed an insurmountable wall. 

And then, the team decided to do something completely different: they reset the lore, brought in a new GM, fleshed out the cast to double its original size and adopted a West Marches inspired campaign design. And credit to them for making that choice. I can imagine the temptation to stick with the winning formula until the golden goose was dead (although they did stick with D&D instead of, say, Daggerheart, but that’s another topic altogether). 

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