PAX Unplugged returned to Philadelphia this year, marking the fifth time the convention has taken place. I was fortunate enough to attend this year, making it the third year I’ve managed to go. Before I begin, I want to take a moment to thank the organizers for a few things: One, for continuing to choose Philadelphia as the site. I think that the area and community are an excellent fit with abundant transportation, housing, and food for a bunch of tabletop nerds, along with a city that prides itself on inclusivity. Philadelphia has gotten some bad press as of late, but I never felt anything but safe and welcome as I walked through, to, and from the event space. Second, I want to thank them for the amount of logistics and cat wrangling it takes to get a group of tabletop gamers to do anything. My GMing has increased since my last visit to the convention, and with it so has my appreciation for the work that it takes to get this rolling each year. This year, the team made sure that getting through the door was about as pain free as possible despite requiring proof of vaccination along with the necessary ticketing and security checks for entry. So I absolutely want this convention to keep going.
Continue reading A Return to PAX Unplugged (2022 Quick Recap)Category Archives: Editorial
Reviews, opinions, and whatever else strikes our fancy!
Blade Runner Review
Cyberpunk is having its second wind. The genre of postmodern science fiction best defined as ‘high-tech, low-life” was born in the 1980s, first in film, then literature, then game. Though declared dead in 1991 after Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash seemed to parody the genre as much as embody it, Cyberpunk came roaring back in the 2010s in the wake of Citizens United, Facebook, and the second tech boom. By the time Cyberpunk 2077 was released in 2020, the setting year of its RPG predecessor, the combination of 80s aesthetic being cool again and the continued specter of corporate overlords made the children of Gibson, Sterling, and Shiner seem all too relevant. Tabletop RPGs were no exception to the trend; in addition to Cyberpunk Red becoming the best-selling non-D&D RPG of the decade so far, many imitators cropped up from all over the game design map, some adhering well to Cyberpunk themes and others not so much.
Free League, a Swedish publisher of ever increasing significance in the last few years, has stepped into the Cyberpunk ring with a licensed title. This isn’t Free League’s first go at a licensed game, with Alien receiving broadly positive reviews, but like Alien Blade Runner is a property with a lot of history and high expectations attached. Based originally on Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner basically started the Cyberpunk genre when it was released in 1982. While William Gibson had started writing in what would become Cyberpunk a little earlier (Johnny Mnemonic was published in 1981), so influential was Blade Runner that he feared Neuromancer would be dismissed as a coattail-grab.
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Avatar Legends Review
Magpie Games currently holds the record for the most funded tabletop RPG Kickstarter with Avatar Legends, its game set in the universe of Avatar: the Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. The Kickstarter campaign earned nearly $10 million from over 80,000 backers, a truly staggering total that, when considering campaigns for specific RPG titles, has yet to be beat. Surely the completion of this game would be met with renewed interest and immense sales success, so we’ve been looking forward to the release- wait. I’m being told that the game was released before Halloween. Huh. Well, one would naturally assume that the release would see a second wind of- so apparently the PDF version on DriveThruRPG hasn’t sold more than 500 copies since coming out. Odd. Now, to be fair, the physical game isn’t yet available, and PDF fulfillments from those preorders don’t count among the numbers I’ve cited. Even so, the campaign sold nearly 8700 PDF-only rewards, so getting not quite to 5% of that number upon release is…worrying.
As many pointed out and grumbled about during the campaign, Avatar Legends is the largest licensed RPG Kickstarter as well as the largest RPG Kickstarter in general, and as such the buyers’ motivations are often a little different. Consider: around 2,800 people paid $50 for the pledge tier which got them a physical core book and PDF copies of everything else. However, over 39,000 people opted for the $75 tier which added all the physical stretch goals. Those physical stretch goals were one more book, dice, a cloth map, a card deck, a pack of journals, and a tile. Combine that with the tier level that gave the physical stretch goals in addition to a copy of the special edition core book, and the vast majority of backers paid for the doodads. And everything I have to say in this review will not take away from those doodads, I’m pretty sure.
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Twitter and the TTRPG Hobby
If you haven’t noticed, Twitter is imploding. Since Elon Musk bought the company, it’s been learning experience after learning experience, with the most important one being the public at large learning that perhaps Elon isn’t a genius after all. Unfortunately, though that lesson was a long time coming, he’s probably going to destroy Twitter in the process.
Twitter in a lot of ways represents the worst of the app-driven attention economy internet. It’s created the term ‘doomscrolling’ and one of the most common euphemisms for it is ‘hellsite’. But, as much as we hate it, we can’t peel our eyes away. This has been strongly true, among many places, in the TTRPG community.
Twitter’s relatively easy engagement algorithm means that even small creators can find eyeballs, and they can do it without much concerted strategy. Though we’ve often termed using Twitter for promotion as ‘shouting into the void’, the fact is that if you keep at it, you will build a following, and it can be really difficult to figure out how to rebuild such a following in the absence of, well, Twitter.
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So You Want To Change The Rules
Play in any game system long enough, and you’re going to want to tweak things a little – there’s something missing, or a rule doesn’t quite work the way you want it to. Or maybe you’re coming at things fresh with an idea of what you want to do. No game system matches your idea 1:1, but there are a few that come close enough that you don’t want to have to design a game from the ground up. Whether it’s just for a home game or you’re designing one yourself to publish, that means it’s time to change or ‘hack’ the system in question. But what thoughts might you want to have along the way? I’ve got three.
Apocalypse Keys Review
Powered by the Apocalypse, or PbtA, is one of the most popular RPG rulesets in the indie gaming sphere. After getting its start with Apocalypse World and the Bakers’ permissive license, PbtA blew up first among single designers and small groups and then in the wider gaming sphere. While Apocalypse World was modestly successful in its own right, many of the games it spawned, including Monster of the Week, Dungeon World, and Blades in the Dark, multiplied its success many times over.
Mainstream PbtA success continues to this day, fed mostly by two mid-sized publishers: Evil Hat Productions and Magpie Games. Magpie Games, arguably the largest and most successful company to design primarily PbtA games, first saw success with titles like Urban Shadows, Bluebeard’s Bride, and Masks, and has gone on to rake in millions of dollars from some of the first licensed PbtA games, Root and Avatar Legends. Evil Hat Productions, more known as the company behind Fate, doesn’t design PbtA games in house, but publishes several of significance. Evil Hat publishes Monster of the Week, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and Blades in the Dark, and they’re about to add another PbtA game to their library.
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The Trouble with RPG Prices
In the past we have discussed playing RPGs, of course. We’ve also discussed reading RPGs, and collecting RPGs. One thing we haven’t discussed much, though, is buying RPGs. A tabletop roleplaying game is a creative work that can take up to hundreds of man-hours, not to mention the intellectual and emotional investment of almost everyone involved with bringing it to fruition. Despite this, there are plenty of people on the internet who deign to call RPGs overpriced. This is in spite of the fact that most indie RPGs cost $30 or less while D&D Monopoly, a monstrosity of branding that should pay me for having to know it exists, costs about $50.
The trouble with pricing is that people not trained in economics think it’s a science. I, however, am the Level One Wonk, with over five years of real actual economics experience and actual professional industrial economics training. All economics aligns to a popular aphorism by George Box: “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. The notion of an ‘invisible hand of the market’ is wildly incorrect, even something you consume every day, electricity, only can be sold in a carefully constructed market that is watched every day by engineers (and still fails wildly from time to time anyway). Similarly, creative goods, far from the ‘widgets’ of every dismal Econ 101 textbook, don’t follow nearly any of the rules proscribed by the masters of micro. So, in order to speak more clearly about RPG pricing, we’re going to talk about some of the economics that doesn’t really work for role-playing games, and then talk through some of the psychology that does.
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Power Rangers RPG Review
There is a new generation of companies emerging in the RPG world. Free League and Modiphius were founded in 2011 and 2012, respectively, but an even younger studio is making big waves. Renegade Game Studios was founded in 2014 by hobby game industry veteran Scott Gaeta, and his business acumen shows through in Renegade’s portfolio. In addition to publishing more indie titles like Alice is Missing, Kids on Bikes, and Overlight, Renegade rocketed into the trad scene when they took over publishing White Wolf games Vampire: the Masquerade and Hunter: the Reckoning from interim publisher Modiphius. Now, they’re internally developing licensed RPGs that have already turned them into a sales powerhouse. Two Renegade titles showed up on the ICv2 top 5 RPG list last quarter, and I was unaware either were out, let alone already selling so well.
These two games, GI Joe and Power Rangers, make sense as sales successes. The licenses are for properties that peaked in the early 90s, aiming squarely at a mid-millennial market while Wizards aims younger (the core D&D demographics have been teens and twenty-somethings at least as long as Wizards has owned the game, if not even longer). And if it wasn’t these games it could have been others; Renegade also published a Transformers RPG and will soon release an official My Little Pony RPG as well.
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Editions and Edition Wars
Last week, the first in what’s assumedly a fairly long series of playtest documents came out for One D&D, the revised version of Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition that is scheduled to be released in 2024. Fifth Edition’s product lifecycle is quite long for modern D&D: 10 years is the second longest any edition of D&D has gone with no major revision, still not quite beating out the first edition of Advanced D&D which went without a revision for 12 years. The main difference between AD&D 1e and D&D 5e, though, is that Fifth Edition is the best selling version of D&D ever and AD&D 1e is one of the worst; Basic D&D sold better at the same time and saw three iterations over those 12 years, clearly getting more of TSR’s attention. This contrast gets us to the broader point that running an RPG business is a complicated game, especially when it comes to figuring out how to maintain your product lines.
New editions of games have been part and parcel of the RPG industry since Gygax attempted to close the Pandora’s Box of D&D hacking by releasing AD&D. Even that first public revision of a game, a wholesale rewrite as opposed to small revisions gained over time, laid bare the various and sundry motivations designers could have for revising their game. It may be an attempt to regain editorial control, or appeal to a new audience. It may, cynically, be a way to sell more books after the product line has flagged. And maybe, in some limited circumstances, it could actually be to improve the game.
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On Character Creation
Role-playing games are games about characters: Who they are, what they do, and what happens to them. In most games, a character is the lever through which the player interacts with the world, and even in broader games the actions of characters are still primary in terms of what happens. What this ends up meaning is that game setup for a role-player, the act of character creation, takes on much more importance than setting up would in most board, card, or other tabletop games.
Character creation is game setup, yes, but it’s also a game in and of itself, and was the solo act of role-playing well before solo games were popularized. Making characters is fun, and many of us who either couldn’t find people to play with or had more desire to game than time would make sheaves of characters who would never be played. As this was the one way everyone could interact with RPGs, friends to play with or not, it created a shift towards games with interactive and evocative character creation systems. Making choices was fun, though rolling random dice and seeing what you got could be fun too.
So where are we at with this? Character creation has broadened significantly since the days of D&D, and games now have longer, shorter, simpler, and way more complicated character creation methods. Each one generates different results and puts you in the head of your character in a different way, and not just because of math. This past week I had a gaming weekend with my primary gaming group, and as preparation I made characters for games of Legend of the Five Rings, Twilight:2000, and a couple others. It was the first time in a long time I had sat down to make a really involved character, and it made it clear that character creation can provide a lot more than stats if you want it to.
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Cannibal Halfling Gaming 