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.
Continue reading Losing the tracks on railroadingCategory Archives: Level One Wonk
noun
: a person preoccupied with arcane details or procedures in a specialized field
broadly : NERD
: a TTRPG wonk
: a game design wonk
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.
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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.
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It’s still all old games
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?
Continue reading It’s still all old games
Reflections on domains, factions, and “high-level play”
As is becoming perhaps more common, I feel compelled to react to an interesting piece from elsewhere in the RPG blogosphere. High Level Play and Scaffolding takes a Bluesky thread from Sam Sorensen and uses it as a jumping off point to discuss why there are noted trends of hesitancy among players to move into “high-level play” in an OSR sense, that is to say gameplay which shifts from focusing on dungeon crawling and party-level combat and treasure hunting to play where the characters become leaders of mercenary companies, warbands, or even nations. Post author Zak H. frames this as a scaffolding problem, essentially stating that the mode of play that “high-level play” requires isn’t set up or framed by any of the levels or modes of play that come before it. I find that perfectly reasonable; it makes sense that dungeon crawling doesn’t prepare you for factional intrigue or morale management. What I’m more interested in is where this all fits into the broader hobby here in 2026.
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From ashcans to zeroth editions: The new face of TTRPG revision
Players from every generation have taken it as a given that RPGs get updated. There are always new ideas to be implemented and tweaks to make, and basically every high profile attempt to make a ‘final’ edition of a popular game ended in failure (or, at least, another edition). Even if you can’t change a manual’s text, there are errata. Even if the base game stays largely the same, new supplements mix up how everything works and plays together. This is, at least in terms of how we engage with games, inevitable.
What’s not inevitable is how games will change, what that actually looks like. I had an opportunity to play in a short Fabula Ultima game a ways back, and while I liked the game (quite a bit, actually!), one thing was seared in my mind from the experience. After almost every session, one of the players would trawl through the game designer’s Discord and bring us rules updates. These weren’t errata, they were notably redesigned spells and class abilities which the designer was rebalancing in response to feedback on the game. Even though the published version of the game hadn’t changed, we had rules modifications delivered fresh…so long as someone in the group was on the Discord and at least nominally engaging with the fannish side of the game’s community. It is a very different way of adjusting rules, and it is but one aspect of a sea change in how designers approach adjusting, fixing, and yes, finalizing their games.
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Shifting Matters: More TTRPG/Bicycle Comparisons
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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Satisficing and RPG Design
Economics is the study of resource allocation and management; behavioral economics is the study of how theoretical economics meets practical, human reality. The split between theory and practice is an entire subfield of economics, and arguably other disciplines benefit from the same thing. The broader study of the alignment of human decision making is called decision science, and it takes the P-Q charts of economics and amplifies them with psychology and game theory.
Tabletop roleplaying games are no strangers to decision science, both within and outside the context of playing the game itself. This week I was inspired to look back at one of the most influential recent schools of RPG theory thanks to the Taskerland review of Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012 by William J. White. The review starts with a reread of Ron Edwards’ essay System Does Matter in the context of the book, and restates the thesis of the essay more clearly than most commentators do nowadays: While good games come from good GMs and good players, better games come when those two are aligned with the right game mechanics and systems. This dovetails with notions of GNS and accusations of gameplay ‘incoherence’, but the issue, as the Taskerland review points out, is less with Edwards’ description than his prescription: Aim to play more narrowly aligned games with players who share your priorities.
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Three Tiers of RPG Purchasing
There’s a wide world of games out there, and from a gamer’s perspective it’s an embarrassment of riches. More games than you could ever play or even read, and altogether too many things to do and places to start. How gamers navigate the hobby is important for game designers, who are all jockeying for the dollars that gamers spend.
Everyone goes about their gaming purchases in different ways, much as they go about buying groceries, appliances, or furniture. In gaming, a hobbyist is likely to make many gaming purchases over time, and how they segment these purchases depends on what they’re trying to do. The assessment of how buyers behave with regards to their purchases is called customer segmentation, and it’s a key element of market research and strategy consulting. When you understand how your customers act, it’s easier to plan for their behavior and make more effective product and marketing decisions.
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