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 gamesCategory 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
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.
Continue reading Reflections on domains, factions, and “high-level play”
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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Breaking Down Random Generation
Random character generation is an artifact of older editions of D&D, with the OSR and other throwback movements embracing it wholeheartedly. In the present day both old-school D&D derivatives as well as the range of games derived from WFRP’s take on d100 mechanics are still locked in with random generation, with the classic ‘roll 3d6 six times in order’ being both common mechanic and a meme. The problem with random generation in this way is that putting characters arbitrarily at different places on a probability distribution, in effect making characters better or worse based on nothing but luck, is a pretty poor way to accomplish the ultimate goal of random character generation, which is to introduce variability to the type of characters that players ultimately play.
In reviewing how a number of different games handle random character generation, specifically random attribute generation, I can’t help but think that these designers know that players don’t like random generation and don’t actually like rolling bad characters. It’s widely known what the most common response to early D&D’s attribute requirements for certain character classes was: Cheat! It therefore stands to reason that games which still commit to random generation either create a system that employs randomness more deliberately, or create a system which softens the blow of the dice.
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Five Tiers of RPG Publishing
Hasbro’s annual earnings came out this week, so I took a look. It is truly staggering how much Wizards of the Coast has changed the company since they were acquired; when looking at unadjusted earnings the Wizards of the Coast and Digital Games division was the only one that turned a profit in the entire company. Not only that, but Wizards is responsible for roughly 47% of the entire company’s revenue and over 90% of all revenue growth over the last year. That’s over 2 billion dollars in revenue; roughly $1.7 billion is attributable to Magic: The Gathering and the rest is attributable to Dungeons and Dragons.
Dungeons and Dragons is obviously the largest, most popular roleplaying game, but $400 million in revenue is staggering. If this was all books, it would be eight million copies. It’s not all books of course; one of the reasons D&D is growing (though perhaps not as fast as Magic is) is the continued expansion of digital services like D&D Beyond, products with high margins and minimal variable costs. This is the future, not because it makes for a better gaming experience, but because it makes for a better balance sheet.
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Around the OSR…Again
If you go by game release dates, 2026 is the year where Wizards of the Coast becomes the longest-running shepherd of Dungeons and Dragons. The release of 3e serves as an inflection point in how the game was designed, and as a historical note set the stage for the enormous surge in popularity enjoyed by both D&D and the TTRPG hobby as a whole in the following 26 years. This transition of power in the hobby also served as the impetus for the largest movement of D&D revanchism, the OSR. For better or worse, every edition of D&D Wizards put out eventually got its own revanchist movement: for 4e the backlash was harvested by Paizo and turned Pathfinder into the second-largest TTRPG. For 5e, the backlash was a slow burn, coming much later in the product lifecycle and mostly as a result of Wizards of the Coast’s attempt to rug-pull the OGL. It’s here now, though, and has brought us games like Draw Steel and Daggerheart.
The OSR, though, is special, because the grievances that started the movement are about playstyle more than one specific edition. D&D started as a wargame, and was molded over time (and editions) into the character-driven heroic fantasy game we know it as today. Somewhere in the ten year window between the release of original D&D and the release of the Dragonlance setting was something special, as the OSR tells it, a recipe for more grounded gaming. I think there is some merit to that idea; it’s one of the reasons I’ve written about the OSR before and also why I play games like Mothership and Mythic Bastionland. Even so. The era between OD&D and Dragonlance (the setting that “ruined everything” according to some) was ten years; the time that has passed between the release of OSRIC and now is about twenty. What does it mean to be part of a “revival” or “renaissance” that has been around for twice as much time as the thing that’s being revived or reborn?
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Level One Wonk Holiday Special: 2025
Come one, come all, to the strangest time of the year! Join me here in the dead zone before Christmas and New Year’s, and let’s talk about how 2025 went. 2025 was a rough year, to be honest, mostly having to do with a lot of not-RPG things. Some of that did bleed over into the RPG world as well. Tariffs have made physical games more expensive to produce and buy, and generative AI continues to drag down the quality of games being produced. While the RPG hobby can be an escape, more and more it seems that engaging with it (and any hobby for that matter) is necessarily intertwined with the news of the day.
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I looked inward this year. Eight of my fifty articles this year were ostensibly reviews, including three fantasy games (Legend in the Mist, Miseries and Misfortunes, Grimwild), two horror games (Lovecraftesque, Triangle Agency), two sci-fi games (Coriolis: The Great Dark, Cyberpunk Red Single Player Mode) and one generic game (QuestWorlds). I definitely wrote my share on the hobby at large, but spent a bit more time zeroing in on game concepts, be that a new System Hack, examining hit points in Cyberpunk games, or reflecting on the “Onion Model” for the OSR. Even among the reviews you can see that things were a bit less forward-looking; the review written closest to release for the game with the most novel execution was Triangle Agency, and that happened in the beginning of the year. Everything else was either a bit vintage, a supplement, or a new edition of an old game.
Was there a big slowdown this year? If anything, there was a big shift in attention this year. Last year was the year of revised Dungeons and Dragons, but this year was the year for the response to Dungeons and Dragons, and that response came through in spades. Daggerheart was released in May and Draw Steel in July, and both games have created a gravity well pulling attention back to mainline fantasy trad. At the same time, a few older titles like Shadowdark engineered some very successful coattail-riding, building on existing success to take advantage of the changing headlines and the renewed focus on “not D&D”.
When you take the economic uncertainty outside the hobby and the retrenchment within it, what you get is conservatism from all sides. Most of the top-selling titles on DriveThruRPG have been new editions, remakes, and sequels; while there’s something to be said about the continued popularity of the Warhammer settings and of Onyx Path’s stewardship of Storyteller/Storypath, the incrementalism of these games don’t exactly make them rich veins of material for critics and reviewers. The games that really surprised and delighted me this year were ones I was late to the party on, like Legend in the Mist.
Was my gaming year similar to my writing year? In a way, yes. I ran Apocalypse World: Burned Over all year, eventually triggering a “gamechanger” which sent the characters to DIE. Yes, I played it safe even as I enthusiastically tried out new mechanics and new rules hacks. Even though I played it safe, it had been about a decade since this group last played Apocalypse World, and I keep seeing new ways that GMing PbtA pushes me and the way I run my games. Now that phase two of the campaign is continuing in DIE, I’m trying to prep for it in a very different way. I’m curious to see how long I can keep things going; on one hand I think this campaign has a longer runway than I’m used to writing for, but on the other hand I’m writing in a definitive ending that the players can trigger at their pleasure. My players will find out about that ending in our next session; for right now it’s the only part of session prep that hasn’t been scrambled and rewritten multiple times as I keep getting new ideas.
New ideas are my continuing blessing/curse as I try to shift my new campaign ideas over to the side. I have several campaigns I want to run in the future, including a horrendously ambitious post-apocalyptic science-fantasy game using at least three different OSR games stuck in a blender. Beyond that are some slightly less intense ideas mostly focused around systems; my group played Wildsea for the first time and there’s interest in going back, so that may be an upcoming campaign (run either by me or possibly someone else). I also clued myself into the upcoming release of Blades ‘68; I played Deathloop and Atomfall this year, and got a nice reminder of how much I enjoy the ‘60s retrotech aesthetic. Given that setting realignment, it’s very likely that Blades ‘68 will be what inspires me to finally get Blades in the Dark to the table.
This was also a year I got back into the RPG discussion space a bit, becoming a more active user on a couple Discords where some great discussion has gone on. I also finally started an account on BlueSky, but that was mostly due to a tangential development this year: I started another site where I’m posting fiction and some personal reflections on storytelling. It’s going to be a smaller, more intimate project than Cannibal Halfling Gaming, but overall I think that doing more writing and being encouraged to engage more (albeit in a relatively contained fashion) has been a good thing this year, both for my sense of belonging in this hobby as well as a way to create dialogue. I’m very pleased with the three posts I wrote in conversation with other commentators this year, and I think my efforts to consider my writing as dialogue, as conversation made the result not only better written but also healthier than trying to write ‘a response’.
So where did all that writing get us? Well, we’re inevitably cramming in more posts at the end of the year, but as of this writing we’re beating the 2024 viewcount by about 6000, with about 15 fewer posts. This is a solid turnaround from the decline from 2023 to 2024, but it also has shown that, once you take outliers out of the picture, we’re trending similarly to the RPG hobby as a whole. 2023 likely shouldn’t have been as big as it was, but we got at least two huge articles posting five-figure reader counts within a week of their release. As we’ve moved away from promoting on Twitter and Reddit, those immediate viewcounts are seldom if ever going to happen, unless we stumble upon a game right before the hype cycle begins (and we don’t have enough free time to ever do that reliably). We’re putting out content that’s generating very healthy viewcounts over time, and continuing to do that is what’s going to enable us to continue growing steadily into the future.
We published 52 posts this year as part of our recurring content cadence: Weekend Updates, plus one Cannibal Halfling Radio episode. I wrote, as I mentioned, 50 posts this year. Seamus wrote 17, and then Aki and Sloane contributed another 3. This got us to our total of 122, which as I mentioned is about 15 less than last year, but with better viewcounts. As we look at this, there’s always the consideration of sustainability. In 2019 we published nearly 150 pieces, but that’s even wilder than you think, because Weekend Update didn’t become part of our posting schedule until 2021. That means that we published more than twice as much content in 2019 as we did this year. Can we return to that? No, not really; at the very least we’d need four regular writers again, and currently we only have two. Our current pace is definitely workable, though I’d prefer to see roughly ten posts a month (four weekend updates, six actual posts) spread out evenly through the year. We do seem to have this habit of cramming a bunch of things in between Thanksgiving and New Year’s…anyway.
And how has this year been for me? Well, a lot. I mentioned it briefly in my Endies 2025 post, but I moved this year. Even that is burying the lede; I moved in with my longtime partner, which was more logistically involved than most. We are lucky to not be renters, but that means that moving required the sale of two condos and purchase of one, as well as two different moves, first consolidating into one (too-small) condo and then moving everything into the new one. The entire process went from May to the middle of August, and dominated my year. As I look to 2026, one significant difference from 2025 will be that no one in my life is moving. The biking is of course continuing as always; our new home has more cycling infrastructure and options around us, though the move itself cut into my ability to ride and train. I felt that hard when we did D2R2 this past year; I simply wasn’t as fit as I wanted to be and suffered through a lot of the hill climbing as a result. Next year should be better, as long as I make time to ride.
I’m not sure where the hobby is going next year, but I still have a drive to play games, run games, and make games. Thanks to my new project I even have a space to talk stories, characters, and worldbuilding while focusing my writing here on new games, the state of the hobby, and nerding out about playing RPGs just like I always have. While I think that predicting things will ‘calm down’ next year is perhaps a bit optimistic, my personal life should be slightly less hectic, which may even mean more time to play games. As with everything else, we shall see. No matter what is coming, I hope to keep writing, keep playing, and keep engaging with all of you who also love this hobby and who I’ve enjoyed speaking to in the past year. Thank you to everyone who reads, comments, and drops by our Discord, I hope to keep seeing you in the year ahead. Of course thanks to Aki, Sloane, and Seamus, who have all made up part of the Cannibal Halfling family this year. As always, keep playing, keep dreaming, and I’ll see you in 2026.
Like what Cannibal Halfling Gaming is doing and want to help us bring games and gamers together? First, you can follow me @levelonewonk.bsky.social for RPG commentary, relevant retweets, and maybe some rambling. You can also find our Discord channel and drop in to chat with our authors and get every new post as it comes out. You can travel to DriveThruRPG through one of our fine and elegantly-crafted links, which generates credit that lets us get more games to work with! Finally, you can support us directly on Patreon, which lets us cover costs, pay our contributors, and save up for projects. Thanks for reading!
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