Category 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

Articles, Level One Wonk

QuestWorlds: Who wants a generic game?

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Generic RPGs are designed to accomplish a goal that many say they want. The ability to write anything, make any genre fit together, and theoretically never have to learn another system again all sound great. The reality usually ends up being something different, though. The entire reasoning behind generic RPGs even being possible has forever been couched in very narrow assumptions about what an RPG actually is. Once you expand those assumptions a little bit, a generic game starts to look impossible.

QuestWorlds, originally called Hero Wars (and HeroQuest in between those two), is a game that came out of a post-TSR, pre-Forge era of the early 2000s much like the first edition of Fate. Both of these games have the same essential objective: build out a set of mechanics that can take any character on one side, any challenge on the other, and adjudicate that character standing up to that challenge regardless of the specifics. Add in some balancing rules for character creation and advancement, and you’ve got a game that’s ready for anything. Kind of. Both QuestWorlds and Fate make very similar disclaimers about only working with genres with capable and proactive heroes prevailing over larger-than-life challenges. The disempowerment of horror doesn’t really work, nor do the continuous drags of hunger, thirst, or wound management found in survival games. These generic games, and many generic games, quickly reveal themselves to be “roughly the way we think people play RPGs” games.

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Confessions of a “realistic” GM

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I feel there is a certain arc that you see among tabletop gamers, especially those who get their start with D&D. D&D is, like anyone’s first RPG, the gateway to a new world, a new mode of expression and imagination. While lots of people enjoy games, some end up enraptured, vibrating at the thought of what they can do and create. So they become a DM and start writing, start doing as much as they can with the game. And they start hitting walls. Some of the walls are from the game; the sort of ‘game logic’ of D&D only tells a limited palette of stories no matter how much the marketing says otherwise. So they try another game. And another game. In most cases, game logic still prevails. Some of the walls, though, are from the other players. Even if the DM wanted to try another game, the players wouldn’t necessarily go along with it. And from the perspective of the person who was most excited by the game, it certainly looks like the other players aren’t taking it seriously enough. The stakes that our aspiring writer sees in their worlds, the other players…don’t. So how do they fix this? How do they make everything feel serious to everyone at the table? How do they make the players feel the way they feel?

This story is a familiar one, and I know that because it’s my story. I was the one who was vibrating out of my chair with excitement at the idea of creating worlds in D&D, and my disenchantment with how D&D actualized those stories led me to Cyberpunk. And when it seemed like the intrigue of the stories wasn’t resonating with my players, I tried to make the game more serious, more internally consistent, more “realistic”. And years later, when I found a literal generation of heartbreakers and retroclones dedicated to making D&D more lethal, making wizards less powerful, and generally making the game more difficult, I finally realized two things. One, there is a nearly universal desire for grounding and meaning among those who tell stories, whether they do so with TTRPGs or something else. And two, for those of us working in the TTRPG medium, making the game ‘grittier’ is usually the answer to a different question than the one actually being asked.

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The funnel and beyond: Pre-play character creation

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In RPGs, character creation methods abound. You can create characters mechanically with point and option spends, build them alongside a backstory with a lifepath, or just roll some dice and see what comes out the other end. When it comes to actually aligning the characters with the game you’re about to play, so much so that you need to bring the GM along for the ride, I think I’ve found one of the best options. Now, one reason you’ve likely never done this before is that it’s time-intensive and it can be a lot of extra work for the GM if not all of the players. Another reason, though, is that to really play through character creation, you need mechanics to do so. Precious few games have these mechanics, but after giving one such system a spin I’m pretty comfortable saying it should be more of a thing for campaign play.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Do games need a reason to exist?

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Last week I puzzled over my “review” of Lovecraftesque. The game is certainly well done, and it is an improvement over earlier games like Fiasco in terms of how it is structured and how it uses board game elements like a game board and cards and tokens. It’s also a Mythos game that uses themes and structure from Lovecraft’s work instead of literal elements of the Mythos, and so I was fairly critical in how it didn’t go deeper to some of the underlying themes below the surface-level stories of horrors from beyond comprehension. But the question in the back of my head while I was writing was “So what? The designers don’t owe me a deeper game.” This is true. And I’ve been thinking about it.

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Lovecraftesque: Shadows Over Story Games

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As I’ve been consuming more cosmic horror, I find that my relationship with games set in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos mirrors my relationship with licensed games. I think there is so much room for them to be great, and then I’m inevitably disappointed nearly every time I read one. In the case of licensed games, this is often because they’re pretty bad; the relationship between licensed games and money is inextricable, and the best licensed games borne out of love and fandom are often from a time in the hobby’s history that’s long gone. In the case of H.P. Lovecraft, it’s a bit more complicated. Lovecraft is a divisive figure, both having essentially invented cosmic horror and changed science fiction forever while also being a known racist, even beyond the conventions of his time. The biggest problem I have with the Cthulhu Mythos in pop culture is twofold: First, the xenophobic roots of Lovecraft’s works are rarely examined or critiqued in games, an omission made even more galling by designers’ desires to hew to a 1920s setting for their games without asking more serious questions about it. Second, the continued sanitization of Lovecraft creations in pop culture (the ‘Cthulhu plushie’ phenomenon) makes it that much more difficult to have conversations about xenophobia, cosmicism, and even New England folklore and dissect how these factors all influenced Lovecraft and his work.

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What actually happens when your group switches games?

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It’s known that table dynamics affect play as much as (and some argue more than) what game you’re sitting down to play. And although both game and player are important, player aims often get talked about less or even disparaged through ‘taxonomies’ which typically valorize the playstyle of the author instead of providing objective analysis. Games are simply easier to discuss and critique; even movements which seemingly downplay the primacy of mechanics end up spending a lot of time discussing written material in the form of modules and settings which rarely if ever lead to the best gaming experience (because of, once again, player dynamics).

I started puzzling over this a few weeks ago, and wanted to return to the discussion at hand because I think it’s an important part of figuring out what you actually want to play. Needless to say, the ‘what’ in this sentence must necessarily be broader than what book you aim to pick up and puzzle through, but that’s always been the case: Even within a single game, editions, supplements, and pre-written material would always enter consideration before a single person sat down at the table. And, of course, the play outcome is still wholly dependent on the group even after the material choices are made.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Gaming groups and the social ‘system’

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Moreau Vazh wrote an excellent post on their blog Taskerland, entitled “System Matters, Explicit Mechanics Less So”. Framing the debate on rules density historically, the post points out that gaming groups end up behaving in patterns similarly seen in many groups of people who have come together to do something creative. Of course, given that the norms of roleplaying are a great deal younger than, say, the social conventions of playing music in a group (an activity which is highly delineated and has many, many titles associated with said groups), there’s still a lot of push and pull in terms of figuring out how everyone actually wants to roleplay. Many of the norms we do have were developed either from prior art (often wargames) or came up simply because they were written into D&D back in 1974 (or perhaps a few years later, depending on the actual rule). Either way, these norms are still evolving, and as Vazh correctly points out, the hobby spends way more time agonizing over mechanics than attempting to understand the social dynamics which lead to game preferences and styles of play. And this leads to the core thesis of the Taskerland post, that ‘system’ is so wrapped up in the social norms and conflict resolution approaches of a group that the way a group plays games often transcends mechanics.

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Diegesis, Mimesis, and You

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The term ‘diegesis’ (and derived adjectives ‘diegetic’ and ‘non-diegetic’) comes from film criticism, but has been used recently in RPG critique. In essence, diegesis defines the narrated world relative to the viewer (or in our case, the player). This is somewhat of a heady, academic definition, so let me give an example. In a movie, the soundtrack is typically non-diegetic. That means that the music playing that the audience hears does not interact with the narrative, with what’s going on on the screen. In some cases, though, the soundtrack is diegetic, meaning that the events of the narrative do interact with the music. The perfect example of that would be musicals: The soundtrack you hear is in fact the characters breaking into song, that is part of the narrative and the world.

And just like musicals, roleplaying games are creating assumptions about their worlds that do not align with the real world. You are never going to suddenly hear a musical cue and break into song while waiting for a bus; similarly you will never find yourself suddenly able to rebuild an engine or speak Mandarin because you were able to invest ‘skill points’. These aren’t bad things: both dramatic works and games are designed in service to their goals as art and entertainment, not to be ‘realistic’ or ‘grounded’. On the other hand, there is a vast world of critical opinion around how much the conceits of both films and games live in either diegesis or exegesis (the realms of the narrative and the audience, respectively); calling musicals divisive would be putting it mildly, and the same can be said about RPG mechanics which treat the characters more like narrative game tokens than extensions of the player.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

The intent of RPG reviews

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It’s another new year, and I am once again asking, in one form or another, the same question I’ve asked myself in January for several years now: Why am I here? Why do I want to be here, writing about roleplaying games? Now, I’m not asking this question because the spark is gone or it feels futile (it does some of the time, but hell if that’s going to stop me). Instead, I’m checking in on myself. What am I trying to do? Am I succeeding in that?

This year, I’m also asking: Why are you here? I don’t necessarily mean at this site specifically, but why are you reading about RPGs online? More specifically, why are you reading RPG reviews? I know for a fact that the reason many go to read reviews is not exactly aligned with the reason I write them, and that’s likely why I felt the need to discuss the intent of RPG reviews.

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Level One Wonk Holiday Special: 2024

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Happy holidays to gamers here and around the world! It’s that time again where I settle in at the end of the year, make a comforting hot beverage and review what’s gone on in the last twelve months. And, to be completely honest, it’s been a doozy. In the gaming world, 2024 was a year of D&D, the game’s 50th anniversary being a banner event that led to the release of the new 2024 version of the 5e handbooks (I guess we’re not supposed to call them 5.5e, but come on). At the same time, the goliath that is D&D has taken some licks; the self-inflicted wound that was the OGL fiasco led to significant fragmentation in the high fantasy subgenre defined by, well, D&Ds. Daggerheart, Draw Steel, and Tales of the Valiant all brought forth new takes on the 5e formula, and were a double-edged sword in terms of D&D’s monopoly: On one hand, that version of fantasy, the swords and sorcery slash Tolkien mashup that existed nowhere except D&D in 1974 and now exists everywhere, is still the most popular RPG genre in the world. On the other hand, a wide range of 5e players took a look at other games, and if D&D didn’t end up being their first choice for D&D things, they definitely ended up looking at other games for other genres.

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