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

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Guide for the Perplexed: Retail Institutions

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Welcome to the second installment of Guide for the Perplexed! Last time I introduced three of the largest RPGs that aren’t D&D, games with long enough histories and big enough communities that they’re easy to get into and find players. Now I’m going to talk about a different angle for finding games and finding players: The places you go to shop for games.

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a lot easier to find games online; between DriveThruRPG and itch.io virtually every game imaginable is one click away (and the two publishers that don’t use these sites are huge and have their own). That said, the ‘friendly local gaming store’ can not only give you access to games, but also advice and even networking. Admittedly the reputation of the game store has been pretty negative for a lot of the hobby’s history; game stores were historically seen as unfriendly to women and minorities and the progenitor of many horror stories as a result. Luckily this is changing, and as even D&D itself is aiming to become more welcoming and accessible, few stores are going to stay in business without putting some effort into the ‘friendly’ part of the moniker.

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Guide for the Perplexed: Biggest Names

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Imagine for a moment that you’re a recent entrant into the tabletop RPG hobby. In all likelihood you entered via D&D; the longest lived brand in the hobby almost certainly holds a majority share of hobby sales and definitely of hobby mindshare. If you wanted to stay in the realm of D&D, that’s easy; the game has the largest community by far, the volume of official supplements is solid, and the third party support is massive. Even if you tire of D&D 5e itself, there are a number of directly comparable games to play; you can go Pathfinder if you want something more granular and more complex, or go to the OSR for something more imagination-and table-driven. But let’s say you want something different. How do you figure out what’s going to appeal to you?

Guide for the Perplexed is going to be a series of articles looking at finding new games outside of D&D. The key angle here is accessibility: These games will be easy to find and it will be easy to find other players. To that end, I’ll be looking at three different approaches to finding new games: Games which have the outright largest player bases, games which are easy to find at your local game store, and games with active communities online. As the series progresses the discussion will not only be about the games, but also about the channels that the games come through. Gaming at your local gaming store isn’t just about what books you can find on the shelf, it’s about the events being offered. The same goes for local gaming cafes or even your local library. Similarly, ‘online community’ can mean a lot of different things, but it’s important to see which ones are welcoming and support gameplay, including subreddits, forums, and living communities.

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Victoriana Third Edition: Last Chance Review

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I’m not going to hide that I have a dim view of games made using D&D Fifth Edition as their base system. D&D has always been a more specific game than Wizards of the Coast makes it out to be; even TSR made separate games instead of a unified ruleset. When I see a game made for 5e my first question is always if the designers had any thought to what rules would best suit the game they’re making rather than what rules more people are already playing.

If there’s a company that has a chance to make me eat my words, though, it’s Cubicle 7. My review of Doctors and Daleks detailed how impressed I was at what they did to make a good Doctor Who RPG out of 5e, including some massive changes to how the game works. Cubicle 7 is now campaigning another 5e game on Kickstarter, the fourth edition to their Steampunk game Victoriana. Victoriana has already seen some ruleset changes over the years; the game started out using Fuzion, a revision of the rules to Cyberpunk 2020 co-developed by R. Talsorian and Hero Games. By the third edition, though, Victoriana is built out using a d6 dice pool system and a wholly custom ruleset.

My questions about 5e Victoriana run rampant. Beyond my ruleset partisanship, this version of the game has been limping along for years, first announced in 2021, re-announced in 2023 using a custom 5e modification that was being called C7d20, and finally making it to Kickstarter earlier this month with the C7d20 nomenclature absent, simply called “Victoriana for 5th Edition”. The campaign is ongoing, and though it’s met its funding goal it’s currently sitting below $75k, a tough number to swallow for a campaign that has stretch goals out to the $200k mark.

What is this new edition of Victoriana going to get us? To attempt to answer that question, I’m going to crack open my copy of Victoriana third edition. Released in 2013, the game has the polish of a title both released by a major design house as well as one from late in the ‘big book’ era of trad games. The question is, given the sort of game Victoriana is, will it work using 5e rules? And in the pantheon of Steampunk RPGs, is it one worth saving, 5e or not?

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The TTRPG Fleet

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If you hang around in bicycle spaces long enough, you’re going to hear someone say ‘n+1’. This is a joke among the cycling community: “The correct amount of bikes to own is n+1, where n is equal to the number of bikes you currently have.” Needless to say the collector’s impulse in the cycling hobby runs strong, and even if you aren’t interested in trying all the brands or vintage frames or anything like that, you still may find yourself in the throes of n+1. After all, you start with a mountain bike, want to try a road bike, then you need a gravel bike, and a cross bike, and an endurance road bike, a climbing bike, a pub bike, a fixie…

It’s no wonder the collector’s impulse is even stronger within RPGs; you can get twenty hardcover sourcebooks for the price of a relatively cheap bike. And yet, collecting RPGs comes with a stronger risk of missing something. There are many, many bikes out there to enjoy, but at the end of the day you’re still going to be riding bikes, and the forty miles you put down on one bike will still help your legs when you pull out the next bike. The TTRPG hobby is a bit different; playing Masks and playing Pathfinder aren’t going to be similar experiences or pull in the same direction.

While RPG reviewers such as myself are often the ones most liable to try and catch all the RPGs like so many Pokemon, there is another way to consider approaching RPGs and actually playing them, and it comes right from bicycling. N+1 may be a joking mantra, but most cyclists have neither the money to acquire a collection of bikes nor the time to ride them. Instead, most cyclists end up with their ‘fleet’, a group of two to eight bicycles that cover the range of disciplines and experiences they want to have. While having twenty Italian road bikes may not amplify your understanding of cycling, having both a road bike and a mountain bike is something that pretty much every cyclist can understand, collector or not.

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Nostalgia, consumption, and D&D

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I am not too proud to admit I’ve watched every episode of Netflix’s That 90’s Show. Unlike the first attempt at a spinoff, That 90’s Show is nakedly and obviously a sequel to That 70’s Show while also fishing in the shallow pool of 90s nostalgia, including groaningly obvious musical numbers and cameos specifically meant to induce memories of going to high school in the 90s. I’m technically a bit too young for the target market, as well as someone who thought themselves too aware of tropes and psychological ploys to get sucked into this kind of TV. And yet, get sucked in I did. It’s a blatant comfort-watch, calling back to the original series, the magical time before social networking, and also the bygone era when multi-camera sitcoms were still the bulk of network TV programming (remember network TV?).

Nostalgia plays aren’t limited to TV, and of course in the TTRPG world we see them all over. There’s arguably two angles to nostalgia within TTRPGs: The RPG as nostalgia tendril, where the game is simply the marketing device used to exploit the audience’s existing love for Star Wars, or Marvel, or My Little Pony. These games can be good or bad, but they’re built around their existing property and serve that property (and its licensors) first. There’s also nostalgia for the TTRPG itself. While a cynic may call the OSR solely a nostalgia play, there’s much more obvious examples at play here; Goodman Games is clearing half a million dollars in crowdfunding for what is effectively a reprint of a module from 1979. They’re making a t-shirt as part of this campaign, so it’s definitely at least a little bit for the money. That said, I don’t think the Caverns of Thracia reprint is entirely indefensible. Goodman is doing a service by taking a great old module and keeping it available, including updating it for new rulesets; it’s still arguable whether that’s worth half a million dollars and t-shirt sales. And that’s the primary issue with nostalgia: Where do we draw the line between archiving and reviewing the past, and wallowing in it?

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Game Changer and the ‘Twist’ campaign

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Our players have no idea what game it is they’re about to play. The only way to learn is by playing, the only way to win is by learning, and the only way to begin is by beginning, so without further ado, let’s begin!

Kicking off in 2019, Game Changer has been a big hit for Dropout, the streaming service which subsumed the CollegeHumor brand after the site was dropped by IAC in 2020. The show consists of host Sam Reich running a game show for a rotating cast of contestants, but the actual ‘game’ of the game show changes every episode. One episode may be a particularly twisted variant of Simon Says, while another calls on contestants to make sounds imitating the onscreen prompts, while yet another locks three contestants in their green room only then to explain that escaping the green room is actually the game.

What makes Game Changer so funny is the combination of new and odd gameplay that the contestants are exposed to and the contestants themselves, all comedians who are part of the broader Dropout cast.The way the contestants react to their circumstances (and to Reich himself, who is as much a ringmaster as a host) generates some great laughs, even when facing the real discomfort of handing over their phones, being hooked up to heart rate monitors as a game mechanic, or even having an entire segment set up where the express purpose is to make you (‘you’ in this case being Brennan Lee Mulligan) lose.

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How do you become an RPG publisher?

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The RPG hobby is nearly 100% self-published. This makes sense on itch.io and when talking about the many solo designers with DBAs like ‘Sine Nomine Publishing’ or ‘Bastionland Press’, but it extends across the whole hobby. At no point did Mike Pondsmith submit Mekton to a publisher; he formed his own company, R. Talsorian Games (and had investors in his company, somewhat unusual then and much rarer now). Steve Jackson Games was formed, unsurprisingly, by Steve Jackson. Even TSR was just designers trying to get their games out into the world.

This dearth of publishers creates a problem for aspiring RPG designers: A complete lack of support services. You can hire an editor, artists, even a marketing consultant, but that’s money out of your pocket and a severe constraint for most designers who haven’t yet sold a game. That’s the reason the publisher model is so appealing: For a promise of future revenue, a publisher will provide a designer with all the resources they need to succeed. All the designer needs to do is bring them a game that all parties agree is good.

It works great for fiction, it’s been used much less often in the RPG world. Some designers who extend into publishing, companies like Evil Hat Productions, typically represent games by designers they’re already familiar with as a way to reduce downside risk. It’s a reasonable business strategy but it greatly diminishes the number of new games that can be elevated if fewer risks are taken to discover them. Others, like Indie Press Revolution, do a great service getting games into print and distributed but, once again, they’re curating existing games and designers more than discovering new ones. It all begs one question: Is there an effective business model to discover promising game designers and give them the resources they need to stand toe to toe with the big guys?

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The Precarity of RPG Design

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I’m not stating anything particularly controversial when I say it’s tough to be a game designer. The tabletop RPG market is an economics nightmare; demand is low and supply is incredibly high. Demand is low because this is a niche hobby whose marketing to the public at large is, essentially, Hasbro screaming so loud that nobody else is heard. Supply is driven by the fact that, at a functional level, thanks to crowdfunding Kickstarter, itch.io, and DriveThruRPG, basically anyone can make a TTRPG and get it on sale. TTRPGs and self-published fiction are very much the same, and everyone’s looking for the solution to the fact that 90% of everything in the market is utter crap.

Imagine, if you will, that you’re a good game designer. You’ve made something that’s captured the attention of part of the audience and, after you run some numbers, you realize that you could make a living on this. If you’ve done those numbers correctly, you’re still looking at a difficult life, one filled with a lot of hustle, a lot of compromises on your creative vision, and, most discouragingly, precarity. Precarity is, in essence, the amount of time you spend one decision away from ruin. It’s the constant enemy of anyone who doesn’t earn a constant and consistent income, and when your precarious income is game design instead of, say, insurance sales, there’s no relief from it, either. The only avenues to some meager financial security are to release a game that honestly gets famous, book dozens of hours of freelance work over and above your own design work, or simply have a day job.

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Stardew Valley’s Closed World

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Stardew Valley returned to the video game consciousness in a big way recently with the release of its 1.6 update. This update includes new content, rebalancing, and generally significant improvements and changes to the game that most thought unlikely after the 1.5 update due to designer Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone shifting his focus to his next game, Haunted Chocolatier. Needless to say the scope of the update was a very pleasant surprise, and many players, myself included, dove back in.

I’ve put a number of hours into a new playthrough of Stardew Valley, having previously put the game down after the 1.5 update. Compared to my last two playthroughs I’ve taken more time to consider the design of the game and what it can teach us about tabletop games. Much like the last time I analyzed a video game like this, No Man’s Sky, the intent is not to imply that the gameplay loops would make much sense at the tabletop; Stardew Valley’s most tactile elements, like its combat and fishing, belong firmly in the digital realm. Instead I’d say there’s a lot to learn about how Stardew Valley presents a world and the avenues by which a player can interact with that world. This world design is, in some ways at least, the opposite of No Man’s Sky. Stardew Valley presents a ‘closed world’ where the avenues of interaction are finite and presented from the beginning, and that mode of world design can teach some lessons to tabletop RPGs, either to designers or GMs.

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Level One Wonk Holiday Special: 2023

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Happy holidays! 2023 is ending, and what a year it’s been. In a lot of ways, 2023 has been a bit quieter here than previous years; while COVID refuses to go away we’ve all lurched back towards normalization, and most of the upheaval in games came from picking up the pieces of events that happened in 2022. Twitter is dead, essentially; anyone who’s attempted to use the site knows that any attempt to see through the haze of algorithmic mud only results in, at best, the absence of continued conversation. Of course, RPG discussion continues, you just need to look a little harder to find it.

Casting a longer shadow over RPG news of the year was Wizards of the Coast. Starting with the OGL debacle and ending with a swathe of layoffs, things were rough this year for everyone’s favorite RPG monopolist. It does mean, though, that my prediction made last year about major players and rent-seeking were correct; MCDM, Kobold Press, Darrington Press and others are all fielding fantasy RPGs intended to be an alternative to D&D. This does mean that whatever happens with the revised D&D rulebooks coming out in 2024 is anyone’s guess; even the home run of Baldur’s Gate 3 has effectively been squandered on the tabletop side.

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