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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Turning the Page on Digital Distribution

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The last ten to fifteen years of the RPG hobby have played host to a veritable explosion of content, from highly original new games to revivals of decades-old games and everything in between. A significant building block of this renaissance was digital publication. Instead of shelling out thousands of dollars for a print run and then having to find a distributor, a designer could create their game in PDF form and put it up for sale on a marketplace like DriveThruRPG, all for no upfront cost beyond whatever time it took them to design the game in the first place. This has made roleplaying games cheaper, more diverse, and more accessible than ever before.

The trouble with digital versions of RPGs does not lie in their economics; the real issue is that RPG PDFs are treated as ‘digital versions’, as facsimiles of a game whose platonic ideal is a bound paper book. I won’t mince words: Selling identically laid out books and PDFs is and will always be a usability failure. The way we use books and the way we use our digital reading devices, be those laptops, tablets, or e-readers, are completely different, and trying to use the same document these two ways usually leads to a suboptimal experience in both.

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The Trouble with Licensed RPGs

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The RPG hobby is in the midst of a significant supply-demand mismatch. With high switching costs and higher still depth of play, most hobbyists stick with one or a couple games and tend to funnel their dollars towards known quantities with existing fanbases and deeper supplement libraries. Meanwhile, there is the appearance that designing a game takes only incrementally more effort than simply running an existing one, something reinforced by the over 130,000 products on DriveThruRPG (most of them selling fewer than 50 copies). Designers struggle to differentiate in this environment, which makes the strategy of hitching your proverbial wagon to an existing property as popular as it ever has been.

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What are RPGs made of?

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The roleplaying experience cannot be solely defined by which books you pick up at your hobby shop. More than essentially any other medium, RPGs are changed by the people who play them and what they attempt to do with the game when they play. It is both the medium’s greatest strength and its greatest source of annoyance when trying to both critique published RPGs and set standards of good play.

If there’s one thing the RPG community is better at than anything else it’s talking past each other, and in a way this is inevitable. Every game and everything about each of those games which makes them good, bad, memorable, or forgettable is dependent on the people sitting around the table (on the discord, in the LARP space) actually playing. Now, this human element doesn’t discount what the rules bring to the game, and the ability to enjoy yourself in spite of a game doesn’t make it good (likewise, having a game bounce off your group because of your particular preferences and predilections doesn’t make it bad). This does mean, though, that we need to know what we’re talking about.

RPGs are more complicated than other games because they present three separate surfaces of writing which, in other media, either aren’t separated or don’t exist at all. The RPG system is the scaffold, the underlying mechanics, rules, and math which define how games work. The game is the group of elements built around that scaffold, the setting, procedures, and options which tell the players what the game is actually about. Finally, the campaign is the game itself, either from the players’ heads or from a pre-written adventure or two (or three). These elements in total build up to the game a group will actually play, and all of them bring something different and important to the final product.

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Postmodernism and RPGs

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If you’re a millennial and deigned to even dip your toe into art or literary criticism, you ended up in a discussion about postmodernism at some point if only because of the time you grew up in. Modernism was a dominant bloc of philosophical and artistic thought in the western world from the 19th through the twentieth century, heavily informed by how society was changing at the time. While I’m not an especially well-read critic (I had the good fortune to study engineering in school, which is why I can blog for free), I do understand the broad tenets of modernism, which are rooted in scientific inquiry and the ability to discover truth, human capacity to create order, and an implied mission to improve all aspects of life and society through creation of something new. Modernism rejected earlier principles of realism, allowing for more innovations of form in visual art, music, and literature. And if you think I’m not about to tie this back to RPG theory communities and extensions of form like journaling and lyric games…well, you’re wrong.

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The Trouble With Combat

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Role-playing games have their origins from wargames. The through-line from Chainmail to Dungeons and Dragons is an undisputed point of historical record, and the through-line from Dragon Pass to RuneQuest pretty much the same. And as the eponym of wargame is war, it’s pretty clear that all wargames have concerned themselves with killing and dying all the way back to the invention of chess. The problem is that, derivative as they are, role-playing games are not wargames. Role-playing games need not merely concern themselves with killing and dying. After nearly fifty years of evolution, I’d argue that role-playing games shouldn’t only concern themselves with killing and dying.

To be fair, even back to the earliest editions of D&D there were more interesting things going on than just monsters to slay. By 1983 we had Call of Cthulhu, where few or none of the foes within the game were intended to be ‘taken on’ in a violent manner. White Wolf games prized intrigue and social dynamics over outright violence, though both clearly had a place. White Wolf games, though, especially Vampire:the Masquerade, revealed the distinct liability of designing a game, regardless of genre or intended primary activity, with a wargame-like combat system at its center.

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The Maximalist Fallacy

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I enjoy a whole lot of different role-playing games. Indie games, trad games, OSR games, solo games, you name it. As I’ve said before, there’s a wide world of games out there. Despite that, there is one design method for RPGs that profoundly irritates me. And, as luck would have it, it is incredibly common.

The basis of pretty much any RPG is that you, the player, have a character, and you guide that character through the setting, using the rules to determine what happens. The ways that RPGs can structure those rules are basically endless; you can have the entire game determined by a single die, or you can map out six phases of play in as much detail as any strategic board game. Where many games seem to fall, though, is that characters and all they can do are defined by long lists of incremental abilities, all assigned or selected one by one. This is a form of maximalist game design, where the quality and capability of a game is defined by the number of incremental elements you can cram in there. And yeah, it kind of cheeses me off.

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How the Wonk GMs: Running a Session

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You’ve prepped, plotted, and planned. You have character sheets from the players, printouts from the rulebook, and everyone found a spot on the calendar that works. Now, your players are sitting around the table, dice in hand, and are looking expectantly towards your end of the table. What do you do?

I wouldn’t go so far to say that running your game is easier than prepping for it, but it is a completely different set of skills. Many of those skills, like using the game’s rules and putting yourself in the headspace of a character, apply equally to all players, whether they’re the GM or not. Others, like taking notes and tracking what’s going on in the setting, look the same whether they’re happening during the session or in prep time before. There is one skill, though, that is both admired and dreaded in equal measure: improv.

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“We Didn’t Touch Dice the Whole Session!”

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Role-playing games are games which involve role-playing, and that would only be a tautology if the category was consistently named. As it is, plenty of games termed RPGs can run just fine without any role-play to speak of, and plenty of role-play described in so-called RPGs lacks the structure which would allow it to fit the loosest definition of a game. Whether not an RPG is a game or involves role-play, it is certainly a product, and perceived experience sells a product as well as if not better than the actual experience that the product delivers. There is no other medium where the audience exclaims, quite positively, that they did not in any way engage with the experience as delivered to them.

When gamers state, often with happiness, that they went through a whole session without touching their dice, this is a tacit declaration that they did not engage with the game they were playing as intended; if the game did not intend for the players to roll many dice, or had no dice at all, such a declaration wouldn’t typically be made. This is not debatable, the experience of not engaging with the rules is special only insofar as the rules are there to be engaged. As much as it’s clear that the game isn’t being played as intended, what we cannot do in a blanket way is state this is a bad thing. RPGs are designed to deliver specific experiences and many of them, especially more rules-intensive games, deliver multiple specific experiences depending on the fraction of the game you’re engaging with. Looking at what players are or aren’t doing with a specific game requires which mechanics they are or are not engaging with, as well as what they’re doing in their game which isn’t in the rules and is done without touching any dice at all.

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How the Wonk GMs: Session Prep

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Welcome back to How the Wonk GMs! Last time we had a bit of an introduction, framing the GMing experience by talking about campaigns and how one sets up for a campaign. Today, the discussion will be more specific, talking about how one gets ready to run a session. Later, I’m going to go into what I actually do in the GM’s chair, and what running a session looks like.

The one comment I got on the last post in this series was that it was vague, and I concede that. Here’s the thing, though: After you frame up what kind of campaign you want to run, what conceits and systems would be fun for you, you want to keep it vague. An RPG campaign is not a novel, and when you’re setting everything up prior to play you want to leave as many doors open as possible. It is now, when you’re looking to set up an actual session that your players are going to show up to, that you can start closing the doors and settling on what you actually want the game to look like.

I call this session prep, but in the real world with schedule breakdowns, cliffhangers, and everything taking just a bit longer than you’d expect, this might be more of an ‘adventure prep’ given that some of these ‘sessions’ will last two or three. For the most part, then, we’re going to be talking in units of plot rather than units of time. For each of these units of plot, you’re going to be figuring out a problem statement, a problem space, and then a problem resolution. When you’re prepping, though, you start with the problem resolution from last time, use that to write your new problem statement, and then use the new problem statement and your existing prep to define a problem space.

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How the Wonk GMs: Intro and Campaign Prep

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If there’s one thing I’ve been asked to write about over the years, it’s what my home games actually look like. Not an imagined campaign, not a system hack, just how I run when it’s my friends, my ideas, and my time. Needless to say that’s not something that can be condensed to 2000 words, so instead I’m welcoming you, albeit temporarily, to ‘How the Wonk GMs’.

I’ve recently come off of a literally five year stint of GMing for my primary gaming group, and I have run a lot of different games in that time. Spending all this time in the GM’s chair has reminded me that I’m extremely lucky to have as engaged and curious a gaming group as I do…as well as the fact that breaks are good. While taking this break, though, I’m going to be trying to distill down my methods and madness into something approximating fit for public consumption.

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