Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Big groups, small games

1 Comment

For the most part, the ideal size for a gaming group is five, four players and a GM. This is driven by group dynamics; researchers wrote in the Harvard Business Review back in 2018 that the ideal group size for meetings is between five and eight, at least if the point of that meeting is to have a productive discussion and get things done. Roleplaying games skew to the lower end of this mostly just due to the fact that in addition to the actual ‘meeting’ of a game, there is also the need to manage that many characters, their contributions, and their stories.

Ideal doesn’t mean only, and an experienced GM can run games anywhere in that 5-8 range without too many problems, at least as long as they’re realistic about how long things will take. More and more, though, games are being written towards a specific group size, usually a smaller one. In some cases it’s obvious, like Fiasco: the number of turns in the game, and therefore the amount of time the game will take, is directly proportional to the number of people playing, and even playing with five people, the maximum number recommended by the rules, the game begins to sprawl and the story begins to sag. In other cases, the restriction comes from a clear place, but the question hangs in the air about how to subvert it. A good example of this is DIE: There are six roles, six dice. That’s how many there were in the comic, therefore that’s how many there are in the game.

Continue reading Big groups, small games →
Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: September, 2025

Leave a comment

Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for September! We’re seeing the post-GenCon movement begin, and several of the big publishers are starting their engines up again with new campaigns. At the same time, there are a number of good indies out there which are worthy of your attention. Let’s get to it.

Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: September, 2025 →
Articles, Level One Wonk

TTRPGs and fandom

1 Comment

The genesis of fandom as we know it starts and ends with communication. Sports fandom began evolving from the 19th century to today as radio, TV, and then the internet all brought access to more and more people. Literary fandom wasn’t too far behind: Jane Austen and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle both inspired fan movements with intensity rivaling the most fervent fandoms of today, famously doing things like publicly mourning the death of Sherlock Holmes.

There’s always a spectre behind fandom, though. Sports has seen a sea change from live attendance to broadcast as team owners can charge more and more for tickets and extract more and more money out of their audience. A massive subsection of the fandom factions collectively referred to as ‘nerd culture’ are owned by Disney, engineered to extract money from the existing audiences of Star Wars and Marvel. The strong feelings of identity and association associated with fandom can easily be weaponized, and the history of nerd culture brings along with it a whole other level of making spending choices feel very personal.

So what of role-playing games? The RPG hobby and RPG fandom are often seen as one and the same; traditional RPGs are high-commitment and there isn’t much of a casual following. Beyond that, RPGs, specifically licensed RPGs, are vehicles for other fandoms, taking advantage of the fandom overlaps implied by that phrase ‘nerd culture’. When we look at RPG fandom, though, we do see things falling out in a few different ways: Those who focus on the act of playing RPGs as a whole, those who are fans of their one chosen game, and those who are fans of the chosen game, Dungeons and Dragons. Just like fandoms of all sorts of other hobbies and media, the RPG fandom is driven not only from the enthusiasm and engagement of its members, but also by the companies who capitalize on those feelings of association and belonging in order to make money.

Continue reading TTRPGs and fandom →
Articles, Editorial

Coriolis: The Great Dark Review

Leave a comment

One small step for the Year Zero Engine, one giant leap for Coriolis…

Free League has been shepherding the Coriolis series for nearly a decade now. Originally published by Jarnringen, the original designers of Symbaroum, Coriolis was released in 2008 to much acclaim in Sweden. Free League first got on board creating additional material for the game, but ended up the stewards of the series, releasing their first version in 2016. Now, we get the newest edition, a ‘standalone sequel’ set 200 years after the events of Coriolis: The Third Horizon.

Coriolis won accolades for being a solidly original sci-fi setting, and The Great Dark carries on that legacy by managing to be different even from the version of the game that came before it. At the same time, Free League didn’t mess with the formula of the YZE mechanics too much; we’re staying closer to home with the version of the mechanics established in Mutant: Year Zero and Forbidden Lands than many other recent YZE games have. While I don’t think that The Great Dark is going to win over all existing Coriolis fans, I do think that its combination of strong premise and continued originality is going to help it make a case for itself, either on its own or sitting on the shelf next to all of your Third Horizon books.

Continue reading Coriolis: The Great Dark Review →
Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Foundation

1 Comment

Let me tell you, I’ve been playing a lot of RimWorld over the last month. The new Odyssey DLC adds a whole dimension to the game that was previously fairly difficult to access: Exploration. With a gravship, it’s possible to go to so many more places on the map, and thankfully they added more things to see on that map as well. Odyssey adds to and enhances the gameplay loop of RimWorld, but thanks to the gravship’s function as a mobile base, that gameplay loop is largely maintained even with the changes.

Thinking about how the gameplay changes and doesn’t change with the addition of the gravship proved to be a good way to start thinking about the gameplay loop of this System Hack. When I’m playing RimWorld, what are elements I want more of that the game isn’t really going to provide? What pieces of the game, on the other hand, are best left to a computer? The trouble with developing an approach to a colony sim RPG is that the genre and its best examples are fairly broad, and you need to make some narrowing decisions very early on.

As I said earlier when discussing my design goals, I’m not trying to emulate RimWorld. Rather, the goal of the game is to provide a similar conceit that leads to storytelling. We are going to be using a few setting concepts from RimWorld to ground the setting of the game, and we are going to be focusing at least notionally on the idea of a colony, a homestead of a handful of people who are trying to make their way on a new world. There are going to be things we want to lean into, like relationships, that can be given significantly more depth at a game table than on a computer. There will be others, like tile-by-tile building layout, that are probably best left on the PC. Ultimately the three elements we want to build from are going to be creating characters, building the settlement, and exploring the world.

Continue reading System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Foundation →

Bringing Games and Gamers Together!