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.
This is my eighth year of writing for Cannibal Halfling Gaming. On one hand, everything I’ve done here has blown up beyond my wildest expectations; the quantity, quality, and audience of my writing are all better than I could have imagined back in 2016 when I asked Seamus to join his project. At the same time, though, the journey often comes with the feeling that we still aren’t doing anything of the scale or ambition to be worthwhile. Some of this is just imposter syndrome, to be clear. Some of it, though, is borne from frustrations that come with being a content creator for a niche hobby and insisting on using the written word to do it.
As Seamus spoke about recently in The Trouble With Reviewing RPGs, there are limits to what we can do on our budget of approximately nothing; we both have full-time jobs and writing for a site like this must be fun and/or fulfilling even before it is useful if we’re to continue doing it. At the same time, there are things we have to say, and having no budget also means we aren’t beholden to anyone. Things are changing, though; we’re changing. When I wrote that very first article about PbtA I was 29 years old; I’m 36 now. That is a huge step away from the core audience of tabletop RPGs, and as our entire millennial generation now sits above the first standard deviation of age for a gamer we need to think long and hard about our continued relevance (or inevitable descent into grognardism).
The tabletop role-playing game has been around for nearly fifty years, and role-playing discourse arguably longer than that. While in recent years we’ve been blessed to see books recording RPG history from the likes of Jon Peterson, Shannon Appelcline, and Ben Riggs, histories of how the RPG player base has evolved are thinner on the ground and indeed more difficult to capture than those chronicling the evolution of game designers.
To give credit where credit is due, Jon Peterson’s books do focus on the player evolution that happened early in the hobby’s history; Playing at the World spends a lot of time discussing how the wargaming hobby birthed RPGs through Braunsteins and Chainmail, while The Elusive Shift examines the first decade or so of RPG evolution through APAs and other fan correspondence. Where things start to get really tricky is in the 1990s, thanks in large part to the stratification caused by this little technology called the internet.
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