Tag Archives: D&D

Articles, Level One Wonk

Around the OSR…Again

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If you go by game release dates, 2026 is the year where Wizards of the Coast becomes the longest-running shepherd of Dungeons and Dragons. The release of 3e serves as an inflection point in how the game was designed, and as a historical note set the stage for the enormous surge in popularity enjoyed by both D&D and the TTRPG hobby as a whole in the following 26 years. This transition of power in the hobby also served as the impetus for the largest movement of D&D revanchism, the OSR. For better or worse, every edition of D&D Wizards put out eventually got its own revanchist movement: for 4e the backlash was harvested by Paizo and turned Pathfinder into the second-largest TTRPG. For 5e, the backlash was a slow burn, coming much later in the product lifecycle and mostly as a result of Wizards of the Coast’s attempt to rug-pull the OGL. It’s here now, though, and has brought us games like Draw Steel and Daggerheart.

The OSR, though, is special, because the grievances that started the movement are about playstyle more than one specific edition. D&D started as a wargame, and was molded over time (and editions) into the character-driven heroic fantasy game we know it as today. Somewhere in the ten year window between the release of original D&D and the release of the Dragonlance setting was something special, as the OSR tells it, a recipe for more grounded gaming. I think there is some merit to that idea; it’s one of the reasons I’ve written about the OSR before and also why I play games like Mothership and Mythic Bastionland. Even so. The era between OD&D and Dragonlance (the setting that “ruined everything” according to some) was ten years; the time that has passed between the release of OSRIC and now is about twenty. What does it mean to be part of a “revival” or “renaissance” that has been around for twice as much time as the thing that’s being revived or reborn?

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Legend in the Mist: Mist Engine may be Fate’s Forged in the Dark

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It is in some ways perfect timing that only a month ago I was comparing Fate and Apocalypse World, and looking at their respective destinies. In 2013 the fourth edition of Fate, Fate Core, went from its Kickstarter to legitimately outstanding commercial success. Around the same time, Apocalypse World had just started on its inexorable upward trajectory not due to its own sales numbers but rather the adoption of its underpinnings, Powered by the Apocalypse. Fate would peak in the lead-up to D&D Fifth Edition while PbtA would continue to soar, eventually powering what was at the time the largest TTRPG Kickstarter ever.

Both games were successful enough to spawn not only hacks but also derivatives, mechanical cousins of the original game which kept the underlying ideas but altered the core mechanics. Blades in the Dark is the notable one for Powered by the Apocalypse, but there were of course others. For Fate, the same thing happened, even if much of the hacking was further under the radar than what John Harper pulled off on the PbtA side. There is one Fate hack of note which is coming back into the limelight, the Mist Engine from Son of Oak Game Studio.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Big groups, small games

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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.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

TTRPGs and fandom

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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.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Hit points: A cyberpunk case study

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Are hit points meat? Does the answer to that question even matter? Hit points are an old mechanic, ported into RPGs at the beginning from wargames, where they made the assessment of unit health more granular than ‘alive’ or ‘dead’. D&D took the concept and applied it to player-characters and monsters alike, and from there it became profoundly common. Measuring damage taken and time until expiration is one of those things where the simplest approach is often the most fun, even if it’s hardly the most realistic.

Hit points as a mechanic are not a monolith. Not even D&D still uses the original mechanic where you have a number and when it’s reduced to zero, you’re dead. Death saves, critical wounds, damage thresholds and any other number of modifiers to the hit point schema make the act of bleeding out after being stabbed a lot more complex than it necessarily has to be, but sometimes more fun, too. Of course, a lot of the relationship that a game has to how its characters get shot and die has to do with genre.

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Audio/Video, Cannibal Halfling Radio

Cannibal Halfling Radio Ep. 25 – Finely Aged Business

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Well, we didn’t want to call it ‘stale’… because it’s not, not really! This chat episode was recorded last year, so a lot has happened since, but there’s still some good stuff here about licenses, bundles, system reference documents, digital storefronts, and other aspects of the tabletop world as viewed through the lens of a business.

Featuring: Editor Sloane TVBand, Aaron, and Seamus

You can also drop by the Tavern of our Discord to chat with us.

If you like what we’re doing with CHR, give us a hand and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify! You can also support us on Patreon.

Music is Sneaky Adventure by Kevin MacLeod
[License], art by Khairul Hisham! Thanks for listening!