Tag Archives: D&D

Articles, Editorial, 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!

Articles, The Independents

Miseries and Misfortunes: When D&D stands for Dauphins and Defamation

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Luke Crane is best known as the designer of The Burning Wheel, an intensely detailed medieval fantasy/Tolkien RPG which aims for a very different fantasy experience than what you find in Dungeons and Dragons and its contemporaries. The Burning Wheel has more and more complex rules than D&D, but it’s also a game with a strong sense of time and place; Crane’s inspiration for the fantasy side of the game was Tolkien outright (which is not the case with D&D), and the rest of the setting was inspired by history nonfiction by the likes of Barbara Tuchman, Desmond Seward, and others. The result is a game heavily steeped in 12th-13th century medievalism, but with the historicity sanded off with some genericization and, oh right, wizards and elves and giant talking rats.

The next biggest non-licensed game from BWHQ (both Mouse Guard and Burning Empires are licensed) is Torchbearer, which is more than anything a direct shot at D&D. While it uses somewhat similar mechanics to Burning Wheel, it is much more focused on dungeon crawling, taking some of the more structured procedures of 0e and Basic D&D and extending them to everything, including not only the dungeons and wilderness exploration but also town visits and social interactions. Torchbearer is a distinct game from Burning Wheel, and while Burning Wheel is known for its complexity Torchbearer is known for being fiendishly difficult due to its constant Grind and aggressive resource management.

Luke Crane designed another game, more similar to Burning Wheel than the others in BWHQ’s portfolio. What’s truly strange about this game, though, is that it is a hack of Basic D&D. That in itself isn’t that weird, plenty of designers hack D&D for many purposes good and ill. What is weird, though, is that this hack of Basic D&D looks at the trajectory that Torchbearer plots from Burning Wheel and runs straight and fast in the opposite direction, aiming for more intrigue, more historical accuracy, and not a single dungeon to bother with. This game is called Miseries and Misfortunes.

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