Tag Archives: Gaming

Articles, Level One Wonk

Guide for the Perplexed: Retail Institutions

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Welcome to the second installment of Guide for the Perplexed! Last time I introduced three of the largest RPGs that aren’t D&D, games with long enough histories and big enough communities that they’re easy to get into and find players. Now I’m going to talk about a different angle for finding games and finding players: The places you go to shop for games.

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a lot easier to find games online; between DriveThruRPG and itch.io virtually every game imaginable is one click away (and the two publishers that don’t use these sites are huge and have their own). That said, the ‘friendly local gaming store’ can not only give you access to games, but also advice and even networking. Admittedly the reputation of the game store has been pretty negative for a lot of the hobby’s history; game stores were historically seen as unfriendly to women and minorities and the progenitor of many horror stories as a result. Luckily this is changing, and as even D&D itself is aiming to become more welcoming and accessible, few stores are going to stay in business without putting some effort into the ‘friendly’ part of the moniker.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Guide for the Perplexed: Biggest Names

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Imagine for a moment that you’re a recent entrant into the tabletop RPG hobby. In all likelihood you entered via D&D; the longest lived brand in the hobby almost certainly holds a majority share of hobby sales and definitely of hobby mindshare. If you wanted to stay in the realm of D&D, that’s easy; the game has the largest community by far, the volume of official supplements is solid, and the third party support is massive. Even if you tire of D&D 5e itself, there are a number of directly comparable games to play; you can go Pathfinder if you want something more granular and more complex, or go to the OSR for something more imagination-and table-driven. But let’s say you want something different. How do you figure out what’s going to appeal to you?

Guide for the Perplexed is going to be a series of articles looking at finding new games outside of D&D. The key angle here is accessibility: These games will be easy to find and it will be easy to find other players. To that end, I’ll be looking at three different approaches to finding new games: Games which have the outright largest player bases, games which are easy to find at your local game store, and games with active communities online. As the series progresses the discussion will not only be about the games, but also about the channels that the games come through. Gaming at your local gaming store isn’t just about what books you can find on the shelf, it’s about the events being offered. The same goes for local gaming cafes or even your local library. Similarly, ‘online community’ can mean a lot of different things, but it’s important to see which ones are welcoming and support gameplay, including subreddits, forums, and living communities.

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Articles, Editorial

Invention and Innovation in TTRPGs

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Invention is a word that most people understand. Inventing is the process of creating something new, and thanks to the patent office we even have broadly accepted standards for what constitutes an invention (novel, unique, non-obvious). Innovation is a bit more difficult to put a finger on, in no small part due to its continual dilution as a popular buzzword. Broadly, though, innovation is the combination of invention and value creation, the ability to make new things useful. I’ve actually talked about the invention/innovation dichotomy before, when I opined on how Most Games Don’t Matter. Indeed, a lot of the gap between invention and innovation in the tabletop RPG world is the gap between the hundreds if not thousands of games that come to market and those which actually make a market impact. That said, I don’t need to retread the grounds of how oversaturated the RPG market is. I want to discuss the innovation that does occur and what it actually means to bring that innovation to market.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

The TTRPG Fleet

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If you hang around in bicycle spaces long enough, you’re going to hear someone say ‘n+1’. This is a joke among the cycling community: “The correct amount of bikes to own is n+1, where n is equal to the number of bikes you currently have.” Needless to say the collector’s impulse in the cycling hobby runs strong, and even if you aren’t interested in trying all the brands or vintage frames or anything like that, you still may find yourself in the throes of n+1. After all, you start with a mountain bike, want to try a road bike, then you need a gravel bike, and a cross bike, and an endurance road bike, a climbing bike, a pub bike, a fixie…

It’s no wonder the collector’s impulse is even stronger within RPGs; you can get twenty hardcover sourcebooks for the price of a relatively cheap bike. And yet, collecting RPGs comes with a stronger risk of missing something. There are many, many bikes out there to enjoy, but at the end of the day you’re still going to be riding bikes, and the forty miles you put down on one bike will still help your legs when you pull out the next bike. The TTRPG hobby is a bit different; playing Masks and playing Pathfinder aren’t going to be similar experiences or pull in the same direction.

While RPG reviewers such as myself are often the ones most liable to try and catch all the RPGs like so many Pokemon, there is another way to consider approaching RPGs and actually playing them, and it comes right from bicycling. N+1 may be a joking mantra, but most cyclists have neither the money to acquire a collection of bikes nor the time to ride them. Instead, most cyclists end up with their ‘fleet’, a group of two to eight bicycles that cover the range of disciplines and experiences they want to have. While having twenty Italian road bikes may not amplify your understanding of cycling, having both a road bike and a mountain bike is something that pretty much every cyclist can understand, collector or not.

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Articles, Meet the Party

Meet the Party: Mecha Wasteland – The Crew of the Ulaid

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Last week we took a look at the creation of a Mecha Wasteland (and getting Baba O’Riley stuck in our heads). This week, we turn to some of the people and machines that might populate it. Sticking with the themes, I went with a crew of freelance operators picking up work in the Free Port of Suez and specializing in quick and discrete operations. This group can take on work from all comers, from desperate Free Cities, pirate lords, or be used as deniable assets by the two great powers as a cold war begins to warm.

Without further ado, let’s meet the crew of the Ulaid.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

When The Game Blows Up

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You have a great idea for a new campaign. You explain it to your group, and everyone’s on board. Session Zero goes great, it seems like everyone has made interesting characters and is totally bought in to the premise. Then you start playing. For whatever reason, things just aren’t hitting the same way that everyone thought. Then comes the big inciting action. This will drive everyone to really dive in, right? Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe everyone’s looking across the table awkwardly. Maybe someone gets upset, maybe not. Whatever happened, the game blew up, and now it’s time to pick up the pieces.

When most of the hobby assumes that you’ll pick one game and play it forever, there’s not a lot said about the risks of trying something new. Even among those inveterate RPG collectors with four dozen different systems in their bookshelf, there were never that many games that were really *out there* until recently…and even now, the vast majority of games sold hew to a common template. So, when the range of experiences and expectations is fairly narrow, you have to be prepared for what happens when you step outside of those experiences and expectations and something unpleasant happens.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Level One Wonk Holiday Special: 2021

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Welcome to the Level One Wonk Holiday Special for 2021! My traditional retrospective for the year in gaming, this Holiday Special has some extra meaning for me because of the time. Cannibal Halfling Gaming kicked off in December of 2016, making this my fifth year here out in the internet. Five years of ups and downs have seen this site go from me and Seamus writing about whatever RPG topics came off the tops of our heads to…well, me and Seamus writing about whatever RPG topics come off the tops of our heads. Though now there’s a podcast. And people send us review copies. And some even pay us!

Though we’ve been having a wild ride behind the scenes of the site, most everyone has been having a wild ride with world events as well. While we had a bit of the ‘hot pandemic summer’ I alluded to in one of our podcast episodes, much of the hope did not last, and we’re now back again in our houses and apartments, hoping more of our fellow humans get the message. But while we can’t control human nature and we certainly can’t control COVID, we can at least get some writing and gaming done.

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Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 8/28/2021

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Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 8/28/2021

  1. Legend of the Five Rings: Fields of Victory
  2. 2300AD
  3. Alien RPG Colonial Marines Operations Manual
  4. Fallout the RPG Core Rulebook
  5. Esper Genesis 5E Master Technician’s Guide

Top News Stories

Not much going on on the RPG front! Stay healthy everyone, mask up in crowds, and play some games.

Discussion of the Week

GM Experience should not be quantified simply by length of time: An interesting discussion about how to compare and assess GMing ability. No conclusion is reached, but a lot of intriguing questions are asked. Does it matter how many games you run? Should you consider the trends in the hobby when you started? Does depth or breadth make for a better GM? Worth a read.

Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.

Articles, Editorial

Seeing Yourself In Gaming: The Power Of Trans Player Characters

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When I first came out, it was a strange time. I had to cope and come to terms with a great many things. Some of them very good. “I can finally wear the clothes I want to.” “People calling me she and her is AWESOME!” “I can be me.” Some of them less so. “God, I was a real little shit before this wasn’t I?” “I can’t tell this person yet. Don’t know how they’ll react.” “How long before I can start hormones?” All in all, it was a wild time. And while things have calmed for me and my transition at this point, there is always one thing that weighs above all else in trials I may never come to terms with.

I never got to grow up as a girl.

I’ve heard it called “The Youth that could have been” from other trans folks who came out older like I did. It happens to quite a few people who have experienced trouble or different from the average childhood. It’s one where you’re constantly thinking about things could have been, How they should have been. It’s one of wondering of “what-ifs” and “why couldn’t it haves”. It sucks. Royally. You look for any out or avenue to get away from the pain of it. From the constant imagination of the childhood you never got to have. That imagination tends to go wild and overpowering.

But. You know what else requires a good imagination? You guessed it: roleplaying games.

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