Tag Archives: Opinion

Articles, Editorial

Extra! Five years of Weekend Update

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In 2021 after a year of pandemic and quarantine, Seamus and I developed a novel way to mitigate the site’s burnout-induced publication schedule contraction: Weekend Update. Launched in April of that year, Weekend Update was a way to ensure something went up on the site every week, regardless of how little either of us wanted to write. It was also a way and a reason to check up on the basic pulse of the hobby regularly, making sure we knew what was getting released and what people were talking about. Even if no one read these posts it would be a useful tool for us, but as it turns out, we’re not the only ones who benefit from taking the pulse of the hobby on a weekly basis. While they definitely have a shelf life, the Weekend Updates still manage to capture a good chunk of readers, with the occasional news story popping off just like the normal articles do.

Putting together Weekend Updates has given me a fairly particular perspective on what is newsworthy in the RPG hobby versus what is just noise. This is an important consideration for any news outlet, but in small hobbies you’re dealing with a much smaller volume of happenings compared to even a modest local newspaper or TV channel. When you compare what we then choose to report on versus other consistent news outlets (and I’ll get to that particular chestnut later), we tend to report many fewer things because there’s a big part of hobby news that we, well, don’t consider news. After all is said and done, we don’t even have news stories in every Weekend Update, and our choice to be more selective has helped me understand why there isn’t (and likely won’t be) a truly dedicated news outlet in our small hobby space.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: May, 2026

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Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for May! Spring is here, and next to the flowers there are new RPG ideas blooming! It’s a big month for game materials broadly, but May is also OSE Month on Backerkit, and we’re starting to see a bunch of campaigns popping up with supplements and adventures for Old-School Essentials. Even with all that, there are still some gems in the original games space. We’ve got storytelling games, we’ve got solo games, we’ve even got a Lego game and a social deduction game. First, though, we have a trendy game.

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Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Satisficing and RPG Design

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Economics is the study of resource allocation and management; behavioral economics is the study of how theoretical economics meets practical, human reality. The split between theory and practice is an entire subfield of economics, and arguably other disciplines benefit from the same thing. The broader study of the alignment of human decision making is called decision science, and it takes the P-Q charts of economics and amplifies them with psychology and game theory.

Tabletop roleplaying games are no strangers to decision science, both within and outside the context of playing the game itself. This week I was inspired to look back at one of the most influential recent schools of RPG theory thanks to the Taskerland review of Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012 by William J. White. The review starts with a reread of Ron Edwards’ essay System Does Matter in the context of the book, and restates the thesis of the essay more clearly than most commentators do nowadays: While good games come from good GMs and good players, better games come when those two are aligned with the right game mechanics and systems. This dovetails with notions of GNS and accusations of gameplay ‘incoherence’, but the issue, as the Taskerland review points out, is less with Edwards’ description than his prescription: Aim to play more narrowly aligned games with players who share your priorities.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Mashups

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Hobby games is a pretty broad field, with both upstarts like TTRPGs and trading card games as well as board and miniatures games which go back decades further. The whole field is brimming with designers taking their ideas about set, setting, and mechanics and committing them to cardboard and plastic, creating new and weird accessories or just sticking with humble dice and meeples. When you combine the recent renaissance in hobby board games (driven, like TTRPGs, by Kickstarter and the internet) with a few decades of family board games that everyone seems to have kicking around, there’s a lot of potential just sitting there.

TTRPGs are just as able to use weird, custom accessories as any board game, and in some cases all it takes is one designer with a weird idea to make something new. Where I think is the most fertile ground is the RPG mashup: taking accessories you may already have in your game cabinet and making new games with them. The hobby has figured out this works great with Jenga, and as you’ll read about in a moment, someone is trying it with the classic family (dis)favorite Monopoly. As far as other games, the sky’s the limit…but there is an extra layer of challenge involved with taking an existing game and both changing the experience while preserving the original bones.

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A Glimpse Into The Vault, Articles

A Glimpse Into the Vault: Esoteric Ebb

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Video games owe a lot to tabletop roleplaying games, with mechanics, terminology, and tropes all being borrowed during the 1980s and 1990s. For obvious reasons, though, the two media drifted, and even video games calling themselves roleplaying games have little to do with their forbears, given both the capabilities of digital games in terms of graphics and gameplay as well as their limitations in terms of breadth and story. All this to say, when I see a claim that a video game is able to capture some of the feel of a good tabletop session, I perk up. This was the case with Esoteric Ebb.

Esoteric Ebb is not the first video game I’ve seen making this claim; we covered Wildermyth a ways back, and I appreciated the way that game tried to incorporate emergent storytelling and feel more like a sandbox than other games in the tactical RPG genre. Esoteric Ebb is perhaps not as different as Wildermyth; it’s built strongly around the mechanics and tropes of another (admittedly very good) video game. However, its writing and the understanding of the TTRPG medium that that writing demonstrates still end up making Esoteric Ebb, in my view at least, a must-play.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: April, 2026

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Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for April! It’s spring now, which means I’m spending more time outside riding my bike and less time writing. That’s why this post is going up on a Thursday! Okay, that’s…not entirely true (it’s also not entirely false). The post is going up on a Thursday also because I didn’t want to post on April Fool’s Day. Also also, some really cool stuff went live on Wednesday, and if I posted too early I wouldn’t get to talk about it. In addition to all of the campaigns below, Orbital Blues Month started on April 1st on Backerkit, and there are a bunch of neat campaigns supporting that particular game of sad space cowboys. It’s all underpinned by Outlaws and Corporations, a new Orbital Blues first-party supplement.

With that, let’s get into it. The major campaigns section is a bit negative this month; as it turns out money corrupts, and that’s how we get proprietary apps and wholly unnecessary D&D 5e money-grabs. Luckily, Pelgrane Press and The Gauntlet also come to the rescue with two big and worthy campaigns.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Three Tiers of RPG Purchasing

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There’s a wide world of games out there, and from a gamer’s perspective it’s an embarrassment of riches. More games than you could ever play or even read, and altogether too many things to do and places to start. How gamers navigate the hobby is important for game designers, who are all jockeying for the dollars that gamers spend.

Everyone goes about their gaming purchases in different ways, much as they go about buying groceries, appliances, or furniture. In gaming, a hobbyist is likely to make many gaming purchases over time, and how they segment these purchases depends on what they’re trying to do. The assessment of how buyers behave with regards to their purchases is called customer segmentation, and it’s a key element of market research and strategy consulting. When you understand how your customers act, it’s easier to plan for their behavior and make more effective product and marketing decisions.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Breaking Down Random Generation

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Random character generation is an artifact of older editions of D&D, with the OSR and other throwback movements embracing it wholeheartedly. In the present day both old-school D&D derivatives as well as the range of games derived from WFRP’s take on d100 mechanics are still locked in with random generation, with the classic ‘roll 3d6 six times in order’ being both common mechanic and a meme. The problem with random generation in this way is that putting characters arbitrarily at different places on a probability distribution, in effect making characters better or worse based on nothing but luck, is a pretty poor way to accomplish the ultimate goal of random character generation, which is to introduce variability to the type of characters that players ultimately play.

In reviewing how a number of different games handle random character generation, specifically random attribute generation, I can’t help but think that these designers know that players don’t like random generation and don’t actually like rolling bad characters. It’s widely known what the most common response to early D&D’s attribute requirements for certain character classes was: Cheat! It therefore stands to reason that games which still commit to random generation either create a system that employs randomness more deliberately, or create a system which softens the blow of the dice.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: March, 2026

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Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for March! We’re wrapping up Zine Month, but despite Backerkit’s more delineated timeline there are still some straggler campaigns here and there. We’ve also seen the big campaign space heat up, as not only were there several notable campaigns during Zine Month (looking at you, Blades 68) but we have big announcements at the end as well, including at least one out-of-nowhere success. Without further ado, let’s check out some games.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: Zine Month 2026

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Welcome back to Crowdfunding Carnival! We’re more than halfway through February, and Zine Month is still going strong. As I covered a couple of weeks ago, Kickstarter’s Zine Quest and Backerkit’s Zinetopia are the key leaders of the month, with Kickstarter’s event currently a little more than double the size of Backerkit’s. Still, you’d be making a mistake if you didn’t check out both.

Overall funding rates are high, with the combined total being north of 70%. Still, there are a number of projects looking to still cross the finish line, and some of them are certainly deserving of more attention. For this mid-month check-in on our zine events, I’m going to focus solely on projects that are still looking for that final push before February is out.

Before we get into it, I’d like to highlight a few non-zine projects: Blades ‘68, the groovy supplement to Blades in the Dark, is campaigning on Backerkit and it looks smashing, baby, yeah! Over on Kickstarter, Free League is bringing the Trudvang setting to Dragonbane, and Green Ronin is campaigning Mutants and Masterminds 4e. Definitely some cool stuff going on, but let’s stay on target, and try to get some zines printed. Every campaign below isn’t quite funded yet, so if any of these sound interesting, consider throwing a few dollars towards the designers. They’ll notice and appreciate your contribution much more than the big guys above.

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