Tag Archives: Opinion

Articles, Editorial

Twilight Sword: Filtering reactions to D&D through video games

1 Comment

Most fantasy RPGs are a reaction to D&D in one way or another. This has likely been true for some time; while games like RuneQuest have had time to evolve and develop their own base principles, many of them, especially ones as old as RuneQuest, were very much about being either in alignment with or in opposition to what D&D did when they were first released. Given D&D’s current market share, this has become more nakedly true in the bestselling entries in the fantasy genre; Tales of the Valiant, Draw Steel, and Daggerheart are all essentially versions of the D&D formula and none of them purport to offer a different sort of game than D&D beyond differing priority rankings for things like narrative development, tactical combat, or power level.

A new trend I’ve observed is typified by game designers taking a different tack to how they ‘react’ to D&D, and this is generally one filtered through other media. Break, Fabula Ultima, and Twilight Sword are all versions of this to one extent or another. While these games all differ from each other, hidden in each is a similar underlying thesis: In order to make tabletop roleplaying more accessible, this game is derived from the most accessible D&D derivative, the fantasy RPG video game. The fact that these are all more from a JRPG lens likely has to do with legacy as well as differentiation; the first Final Fantasy outsold its licensed D&D contemporary Pool of Radiance by about 50%, and the gap only got wider. Final Fantasy VII outsold Baldur’s Gate, its licensed D&D contemporary, by about fivefold (and that’s only to 2005, not including any of the remakes or re-releases of either). Even if Baldur’s Gate III and the recent explosion in popularity for D&D have shifted this narrative, there’s no question that through the 90s, the JRPG reigned supreme when it came to sales volume and cultural impact.

Continue reading Twilight Sword: Filtering reactions to D&D through video games →
Articles, Level One Wonk

Reflections on domains, factions, and “high-level play”

1 Comment

As is becoming perhaps more common, I feel compelled to react to an interesting piece from elsewhere in the RPG blogosphere. High Level Play and Scaffolding takes a Bluesky thread from Sam Sorensen and uses it as a jumping off point to discuss why there are noted trends of hesitancy among players to move into “high-level play” in an OSR sense, that is to say gameplay which shifts from focusing on dungeon crawling and party-level combat and treasure hunting to play where the characters become leaders of mercenary companies, warbands, or even nations. Post author Zak H. frames this as a scaffolding problem, essentially stating that the mode of play that “high-level play” requires isn’t set up or framed by any of the levels or modes of play that come before it. I find that perfectly reasonable; it makes sense that dungeon crawling doesn’t prepare you for factional intrigue or morale management. What I’m more interested in is where this all fits into the broader hobby here in 2026.

Continue reading Reflections on domains, factions, and “high-level play” →
Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: July, 2026

1 Comment

Come one, come all, to the Crowdfunding Carnival! It might be summertime sadness, but things are a bit quiet here at the carnival. That said, at least one barker has taken the opportunity to put a fresh coat of paint on the old tent. Kickstarter has rolled out a new search page, including significantly more filtering options. Also of note is the new ‘TTRPG’ category. While this first appeared last month, the line between it and the old Tabletop Games category was still blurry, so I opted not to bring attention to it. There’s still crossover between the two, but it looks like the more specific categories should help with searching. In addition to TTRPG there’s also STL being added as a category, which should help filter minis and other accessory-specific campaigns away from your search page if that’s not what you’re looking for.

While I don’t have proof I’d anticipate that Kickstarter is responding to the ever-increasing competitive pressure from other providers like Backerkit. While Kickstarter is still dominant in the broader crowdfunding space, Backerkit has brought the heat in TTRPGs as well as other toys and games categories. This month’s campaigns come from both services, and as is often true in the doldrums of July, it’s the indies that have come to play.

Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: July, 2026 →
Articles, Level One Wonk

From ashcans to zeroth editions: The new face of TTRPG revision

1 Comment

Players from every generation have taken it as a given that RPGs get updated. There are always new ideas to be implemented and tweaks to make, and basically every high profile attempt to make a ‘final’ edition of a popular game ended in failure (or, at least, another edition). Even if you can’t change a manual’s text, there are errata. Even if the base game stays largely the same, new supplements mix up how everything works and plays together. This is, at least in terms of how we engage with games, inevitable.

What’s not inevitable is how games will change, what that actually looks like. I had an opportunity to play in a short Fabula Ultima game a ways back, and while I liked the game (quite a bit, actually!), one thing was seared in my mind from the experience. After almost every session, one of the players would trawl through the game designer’s Discord and bring us rules updates. These weren’t errata, they were notably redesigned spells and class abilities which the designer was rebalancing in response to feedback on the game. Even though the published version of the game hadn’t changed, we had rules modifications delivered fresh…so long as someone in the group was on the Discord and at least nominally engaging with the fannish side of the game’s community. It is a very different way of adjusting rules, and it is but one aspect of a sea change in how designers approach adjusting, fixing, and yes, finalizing their games.

Continue reading From ashcans to zeroth editions: The new face of TTRPG revision →
Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: June, 2026

Leave a comment

Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for June! June is a great time for all the small, weird games in the world: It’s several months after Zine Quest and Zinetopia, so the attention and designer attention isn’t focused there. At the same time, while it’s not close enough to GenCon to suck the air out of the room, it is close enough that most of the major publishers will wait a couple months before any big announcements, giving the little guys a chance for some more spotlight. We’re seeing it now and, as you’ll see later in the article, we saw it five years ago as well. With that said, let’s get into it. No major publishers this month, but we do have the newest campaign from one of the most successful singular designers going.

Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: June, 2026 →
Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Shifting Matters: More TTRPG/Bicycle Comparisons

1 Comment

As readers of the site know, I’m a cyclist in addition to a gamer. I spend at least as much if not more time riding and working on my bikes as I do playing, reading, and writing about RPGs, and riding my bike is an integral part of how I get around and interact with my community. I’ve even written about RPGs and bicycles before, though in that article I was speaking more to how the economics and business models of the hobbies compare. There are also comparisons to be made about how one actually rides a bike compared to how they play a game, and while this analogy is imperfect it can provide some insight to how we both play games and engage in games discourse.

Continue reading Shifting Matters: More TTRPG/Bicycle Comparisons →
Articles, Editorial

Extra! Five years of Weekend Update

Leave a comment

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.

Continue reading Extra! Five years of Weekend Update →
Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: May, 2026

Leave a comment

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.

Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: May, 2026 →
Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Satisficing and RPG Design

5 Comments

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.

Continue reading Satisficing and RPG Design →