A few months ago I wrote a survey of Superhero RPGs, and more recently I began looking into the best games from that survey in more detail. Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5; since everything I say here supersedes what I said in my original post, I recommend looking at that one after reading this one, if at all [you probably shouldn’t].
Continue reading Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 6 (Conclusion)Tag Archives: Opinion
Nostalgia, consumption, and D&D
I am not too proud to admit I’ve watched every episode of Netflix’s That 90’s Show. Unlike the first attempt at a spinoff, That 90’s Show is nakedly and obviously a sequel to That 70’s Show while also fishing in the shallow pool of 90s nostalgia, including groaningly obvious musical numbers and cameos specifically meant to induce memories of going to high school in the 90s. I’m technically a bit too young for the target market, as well as someone who thought themselves too aware of tropes and psychological ploys to get sucked into this kind of TV. And yet, get sucked in I did. It’s a blatant comfort-watch, calling back to the original series, the magical time before social networking, and also the bygone era when multi-camera sitcoms were still the bulk of network TV programming (remember network TV?).
Nostalgia plays aren’t limited to TV, and of course in the TTRPG world we see them all over. There’s arguably two angles to nostalgia within TTRPGs: The RPG as nostalgia tendril, where the game is simply the marketing device used to exploit the audience’s existing love for Star Wars, or Marvel, or My Little Pony. These games can be good or bad, but they’re built around their existing property and serve that property (and its licensors) first. There’s also nostalgia for the TTRPG itself. While a cynic may call the OSR solely a nostalgia play, there’s much more obvious examples at play here; Goodman Games is clearing half a million dollars in crowdfunding for what is effectively a reprint of a module from 1979. They’re making a t-shirt as part of this campaign, so it’s definitely at least a little bit for the money. That said, I don’t think the Caverns of Thracia reprint is entirely indefensible. Goodman is doing a service by taking a great old module and keeping it available, including updating it for new rulesets; it’s still arguable whether that’s worth half a million dollars and t-shirt sales. And that’s the primary issue with nostalgia: Where do we draw the line between archiving and reviewing the past, and wallowing in it?
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Crowdfunding Carnival: July, 2024
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for July! July is the summer doldrums in the RPG world, no doubt about that. With GenCon in early August, a large portion of the design world shifts the timelines of their games so that they have either announcements for GenCon, or something to sell at GenCon. As a result, product announcements, be those releases or crowdfunding, rarely if ever happen in July; the potential benefits of waiting just a few weeks are too much. As a result, this article will not hit the target of ten campaigns; the designers aiming to put forth original RPGs are exactly the ones who would benefit the most by using GenCon as a platform.
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Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 5
In case you missed them, links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. This is going to be the final part of this series where I cover new games; in the conclusion, which will go live on the 16th, I will discuss which games I thought were the best. There are a lot of really good ones!
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A Look Back at aethereal FORGE’s Comedy Games
aethereal FORGE was a small independent RPG publisher active during the aughts. While multiple artists, editors, and other contributors were hired by æF, the publisher’s products were largely conceptualized and written by a single person, Michael Fiegel.
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Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 4
Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 if you missed them. Anyways, this week’s post is going to be a lot shorter than usual.
After finishing 90% of an entry on Prowlers & Paragons I discovered Sean Patrick Fannon, co-author of the “Ultimate Edition”, has an extensive history of sexual harassment. The original version of the game that Fannon did not work on is still available on DriveThruRPG, but I cannot personally comment on its quality.
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Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit Advance Review
Few tabletop roleplaying games have leveraged other forms of licensed media into improved sales of the original material better than R Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk. No game has popped back into our weekendly noting of bestsellers more times long after initial release than Cyberpunk RED, and while they’re not the only factor the biggest noticeable spikes were in the wake of first Cyberpunk 2077 and then Studio Trigger’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime. For those who played as V and watched David Martinez chrome up and went looking for more, though, RED could be a bit jarring: it’s still Night City, but a very different one, not 1:1 the setting the players and viewers would have been hooked by. Clearly the bait was good enough, but a certain Fixer got us a look at something that will pull them in ever better ahead of its release: the new Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit. Wake up, samurai. We’ve got a beginner’s game to review.
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Crowdfunding Carnival: June, 2024
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for June! We’re just starting to creep into con season here in the US, and there is an attendant slowdown in major campaigns as a result. That said, there’s still a lot of energy in crowdfunding, and this month it felt pretty easy to come up with at least ten to cover. More of an issue were some of the campaigns themselves. Did you know I actually opened a campaign, started to write about it, and then had to actually Google the name of the game to find out that the campaign was for a fourth edition of the game, because that hadn’t been written anywhere in the campaign’s text? Don’t do that! Don’t assume we know anything about your game, because the fact is that unless your name is Mike Pondsmith or Mr. Paizo (or Gary Gygax, I suppose), we don’t! No one knows anything about your game! Anyways. There are some solidly interesting campaigns here, both from your larger studios and some completely new outfits. Let’s check them out.
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Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 3
Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2 in case you missed them. To open this part, I’d like to talk about hallmarks of the superhero RPG genre; there are some things I’ve noticed across all of these games that I think are worth highlighting.
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How do you become an RPG publisher?
The RPG hobby is nearly 100% self-published. This makes sense on itch.io and when talking about the many solo designers with DBAs like ‘Sine Nomine Publishing’ or ‘Bastionland Press’, but it extends across the whole hobby. At no point did Mike Pondsmith submit Mekton to a publisher; he formed his own company, R. Talsorian Games (and had investors in his company, somewhat unusual then and much rarer now). Steve Jackson Games was formed, unsurprisingly, by Steve Jackson. Even TSR was just designers trying to get their games out into the world.
This dearth of publishers creates a problem for aspiring RPG designers: A complete lack of support services. You can hire an editor, artists, even a marketing consultant, but that’s money out of your pocket and a severe constraint for most designers who haven’t yet sold a game. That’s the reason the publisher model is so appealing: For a promise of future revenue, a publisher will provide a designer with all the resources they need to succeed. All the designer needs to do is bring them a game that all parties agree is good.
It works great for fiction, it’s been used much less often in the RPG world. Some designers who extend into publishing, companies like Evil Hat Productions, typically represent games by designers they’re already familiar with as a way to reduce downside risk. It’s a reasonable business strategy but it greatly diminishes the number of new games that can be elevated if fewer risks are taken to discover them. Others, like Indie Press Revolution, do a great service getting games into print and distributed but, once again, they’re curating existing games and designers more than discovering new ones. It all begs one question: Is there an effective business model to discover promising game designers and give them the resources they need to stand toe to toe with the big guys?
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Cannibal Halfling Gaming 