Here’s a link to Part ,1 in case you missed it. I originally was going to just go straight into talking about the games, but I decided I’d quickly talk about some of my favorite superhero comics here. I’m doing this partially so that you, as a reader, can know what I care about in superhero comics, what I would want to see emulated in a game . . . but it’s mostly so I can create a cool visual motif for this article. You can skip this if you don’t care.
Continue reading Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 2Tag Archives: Opinion
System Split: War Never Changes
The Fallout show on Amazon Prime is actually good, the latest video game property to successfully push back a decades-old curse that has sent similar adaptations plummeting to the bottom of box office rankings and critics’ opinions. And, like any good mass media property, the Fallout TV show has inspired interest in other formats. The contemporary video games were already big hits; with the newest one being six years old the tail effect has been relatively modest (both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 did re-enter Steam’s top 10 most played games, but that impact has already abated). In the smaller TTRPG world the impact on the official licensed Fallout RPG has been a bit more pronounced, with both the game’s core rulebook and its most recent supplement staying in the DriveThruRPG top ten for weeks now. Much as happened for Cyberpunk Red in the wake of Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout is seeing a wave of renewed TTRPG interest.
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Deathmatch Island Review
Back in 2020 I reviewed the newest edition of John Harper and Sean Nittner’s Agon. Agon is a fascinating game, taking the characters on an Odyssey-like journey of myth through a number of islands. Like Greek myth, though, the game has a strict structure and, barring a small chance of premature retirement, usually ends in the same way. It’s great for generating stories, but not what I’m typically looking for.
Deathmatch Island is based on Agon’s mechanics, but casts the strict structure differently. The structure of each island is because the characters are contestants in a game show, a twisted game show where physical challenges and loot boxes give way to a literal battle to the death. Survivors make their way from one island to another until they reach the end game with Production, the shadowy administrators of the whole thing, shaping the game based on how many social media followers each contestant gets. The last surviving contestant may win a big prize…or wake up on yet another island with a job offer they never could have imagined.
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Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 1
About two months ago I wrote a piece here on rules-lite superhero games. In the piece I talked about a bunch of games, and at the end I made a list of the games that I found most essential.
I recommend reading these Revisited articles first and then circling back to my original piece, because everything I say here supersedes my opinions from the original piece. The important thing to note is that I didn’t actually read the rulebooks for almost all of the games I discussed; I read forums posts and reviews, listened to podcasts, read product descriptions, and studied other sources to get some kind of rough idea about each game.
In this four part series I’m going to go deeper and take a closer look at the handful of games that I said I most wanted to play last time, which is to say I’m going to read the rulebooks and make further observations about the games. I’m also going to look at a small handful of games that I didn’t mention last time, and look at the rulebooks for most of those as well.
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Crowdfunding Carnival: May, 2024
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for May! The push in April means that the crowdfunding machine is quiet, at least in terms of big names pushing big games. For newcomers, though, there is some variety. We’ve got dystopias, we’ve got mecha, and we’ve got…maggots. Come with me, and see what games you want to throw some money to this spring.
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Stewpot: Tales from A Fantasy Tavern Backerkit Review
The tavern is the fulcrum point of the adventuring lifestyle. It’s where wandering heroes can find food and shelter after weeks out in the wilderness, it’s where quests can often begin… and it’s where quite a few stories find their happy ending. After all, being an adventurer is a tough life. Many adventurers, whether they retire after a successful career or call it quits early, get the idea to be the ones running the tavern, providing the same things they needed back when to a younger generation. It can take some doing, however, integrating back into settled society after a life living on the road and by sword and spell. How do you let go of who you were, and who will you become? Let’s have a taste of Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern from Takuma Okada, now on Backerkit with Evil Hat Productions!
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Spooktacular Adventure Writing: Part 2
Adventure Design
Before we get started, here’s a link to Part 1 in case you missed it. There is an idea that rules-lite games don’t require adventures and scenarios the way crunchier games do. I think this is an idea shared mostly by younger gamers, because modern games that use Powered by the Apocalypse designs generally encourage the GM to build things improvisationally with players.
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The Facility – A Breathless Choose Your Own Mad Science Adventure
You awaken, cold and in the dark. Fumbling around by low blue lights in a coffin shaped pod. You pull yourself out of the box, and in the dark see the faces of others. You are all wearing loose fitting white clothing and laceless shoes. Hospital patients? You peer into the dark, seeing little but hearing the sound of dripping, running water and distant machinery. You gather what you can, knowing that something is hunting you. It will be here soon.
Wait.
Can you remember who you are?
Welcome to The Facility by Galen Pejeau!
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The Precarity of RPG Design
I’m not stating anything particularly controversial when I say it’s tough to be a game designer. The tabletop RPG market is an economics nightmare; demand is low and supply is incredibly high. Demand is low because this is a niche hobby whose marketing to the public at large is, essentially, Hasbro screaming so loud that nobody else is heard. Supply is driven by the fact that, at a functional level, thanks to crowdfunding Kickstarter, itch.io, and DriveThruRPG, basically anyone can make a TTRPG and get it on sale. TTRPGs and self-published fiction are very much the same, and everyone’s looking for the solution to the fact that 90% of everything in the market is utter crap.
Imagine, if you will, that you’re a good game designer. You’ve made something that’s captured the attention of part of the audience and, after you run some numbers, you realize that you could make a living on this. If you’ve done those numbers correctly, you’re still looking at a difficult life, one filled with a lot of hustle, a lot of compromises on your creative vision, and, most discouragingly, precarity. Precarity is, in essence, the amount of time you spend one decision away from ruin. It’s the constant enemy of anyone who doesn’t earn a constant and consistent income, and when your precarious income is game design instead of, say, insurance sales, there’s no relief from it, either. The only avenues to some meager financial security are to release a game that honestly gets famous, book dozens of hours of freelance work over and above your own design work, or simply have a day job.
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World Ending Game – Saying Goodbye With Style
“Think about screenplays and films, or the final episode of a television show that you know will not be renewed. Think about saying goodbye to friends who are moving away. Think about the last day of summer vacation. Think about funerals. Think about the restaurant that closed all those years ago, and the noodles they used to serve. Think about the best birthday party you ever had. Think about putting off the last chapter of a book until tomorrow. Think about grief, and relief. Think about the end of a world. Think about the feeling of emerging from a movie theater into a dark parking lot, under the stars.” Longtime readers might recall I’ve written about saying goodbye to characters before, but that was largely in a ‘how to remember and treasure them’ way. The reasoning behind that article is, however, the same one that drew me to check out the subject of this one: the attachment to characters that we’ve created and a desire for closure as we leave them, and the snapshot of their lives that we played out, behind. This is a look at World Ending Game by Everest Pipkin.
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Cannibal Halfling Gaming 