Back in November of last year while talking about network effects and how they make you play D&D, I dropped a little bomb. I stated that there has never been a good mass market RPG in the superhero genre. At the time, no one took the bait, but I can imagine some easy dissent there. What about Champions? What about Marvel Super Heroes? How can you possibly hate FASERIP? But yet, I do maintain my position. While there have arguably been good superhero games, none of them have reached mass market popularity and, by the way things are going, none of them ever will. It’s not the fault of any particular game or its design, at least not directly. Instead, the instinctive way that a game designer wants to approach comic book superheroes is one that’s fundamentally at odds with ever seeing broader popularity.
Of course, as one would naturally surmise, that means there’s a different way to write a superhero game that could see broader appeal and generally be more easily used to tell superhero stories. We were even close to having a game that fit in this template actually see some measure of success; what killed it was of course nothing to do with the game but rather the other reason that superhero games can never really succeed, licensing. So let’s look at the flavors of superhero games we get, the flavor of superhero game we want, and why the two aren’t likely to match.
This month’s Crowdfunding Carnival has itself an interesting sideshow, hosted by Backerkit itself! Pocketopia 2025 isn’t exactly Backerkit’s answer to Kickstarter’s ZineQuest, since zines aren’t the focus, but it’s definitely in the same genre. The stated goal is to be “a celebration of portable easy-to-learn tabletop games”. So, as it comes to an end less than a day from now, how has it gone?
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for April! The world outside is crazy, so come on in and take a gander at some quality, handpicked RPG campaigns. We’re seeing some solid activity from major players this month, albeit maybe too much activity from some. And then there are of course a number of fantastic indie campaigns, covering the fae, werewolves, kids with weird powers, and more. Check it out!
Last week I puzzled over my “review” of Lovecraftesque. The game is certainly well done, and it is an improvement over earlier games like Fiasco in terms of how it is structured and how it uses board game elements like a game board and cards and tokens. It’s also a Mythos game that uses themes and structure from Lovecraft’s work instead of literal elements of the Mythos, and so I was fairly critical in how it didn’t go deeper to some of the underlying themes below the surface-level stories of horrors from beyond comprehension. But the question in the back of my head while I was writing was “So what? The designers don’t owe me a deeper game.” This is true. And I’ve been thinking about it.
As I’ve been consuming more cosmic horror, I find that my relationship with games set in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos mirrors my relationship with licensed games. I think there is so much room for them to be great, and then I’m inevitably disappointed nearly every time I read one. In the case of licensed games, this is often because they’re pretty bad; the relationship between licensed games and money is inextricable, and the best licensed games borne out of love and fandom are often from a time in the hobby’s history that’s long gone. In the case of H.P. Lovecraft, it’s a bit more complicated. Lovecraft is a divisive figure, both having essentially invented cosmic horror and changed science fiction forever while also being a known racist, even beyond the conventions of his time. The biggest problem I have with the Cthulhu Mythos in pop culture is twofold: First, the xenophobic roots of Lovecraft’s works are rarely examined or critiqued in games, an omission made even more galling by designers’ desires to hew to a 1920s setting for their games without asking more serious questions about it. Second, the continued sanitization of Lovecraft creations in pop culture (the ‘Cthulhu plushie’ phenomenon) makes it that much more difficult to have conversations about xenophobia, cosmicism, and even New England folklore and dissect how these factors all influenced Lovecraft and his work.
Hero Forge did its first Kickstarter more than ten years ago to launch a custom miniature printing business, and launched a second one to bring color to their minis. In between and after the fact the platform has continued to add more and more options to their catalog: new items, species, materials, and so on. Now Hero Forge has a third crowdfunding effort, and it’s focused on what you use to determine your miniature’s fate: the dice.
It’s known that table dynamics affect play as much as (and some argue more than) what game you’re sitting down to play. And although both game and player are important, player aims often get talked about less or even disparaged through ‘taxonomies’ which typically valorize the playstyle of the author instead of providing objective analysis. Games are simply easier to discuss and critique; even movements which seemingly downplay the primacy of mechanics end up spending a lot of time discussing written material in the form of modules and settings which rarely if ever lead to the best gaming experience (because of, once again, player dynamics).
I started puzzling over this a few weeks ago, and wanted to return to the discussion at hand because I think it’s an important part of figuring out what you actually want to play. Needless to say, the ‘what’ in this sentence must necessarily be broader than what book you aim to pick up and puzzle through, but that’s always been the case: Even within a single game, editions, supplements, and pre-written material would always enter consideration before a single person sat down at the table. And, of course, the play outcome is still wholly dependent on the group even after the material choices are made.
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for March! We’re in the post-zine nowhere zone, where backers and creators alike have a little bit of a hangover. Even so, there are still some interesting games to talk about. March and April have become a key campaign window for larger publishers after zine enthusiasts put them on blast for trying to campaign during Zine Quest (even if such campaigning may have been a net positive), so even in the early part of the month I have a number of campaigns and early campaign notices that all seemed to show up in my inbox exactly on February 28th. This means that even though there’s a smaller number of campaigns this month, we’re still seeing at least two major licensed campaign pushes. It’s even possible one of the two might be worth backing!
Moreau Vazh wrote an excellent post on their blog Taskerland, entitled “System Matters, Explicit Mechanics Less So”. Framing the debate on rules density historically, the post points out that gaming groups end up behaving in patterns similarly seen in many groups of people who have come together to do something creative. Of course, given that the norms of roleplaying are a great deal younger than, say, the social conventions of playing music in a group (an activity which is highly delineated and has many, many titles associated with said groups), there’s still a lot of push and pull in terms of figuring out how everyone actually wants to roleplay. Many of the norms we do have were developed either from prior art (often wargames) or came up simply because they were written into D&D back in 1974 (or perhaps a few years later, depending on the actual rule). Either way, these norms are still evolving, and as Vazh correctly points out, the hobby spends way more time agonizing over mechanics than attempting to understand the social dynamics which lead to game preferences and styles of play. And this leads to the core thesis of the Taskerland post, that ‘system’ is so wrapped up in the social norms and conflict resolution approaches of a group that the way a group plays games often transcends mechanics.
When Dungeon World was released in 2012, it slammed the door to Powered by the Apocalypse open so hard it broke the hinges. By taking the recipe crafted in the Baker House and mating it to the memetic power of Dungeons and Dragons, suddenly everyone could see what was so powerful about PbtA. Of course, Dungeon World was hardly a perfect recipe. Using the architecture of ‘moves’ established in PbtA but keeping both the stats and classes of D&D made for an incomplete match, and some of the mechanical choices made to get the two to pair up have received more significant criticism now that the design community has had a good decade and a half to really figure out what PbtA is. Still, the combination of a solid foundation and a lot of good ideas made Dungeon World into a rare specimen: The commercially successful fantasy heartbreaker.
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 