The RPG theory ship sails on unbidden, even as RPG networks of practice seem to be drifting apart. In November, there was a great post over on The Dododecahedron which bucked the trend and pulled theory work from outside of the author’s primary discipline, the OSR. Starting from a description written by Vincent Baker about the PbtA ‘conversation’, Dododecahedron author Rowan describes OSR play as an onion with four concentric layers: Character on the outside, then working inward to Mechanics, Procedures, and finally Adventure. Adventure is in the middle as the diegetic ‘fiction’ that the players are engaging with is the source of truth for OSR play. From there are Procedures, which describe the rules for how to go about play; that is to say, what travel looks like, or when random encounters occur, or how to track consumables. The next layer out is Mechanics, which describe the “rules” as most RPGs understand them; this is where initiative, ability checks, and all those specific bits live. Finally on the outside is Character, where elements like attributes, experience points, and skill ratings, all the things that make characters unique, sit.
Continue reading Coring the Onion: OSR structuralism and non-OSR gamesTag Archives: rpg discourse
Gaming groups and the social ‘system’
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.
Continue reading Gaming groups and the social ‘system’
“We Didn’t Touch Dice the Whole Session!”
Role-playing games are games which involve role-playing, and that would only be a tautology if the category was consistently named. As it is, plenty of games termed RPGs can run just fine without any role-play to speak of, and plenty of role-play described in so-called RPGs lacks the structure which would allow it to fit the loosest definition of a game. Whether not an RPG is a game or involves role-play, it is certainly a product, and perceived experience sells a product as well as if not better than the actual experience that the product delivers. There is no other medium where the audience exclaims, quite positively, that they did not in any way engage with the experience as delivered to them.
When gamers state, often with happiness, that they went through a whole session without touching their dice, this is a tacit declaration that they did not engage with the game they were playing as intended; if the game did not intend for the players to roll many dice, or had no dice at all, such a declaration wouldn’t typically be made. This is not debatable, the experience of not engaging with the rules is special only insofar as the rules are there to be engaged. As much as it’s clear that the game isn’t being played as intended, what we cannot do in a blanket way is state this is a bad thing. RPGs are designed to deliver specific experiences and many of them, especially more rules-intensive games, deliver multiple specific experiences depending on the fraction of the game you’re engaging with. Looking at what players are or aren’t doing with a specific game requires which mechanics they are or are not engaging with, as well as what they’re doing in their game which isn’t in the rules and is done without touching any dice at all.
Continue reading “We Didn’t Touch Dice the Whole Session!”
Plumbing the RPG Blog Depths
The tabletop role-playing game has been around for nearly fifty years, and role-playing discourse arguably longer than that. While in recent years we’ve been blessed to see books recording RPG history from the likes of Jon Peterson, Shannon Appelcline, and Ben Riggs, histories of how the RPG player base has evolved are thinner on the ground and indeed more difficult to capture than those chronicling the evolution of game designers.
To give credit where credit is due, Jon Peterson’s books do focus on the player evolution that happened early in the hobby’s history; Playing at the World spends a lot of time discussing how the wargaming hobby birthed RPGs through Braunsteins and Chainmail, while The Elusive Shift examines the first decade or so of RPG evolution through APAs and other fan correspondence. Where things start to get really tricky is in the 1990s, thanks in large part to the stratification caused by this little technology called the internet.
Continue reading Plumbing the RPG Blog Depths
Weekend Update: 9/4/2021
Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Continue reading Weekend Update: 9/4/2021Weekend Update: 8/28/2021
Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, and discussions from elsewhere online.
DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 8/28/2021
- Legend of the Five Rings: Fields of Victory
- 2300AD
- Alien RPG Colonial Marines Operations Manual
- Fallout the RPG Core Rulebook
- Esper Genesis 5E Master Technician’s Guide
Top News Stories
Not much going on on the RPG front! Stay healthy everyone, mask up in crowds, and play some games.
Discussion of the Week
GM Experience should not be quantified simply by length of time: An interesting discussion about how to compare and assess GMing ability. No conclusion is reached, but a lot of intriguing questions are asked. Does it matter how many games you run? Should you consider the trends in the hobby when you started? Does depth or breadth make for a better GM? Worth a read.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
Weekend Update: 8/21/2021
Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, and discussions from elsewhere online.
DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 8/21/2021
- Aliens RPG Colonial Marines Operations
- Fallout the RPG Core Rules
- Wrath and Glory – Redacted Records
- A Book of Tales
- Battletech: ilClan
Top News Stories
ENnies voting is live: Nominations are out and it’s time to vote for your favorites in the 2021 ENnies. The process has been rife with technical issues (votes have reset at least once) so it may be good to return to the site and check that your votes have in fact been counted.
Discussion of the Week
Beautiful Books, Great Settings, Terrible Games: On Reddit this week there was a discussion of games which hold tremendous value as pieces of media, or as static worldbuilding exercises…and then crumble to dust the minute you try to *play* them. As continued discussion around what makes a game and what makes a game good is centered within the discourse, we need to keep in mind that some things we just love to hate.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
Weekend Update: 8/14/2021
Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, and discussions from elsewhere online.
DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 8/14/2021
- Fallout: The Roleplaying Game Core Rules
- A Book of Tales
- Battletech: ilClan
- Wrath & Glory – Redacted Records
- BLASTER: Volume 3
Top News Stories
2021 ENNIE Awards Nominees and Judges’ Spotlight Winners Announced: The header says it all, the list of this year’s batch of Nominees and Spotlight Winners has been released. There are a number of creations we’ve looked at in the mix: Cortex Prime, Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying, and Alice is Missing are all nominated for more than one category, and SLA Industries 2nd Edition got a Judge’s Spotlight!
Discussion of the Week
An Apology: A needed piece of meta-discourse. A Redditor concedes that he snarked about the game Ten Candles because designer Stephen Dewey was “a dick” to him…over a decade ago. The resulting post makes you feel good for knowing it happened, and reminds us all to take a step back from all the heated discussions we can so easily be sucked into, online and elsewhere. Also, you should probably check out Ten Candles.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
Weekend Update: 8/7/2021
Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, and discussions from elsewhere online.
DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 8/7/2021
- Fallout: The Roleplaying Game Core Rules
- Battletech: ilClan
- BLASTER: Volume 3
- M20: Technocracy Reloaded
- Trails of Ash and Bone
Top News Stories
DM’s Guild Releases Print-On-Demand Guidelines: Announced in the DriveThruRPG Discord on Wednesday, the DM’s Guild has established guidelines for community content getting to Print-On-Demand. First, it has to be said that this does make PoD on the Guild more accessible than it was – we checked with DM’s Guild staff, and prior to this the only way to have a printed product on the Guild was on a very limited case-by-case basis – Exploring Eberron is the only one to have crossed our desk. That doesn’t mean it’s now actually easy.
In addition to all of the usual guidelines familiar to DTRPG’s PoD market, all print files need to be completed by a Guild-approved layout designer, of which there are currently only four. Only products that are already Platinum Best Sellers or higher, or new products from a creator who has another product that is Platinum or higher, can be submitted. In terms of actual numbers that means more than a thousand copies sold – only 889 products (3.47% of everything on the guild) meet that specification as of this writing, and it’s likely that that does not translate to 889 individual creators. Finally, a product has to have 100 or more pages, meaning even many of those Platinum or higher products still don’t qualify – a quick count seems to show that only 20 of the 72 Adamantine products, the bestsellers, would make the cut.
Some of these restrictions make internal sense, particularly the layout requirement – you’re playing in the Guild’s sandbox, it tracks that you’d be held to a certain standard of quality. Still, while undeniably more attainable than it was, actually calling the Guild’s Print-on-Demand program ‘accessible’ doesn’t quite fit either. It’s early days yet, though; hopefully this is the first step towards a greater number of creators getting to see their work on the printed page.
Discussion of the Week
The Avatar Kickstarter and TTRPG Cross-Pollination: The Kickstarter for Avatar Legends from Magpie Games has shattered records for TTRPG projects by raising $2,502,090 as this is written, a number that will be hilariously outdated by the time we add a period to the end of this sentence. It has also, predictably, kicked off discussions ranging from the right of licensed games to use kickstarter at all to how much, if at all, Magpie’s success will either help or harm everything from other individual projects to the entire TTRPG industry/crowdfunding mechanism. In all the fervor, though, we’ve found one thread by @JazzElves to be particularly worth a look, talking about entry points for the hobby and the best ways, Avatar or otherwise, to actually get people playing new games.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
Weekend Update: 7/31/2021
Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, and discussions from elsewhere online.
DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 7/31/2021
- Blaster, Volume 3
- M20 Technocracy Reloaded
- Fading Suns 4 – Character Book
- Trails of Ash and Bone
- The Starship Warden
Top News Stories
PAX West to require proof of vaccination or negative COVID test: Running a con in September is dicey business with the current uncertain state of the pandemic, but PAX West is trying to walk the balance beam as carefully as they can. Earlier this week, con organizers announced that entry would require either proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test. The con is also maintaining reduced capacity as well as a face covering requirement. Although evolving news on the pandemic front is making any mass gathering a calculated risk, hats off to the PAX West staff for keeping their event as safe as they can.
Discussion of the Week
Why were RPGs only invented in the 20th century?: Roleplay as an activity is hundreds, possibly thousands of years old. So why is the role-playing game as a product so relatively new? This Reddit thread contains both a lot of fascinating history as well as interesting discussions about the commercialization (and lack thereof) of roleplay over the years.
Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 