Tag Archives: RPG

Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Satisficing and RPG Design

4 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 →
Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Mashups

Leave a comment

Hobby games is a pretty broad field, with both upstarts like TTRPGs and trading card games as well as board and miniatures games which go back decades further. The whole field is brimming with designers taking their ideas about set, setting, and mechanics and committing them to cardboard and plastic, creating new and weird accessories or just sticking with humble dice and meeples. When you combine the recent renaissance in hobby board games (driven, like TTRPGs, by Kickstarter and the internet) with a few decades of family board games that everyone seems to have kicking around, there’s a lot of potential just sitting there.

TTRPGs are just as able to use weird, custom accessories as any board game, and in some cases all it takes is one designer with a weird idea to make something new. Where I think is the most fertile ground is the RPG mashup: taking accessories you may already have in your game cabinet and making new games with them. The hobby has figured out this works great with Jenga, and as you’ll read about in a moment, someone is trying it with the classic family (dis)favorite Monopoly. As far as other games, the sky’s the limit…but there is an extra layer of challenge involved with taking an existing game and both changing the experience while preserving the original bones.

Continue reading System Hack: Mashups →
A Glimpse Into The Vault, Articles

A Glimpse Into the Vault: Esoteric Ebb

1 Comment

Video games owe a lot to tabletop roleplaying games, with mechanics, terminology, and tropes all being borrowed during the 1980s and 1990s. For obvious reasons, though, the two media drifted, and even video games calling themselves roleplaying games have little to do with their forbears, given both the capabilities of digital games in terms of graphics and gameplay as well as their limitations in terms of breadth and story. All this to say, when I see a claim that a video game is able to capture some of the feel of a good tabletop session, I perk up. This was the case with Esoteric Ebb.

Esoteric Ebb is not the first video game I’ve seen making this claim; we covered Wildermyth a ways back, and I appreciated the way that game tried to incorporate emergent storytelling and feel more like a sandbox than other games in the tactical RPG genre. Esoteric Ebb is perhaps not as different as Wildermyth; it’s built strongly around the mechanics and tropes of another (admittedly very good) video game. However, its writing and the understanding of the TTRPG medium that that writing demonstrates still end up making Esoteric Ebb, in my view at least, a must-play.

Continue reading A Glimpse Into the Vault: Esoteric Ebb →
Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: April, 2026

Leave a comment

Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for April! It’s spring now, which means I’m spending more time outside riding my bike and less time writing. That’s why this post is going up on a Thursday! Okay, that’s…not entirely true (it’s also not entirely false). The post is going up on a Thursday also because I didn’t want to post on April Fool’s Day. Also also, some really cool stuff went live on Wednesday, and if I posted too early I wouldn’t get to talk about it. In addition to all of the campaigns below, Orbital Blues Month started on April 1st on Backerkit, and there are a bunch of neat campaigns supporting that particular game of sad space cowboys. It’s all underpinned by Outlaws and Corporations, a new Orbital Blues first-party supplement.

With that, let’s get into it. The major campaigns section is a bit negative this month; as it turns out money corrupts, and that’s how we get proprietary apps and wholly unnecessary D&D 5e money-grabs. Luckily, Pelgrane Press and The Gauntlet also come to the rescue with two big and worthy campaigns.

Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: April, 2026 →
Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Lists part 2

Leave a comment

Welcome back to our System Hack! We’ve moved into the detail part of this hack, actually nailing down what everything in the game is and how it works. Now that we’ve nailed down what the skills are, it’s time to talk about Resources and Items, how they’re made, and what they do. Later on this leads us to part 3, where we lock down the tech tree and more specific base stations. After that’s all situated, it might be time to prototype this thing as a game.

RimWorld does give a guide in terms of what level of simplification we should go for. Resources like ‘compacted steel’ and ‘compacted machinery’ sidestep massive parts of the metal and machining supply chain, and also end up neatly creating resource constraints at different stages of the RimWorld gameplay loop. We’re not necessarily restricted by the same intent with our designs; this game is still an RPG at its heart and things like trading and finding more resources aren’t necessarily constrained to a single map and random events. With no (or at least much less) dead-ending, it’s okay to make the resources palette a bit broader and a bit more interesting.

Continue reading System Hack: Colony Sim Cortex Lists part 2 →