Tag Archives: RPG

Articles, Level One Wonk

Level One Wonk Holiday Special: 2023

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Happy holidays! 2023 is ending, and what a year it’s been. In a lot of ways, 2023 has been a bit quieter here than previous years; while COVID refuses to go away we’ve all lurched back towards normalization, and most of the upheaval in games came from picking up the pieces of events that happened in 2022. Twitter is dead, essentially; anyone who’s attempted to use the site knows that any attempt to see through the haze of algorithmic mud only results in, at best, the absence of continued conversation. Of course, RPG discussion continues, you just need to look a little harder to find it.

Casting a longer shadow over RPG news of the year was Wizards of the Coast. Starting with the OGL debacle and ending with a swathe of layoffs, things were rough this year for everyone’s favorite RPG monopolist. It does mean, though, that my prediction made last year about major players and rent-seeking were correct; MCDM, Kobold Press, Darrington Press and others are all fielding fantasy RPGs intended to be an alternative to D&D. This does mean that whatever happens with the revised D&D rulebooks coming out in 2024 is anyone’s guess; even the home run of Baldur’s Gate 3 has effectively been squandered on the tabletop side.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Hobby Economics: RPGs and Bicycles

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Recently Wizards of the Coast has been in the news as Hasbro laid off 1,100 people, including numerous Wizards employees. In addition to the typical bad rap a company gets from firing that many people right before Christmas the Hasbro layoffs, especially those which affected Wizards, have made a lot of people ask questions. Wizards is a bright spot on Hasbro’s balance sheet, especially in light of the recent sale of the eOne film and TV business which highlighted the weakness of the company’s entertainment division. Despite their performance, Hasbro opted to lay off people responsible for some of their greatest successes, including most of the team responsible for working with Larian on the hit video game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Although I can’t comment on the wisdom of Hasbro’s particular headcount decisions, I can say that when RPGs meet money, good things don’t usually happen. Indeed, Hasbro’s reported tabletop gaming revenue in one quarter of 2023 was $290 million, or 50% larger than the entire tabletop RPG industry for the whole year of 2022. By that math, Magic: the Gathering alone is roughly six times larger than every TTRPG combined on a revenue basis. Ouch.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Advancement for GURPS

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As longtime readers of this site may be aware, I have a long history with GURPS. GURPS was the first game I GMed for what is still my primary gaming group, and I GMed GURPS for the majority of all games that I ran from 2006 until 2014. In the intervening decade I moved away from the system because my own interests changed; I began seeking out specific experiences and different approaches to game design. Some of my favorite games and game systems from the last decade, systems as diverse as Twilight:2000, Electric Bastionland, and Apocalypse World, all share the common property of being designed for a specific circumstance. In other words, all of these games could be considered the antithesis of GURPS at least as far as design goals are concerned.

That said, my affection for GURPS and generic game systems in general has never completely waned. Beyond that, when it comes to a more simulative approach to gaming, to times when you want to know how to make a very wide range of situations relevant, GURPS is still king. I cannot think of a better game for bringing verisimilitude and consistency to a very wide set of characters and circumstances. However, as much as I hold a lot of affection for GURPS, there are still some things I’d want to change if I were to return to the system. For this System Hack or two (or three?) I’m going to look at GURPS and look at things which haven’t gotten as much revision and research as the tech level system, or the frightening number of weapons, or the comprehensive and extremely math-heavy solar creation templates of GURPS Space. No, I’m going to be talking about things that have received a lot of attention since GURPS Fourth Edition was released in 2005. Spotlight management. Player-driven goals. And today, advancement.

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Articles, Editorial

The Trouble With Reviewing RPGs

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Usually we keep any mention of the Wider TTRPG Discourse to the Discussions section of the Weekend Update, but there’s an exception to everything. Supposedly Matt Colville said some things on a stream earlier this week? I’m sure he did, the man’s got a lot to talk about, he’s got a Kickstarter going on that I’m sure Aaron will talk more about in January’s Crowdfunding Carnival. Of course then the topic got sucked into the ouroboros of social media, starting with Twitter’s rotting alive husk, and do you think anyone is providing any links to said stream? No, of course not. Doesn’t matter, though, because The Discourse spins on, and its latest incarnation is, broadly, this:

Reviewing a game after reading it versus reviewing a game after playing it.

Oh. Oh wow. Are… are we The Discourse?

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: December, 2023

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Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for December! Well, folks, we made it. It’s nearly the end of 2023, and the holiday season is now upon us. It’s time to look back on the year, look forward to the next, and light lights to guard against the darkness of winter.

It’s also time for statistics! This year as part of Crowdfunding Carnival, I went into the archives and did retrospectives of the Kickstarter Wonk articles from 2018, the start of the series. With over 100 campaigns reviewed, I was able to collect some interesting data and reflect on the nature of RPG Kickstarters based both on trends within the sample as well as some reflection on what was included in my sample and what was not. While I don’t think anything I learned is particularly earth-shattering, it’s always nice to get a little quantitative nugget among the highly qualitative world of writing about games.

First, though, let’s talk about what’s campaigning now. The holiday season is when you want to finish, not start your campaigns, but there are at least a few that are worth highlighting.

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Articles, Editorial

Cannibal Halfling’s Reviewed Games at PAX Unplugged 2023

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Aki and I are both wandering around PAX Unplugged this weekend – Aki already put out a great guide to both the con and to the surrounding area, and I’ve been sending artificial intelligences up against a ‘ghost ship’ with Games on Demand. We’ve been quite pleased to run into a series of familiar names this year, so here’s a short list of booths we think you should definitely be checking out if you’ve made it to the con.

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Articles, Editorial

Paranoia The Core Book Review

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It shocked me to learn that it has been six years since I last reviewed an edition of Paranoia; back in 2017 I did a System Split comparison between Paranoia Red Clearance Edition and Paranoia XP, two editions of the game which had significant mechanical departures from each other. At the time, my conclusion was that while Red Clearance Edition was a better game, XP was the better Paranoia. Apparently someone over at Mongoose read my review, because the new edition of Paranoia (called The Perfect Edition while on Kickstarter) takes my conclusions to an unsettling tee: the slicker rules are kept, the setting is rolled back to more reflect a throughline from the older editions, and the cards, which worked way better in theory than in practice, were removed. The result is remarkably close to a version using Red Clearance Edition rules with XP-style fluff, and (unsurprisingly) it turns out that yes, I really do like the version of the game made seemingly in direct response to my critiques. That all said, the new edition of Paranoia is still an edition of Paranoia made in 2023, and that alone has gotten me thinking about this. So let’s set aside the goofy clearance warnings, fake redactions, and admonishments to self-terminate, and talk about how Paranoia, any Paranoia, actually fits into the gaming landscape here in the roaring 2020s.

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