Tag Archives: RPG

Audio/Video, Cannibal Halfling Radio

Cannibal Halfling Radio Ep. 23 – Now Playing: Cowboy Bebop – Trifecta Tango Pt. 1

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I think it’s time we blow this scene. Get everybody and the stuff together… On a ship named Progressive, three bounty hunters down on their luck jump at the chance to score big at the House of Dice casino, in orbit over the Jovian moon Europa. Rather than rolling the dice at the tables, though, they’ll be gambling on whether or not they can track down a culprit who is already in the system…

Now Playing: Cowboy Bebop – Trifecta Tango Pt. 1!

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Stardew Valley’s Closed World

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Stardew Valley returned to the video game consciousness in a big way recently with the release of its 1.6 update. This update includes new content, rebalancing, and generally significant improvements and changes to the game that most thought unlikely after the 1.5 update due to designer Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone shifting his focus to his next game, Haunted Chocolatier. Needless to say the scope of the update was a very pleasant surprise, and many players, myself included, dove back in.

I’ve put a number of hours into a new playthrough of Stardew Valley, having previously put the game down after the 1.5 update. Compared to my last two playthroughs I’ve taken more time to consider the design of the game and what it can teach us about tabletop games. Much like the last time I analyzed a video game like this, No Man’s Sky, the intent is not to imply that the gameplay loops would make much sense at the tabletop; Stardew Valley’s most tactile elements, like its combat and fishing, belong firmly in the digital realm. Instead I’d say there’s a lot to learn about how Stardew Valley presents a world and the avenues by which a player can interact with that world. This world design is, in some ways at least, the opposite of No Man’s Sky. Stardew Valley presents a ‘closed world’ where the avenues of interaction are finite and presented from the beginning, and that mode of world design can teach some lessons to tabletop RPGs, either to designers or GMs.

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Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: April, 2024

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Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for April! As you business types know the first quarter is over, and it’s time to kick things up! More realistically, ZineQuest is over and PAX East is recently in the rearview, meaning that the first set of product announcements in the tabletop gaming world have kicked off in earnest. Commercial con season runs from roughly PAX East to GenCon in August, so we’re in the height of major announcements and the crowdfunding campaigns which accompany them. As such, we have four major glorified pre-orders campaigns that you can check out. Beyond that there’s still a lot of momentum in the indie space, at least somewhere down in there. Sifting through the weird porn minis and 5e “supplements”, I’ve picked out five indie campaigns that are worth checking out and, quite possibly, worth a pledge as well.

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Articles, Editorial

Black Sword Hack and the evolving OSR

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The Old School Renaissance is a microcosm within the RPG world. Although many (including myself) refer to the OSR as a whole, cohesive thing, the reality is that the movement is more the result of at least half a dozen origins that random-walked into game preferences which, to an outsider, look similar. The broad preference towards the genre establishment of Dungeons and Dragons (or at least Appendix N, if not the system itself) bounds the definitions we work with; other retroclones and revivals like Cepheus and RuneQuest aren’t included, even if they too are ‘old school’. No, the main thing that all vectors of the OSR have in common is that they are trying to recreate the time when the roleplaying game was new. And when RPGs were new, either literally or in the eyes of the designer, the new thing that they first touched was (almost always) D&D.

All OSR games are aiming for either D&D as it was, D&D as it could be, or D&D as it was supposed to be. D&D as it was is simple; Old School Essentials is a straight-up retroclone and proves that ‘Basic D&D without shitty layout and shitty editing’ is a winning recipe. It’s the best known and best selling retroclone, but the retroclone camp of the OSR is arguably the oldest (to the degree that OSR is a label we can trace it back to OSRIC). D&D as it could be is where we start getting a lot of the distillations; the rules in early editions were such a mess you barely used any of them, so clearly one could write a game only using those few rules we could actually make work. This is where Into the Odd comes in, this is arguably where The Black Hack comes in, and, if rules were in any way supposed to be primary in the game, this might be where Mork Borg would come in. This example shows setting and tone are a different topic here than ‘game’. D&D as it was supposed to be is a tough one, and there aren’t many games that really aim for this mark. Whitehack is the one that comes to mind for me, taking the length and complexity of the original booklets and turning that into something much more flexible and consistent.

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Articles, Editorial

Daggerheart Preview

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Earlier this month, Darrington Press released the free playtest version of Daggerheart, their traditional fantasy RPG meant to go toe-to-toe with D&D. First with Pathfinder but now also with entries from MCDM and Kobold Press, we’re getting an awful lot of D&D-alikes, thanks to last year’s saga with the OGL. It’s now clear that a corporate game is a liability, so anyone making a livelihood in the gaming space is clearing out of the Halls of Hasbro. What makes Daggerheart, the entry from the Critical Role folks so special? I downloaded it for free, for one thing. In all seriousness Daggerheart is entering the public eye a little earlier than the MCDM RPG or Tales of the Valiant, both of which are currently fulfilling crowdfunding and doing any additional playtesting either contained to backers or within their own teams. The public playtest process is a great way to get a lot of feedback, and it’s worked well in the past; both 5e and the second edition of Pathfinder went through public playtesting.

It’s also caused some grief already. Darrington is somewhat in the crosshairs, between the moderate reception to their first game Candela Obscura and the relatively polarized fanbase that Critical Role has created by being the biggest voice in the room. Seems like a perfect time for someone like me to come in. I’m not the most impartial judge, given my growing disinterest in D&D or its cousins over the last five years, but I do understand what these games are trying to do. To that end, Daggerheart seems to have what it takes to grow a fanbase. It just needs to solve a few niggling issues with its own relationship to narrative mechanics first.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Using Playing Cards

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Welcome to another System Hack! Way back when I gave an intro to how to use dice and dice statistics in your game designs. This is in some ways a sequel to that article, but given the design assumptions of RPGs it also plays a very different tune. We use dice in RPGs because large swathes of our game mechanics are predicated on the probability of something happening. Success, failure, or something in between is determined by odds that reflect the internal consistency of the setting. This, like so many norms in gaming, comes from wargames and isn’t particularly necessary in many game designs. We have gotten through the checkpoint of ‘you don’t have to use dice’ but the result has been, merely, diceless games. What if we play differently, and steal a deck of cards from the poker set instead of stealing dice from Monopoly?

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