Tag Archives: RPG

Articles, Editorial

The Trouble With Reviewing RPGs

6 Comments

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?

Continue reading The Trouble With Reviewing RPGs →

Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: December, 2023

Leave a comment

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.

Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: December, 2023 →
Articles, Editorial

Cannibal Halfling’s Reviewed Games at PAX Unplugged 2023

1 Comment

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.

Continue reading Cannibal Halfling’s Reviewed Games at PAX Unplugged 2023 →

Articles, Editorial

Paranoia The Core Book Review

5 Comments

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.

Continue reading Paranoia The Core Book Review →
Articles, The Independents

PLANET FIST Review – Nano-Powered Narrative Wargaming

2 Comments

I toss down a disc of nanobots that quickly assembles itself into a squad beacon, sending its beam of light up from the balcony of the building I’m in and into the sky, before looking through the scope of my sniper rifle. A squadmate, Ultra Rare, is trying to 1v1 an assault trooper using only her knuckleblades, and I sigh wistfully; we used to be an item before I accidentally got her demoted. I fire a shot, miss terribly, and am immediately targeted by the assault trooper’s team and ripped to shreds by machine gun fire.

Reassembled in orbit, switching from a force recon loadout to that of an engineer, I crash onto the balcony in a drop pod next to the beacon and the nanodust that was the smear I left behind. I exchange greetings and a salute with another squadmate – “Butler.” “Setback.” – who walked into the room while I was dead, and I look down into the courtyard. An enemy mech is literally stomping all over an allied squad – what a bunch of blueberries. I raise my anti-materiel rifle and blast off one of its arms – and am splattered across the wall behind me by the weapons in its other one. 

I’m considering another drop pod, when suddenly I schlorp back together, on the ground next to Goblin, who apparently got splattered as well at some point. Between us is a spent revive grenade, and standing over us is Butler. More salutes, more greetings. “Setback. Goblin.” “Butler.”

Just another day on PLANET FIST.

Continue reading PLANET FIST Review – Nano-Powered Narrative Wargaming →

Articles, Editorial

Give us more devastating games

2 Comments

What do you do?

The call to action within a tabletop RPG implies freedom. When all is said and done, when the cards are down, the GM asks the players ‘what do you do?’ and they go forth as they see fit. Not bound by rules or procedures, only by their imagination of the game world; the rules are there to help explain what happens, not to limit what can be done. This is the siren’s song of the roleplaying game, the freedom to do, and to be, whatever and whoever you want. There are many roads to a roleplaying game, and most traditional games (and many popular non-traditional ones) are built around this question. There is another question, though, that a game can ask, and for me, games which ask this second question have been the ones providing the most affecting, engrossing experiences.

How do you feel?

While games don’t literally ask this question outright (with a few exceptions), it is the key to another layer of character development, of narrative, even of mere in-game consequences. Once a game makes you think about how your character is feeling, you’re inhabiting that character on a whole other level. The problem with this should essentially go without saying: Rules can’t make you feel things. Game procedures can’t make you feel things. If a game wants to make you feel things, and more specifically feel the things your character would feel, the designer has to be a lot more inventive in how they go about this task than they would be, say, determining the probability that you hit a target with an arrow. But there are designers who have succeeded in this, delivering gut punches, heart wrenching decisions, and a sprinkling of light trauma. To them, I have only one thing to say: I want more of it.

Continue reading Give us more devastating games →
Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 11/18/2023

Leave a comment

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 11/18/2023

  1. D&D: Chains of Asmodeus
  2. Delta Green: God’s Teeth
  3. Fallout: The Roleplaying Game Settler’s Guide Book
  4. The One Ring™ – Tales from the Lone-lands
  5. Cyberpunk RED

Top News Stories

Dicebreaker announces Tabletop Awards finalists: Dicebreaker has announced the finalists in their Tabletop Awards, with the winners to be announced at PAX Unplugged later this year. Dicebreaker’s entrant in the tabletop awards space has been somewhat controversial, both due to who the winners have been and the somewhat loose standards of their ‘Rising Star’ categories. Nonetheless, the ‘Best Roleplaying Game’ category has some solid picks in it, including larger games Fabula Ultima and Blade Runner, and indies like Women Are Werewolves and This Discord Has Ghosts In It. Speaking of the last title, Will Jobst is also in the running for Designer of the Year.

Winners for The Awards 2023 announced: In contrast to the rather mainstream Dicebreaker award picks, The Awards, an indie RPG award whose two directives are ‘make weird shit’ (to designers) and ‘recognize twenty things’ (to the judges) have announced their winners for 2023. The whole list is fascinating, and includes higher profile work like FIST, Wildsea, and CBR+PNK. Check out the whole list in one easier to read format on Reddit. Let’s hope The Awards gets themselves a bit more organized off Twitter; their website is linked on Reddit but hasn’t been updated since June.

Discussion of the Week

You absolutely CAN play long campaigns with less crunchy systems, and you should: This is a canard I hear even from my own group, none of whom have less than fifteen years of gaming experience. There’s this belief that for a game to continue to be interesting after months or years of play, there needs to continue to be a stream of mechanical widgets you can engage with. As long as the group still has stories to tell the campaign can keep going; you don’t even necessarily need much or any advancement to keep things interesting!

Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, through Mastodon via @CannibalHalflingGaming@dice.camp, and through BlueSky via @cannibalhalfling.bsky.social.