#148: Opinionated Games

Someone is going to have to decide if purple is cool or not.

I. Dear Reader,

One of the big divides I see in RPGs is between folks who like their games to have strong opinions or not. If you don’t like opinionated games, it might be because you see it as overly formal or constrained, or maybe even like you’d be playing someone else’s story. If you like opinionated games, you probably see them as opportunities to have unique or novel experiences – a chance to play in a way you wouldn’t have done if just left to yourself.

I think this divide is pretty unique to RPGs. The only thing I’ve seen at all similar in videogames is the criticism of very railroad-y games but that has its own different parallel in RPGs. Has this ever cropped up in boardgames? Not to my knowledge but let me know if I’ve missed something!

So I find this interesting because the question isn’t whether a game should have very specific details or procedures. It’s where those specifics should come from.

Some people want all the opinionated stuff in their settings or adventures. But setting is a kind of rule, isn’t it? A different kind of rule, sure, but in the same broad area. For example, if the setting says, “The Pigmen will only fight you if you look them in the eye”, and a rule says, “If you look a Pigman in the eye, roll 2d6+Blood”, those are basically the same thing.

Some people want the opinionated stuff to come from them. A GM running a generic game is choosing a generic game so that they can come up with all the specifics. We might be playing Fate or GURPS but if the GM says in this fantasy world, there are no gods and all magic has a corrupting influence, that’s pretty opinionated. In that sense, the GM sees this kind of thing as their domain and doesn’t like the rules elbowing in.

But I think there’s also another important difference about where we like our opinions: inputs and outcomes. I think a lot of people are comfortable with a very specific premise: “This is a time of war. In this time of chaos, robbers abound, famine rears its ugly head, and brother suspects brother.” That sounds pretty normal even though it does constrain play a whole lot!

But this feels different from, “In this game, everyone will die randomly and tragically.” Even though I don’t think this is necessarily more constrained than the previous example. It feels different because one is an input and one is an outcome. The latter statement constrains outcomes and a lot of people take “undecided outcome” as a central pillar of roleplaying.

So why do some people not have a problem with decided outcomes? Next week!

Yours opinionatedly,

Thomas

II. Media of the Week

Nothing this week!

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III. Links of the Week

• A nice, long read on the history and politics of Warhammer 40k:

  “When fans (or the company itself) point at Warhammer 40,000 and call it ‘satire’, it is really 2000AD that they are pointing to… Warhammer 40,000 on the other hand openly glamourised the villains of 2000 AD, said to itself “what if those were actually the good guys?”, added a bunch of homebrew worldbuilding around the edges, and sent the whole thing off to the printing press without really thinking too hard about what exactly they were trying to say.”

• Over on Githyanki Diaspora, Judd Karlman tells a fun story of how his players saw a simple mission and decided to make it way more interesting! Players doing cool stuff, love to see it.

• Ninefox Gambit, the award-winning sci-fi novel from Yoon Ha Lee, is getting an official RPG designed by the author.

• Age of Ravens has collected more than 200 different names for GM across various games. Some standouts include The Big Cheese from Rat Pack and Q in Star Trek: Alpha Quadrant.

• An older essay that I enjoyed rereading this week: Towards an art history for video games.

• A long lost admin comes in and boots out some bigoted moderators in this story about the Battletech subreddit and a queer fanzine.

• KiwiRPG Week is an upcoming RPG event which is going to host actual play streams, offer discounts and showcase games from Aotearoa / New Zealand.

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