I. Dear Reader,
Back home now, happy-tired, typing out this quick post because the computer clock warns me it is very close to go-time for this week’s newsletter.
The latest review on Quinns Quest is on Vaesen and highlights one of the key problems in modern RPG design. And since I’ve been talking to people about this all-over (including the good folks over at the Indie Game Reading Club), I thought I’ll try and explain it.
Think about a game where you’re exploring – a video game or a tabletop RPG like old school D&D. These games assume you’re an outsider and that you’re visiting new, exotic locales for the first time. This means that the knowledge of the player and the character are roughly similar. This is a nice and convenient place to be in and everyone’s happy – player, designer, your sleep paralysis demon, etc. In fantasy novels, the story is often told from the point of view of an outsider so the author can explain stuff to you. (“What’s a mandibular gorbule, Hagrid?”, “You don’t know what a gorbule is? Pshaw, kids these days. Oh well, let me explain…”)
But, in modern games, you’re cast as an insider – someone who’s from the place that the game is set in. This is great because you get to tell all kinds of different stories now but it’s also not-great because if this is a fantasy setting (or even a historical one), you get this annoying difference in the knowledge between the player and the character. The character knows stuff that the player does not. This leads to one of my least favourite interactions ever.
Player One: “Player Two, you’re a priest of Argonarax, where’s the nearest temple?”
Player Two: “Hey, GM, do I know that?”
GM: “Yeah, sure. It’s in Galagooly.”
Player Two: “Player One, I tell you that it’s in Galagooly.”
Player One: “Okay, how do we get there?”
Player Two: “Hey, GM, do I know that?”
Listen, I love fantasy games but I hate this. If you don’t mind this stuff, fair, we can still be friends. In most trad games with a pre-written setting, you just mitigate these issues. You develop ways of having this conversation that are less annoying. But sometimes this kind of stuff fundamentally changes how a game feels.
Like in Vaesen, your characters should know a lot of stuff about monsters from local folklore. But the players don’t. And the game doesn’t care to bridge that gap in any way except, “make some dice rolls, ask the GM”. This absolutely changes the way the game feels to play. In his review, Quinns makes these handouts of the game lore and hands them out. It’s a good solution!
In my experience, the only real way for players to feel like insiders in a setting is when they make it up for themselves. If we spend session zero, brainstorming factions and coming up with NPCs, then our games feel different. Players start games out with opinions and concrete knowledge, things they know and people they care about. Also, importantly, they have a sense that the GM doesn’t know the correct answer and can judge whether they can make something up in the moment or not. It’s, by far, my preferred experience.
Now, for a lot of people, the cost of having to improvise a setting is way higher than the cost of this disconnection between player and character knowledge. But I mostly can’t read a setting book in the first place so this is actually a double-win.
Anyway, there’s much more to talk about here but we’ll have to get to it next week.
Time marches on,
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
See above!
- What ho! Support the newsletter on patreon!
- If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.
III. Links of the Week
Articles
- Evan Torner writes about the travails of life and how to run one hour RPG sessions.
- The Alexandrian writes a very insightful explanation of why trad adventure design sometimes falls apart at the table and how they might be reformulated.
- It’s framed as something the GM might do at the table but, like various OSR designers have grokked, it would be better if the adventures were formatted like this from the start. (The post is called the Rachov Principle but I’m happy to assure you Rachov is a fictional character.)
- Explorers Design highlights various RPG covers and what makes them good. I particularly like it because there’s a wide variety of stuff here from complex art-driven covers to minimalist type-driven ones. You’re more likely to be inspired than demotivated from it, hopefully!
- On the Walking Mind, Rob Donoghue writes about the interesting stuff that happens if you pre-commit to constraints like “we’ll only play for ten sessions and characters will advance every two sessions”.
- For the design-heads, Geoff Englestein has a good post about a cool mechanic that got deleted because it could be optimized a bit too easily.
Reviews
- On the Playful Void blog, a review of a very interesting game called The Adventures of Gonan.
- On the Indie Game Reading Club, a deep dive into Deathmatch Island which sounds funny, creepy and relatively simple to play.
- The Other Side blog does a two part retrospective into Gamma World with a TSR era and a WOTC era.
It Came From The Bookshelf has a couple good posts like this one about beloved mess Shadowrun 3e and also a nice take on the recent phenomenon Coyote and Crow.
News, Misc
- Chris Chinn has made a playingcards.io template for Prime Time Adventures and it is instantly the best way to play this game online.
- Kickstarter announced a bunch of new features that seem squarely aimed at competing with Backerkit.
- Dicebreaker reports that there is a Neopets RPG on the way? (Also, if you haven’t heard, Dicebreaker along with a bunch of other sites were sold to IGN and there were layoffs instantly.)
IV. Small Ads
All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.
- Become a ghost hunter endowed with supernatural abilities, and delve into eerie manors in Wraithound, a solo/coop TTRPG in which you investigate and confront spectral horrors that plague reality.
This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.
- From Runehammer games and Index Card RPG, a bundle of tabletop fantasy game, Crown and Skull.
- Also, a bundle of murder mystery party games.
Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!
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