Subjectivity

I. Dear Reader,

One of the things I figured out this year is that writing about games is a celebration of subjectivity, of personal experience. There’s been a long semi-academic debate about how to review games (going back at least to Robin Laws’ essay The Hidden Art) and I think I let it trick me into thinking the task was more complicated than it is.

For example, I’ve been meaning to play through Masks of Nyarlathotep for months. And a big part of the reason was that so I could write about it. But even if I wasn’t going to write it, it would be appealing because it’s such a famous work and that engaging with it is like having a shared experience with other people. I like connecting with people over games and one of the ways that happens is by playing the same games and swapping notes.

But for both those reasons (writing about games, connecting with people), I started to think that I needed to try and play it the way it was meant to be played. Or to put it another way, I needed to have the common experience, the general experience. Because otherwise I’d not succeed in achieving either of my goals. To review a game, shouldn’t I try and review the experience I think people will have? To connect with other people, shouldn’t I aim for a similar experience to them?

The problem with answering that question in the affirmative is that it actually saps me of all excitement. I didn’t notice it at first.  But I had somehow turned playing this game into a task with good outcomes and bad outcomes.

What I want to do, what is exciting for me to do, is to run the adventure in the weird, idiosyncratic, non-traditional ways. To break it open or turn it upside down. To play it backwards, rather than forwards. Use different rules. Speedrun it. I don’t know what any of this entails for this adventure specifically (because I haven’t decided if I’m actually going to play it) but I’m gesturing at a broader idea of not playing the game, but rather playing with the game.

Will this make my experience of the game incomparable to other people’s? Yes, but it always was. This just makes it very clear. Can I still review the game? Can I still connect with people about it? Yes, and yes. What will that review look like? It’ll look like my review of Impossible Landscapes where we changed the game to be about artists, rather than Delta Green agents. Was that a traditional review? No. Was it better than if I’d written a traditional review? YES.

I’m done pretending that there is an average experience when it comes to RPGs — the average player isn’t a real thing and impossible for me to commune with. I think that pursuit comes at the cost of the grander experience of celebrating human creativity and diversity. So yeah, going forward, I’ll be talking about my experience and you can tell me about yours and that sounds to me like a pretty great conversation. The fact that they’ll be different experiences will not get in the way at all!

Have a good week!

Yours creatively,

Thomas

PS. Someone will interpret this to mean that I’m saying you can’t talk about games as things at all or something equally contrary to the spirit of this post so I just want to get in early and tell them that they’re wrong. Boo!

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II. Media of the Week

• Over on Yes Indie’d, I spoke to Aaron Lim about how events and spaces, meeting people and playing games with them, on-line and off, has been at the core of his game design practice. Aaron and I met through a playtest of his game and it’s very special to chat with him about the five intervening years.
• Another Aaron, Aaron Voigt, recommends a list of games for reveling in toxic drama.

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• 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.

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III. Links of the Week

Articles

• Ty Pitre, the uncrowned king of the blogs, returns with a great post with almost-formula for making charged scenarios for adventure games. It’s very smart stuff that puts factions and things they value at the heart of everything.
  • I tend to bounce off a lot of dungeon design advice because I don’t play location-based adventures normally but this applies to all the fast-and-loose stuff I do as well.
• NY Stage Review has a piece about a five hour play that uses D&D as a part of a queer coming-of-age story: “Over time, the players take their roles of warrior, magus or demon ever more seriously. Props and costumes emerge, and the entire LuEsther space becomes a fantasy land (strong contributions from lighting designer Christopher Akerlind here) where the kids’ real-life conflicts start to be played out – cosplayed out! – within the events of the Quest, domains converging to an ominous end. This is storytelling at its most audacious.”
• Valeria Loves talks about Over/Under, the Mothership discord megagame that just wrapped up, in the wider context of live-text roleplay and how to do more of it, if you want.
• If you’re a game design looking to make your game more retailer-friendly, this is a nice blog with some good advice.

Reviews

• Messed up the link to this review of Riverbank last week so here it is again properly!
• Mint from There’s a TTRPG For That has a review of Sunset Kills, a one-shot urban fantasy monsterhunting PbtA game from Jesse Ross: “Sunset Kills is a slam-dunk example of a good PbtA one-shot. The character concepts are simple and easy to slap together, the genre it pulls from is iconic, and character advancement is quick and rewarding.”
  • She also made a lovely list of games about Queer Community.
• Seyed Razavi continues to publish at an astonishing pace. I really enjoyed this review of scrappy mech game Salvage Union because it looks at all the adventures that come for the game and honestly, they sound pretty cool. He describes one of them, False Flag: “Players will be constantly choosing which horrible people to help, how far they’re willing to go, and what happens to the workers caught in the crossfire.”
• Paul Beakley’s new piece about Coriolis: The Great Dark had me chuckling just at the headline. It’s called The Pretty Good Dark and it’s about returning to trad prep and how that feels different to the more relationship-driven play that he loves.
• Andrew Girdwood over at GeekNative reminded me about a game I wanted to check out a long time ago. It’s called Zin Never Dies (zin is what they call magic) and it’s got great art and a weird setting: “You have the Masked, small beings who simply appear from caves fully formed and never remove their bone-white masks. There are the Suits, intelligent slugs who pilot suits of armour to interact with the world. Then there are the Hardened, gentle giants who are completely immune to magic.”

Misc

• Adrian Hon is organizing a jubensha convention in London next year.
• Vincent Baker did an AMA on reddit.

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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.

• Would a long-time RPG designer ever create a skirmish wargame? Would it include crews of angry, armed, alien swine battling over a spaceport? Rebel Trash, kickstarting now, answers both affirmatively!
• Uncharted Dungeons helps you build better dungeons, featuring new rules for dungeon complexity and challenge levels. Live on Kickstarter now!
• “BEAST RPG is a success.” Find out why Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood loves this game. Try the free 100+ page preview on Kickstarter today!

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• The Magical Land of Yeld, a beautifully illustrated all-ages fantasy game.
• Salvage Union, the post-apocalyptic salvaging mech game, with all three campaigns.

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.