"Feel" and Old School RPGs

 

Around here we've had a lot of talk comparing DCC and other old-school rules to D&D 5E and our recent Tales of the Valiant campaign. It has a very different feel from 5E D&D and its variants which tend to rapidly develop into superheroic levels of power. While that's fun, some of the group is very interested in the more bare-bones stuff where the answer to every problem is not "what class ability or feat can I use here?" Some of these old-school games not even having a skill list is a real shift in perspective back to the old days. We've had plenty of fun with the more modern games but this experience had me thinking back to 10-15 years ago when I was introducing the boys to Basic D&D and they were just doing all kinds of improvising and thinking on their feet too. 

I don't hate modern games of course - I've run them quite a bit over the past ten years+ - but I do see the difference in attitude that much more clearly right now. Online discussion is so tied up in "balance" - between classes, party vs. monsters, and encounters in general, that it amazes me. It feels like so much of the talk around the game gets wrapped around its own axles that it misses the point of what the game is for: you're supposed to play it!

Someone in this picture may well be complaining about balance ...

I think there are far more people talking about RPGs than are actually playing them. This is not a new or revolutionary take, I'm just feeling it more after diving in to a different game for a few weeks. People comparing builds, people doing a bunch of math comparing classes to each other, people running the monster numbers in similar ways ... it feels like pointless electron burning to me most of the time because most of it occurs in a featureless clean-room situation with no campaign details of note. Stuff like "this dragon is a poor opponent for a party of 8th level PCs because it's AC and damage output are under-spec for what's expected at that level". OK, sure. Is there a lair involved? Offspring" Worshippers? A mate? A river of bubbling lava flowing through it's rest chamber? Does the party have a sword of dragon-slaying?  Does the dragon have some magical trick or effect that makes it immune to normal weapons? Does it speak? This kind of stuff is mostly ignored in these mathematical exercises which brings me back to wondering  - what's the point? 

If you love the game, maybe it's D&D 5.5, is this all you have to say about it? Is it what you want to focus on? Anyone with the books or PDFs can run the math on these things - it's not hard. What about your campaign? What's the setting? What's going on there? How many people are playing in it? What kinds of characters do you have in your group? Is there something going on you've never seen before? Tell me about the special parts - the math of the game is not the special part!

It just feels like so much energy is expended on stats, product announcements & debates, rules talk, edition talk, and balance yet far less is spent on things coming out of actual play in actual campaigns. You know ... the thing we're all trying to do with this mass of paper & words & possibly electrons.

A wizard, a warlock, and a sorcerer debating who is breaking the game this week

I can say digging into DCC conversations there are no balance debates about a new warlock subclass and whether it's free zap power should be 1d4+1 auto-hitting or 2d4 with a hit roll. There's very little complaining about monster damage or AC or hit points. Questions about encounter balance tend to be coming from people new to the game who are coming over from 5E and similar games, not from people already playing the game. The atmosphere and mechanics of the game help point out that not everything a party encounters is meant to be defeated in combat by using character powers. This leads to some interesting situations and some creative thinking, moreso than I typically see in more modern games. I've seen PCs run away, set up traps and ambushes, use the environment, and generally just engage with the game more, beyond doing some math and burning some metagame resources. 

Now I'm not going off into some one-true-wayism here. I'm just enjoying a refresher course in why these games work for many people. By all means, if a game tells you that balance is tremendously important and gives you an elaborate mathematical framework to ensure it, then it really should should work. If it doesn't then the company should be griped at for it - the later D&D 3E Monster Manuals were notorious for violating their own monster creation rules and there were people whose main claim to fame in the forums was going through and checking the math on every monster as the books came out. If that gives you some joy then hey, that's cool, but hopefully you're also using them in your campaign while you do this. I can read the monster entry myself - if it looks interesting I'll end up using it somewhere. If it looks boring I probably won't - the math doesn't really affect me one way or the other because I don't care that much about theoretical balance in a roleplaying game!

I don't get too caught up in edition debates for say, D&D, because I've run and played every edition and I've had fun in all of them! Balance and edition-warring is not really a thing that comes up at a table during a game in my experience. It mainly shows up in online forums. 

Even newer but say, less "rules-heavy" games tend to fall into that old-school side of things. If you don't have a detailed skill system then tasks tend to be resolved fairly quickly and you don't have endless debates about the utility of various skills.  

Classless games avoid some of this as well - a lot of the Traveller discussion I see is more about the setting, its technology, and interesting situations than it is about "builds" and balance. 

Maybe "were mad" ...

Savage Worlds does this too - discussion tends to be more settings, using tests and tricks in play, and "would you allow this" type questions than rules. I mean there are rules questions but they tend to be from new players trying to figure out initiative, arcane backgrounds, bennies, and shaken vs. wounds ... so many questions about "shaken" ... the single most misunderstood part of the game for the last 20+ years.

The last thing I'll point out here is that games (like a lot of OSR games) where there is a real threat of character death do tend to play differently as well. Aside from all of my other takes up there, Feeling like their pc is vulnerable makes a huge difference with the players I know. Low level D&D in most versions, most OSR games, DCC, GURPS, Traveller, and Savage Worlds all have some of that feel because even an experienced character in those latter games can die with a few bad rolls of the dice.

So hardcore they named a station after it!

Anyway that's enough ranting for today. Crossing the streams by sampling the online discussion around some different games sent me down a rabbit hole so I thought I would share. Tomorrow: 40K talk, where balance is never a topic of debate.

See it's a cloud giant because I'm shouting at ... oh never mind ...

The Perpetual Golden Age of RPGs

 

This post is driven by some YouTube stuff I saw recently but it's been  showing up anywhere people discuss RPGs - forums, social media, reddit ... everywhere. The "it" is the shocking discovery that there are a lot of other games out there besides D&D! Really? Incredible!

I know that new people come into the hobby all the time and that's a good thing. I know that D&D is the first encounter for a lot of people - which is cool, it was for me as well. I just don't understand how people could spend, say, months getting into D&D and looking into it online, and remain blissfully unaware that other RPG's exist. I mean you have to run into references to, discussions about, and ads for things like Pathfinder, right? Shadowdark? You'd at some point hear that there is a Marvel RPG, or a Star Wars RPG, or a Star Trek RPG, plus various other pop-culture relevant games too, right?

There is a similar thing with Warhammer players too when they first notice/discover/get into other miniatures games, especially other genres. "Hey did you know there are miniature rules for WW2 battleships?" Yes, yes I am quite aware and I've even played some.

I think the latest surge of this is probably due to the 5E changeover to 5.5E - an edition change is always a good place for people to jump off the bandwagon - as over the past year or two the game that so many people were attached to became less of a stable, settled thing. I suspect that 5E D&D was the only game that was big enough to support blogs, YT channels, Discord channels, 3rd party companies, and the like as far as running a single-focus channel. Even Pathfinder seems to have trouble supporting narrowly-focused media. As that monobloc is shaken up, cracked even, people start looking around and realize there are other options and the (re?) discovery process begins. 

One example: I actually played my first session of Dungeon Crawl Classics over the weekend. I've run it a fair few times over the years but I've never gotten to experience it as a player. You'll see people mention it when they find it as if it was a hot new OSR game. It's been out longer than 5E has! DCC came along in 2012 and has been continuously in print the entire time, supported by a stupidly huge line of adventures from the publisher and a pretty good pile of 3rd party support as well. It's cool when you see someone discover it but it's weird when they act like it's new. Sure, it's new to you, now, but it was there the whole time while you were caught up in 5th Edition.

One of the older covers - not the oldest, but it's up there

Another example where this happens a lot, at least on the internet roads I travel, is Savage Worlds. I feel like Savage Worlds might be the king of this. D&D players and groups are excited to find a game that works completely differently to D&D - although they do often struggle to grasp the mechanics - they can tell that it's a cool thing and want to give it a whirl. While it does get some coverage online there is not anywhere near the blather on this game that there is on D&D. I guess this makes people feel like it must be new - it's not! It's over 20 years old now! And it stings to say that! Because I remember when it was new and radical and we were all just figuring it out and we had the email lists and google groups to help us along! But no, SW has been around for over two decades and with a few rules tweaks along the way is still pretty much the same game now that it was then. 

You don't see much about this one anymore

I think maybe this being the first big edition changeover since the juggernaut of 5E D&D becoming a modern media centerpiece might be why so many people keep proclaiming it as "the golden age of RPGs". My beef there is with the "the". It's easily "a" golden age of RPGs but every decade has a great run of new or revitalized games that earn that title for that decade all over again. For example, what are the big games now besides D&D itself?

• For fantasy we have Pathfinder, Shadowdark, OSR games...
• In the 80's besides D&D we had Runequest, Tunnels and Trolls, Chivalry and Sorcery, Pendragon, Warhammer Fantasy RP, Fantasy Hero, GURPS Fantasy, and a bunch of small press games that were tweaked versions of D&D. 
• In the 90's we had most of those plus Earthdawn, a resurgent Palladium Fantasy RPG, and possibly Torg and the various White Wolf games depending on how you want to count those.
• For Science Fiction we have versions of Traveller, a Star Trek game, a Star Wars game, Cyberpunk Red, and the various Alien space-horror games.
• In the 80's we had various versions of Traveller, we had a Star Trek game, we had a Star Wars game, we had other takes like Other Suns, Star Frontiers, Space Opera, plus GURPS Space and Star Hero and, of course, original Cyberpunk
• In the 90's we had a new Star Trek game, a new version of Traveller, a new version of CP,  and increased multi-genre weirdness like Rifts, Shadowrun, and Torg
• We have superheroes both name-brand (Marvel, Justice League) and do it yourself with Mutants and Masterminds, various FATE and PBTA games like Masks, Icons, and others.
• In the 80's we had a Marvel game, a DC game, and do it yourself games like Villains & Vigilantes, Champions, and Heroes Unlimited
• In the 90's all of those were still going with new edition and we added GURPS Supers, Aberrant, and the awesomeness of Underground to the mix as well. 
• For more universal systems I'd say Savage Worlds is exhibit A today, plus maybe the Cypher System from Monte Cook, the AGE games, and maybe even BRP making a late comeback these days
• In the 80's it was Hero, with GURPS coming along late
• In the 90's it was definitely Hero, GURPs, and then maybe BRP even then as a third. The White Wolf games were kind of a multi-genre system as time went on but not really one for playing normal people. 

Man this makes me want to drag this game out again

So RPGs have always inspired people to make something new, whether it's "like D&D except for ..." or "nothing at all like D&D". Anime is way too popular now and has inspired multiple games but even in the 80s & 90s when popular anime was mostly "robots and spaceships" we had Mekton for generic giant robot type games and Robotech for your licensed robot/spaceship game, and then BESM for everything else by the late 90's. Post-Apocalyptic games feel less popular but we have a new edition of Twilight 2000 for the rougher edges of post-nuclear life, Mutant Crawl Classics to keep the spirit of Gamma World alive, and a newer version of Rifts via Savage Worlds to keep that particular flavor of 90's cross-genre game going into yet another new decade. The more things change ...

Before the cartoons ... before the movies ... this was already a thing...

So when I hear proclamations of a new golden age I just shrug my shoulders. Sure, there may be some innovative mechanical approach. There may be an awesome new setting. That's all good but those of us who have been at this for a while have seen a lot of it before and it's weird. I do want to see the expansion and innovation continue and I want to see the next new trend but we have had interesting choices and options with RPGs since the late 70's! It's not going to stop anytime soon but it didn't just start this decade!

The last 50 years have been a Golden Age for RPGs and the fun rolls on ...

Online Research for the M&M Campaign

 

So I've been poking around online looking for discussions, inspiration, useful items or documents for M&M this week and it is ... weirdly sparse in my opinion. The Facebook group has been slow for years, Reddit sees a post or two a day typically. RPG.net has some talk but not much in-depth about M&M specifically. The current version of the Atomic Think Tank is just strange - like Discord in some ways - mostly the negative ones. The old Think Tank was amazing for years - campaign ideas, rules discussions and debates, character write-ups ... the new one is just not in the same league. Echoes of the Multiverse is a non-official forum that is the closest thing remaining to the old ATT forums. 

Seeing a lot less than I was hoping for I went to the next level of resources. 

There is some limited activity on YouTube - these two channels have at least been recently active: Weeknight Hero and Power Level 10 but there is a lot of focus on explaining the mechanics more than anything which is cool but not exactly what I'm looking for. Still happy to see some activity though. 

There are a few blogs out there but not one focusing heavily on M&M and many of those not been touched in years. Many of the results are more news-type blogs - again not really what I'm looking for. Heck, this blog is coming up pretty regularly in the first page or two of results which is a little disappointing as I haven' really focused much on the game myself recently.   

Podcasts are not super common either. There were a bunch of actual-plays done in the first 5-10 years or so of 3E but it has really tapered off since then. Maybe it's not new enough anymore, I don't know. 

I also went over to Obsidian Portal to see what kinds of M&M campaigns were happening there and the answer is "not many" - there were 4 that were updated in the last month, 6 in the last year. There are a whole bunch listed, going back most of 20 years, but a high percentage of them never made it to ten sessions, fizzling out in the single digits. This has me wondering if "single digits" is where the majority of RPG campaigns end, not just superheroes and not just on OP, but games that people start in general. I may have a separate post on that coming up now but here, for this particular inquiry, I found some inspiration in some interesting campaign ideas but not much else. 

So what's going on here? Why is it so thin? Is there just not that much to talk about when a game has been out for 15+ years? Rules debates, maybe so, but how about campaigns? Surely people are out there running some games? Where is that chatter? I know it's not D&D but sheesh, it looks really light. Especially heading into a new edition this year!

Well, I'm spinning up the machine here, such as it is. I'll be posting about it a fair amount, both how the campaign goes and how the system and game line are working for us as well. I already know I like the game but it's been a while since we really put it to the test and I am looking forward to doing that. 

Also, if anyone has a good resource that I have missed, please feel free to share it!

Super Saturday - Bad Takes on Some Super Systems

 

First up: yes I did get the M&M 4E playtest and yes I'm working my through it. More to come next week on that.

That said in the lead-up to its release I re-read the 3E rules and then that spilled over to Champions as well and I spent a lot of time seeing where people stood on 4th vs. 5th vs. 6th edition for that game as I had really not paid attention to it up until now as an online discussion. Doing that led me to some other items of potential interest like the Spectaculars game. I was vaguely aware of it but had never really studied it and I don't own it yet.

Now Spectaculars looks interesting so I spent some time poking around for reviews and actual play reports of it and that led me to a now-defunct blog where the writer wrote up some articles about older superhero games leading up to a report on Spectaculars. Now I don't want to turn this into a dispute with an individual so I'm not linking to the blog here but I want to use it as an example of how some of these games are perceived by some people in a more general sense and how some internet groupthink seeps in and how time screws with perceptions as well.

The writer in question started with Marvel Super Heroes - nothing wrong with that, a lot of people did. He credits it with being easy to understand for young players - sure, totally agree. He then turns and says there wasn't much of a character generation system with it being a lot of random rolling and making a few limited choices ... and this is where I veer away hard from this take. 

Hmmm, random rolls and limited choices? Sounds a lot like D&D! The dominant RPG at the time! And now! Also Runequest, Traveller, and many other games of the time! We made a bunch of characters with it and played for several years. I wasn't going to but I have to insert a quote here:

"For me it did also set out the fundamental template for superhero RPGs – all fun in different ways, but all having different and significant flaws."

I could not disagree more. This mostly ignores the revolutionary take on task resolution with the color chart system among many other things and the more general fact that superhero RPGs are where you find a lot of the innovation and fresh thinking that happens in RPGs. They have to, because they have to encompass the widest range of possibilities, the widest scope for a game.

"Overall the Marvel RPG was simple and fun, but really lacked any depth and longevity."

I just ... how does one get to this point? It so lacked longevity that people have been maintaining websites for it  for almost three decades after it went out of print. It is regularly referenced as an important game and served as inspiration for everything from retroclones to Icons. I played in long loose campaigns with friends and I would run it tomorrow if someone asked. It's a bad take. 

I will note that the author does not appear to have gone back and picked up a copy, looked back through other peoples notes on it, or played or run it anytime recently - this was strictly memories of it from the 80's.

He moves on to DC Heroes, calling it "much more technically polished than the Marvel game" - was it? It was more complex but that's a take I haven't seen if we're talking 1st edition DCH. I think it was perceived as a more sophisticated game at the time as in "not aimed at kids as much as the Marvel game" so I'll agree if that's the real take.  He seems to like it better than Marvel but then we get to  points, gadgets, and this take:

"This would highlight a design pattern bug in most superhero systems involving points:  if your super widget can be lost/stolen/damaged then system designers seemed to think that they should always cost you less of your character points during generation otherwise a gadget hero would always be disadvantaged.  Then again if this discount is too high then gadget heroes seem to have an advantage over others."

Yes ... a power that can be taken away easily are less valuable than one that cannot. That seems incredibly obvious to me. Yes, it does depend on the kind of system and campaign one is running but it's a fairly common thing in comics. Characters with inherent powers get a points break for things like being vulnerable to green rocks or needing to be immersed in water every other day to retain their powers. That's the flip side of the gadget guys.

He then mentions Golden Heroes which I admittedly have very little experience with. He doesn't like the random rolling for powers much and mentions "power imbalance" within a group"  - isn't that exactly what points systems do extremely well? - and "it didn’t give you much scope for crafting a coherent group around a specific sub-genre of superhero themes" - a group theme? Like the JLA? What's their group theme? The X-Men? The Avengers? I think the theme there is who is popular right now or who do the writers like and want to include. Is "we're all mutants" enough of a theme to call a group coherent?

Finally (for the early years part of the review) we get to Champions 4th edition and he seems to have liked it then but he says he wouldn't go back to playing something like it now because character generation is too nitpicky, there are too many acronyms, and combat is slow (the one truly legit complaint in my eyes) but then he goes here:

"It does tend to encourage players with munchkin tendencies to spend ages optimising their characters for specific offensive or defensive abilities at the expense of playability.  Also it can make it really hard to balance a party of players unless you lay out specific parameters in advance to discourage anyone from being too highly skewed in any one particular direction."

Any superhero game can result in players going nuts without GM advice and intervention. The 4E Champions book has a section with multiple examples of ridiculously overpowered characters that could break a game with specific advice to not let people do that. And if party balance is a big concern any point-based game will do a better job of it than a random roll creation type game - that's what the points are for! Plus this was written in 2020 - are we still concerned with "munchkin" players in 2020? Who are you playing this with? 

Of the early games there's no mention of various editions of these or any mention of Villains & Vigilantes and it's player-based character stats plus random generation so I'm assuming he never played that one.

For later games he discusses Aberrant, M&M, and Savage Worlds via Necessary Evil:

• Aberrant seems to have been one of his more-liked options though he seems put off by player character potentially being really strong or really charismatic - I mean, this one is not my favorite but it is a superhero game so ...
• Mutants & Masterminds he describes as less crunchy than Champions but with less flavor and then describes the setting as very generic and bland. He used a picture of the 1st edition M&M cover so maybe that's what he played and I wouldn't completely disagree there but that was over 20 years ago and the game grew tremendously, as did the setting.
• Necessary Evil he praises for the concept, calls it very setting-specific, then mentions that he didn't actually play the campaign as-is because he wanted to build up to it and then ends with this:
  "We played 11 sessions in the end which actually makes it one of my longest RPG gaming runs..."
  
  Ah - that explains a lot, actually. About all of this. 

Some of these things are takes I've seen before:

• Marvel is simple and for kids
• DC is more complex, which is a benefit until it gets too complex apparently
• Champions (and point systems in general) are too hard, prone to abuse, and make it difficult to actually run a campaign
•  Aberrant is mostly liked for its concept and metaplot more than for it's mechanics or ability to emulate comic books
• M&M ... not sure what to say about this take. I see it get lumped in with Champions as "point systems bad" most of the time and I've never seen the setting described as bland but OK.
• NE - Most people who become aware of it fall in love with the concept instantly because 20 years on it's still damn near unique. People who have tried to play or run it tend to have more mixed opinions, for several reasons in my experience:
• Like this blogger, the GM tries to complicate things by creating an extensive prequel pre-campaign - just run it! It's great! You don't need to play out what the villains did before, the day the heroes died, how they got to the city - at most include a single session of buildup, maybe as part of a session zero, and then get into the campaign! 
• GM's also sometimes complicate it by moving it to a different city or setting (guilty here at least once). This creates a bunch of extra work, potentially, and how much does it really add to the campaign if it's happening in Freedom City, or Millenium City, or Paragon City really? Again, just go with the setting! The fun is in playing the game, not making everyone wait to get into the core of the thing.
• It's also a rough introduction to the Savage Worlds system. SW is different enough from most other RPGs - especially today when 5E is the big game - that it takes some adjustment for most players. I think the concept pulls a lot of people in - because it's awesome - and then you get damn near Maximum Savage Worlds with aliens, robots, and superpowers as part of that whole new system to learn. It makes that learning curve steep.

This mostly seems to be a case of looking for flaws rather than seeing the awesome with superhero RPGS. The idea than random roll character generation leads to an imbalanced party and make some feel less connected to their PC than if they had hand crafted it but then turning around and describing point-based character generation as prone to munchkin behavior and being too nitpicky ... well, what do you want? Those are two almost opposite approaches with a lot of positives on each side so if you can't get excited about either one I'm not sure what to tell you.

Fortunately now we have a third approach with the more narrative games like Marvel Heroic and Sentinels of the Multiverse (whatever the official state of the game may be the books are still out there), and ICONS and the various PBTA and FATE-based games. He seems to have completely missed MHR and SotM but he does mention the latter two. 

• FATE gets dismissed as requiring a lot of homework and having books built around specific settings. Alright that's a new take on FATE but OK. I'm pretty sure you just need FATE core or FATE light + a super book of your choice and you're good to go and if you're running FATE yo ucan really use any book as a setting - you don't really need a ton of specific mechanics. 
• PBTA he mostly describes Masks and while he likes the system he's not thrilled with the setting - yeah, I don't play supers games to focus in on teen drama either. Not my thing but it's not like they don't tell you that up front.

To wrap this up I feel like I see some of these opinions quite a bit when it comes to superhero roleplaying games and while some of them are just personal taste some of them are just opinions molded by years of internet-fueled standard takes on them: Champions is hard, Marvel was just a kids game, etc. I also think some people when looking back at things have their opinions bent by today's common knowledge as if it was yesteryear's common knowledge. We liked Marvel. We liked DCH. We loved Champions. We liked V&V. Sure, they're all different but they all have some really cool elements that stand out and they established a lot of the "standards" that are just kind of built-in today. Maybe no single ruleset was perfect but that's the beauty of RPG's - change it! Stick with a game and tweak it to fit your group!

I feel like a lot of RPG opinion these days is fueled by very thin experience levels. When I see criticism of a game  - new or old - I always want to know:

• Have you read it? All of it, not skimmed it?
• Have you made some characters for it?
• Have you run a test fight?
• Have you played it?
• Have you run it? 
• And for either of those - for how long?

This stuff matters. From forums to blogs to YouTube there are so many new games coming out that discussion tends to max out at "I read the book" and you have to dig to find people really getting into a game and not just theory-crafting stuff from a first impression. The Necessary Evil comment about 11 sessions being one of the writers longest RPG runs just has me shaking my head as yes that's enough to get a feel for things but how much did you play or run all of those other games? Yes, I ran an original Rifts campaign for over a year and I can tell you the system is a huge pain and if you are looking for balance it is absolutely not the game for you but it is completely playable. Not easy all the time but you can run it. Having run some sessions of Savage Worlds Rifts I can tell you it's a much better game for me and something I am far more likely to run now than OG Rifts. That's the benefit of experience.

I'm seeing it a lot now with M&M 4 and I expect it will continue. The playtest book just came out and people are already making declarations about the game because I suppose we live in a hot-take world now. I expect there will be a lot of  "playtest" feedback without a lot of actual playtesting but that's a risk you run with a public playtest. When we get to running it here I will post about it because I think it helps to get some actual play time experiences out there. That's one reason I talk about our Tales of the Valiant game here - approaching 40 sessions now we know a lot more about it than we did before.

That's more than enough for now - more to come on M&M4, Spectaculars, and Hero in the current day.

The "Barriers" to Old and Out of Print RPGs.

 

Thought I would put an AD&D PHB cover here didn't you?

This post was spurred by a couple of things:

1. A post asking why anyone would choose to play AD&D (1E) over another game
2. A post discussing the best ways to get players to try a new game where one of the responses was that a game needed to have merch, like T-shirts, because that helped get players interested.
3. Discussions on "when is an RPG dead?" and "what a successful RPG looks like"

So let's discuss ...

First up - Why would one choose to play an "old" game? Or at least an old edition of a game with newer editions? "Because I like them better" is all the answer anyone needs to give. RPG's are not technology. Newer is not automatically better - which is not even true of technology but that's how people tend to see it. RPGs are art, not science, and don't let anyone tell you different. Are there innovations in game design from time to time? Sure. Does that make a game that uses them "better" than one that does not? No.

Innovative but not a replacement for many

Let's talk about an example: Advantage/Disadvantage as described in 5E D&D. It's a solid mechanic. It simplifies a lot of what used to be separate modifiers, often found in charts, and lets the game play faster. It can be included in new games (and should be in some) and is pretty easy to retrofit to existing games, even non-d20 games like Traveller. But ... some people like granularity. Some people don't mind checking multiple modifiers for range, light levels, target movement, attacker movement, etc. That adds to the fun or immersion or realism for them, and abstracting it into advantage/disadvantage just feels less good. Sometimes this could vary by genre or specific game for the same person. Sometimes speed of play or simplicity is not the ultimate goal but that's where a lot of recent game design trends have been headed. "People don't have time to play games with complex rules" - maybe you don't. Maybe I do. Maybe I want to count every bullet in my Twilight 2000 game and not really worry about it in my Star Wars game.

Also nostalgia should not be discounted. I suspect that for many people the edition of D&D that you first played, or the one that "clicked" for you is what D&D is for you and that person would always be open to giving it another try. I started when AD&D was still coming out and we played it (and the various Basic, B/X, BECMI sets too) for a decade+ and so while clunky in places we know it is eminently playable and it feels like home to some degree. To someone else it may well look clunky, needlessly complex, and just old. That's fine. No one can make you play a game you don't want to play.

As someone who has taught multiple members of the Next Generation to play RPGs I can tell you they have been interested in some old games because they are good, not because of any nostalgia. Moldvay Basic, Runequest, and Warhammer FRP are all old at this point and all feel very different and the younger set liked all of them when they got the chance to play. RQ 1-2-3 in particular is not like any modern RPG and has a whole different feel to it. It's nostalgic for me to run these - it's  just cool and different to them to play them. Heck Blaster started out loving d20 Saga Edition Star Wars and then after playing just a few sessions became a d6 Star Wars Die Hard and refuses to play any other version - and this is a game that published its last supplement the year before he was born.

For the second part let's just combine those other two entries- "merch" and the current state of a game:

Right up front I will say I don't care about either of these things when it comes to RPG's.

Merch? Seriously? Does having a t-shirt for Game X make it a better game? A more interesting game? Does it make playing it more fun? I suspect this is the mark of some of the newer type of player we see that is more interested in tying themselves to a thing than in actually playing a game. I really don't understand this mindset when there are so many other hobbies out there one could join. It's the same with "does it have a YouTube following" or some other social media presence - who cares? Why does it matter? Does any of that make the game better?  How did we survive before these things existed? This kind of stuff is really satisfying something else as it has no bearing on actually running or playing the game.

It's the same for "is a game dead?" or "is the game still in print?" - why does it matter? A good local game store will have a used game section, there are online used game sellers like Noble Knight, even Amazon sells quite a few old games, and eBay is basically the world's attic or garage where you can find the most obscure stuff for pretty reasonable prices most of the time. That doesn't even get into PDF's which are widely available for the more known games, legally and not. So the question can't be a concern about availability.

Definitely on the TBD list

Is it about finding players? It's not on store shelves or it's not widely discussed on the socials so someone thinks finding players might be more difficult? I mean, it might be, but isn't everything outside of 5E a bit challenging now? maybe your players have never heard of Lords of Creation - if you want to run it then it's time to make a pitch*. You really only need 3 players for a fun time with most RPG's, maybe as few as two, so this is not an insurmountable obstacle. 

* You are talking about running it right? Otherwise you're going to have a hard time with any slightly obscure game. 

I'd be happy to run this tomorrow if someone asked

A fair chunk of the games I've run over the last 20 years were out of print, sometimes drastically so, at the time I ran them. The aforementioned d6 Star Wars, RQ2, WFRP 2E, Mechwarrior 3E, Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, B/X D&D, 4E  D&D ... the publication state of a game means very little in reality. If you have the core book for any RPG I can think of you could run a campaign for years with no outside support if you have interested players. Maybe you need to spark that interest at the beginning but that's often the GM's job, regardless of how current the game is. There's really no reason to not pull out that old game you've been thinking about running and make your pitch - take the grognards home and take the noobs somewhere interesting.

40K Friday: Grab Bag for May

 

Time to shout at some clouds ...

• It's been going on a long time and it's not exclusive to 40k sites or groups but when did people start feeling that posting a picture of a pile of boxes of stuff was worthwhile in some way? You see it when someone starts a new army, when a new set of units for an army is released, when someone gets their kickstarter shipment ... why? What possible value does it have? What does it contribute to a group? It's meaningless - "hey I bought some stuff ... and it arrived ... and ... I took a picture of it."? Yay. Congratulations. How about doing something with it and THEN posting about it?
  
  Build it and show us. Paint it and show us something. Play it and share a battle report or first impressions or a comparison to your other army or to another game.
  
  Acquisition is easy - it's a simple monetary transaction. The rest of it is what makes the difference. I say this as someone with several armies still in boxes, boardgames unopened on a shelf, and RPG's unread. You won't see them on the blog until I've built or painted or played or at least read the things.

• One thing that seems to be fading finally - the need to mix in what kind of alcohol one is consuming while painting or playing a game. This seems to be on the downswing now but for a few years there was some weird need to add some kind of extra ... credibility? ... to a post or a video for say a 40K battle report by talking about beer or wine or whiskey before (or during) the playing of the game. I don't know if this was some leftover trauma from the "nerds aren't cool" days or something but two guys playing 40K on YouTube is not a place I am going for craft beer recommendations. Just talk about the game - no one cares what, or if, you are drinking. Many of us have been able to drink or smoke or whatever for a very long time. It's not anything that's impressive or particularly interesting. Focus!

• The constant proclamations of doom or "Beyond Clickbait" takes in articles or on YouTube - things like "6 Reasons D&D is Doomed in 2025", "Is 40K dying?", "Games Workshop/WOTC/Hasbro about to go Bankrupt" etc. I know it's BS, you know it's BS, they know it's BS but they have to keep upping the hype to get attention. D&D has been the biggest RPG since the beginning, it's the biggest right now, and it will be the biggest a year from now and for a long time after that. Now that doesn't have to mean anything to you - I'm not sure why anyone not trying to sell RPG material would be too concerned about which game is more popular right now - but if you care there it is. Correspondingly 40K is the biggest miniature game, has been the biggest miniature, and will continue to be that until something wild happens. 
  
  Yes I am aware of the several quarters circa 2010 where ICV2 reported that Pathfinder was outselling D&D 4E. I was there when it was published amidst much crowing by certain parties but keep in mind that's a very limited sample of stores and included neither Amazon nor Paizo's direct sales. Hey, it may have been true, but there's the one time you can -maybe- point to a time when D&D wasn't number one. How has it been doing for the past decade?
  
  These days I see it even from sources I otherwise respect - bringing up things like Shadowdark having a million dollar kickstarter for the rules and then another one a year later for a setting and pronouncing that it is more popular than D&D. Sure. It's doing well and that's great. It's this year's retroclone flavor of the month. Remember OSE? Remember Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC and Shadow of the Demon Lord and Black Hack and 13th Age and a bunch of other tweaked D&D rulesets that everyone talked about for a year or two that have been pretty quiet for a while? It's one of those and it's not going to replace D&D even if the 2024 edition ends up less popular than 2014. 
  
  
  

  

  It has long been a dream of mine to find a reason to include a picture from "Wicked" on the blog and that day has finally arrived. The wife will be pleased.

  
  
• Regarding miniatures yes I saw the report a month or two back that said Battletech was the #2 game at a very small set of hobby stores. Cool. It was clearly a very distant #2. On Dakka I saw a discussion about Zeo Genesis, a new mecha skirmish game designed by Andy Chambers and Gav Thorpe (two former GW big names):
  
  "This seems to be the popular genre right now with BLKOUT, Gamma Wolves, this, and the name of the third one is escaping me at the moment...... "
  
  "Arsenal, from Blaster magazine issue 7, or maybe Steel Rift. It's a pretty saturated genre."
  
  Apparently it's a saturated genre with 4-5 games you've probably never seen or heard of and certainly never seen played.
  
  And don't get me started on "popular" here - will there be a dozen games of any of these played over the weekend world wide? The "popular genre right now" is 40K - just like it has been for the past 30+ years. Age of Sigmar, Old World, Flames of War, Bolt Action, and of course Battletech are also in the mix for "what's popular".  

Yeah that's Grand Moff Tarkin playing miniature battles. Your welcome.

• A final point for the day: The constant anxiety around the state of the various gaming hobbies is overblown and unnecessary. If GW went out of business tomorrow we would still play the games. If WOTC went under we would still play the games. If your FLGS disappears we will still play the games. Resist the lure of the clickbait and the anxiousness. Let the older cloud-yeller assure you that some of us were playing before "games at the store" was a thing, before the FLGS existed really. We survived the Satanic Panic. We played before GW was anything important. We played before WOTC and Hasbro made RPGs full-on corporate assets. We played before the internet existed. If all of it disappeared tomorrow we could still play.
  
  H.G. Wells published a set of miniature rules 100 years ago that you can still find today in book or online form. We have the books. We have the figures. We have the dice. Best of all, we can make more - ourselves, without needing sizable corporate entities to be a part of the process. 
  
  None of this is going anywhere. We're going to be OK.