Soooort of agree. Let people have their own fun how they like it. At the same time...
RPG systems are tools. If someone just wants to use D&D-hammer on dungeon-nails, more power to them. If they want to use said hammer to do the courtly intrigue-dishes, I feel it's good to at least warn them.
Having a stable TTRPG group (or two!) is its own magic. I had an old Delta Green PC show up in the current Fate of Cthulhu game as a potential foil or ally. The players cheered when he confirmed it was him by asking if they had seen the yellow sign.
Spoke too soon. Instead of a time skip, one of the players had volunteered to run a spinoff adventure with the new party working for the old one.
This has happened once before with the same group. They get invested :D
New TTRPG books!
When will I play them? Who knows. But they sure are shiny.
Today's RPG discourse is on the topic I wrote about, the non-existance of D&D!
Old post, too, from when 5e was just announced. Which makes sense as 4e is the catalyst of the current discussion.
Which is as good a reason as any to finish a campaign.
Maybe that's because we didn't solve the main issue facing the party - and we weren't going to, it's larger than them. Or because some of the characters felt they were better off away from the others, too much foul sorcery and demonic pacts in their noble family.
Or I'm too far in my own head.
Feeling strangely empty. It was a good place to end it, we resolved all the plot threads we were going to resolve. Everyone described what their characters would be doing next. A proper ending! A rarity in ttrpgs.
Still.
We've actually wrapped our Swords of the Serpentine campaign that's been running for a year and a half of mostly weekly games. Maybe? Probably. Left the window open for a time skip capstone adventure, but nothing comes to mind that would qualify.
Which is strange, honestly, because I thought BitD's setting was very cool and very underused. There's no sun! The world's drowning in ghosts! Fortified trains connect electrofenced cities! Everything runs on leviathan blood!
...
We do petty crimes.
They're doing a "swinging 60's" Blades? That's nice.
Wait, it's set in the same Doskvol, 100 years in the future? I *need* it.
Full Kingdom Hearts naming. 7th game, not counting the non-canon spinoffs.
I definitely wouldn't use D&D rules for such a game. Huge mechanical load for very little benefit - if you're not fighting demon princes every other session, why do you care how many delayed blast fireballs you can cast while in time stop.
Which is interesting (to me at least) because if you were to describe what OSR or storygames are and how they work, whether the majority of conversation happens before or after die rolls would not be a part of it. And yet.
Are there major exceptions I'm not thinking of? Probably.
In "storygames" (w/e the modern nomenclature is), interpretation typically happens after mechanics. They often want you to roll some dice first, then figure out what actually happens: what consequences a move has in PbtA or FitD, whether you need to look for ways to invoke aspects in Fate, etc.
In OSR games, the goal is to come up with an interpretation that doesn't involve mechanics at all, because their mechanics tend to emphasize how dangerous PCs' lives are. We accept that once dice are involved, their pronouncements are final. Failed to spot a trap? 2d6 damage. Ran out of hp? Death.
(Modern) D&D tries to be "objective", with no need for interpretation at all. Want to do a thing? Roll the thing skill with thing stat bonus and thing feat bonus. At most the GM gets to give you a circumstancial modifier/(dis)advantage. Of course, everyone plays their own D&D don't @ me.
A somewhat different, perhaps even novel, lens for looking at TTRPG rules systems I keep trying to formulate: the role interpretation plays in the game. As in, GM and/or player judgement of how and which mechanics to apply. Let's look at a few common types of games.
How it started vs how it ended
The #EternalRuins #RPG is live on #Kickstarter now! I co-wrote this one with Rob Leigh, a new Wild Words game to showcase the ancient megastructure created by worldbuilder Sam Carr, and it was *particularly* lovely to work on.
#TTRPG #Crowdfunding #WildWords
www.kickstarter.com/projects/myt...
Even if you're not doing balanced encounters, knowing how tough a monster is helps position it in the world, signal its capabilities to the players, etc.
CR worked quite well in *drumroll* 4e. Also 13th Age and probably other 4e descendants.
4e focused on an aspect of greater D&D experience, tactical combat & robust character building, and was great at it. That lined up with how I played 3e before, so it was an improvement for me. But those who played it differently felt left behind. I don't think it could get the OSR crowd, OGL or not.
Describing it as an "open world Talisman" was all too accurate.
Played Runebound (2e) for the first time in at least a decade, due to a sudden craving and a request for a simpler game. And, uh, I recall actually accomplishing something in this game in a reasonable amount of time previously. This time we gave up after 6 hours. Back onto the shelf it goes.
A day well spent: moving everything from the boxes on the right into the box on the left. Cat for scale.
Yet when I pointed this out, the entire party went "but that's not the end of the campaign, riiiight?"
Yes, no, I guess? I don't think every plot thread has to be, or even should be, resolved in a game. Especially if you want its world to be bigger than the game.
We've kicked off the "boss fight" at the end of our Swords of the Serpentine campaign. One PC is performing soul surgery excising a demon from another, while the rest hold off the oncoming demonic hordes. In a cursed bog. With the help of their collective cousin, the Bog Witch. Noble families, man.
They just want to talk
To this day, one of my favourite gaming memories is the first time I did this: in a Dark Heresy campaign, after the party confronted a demon, I gave the players brief write ups of inquisitors assembled for a panel to determine if they've been corrupted. One of the PCs was turned into a servitor!
Not a unique idea, certainly - see e.g. Ars Magica's troupe play. Still, it is a versatile technique. You can even lend out antagonists, just to see what they'd get up to. Or do a scene with just the villains plotting: "meanwhile, in the evil castle...."
