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If there’s something you want to appear regularly in your RPGs and the answer/advice out there is “psychoanalyze your players so you can engineer them into making the thing happen” what you need, instead, are rules.

Even in the most strict, traditional, GM/player power divide, you are playing the game together and making the events in play, together. You actually need the players to help make things happen. The easiest way to coordinate that is to make that clear that it’s part of the game, and have some set of rules that make that happen regularly.

(Note I’m not saying complex, extensive, or deep rules. Just clear communications what about what you want to have happen and how to negotiate that in play. Many of the safety tools are a good example of this – “Never include this in play” look, an easy rule that makes things clear.)

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I put together a little zine with tools for improvising NPCs, running scenes, and some stuff with factions. It’s a short, 16 page PDF called Hella Folks and Drama Happens.

• If you’re already a paid Patreon supporter, you’ve got access on there.
• I tried to make it easy to print; if you have a printer/software to do “booklet” style printing, everything comes out on 5 sheets (1 cover, 4 pages) of US Letter, folded in half.
• If you absolutely would prefer a physical product, I will be looking into how best to sell and distribute these but it’ll probably be a few months before I get it together.
• If you’re a regular blog reader, there’s nothing “new” compared to stuff I’ve shared before, other than it being more cleaned up and less rambley.

If I can find some other topics to squeeze into a zine format, I might do more things.

I backed Defy the Gods a while back, but as is often the case, I didn’t bother reading the PDFS or any preview stuff until I got my hardcopy today. And I’m very hyped! This game is taking a lot of good ideas from other games and mixing them well.

First, while I’m only just a little ways into the book, the writing and layout is clicking for me in a perfect way. A pitfall I’ve found happen here and there with games is when they do too much handholding/explaining, and you end up making some aspects of play seem exceedingly more complex than they actually are. (I love Tenra Bansho Zero, but… those GM advice sections feel this way). In Defy the Gods, it’s enough, and not more, and it’s just right. We get a break down of the larger systems in play and then go into the specifics of how to apply it.

It’s labeled Queer Sword & Sorcery, and does a great job of setting up that it’s the combination of society and the gods that oppose your existence. The safety section clearly talks about setting up the dial of how your oppression works in play; whether it’s highly coded and made distant or blatant and clear about the nature of queerness and hate. Honestly the safety section is one of the best I’ve seen.

Second, this game has a perfect cycle of drama and pacing built in. It’s a fantastic Mesopotamia, with your heroes doing bronze age sword & sorcery stuff… but deeds which are too great draw the attention, jealousy and ire of the gods. As you play, if you roll too high, you build up Fire, and Fire brings the Gods upon you. As you fight and defy them, go long enough, you might become one was well, which is explicitly explained that it is your superhuman power eroding who you are as a person… (Speaking of Tenra Bansho Zero…).

Unlike most PBTA games, your character is built on Epithets, or player defined traits; aspects of yourself that define who you are. Gaining power replaces them. The people closest to you can grant you new ones, as well, for they know you better than most. Betraying these Epithets also wounds them; denying who you are has costs.

I’m barely into the book and very excited. Also! There’s a whole index for the artists in the back – thumbnails of the pieces they did, page reference, the artist’s names and links to their websites/socials. I had never seen something like this before, but it’s an incredible and great idea.

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God I’ve been running Errant 4 years now! Now, to be fair, we do end up taking significantly long breaks at time; usually November-December is off for holiday time and people have other things, but I’d say we’re probably playing 40+ weeks out of the year.

There’s been some really interesting shifts in the tone of play as we’ve gotten into middle level play, and it’s all based on the mechanics rather than me pushing play in any specific direction. We’re still doing the basic loop of “go to dungeon, clear dungeon, come back and blow money on partying”, but the part of “getting tied up in faction level bullshit between dungeons” becomes more and more a focus of play.

Untrusted, Unwanted

First context; Errants are untrusted and unwanted. These are the people you only hire if you have to, for problems you do not want to deal with. That’s the default lens of how society sees them. Yes, you can win people over eventually, yes, you can earn people’s respect… but… it’s an uphill battle. In the best situation you are seen like a rock star; a hero, famous, probably worth seeing, but not the sort of person you want to settle down as your neighbor.

Negotiation mechanics give you a limited amount of chances to make your points before people get tired of you, Errant, trying to waste their time. Institution building mechanics put the odds against you; your businesses, your magic academies, your alchemist business, your smith workshops are constantly beset with problems and delays to profit.

The easiest road is always adventure. Or risking death, if we’re going to be honest.

Renown & Reputation

Roll 1d10 to see if the party’s reputation precedes them; if it’s equal or under their level, the NPCs have heard of them.

As we hit the mid levels, this is pretty common, right now players are level 5 so it’s a 50% chance. For the average citizen, they want to hear the stories of adventure, see the party show off the thing they heard about, help promote their chosen cause, or sleep with them.

The people with power and influence see the Errants quite differently; dangerous. The more powerful deeds they’ve heard, the more they recognize the Errants as walking time bombs. So they want to see the party get sent off to do some quest or deal with their rivals or anything other than stay here, too long, and get ideas.

Our party has been seeing the gulf in treatment depending on how this roll goes. Sometimes they’re nobodies who seem sketchy and are basically ushered along and sometimes a powerful politician seems to know a little too much about them, their proclivities, and maybe sometimes, their misdeeds. NPCs are knowing about them, they’re knowing nothing about these NPCs.

And of course, some of it is quite reasonable why it’s happening. The governor wants to know who the heroes were that stopped the wyvern attack. The noble who collects weird arcane stuff wants to know where this delightful eldritch statue came from, maybe they could find some more? The crime boss wants to know who killed all the highwaymen he stationed along the best trade route. The Guardian of the Palace has definitely done multiple divinations about groups who have done great deeds and arrived to the capital just after the majority of the army has left for war.

It leads players to being entangled in faction drama even if they didn’t go looking for it. As they get a name for themselves, the trouble looks for them.

Leverage

So as I mentioned at the start, Errants are untrusted. So to get favors or resources, you start by taking dangerous, terrible jobs. Over time, you might win some people over. But, as you level up and go further, you get more money, and do greater deeds. And win over more people.

After some point, the problems that plague most villages are minor threats to you. And that means it’s super easy to help them and earn some good will that might overcome that bias against Errants. Or, if you’re less of a hero than that, it also becomes easier to threaten to get what you want. Basically, of normal resources in a village, the party can usually get what they want, one way or another.

Even then, the larger cities will not get won over or pushed around this same way. Yes your band of adventurers killed a wyvern, so what? The town has ballista and well trained soldiers who can do the same thing. It may take 10 times as many people, but they can do it. Oh, you want to threaten people here? You’re not the first person to summon a flaming skeleton in the Duke’s Hall. Larger cities have more people, more resources, and most importantly; more history and a past to have developed countermeasures to many of the Errant’s tricks.

The other issue, which goes back to our first year of play; if you act out or destabilize the large cities; you lose access to what that city offers. Errant has tiers for towns; small towns only have limited resources – the best smith went to the capital, the best healer went to study under the Alchemist’s Guild. All of those people are in the bigger towns. The Errants will accumulate a bunch of “projects” that they’ll want to hire help with. Someone to decipher an ancient book, someone to melt and smith this chunk of mithril into a choice weapon, someone who can train the weird bat stone monsters you’ve captured.

It’s where Errants find themselves having to endure bullshit if they want to maybe have nice things.

In comparison

I think all of this is pretty interesting especially when I compare it to D&D. D&D leaves it up to the group or the GM about what the focus of play is going to be, or how involved the party gets with factions and society. Errant starts you at a very specific social standing (bad) and never lets the foot fully off your neck.

The system structure starts forcing you into larger and larger faction and scale problems even if you’re not directly pursuing those things. Reputation becomes a double edged sword, more power means being asked to deal with bigger problems or being considered a bigger problem yourself.

It’s just been very interesting watching how this has been shifting over our campaign and sort of building up without any extra push on my part or the players.

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So Quinn of Shut Up Sit Down has been doing RPG game reviews for a few years now. I’m really enjoying this video he recently released on Mothership:

Well, specifically I really enjoy the section towards the end about “complaints”, not to down Mothership or anything, but because they highlight a key point of a review in explaining the experience people can expect with an RPG overall; in this case, he highlights players feeling a bit detached or not fully locked in on their characters, issues around the supplements being very different settings, and so on.

This is a key part I really like to hear about from play experiences because it lets me know what kind of work I’d have to expect as a GM, or what kind of things this game doesn’t do. It sets expectations. The gaps are where I really know what it is before buying or running a game. You can always read pitch copy on a website or description on the store website, but the gaps are things people generally don’t advertise, hell, if they even recognize them for their own game.

Anyway, I’m just pointing this out as an example of great reviewing and an example of specific criticism that works great, and that it’s helpful for more games to have this kind of coverage.

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Saw a few different conversations with people complaining about how hard it was to get their groups to try out new games. I’m not going to talk about “tips to help make that easier” because what I want to talk about is emotional honesty and choices of how you spend your time.

First, a flashback: “It’s not hard to get people to do what they already want to do.”

It’s a good post to read in full. It’s not long.

Now, the emotional reality for a lot of these discussions is simple; one person wants to try different games, the majority or entirety of the other group is not interested.

If you’re that one person, you need to make some choices with your time. The most fulfilling thing is to find a group or two who DO want to try a bunch of different games. The second thing, is, you don’t have to keep playing/running for the group who doesn’t. You can hang out, you can stay friends online, you can play videogames, you can watch movies, but maybe dedicating 2-6 hours a week to a game you’re not really feeling that much isn’t a good use of your time, and, will build up long term bad feelings.

You don’t have to stay trapped in a gaming situation you don’t enjoy.

To make a weird but accurate analogy; RPGs need to have enthusiastic consent like sex. If you’re going to spend hours of time at this, maybe get emotionally vulnerable, maybe not, but definitely a long term commitment? God everyone involved better be interested in doing this.

The other half of that is if everyone else isn’t enthusiastic about it either? You should also expect that game to fall apart.

It is not hard to get people to do things they already want to do. Conversely, it is impossible to get people to do things they do not want to do (for fun).

It’s ok for friends to not all like the same (games, movies, music, food, whatever). We’re not hiveminds. If you can come to that basic understanding, then you can make choices about how you want to spend your time. Sometimes you spend time with friends doing something unfun (“move furniture”) but you generally attempt to spend more time doing fun things together. If the activity isn’t fun for you, and hasn’t become that way after a session or three, it’s not going to change.

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I’ve been following Dragon Reactor since the demo release last year and very excited for it. The hardcopy finally arrived and I’m going through looking more at the details. There’s a lot of great things in this game, but one piece of design more games could/should consider is how it uses the Rivals:

You get these great short hand prompts that define a lot of the characters motivations and way of dealing with things, without being too locked in and specific. The short pick list makes it easy to do this in moments, if need be, but gives you just enough variation it won’t always feel the same if you use the same template.

You can see how it’s a much more refined design along the lines of what I was reaching for from the Character Concept Generator years ago. It probably also helps that when you’re generating NPCs, people are less concerned if the choice range is narrowed more, if they fall a bit more into archtypical roles than being specifically unique.

(I do think that even if you gave 3 different people the same choices in a Rival like this, you’d still get different characters, in part from them being different people but also the context of the setting for each game would be different as well.)

Anyway, I’ll be excited to run this at some point, but given how slow it’s been this year to get my normal group’s schedule back into play (and health issues, and life emergencies, etc.) it might not happen until next year.

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A friend linked me this post from David J Prokopetz, which I think halfway gets things correct, but is missing some key historical context. It is true that there’s a subset of play culture that believes there is no actual connection between rules as written and play as experienced. It’s much older than Hasbro though.

Back in my day…

It was kind of the dominant play culture in the 80s and 90s. With one major caveat; it wasn’t “the rules don’t link to how we want to play” the advice in many of the games was railroading, either a straight line plot or branching path, but the idea was that the GM was to use Fiat and ignore rules and force things into a specific path, all the while constantly telling the players “they can do anything they want”.

If you want to know why early 00’s rpg theory writing was very concerned with GM Fiat and System Matters it was this.

To give an analogy; remember when a few people started buying thousands of dollars of toilet paper at the start of the pandemic? Even to the detriment of OTHER things they needed? Imagine that was most people, imagine that went on for decades, and you’re trying to tell people there’s a different way to do things. You would probably sound a little off kilter after a point, because you’ve been arguing with weirdos so long. (If you read old RPG sections on GM advice, you can often find the advice to lie to the players, punish their characters, etc. so… yeah… that was normalized).

This is literally where these two posts I wrote in 2009 came from:
Roots of the Big Problems
A Way Out

Sales strategy: Brand as identity, not as design

Anyway, in those, one of the things I pointed out, which applies just as much to current 5E/Hasbro culture, was that some companies realized you don’t have to focus on design when you can simply make the brand an identity issue. Much like how “brand as identity” works in other fields of commerce, it’s about subverting your consumers to not think about something but make it a reflex action about what they side with and gravitate to. “brand name loyalty”.

You can shovel anything out; they’ll buy it, it has the right brand name on it. If it’s not built well, they’ll say “you’re too soft/spoiled for this”, or “you’re a bad roleplayer”, etc.

The pitfall in this strategy is that you have to keep your base from seeing the contradiction in “the system doesn’t matter BUT I should buy the new thing”. If they lean too hard into thinking the system doesn’t matter, why should they buy anything you’re selling? If they lean too hard into “the product is providing useful things” they might measure against that to see if that’s true and find it comes up short.

Anyway, while I’m sure a lot of folks looking around after WOTC burned the streamers are trying out new games, I don’t think it’s an incredibly common experience to constantly run into people who are actually reading and playing rules bumping into people who don’t understand rules exist, outside of maybe conventions. Maybe a bunch of people are still trying to form random groups online?

That said, I feel like there’s not much value in trying to convince people directly, rather than just keep playing your games and showing how they work and maybe folks might take an interest and see “oh wait, rules CAN do very good things, it just has to be the right ones”.

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I always appreciate when I get quoted/linked for something other than the Same Page Tool. In this case, D&D Youtuber Ginny Di covering the topic of romance quoted something I wrote way back when on rpg.net:

It’s also interesting how, after so many years, we’re finally at a point where a lot more games are doing stuff with mechanics and romance, and that there’s a subset of people who are still at the same argument of “you can’t mechanize love” which always reads as a funny misunderstanding of RPGs… you can’t mechanize fear, either, yet people understand games with fear saving throws or a “panic points” or whatever exist not to make the player feel fear, but to be a prompt and constraint on play to produce the larger experience of the game that the group desires. (I wrote about this thing just a few years ago too)

You, the player, don’t feel fear from failing a fear save, but the fact your character is now out of your control or limited in their actions, adds a tension. Your character failing to act to help an ally at a critical moment, adds a tension. Not all horror games are about the player feeling fear, which is different than the character feeling fear, but the tensions matter to the play experience. (The player need not always be projecting themselves into the character emotionally, it’s just one option of play one can take or leave depending on the player’s preference and the game and situation in the moment).

When you put a reward on romance it’s not because “romance has no inherent value” it’s a reminder to the play group about where to put spotlight and focus in play. There’s some fun mini-games like Beach Episode which are just about that kind of character spotlight focus and nothing else.

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This covers a lot wider than what I’m familiar with but seems like a decent primer for anyone trying to dig up history on the outgrowth of indie RPGs post-Forge/Story Games https://aavoigt.com/f/the-golden-age-of-indie-rpgs.

I had picked up GILA games Dragon Slayers a while back and just hadn’t gotten around to reading it. Which is a shame because I think this game actually does a lot of really clever things in a very understated way.

Gameplay-wise, I think Dragon Slayers hits a lot of buttons for what many modern D&D players want who aren’t already served by a more complex gridfight game like Pathfinder:

• Bespoke mechanics for your character
• Light tactical play, but fast and less complex tracking
• Go on adventure, fight monsters, return.
• Easy set piece battle design, easy monster tracking for GM

You’ve got a number of character classes, each designed to interact with their own custom rules, but each set of custom rules is not terribly complex. One of the cool things is that every character class has some Support Actions – things they can do in a fight to aid another character, and every class has a Camp Action which is a benefit they grant during the rest.

This is one of the things that helps ease a long standing problem with D&D-ish games, of party balance. By making all these things built-in from the start, you don’t have the problems where “people made bad choices in their build” that can make early play less fun.

Taking a page from PbtA style design, each class is basically 80% complete; you pick a couple of skills and such and have a few advances you can take to customize and improve the character. This also means it’s very easy to pick up and play for this game, which makes it much easier as an entry level game for players. (I think the GMing isn’t complex, just that this is clearly a game that assumes the GM will have some minimal experience elsewhere first).

Combat uses the idea of zones, making it easy to scribble out an abstracted map on the spot if need be. Characters can Move & take two actions, just that they generally can’t repeat the same type of action twice, which means there’s more incentive to do Attack/Support Move and set up team actions between each other, or do small stunts and such.

Zones also work pretty well for the setting up effects from monsters. DS’s take on the red dragon has a brutal but exciting mechanic; whatever zone the dragon enters is destroyed; presumably the combination of fire blasting everywhere, flailing tail and smashing claw. The players need to move to another area or they will eat heavy damage by the end of the turn. It’s cool, simple mechanics like this that pretty much guarantee fun set piece battle action in play.

Now, the game does note that it doesn’t have a deep advancement path, which I think is something a lot of modern D&D people want, because they usually also want months or years of play as an ideal. For that reason, I think the game as it stands fills a better place as a short term play game or an intro for many people to action roleplaying. Hopefully supplemental material or fanhack stuff will be made in the future, or, if you’re that deep into it, you can probably build it out yourself, though I think the class stuff is probably the harder part to create as far as the way the game works.

I’ve just moved it up on my “play soon list” because I’ll be seeing friends in town and a pick up game might be exactly what we’re looking for.

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