The modern tabletop role playing scene is a very weird scene indeed. If you only have a passing knowledge of the current role playing world we live in then you have probably heard that D&D still exists, and it’s latest iteration is actually doing quite well and bringing a lot of people back to the hobby. And while that is certainly true, there are so many other things going on in this scene that it is actually intimidating to think about writing an article about it all. Even to me, a guy who commonly writes articles in the range of five to ten thousand words.

There are those who want the hobby to return to what it was in the 70’s and 80’s, they are often referred to as the old school revolution, which is an awesome movement name for anyone I think. They seem to want more heavy simulation in the rules of their rpg systems. Which is not to my taste personally, but I support them fully. There is no wrong way to have fun, assuming no one is being hurt.

Then there are of course people who want exactly the opposite of heavy simulation in their rpg’s. Systems that cater toward this newer group of players appear to be adopting the title of Story Games, which as a name, sounds super appealing to me, but I do worry that they will eventually segregate themselves right out of the hobby and essentially become a whole new hobby.

That worries me because tabletop roleplaying games as a hobby have always been somewhat niche and I don’t think anyone wants to be in a niche of a niche of a niche. Pretty much any role playing system or product that doesn’t have official D&D branding on it already suffers from this problem. I think most products in this category think they will break out of the D&D Venn diagram and become a hit with mainstream game audiences but my fear is actually that they will turn off their main market of wargaming audiences, who are the real big spenders of the gaming world.

What makes this problem even worse for anything that doesn’t have D&D branding is that one could more easily justify writing ten thousand words about D&D fifth edition itself than just about every other system or style of play combined at this point, if one was just looking at the potential popularity of ones material. Luckily that is not something I care about. What I care about is that more people pull back the curtain that D&D draws over the rest of our hobby and get a chance to see all the wonderful things that can be found here.

To that end I offer two things. Firstly a look at a role playing game that I have been cobbling together for the last few years. It has primarily been for home use, but lately I’ve been thinking of releasing it. And then later on, (probably in a month or so), an article expounding even more on the many other role playing games that came to inform different parts of my homebrew games and how those have grown over time into their own system.

Firstly - The Why

I think before I get into the nitty and gritty of the role playing system that I am currently playing around with, I need to explain why it is that a person would ever think to create their own role playing system in the first place. I mean there are obvious reasons of course, like if you are a game designer and it is job to create role playing systems. But that is not my job. Well, I certainly don’t get paid for it yet anyway. But besides doing it for work, or with some plan to sell the game that you design, why the hell would you bother? There are tons of tabletop role playing systems out there. They come in every shape and size, every theme, with every style of play in mind. So why make your own?

Want to keep reading this post? Click here: A System to Call My Own - Feb 23, 2018

I made this before I had even played one game of D&D.
Which is kind of sad and kind of cool at the same time.
Which nerd stuff usually is when you're a kid I guess.

Discovering Magic Amongst the Ruins

I love pen and paper role playing games. Always have. And like many rpg players, my very first role playing game book had the words Dungeons & Dragons in strong, bold letters on the cover. I say book but the copy of D&D basic that I had was more like a large pamphlet to be honest. But there were fighters and sneaks and magicians confronting some of the weirdest monsters to ever spring forth from human imagination and in the tradition of many kids before me, I loved every second of it.

I devoured every D&D book that I could find. I still have every role playing game book that I’ve ever managed to acquire, including D&D basic, AD&D and various original adventure modules by Gygax himself. Looking back at it now I was pretty lucky to get any RPG books at all back then. They weren’t popular, which meant they simply weren’t available in any brick and mortar stores in my area. Worse still the term ‘brick and mortar store’ wasn’t really in the vernacular since the internet barely even existed. So how do you buy something that isn’t available for retail? Op shops. Many, many op shops.

I have some deeply mixed feelings whenever I see the Vinnies logo.

Op shops, AKA opportunity shops, are basically junk shops wherein all presented stock has been donated or otherwise acquired by the store owner for practically nothing. Primarily these types of stores exist for clothing people who are dirt poor, which is why our family frequented them constantly and to the exclusion of all other stores (besides the cheapest local grocery store). Most people, when writing about their own impoverished childhoods, say that they didn’t really know they were poor at the time. They say ‘we were just kids and we loved our families and didn’t realise that other people lived differently’. I understand why that’s such a common statement. Back then I was pretty happy and focused on whatever toy I was playing with at the time. But I if I’m being honest; I always knew we were poor as shit.

I guess though, as a kid, you just don’t care that you’re poor. Sure you see cool toys and other dumb shit on TV and you ask your parents to buy it for you. But you want your parents to buy you fifty new things a day. You don’t actually expect them to buy every single one. In fact as a poor kid you probably wouldn’t even ask them, since you know they get barely enough money to put food in your mouth, but you just haven’t developed that sense of self hatred that kicks in when you are an adult that tells you not to get excited at every colourful thing that you see. I think part of the job of being a poor, single parent is trying to pick out the cheapest things that your kid seems excited about so that you can provide them the same feelings as other kids, just not the same material possessions.

Once for xmass when I was around ten years old my dad got me a basket of the above presents.
The kicker was that the bottle of coke didn’t even contain coke, it was water, tea leaves and pen ink.
This is not a joke. And I wasn’t even mad. It was hilarious.
I put about as much effort into this photoshop job as he put into that present.

I wish I could say that I remember the exact moment that I found each original D&D book that I own buried deep in some pile of National Geographic magazines and huge sun-bleached cook books from the 50s and 60s at our local Saint Vincent De Paul store. I wish that I remembered the exact cute-little-kid phrasing that I used to persuade my mother to actually buy the things for me. But unfortunately another thing that comes with having a poor childhood is that you go through a phase, somewhere around the age of 20 for me, where you decide that your life will no longer be what it once was and you actively try to focus on the future and forget the past.

Even more though I wish I could remember the first time I cracked the books open with my little kiddie friends and played our first adventure, eventually losing the game to Gygaxian monsters and puzzles. But in that case the problem isn’t repression or the gradual fading of memories. In that case I simply never did. That’s not to say that even though I own all these books I’ve never played them. I’ve played every D&D system that has been made, besides the latest one which I’m sure I will get around to trying out at some point. (This is barring 4th edition, which I did test out a little but seemed horrible in its own right in addition to coming out just as I made the realisation that I would never play D&D again if I could help it. I still might play it for real one day just so I don’t have to make this addendum in the future.)

My first real experiences with D&D came about when I was about ten years old. I had managed to scrape together enough of these magical tomes from random finds in bargain basements that I actually had enough information to run a game. No one I knew had ever played D&D, which seemed like a problem, but I was still reading the books over and over and over again. So much so that, even at that age, I would have made a pretty decent Dungeon Master. As most people know, even those who’ve never tasted the crack-flavoured-magic-candy that is a pen and paper role playing game, the Dungeon Master is the person in charge of a D&D game. The Dungeon Master controls the monsters, the story (assuming there is one) and basically everything else one might find in a Tolkien novel besides the main characters. It’s everyone else at the table who gets control of the main characters. And here is where most people find the first major problem with role playing systems like Dungeons and Dragons.

You'd be surprised how useful a large sack can be.

Want to keep reading this post? Click here: On Dungeons and Dragons - Mar 25, 2016