Skip to main content

#RPGaDay2018 - Day 2: What do you look for in an RPG?

I think the single most important thing I look for in an RPG is 'will the people at my table (including me) enjoy the experience of using this system?' A lot of times in the past, I've defaulted to one system or another, one game or another, because it was simple and ubiquitous and easy for me, as opposed to easy or interesting for everyone including me. So I ended up running a lot of D&D games in situations where I wasn't actually particularly interested in D&D or even in something in the D&D milieu, but because it was a familiar and easy touchstone, that's what I reached for.

These days, I'm much more about finding a good balance for my table. I'm partial to Fate Accelerated Edition, but my players prefer something a bit crunchier, so we compromise and use Savage Worlds for our RIFTS game. I would love it if I could talk my group into something a little bit more out there, like Monsterhearts or even Dogs in the Vineyard, but given the audience that's probably going to be a stretch.

I mean, I look for a lot of things eventually: is it fun? Is the playstyle compatible with me and my table? Does the game avoid problems with flat dice curves and narrative falloff due to failure (or success)? Can I hack it to tell the kind of story I want to tell? Does it make me think about corner cases, or does it feel like I can gloss over stuff in play easily enough?

But mostly, it's "will this be fun". And if not, then I'm probably not going to put much skull-sweat into it.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Organizing And You: Lessons from Labor History

    I made a joke on Twitter a while ago: Do I need to post the Thomas M Comeau Organizing Principles again? https://t.co/QQIrJ9Sd3i — Jerome Comeau says Defund The Police (@Heronymus) July 15, 2021 and it recently came back up because a member of my family got their first union job and was like "every job should be offering these sorts of benefits" and so I went ahead and wrote down what I remember of what my dad told me. My father had many jobs, but his profession was basically a labor union organizer, and he talked a lot about the bedrock foundation items needed to be serious about organizing collective action. Here's what I remember.    The Thomas M. Comeau Principles of Organizing -- a fundamental list for finding and building worker solidarity from 50 years of Union Involvement. This list is not ranked; all of the principles stated herein are coequal in their importance. Numbering is a rhetorical choice, not a valuation. 1) Be good at your job. Even in an at-will
Post a Comment
Read more

Activision, Blizzard, Game development, IT, and my personal role in all of that.

 I'm pretty sure if you spend any sort of time at all on Twitter and/or spend any sort of time playing videogames, you are by now at least aware of the lawsuit brought forth by the State of California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing versus Activision Blizzard, Inc., et al. From this point on, I'll add a Content Warning for folks who are sensitive about sexual assault, suicide, and discrimination based on sex, gender, and skin color, as well as crude humor around and about sexual assault , and what the State of California refers to as "a pervasive 'frat boy' culture" around Act/Bliz, especially in the World of Warcraft-associated departments.   Just reading the complaint is hard rowing, even with the clinical legalese in place. The complaint itself is relatively short; 29 pages laying out ten Causes of Action (basically, "these are the legs on which our lawsuit stands"). I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to properly express how a
Post a Comment
Read more

Money and Happiness as a fungible resource

Money really does buy happiness. Anyone who tells you differently has a vested interest in keeping you poor, unhappy, or both. I know this because I grew up on the ragged edge of poor, and then backed my way into a career in IT, which is where the modern world keeps all the money that isn't in Finance. So I am one of the extreme minority of Generation X that actually had an adulthood that was markedly more financially stable than my parents. And let me tell you: money really does buy happiness. To be clear: at 45 years old, I'm now in a relationship and a period of my life where our household is effectively double-income, no kids. I live in the city, but I own a house, and can only afford to do that because of our combined income. We also have two cars -- one new, one used (though neither of them is getting driven very much these days) -- and we have a small discretionary budget every month for things like videogames, books, and the like. What my brother used to call DAM -- Dic
Post a Comment
Read more