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

The Experience of Diversity (and the blindness of privilege)

Last year I made a vow to myself that I would only read books written by authors who were not straight white men. By and large, with two explicit exceptions, I was successful in my goal. And I learned a bunch of things. The first (and most important) thing I learned is that my reading habits were already moderately diverse; I made a list of ten of my favourite authors and nine of them were women, so I didn't really have to give up on anyone that I was particularly invested in. The second thing I learned was that my "historical read" list is actually pretty white/straight/male, though; I often go back and read a book again for comfort's sake, to go over familiar territory and comfortable writing and try and find something new or at least interesting. That means I haven't been doing a bunch of rereading and that led to... The third thing I learned, which is there are a LOT of non-cishetwhitemale writers in SF, both historically and especially currently. Just l...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

#RPGaDay 2017 -- Day 26

Which RPG provides the most useful resources? I'm not sure there are any better general-case resources that are RPG-specific (as opposed to history books or the like) than GURPS books. GURPS has an entire line of books that are nothing but general-case resources for various backgrounds, settings, histories, and the like. There are some books that are specific to GURPS particularly, but even when ignoring those portions, I'm not sure there are any books that are better written or better sourced than the GURPS back catalog. I mean seriously: look at this .
Post a Comment
Read more