RPG Addict: A Seedy History

Before I go shooting my mouth off about what I think of different RPGs, I feel as though I need to explain where I'm coming from and why I think what I'll say about games has some base of knowledge behind it. I grew up with them and became addicted to them when I had my own source of income to throw at the publishers to give me their games.

When I was younger my older brother first tried to run some games of AD&D with me. Looking back on it I'm 99% sure he had just created an impossible dungeon that he wanted to torment me with my first making me love my character and then making me kill him by sending him through a meat grinder. That's just kind of what older brother's do though. As a younger brother it was my job not to get what he was trying to do and do my own thing that made his hard work fall apart due to my complete lack of understanding of the games basic ideas. I don't remember him doing much as far as teaching me what to do except insisting my dwarf be named Thorin.

Years later I had a friend whose father was a used book dealer. He would find the weirdest RPGs and give them to his son as a gift. My friend and I would play through them with him running them and me and our mutual friend as players. We went through everything from Toon, Tales from the Floating Vagabond, and Paranoia to Deadlands Classic (whose binding smell I can still remember), the officially licensed TMNT RPG and the rest of the Palladium mess of mega damage systems.

For years I kept a secret collection of books in PDF form on my PC that I would read through with no intention of playing or mounting any real effort to try to get players together to actually test out. I just enjoyed reading about the weird worlds the game designers had put around their systems. 

More recently I started getting back into them because they are awesome and I missed them and I realized I can lure non-gamer friends over with pizza and beer to make new players. I started up again with Deadlands Reloaded, aka weak-sauce Deadlands. Worked my way through a few dozen Savage Worlds settings and all their samey-ness. Had a brief flirtation with Pathfinder, but never really tried to play it.

Around that time I was hearing a lot of talk on forums about Apocalypse World being an amazing story telling RPG. That naturally lead to Dungeon World; which at first confused and frustrated me at first, but then became part of the warm glow in my heart that Saint Vincent D Baker first started with his game.

Since then there have been a slew of Kickstarter funded and other indie games that I've added to my collection of titles I'll probably never play. Rather than write them all off as money wasted, I thought I could put them to good public use and review them for the masses of non-existent readers of this blog.

Now in an effort to create some sort of useful information for the general public and not just a white space for me to type out my ramblings about games, I'm also going to include a few key questions a GM should be asking themselves before they start trying to force their latest favorite game on their players.

• What type of story can you tell with this game?
• This is an important and often overlooked question that a GM should ask. If you try to force a game to tell a story it's not designed for then it won't be any fun for anyone involved. A game that has mechanics that focus on combat and fighting magic might not be the best game for a campaign of courtly intrigue. Or a game that starts the player off as a strong capable archetype might not be the best system for a zeroes to heroes type of campaign.
• What type of players will enjoy this game?
• The mechanics of a game can destroy a player's enthusiasm pretty quickly. Combat that drags on for hours will bore some players, but other players love to be able to meticulously plot out how they'd like their character to act in battle. Some players really want to be able to affect the world around them, but others would rather you just start their game at the beginning of each adventure and ignore the in-between bits.
• What is the goal of this game?
• Every game has a goal. Some make it obvious and others point you in it's direction and hope you will find it. Vincent Baker described RPG design as trying to make a provocative paint brush for other artists to use. It's up to GM's to determine what that brush will provoke from players. That's the games goal.

I'll try not to make all of my reviews about bad games and even with bad games I will always mention the good parts, provided I can find them. I make no apologies for people's awful games or awful game design.