A personal account of tabletop RPGs, design and play philosophies, and other things

I think I'm past the point of being depressed about how people weren't willing to take my GNS survey* despite it taking less than a minute and having no negative outcome case, mostly past the point of being legitimately angry about it, clearly still in a place of being not-so-passive aggressively annoyed about it but that'll pass too, but I still want to talk about some of these things, so this time I'll just talk a little bit about my tabletop history and how that history informs how I think about tabletop as a whole. This is more a stream of consciousness than anything else, but I hope people find it interesting or informative.
*incidentally I think I've come up with a way to redesign the study that will account for the concerns people had more directly and actually have greater statistical power, but the results will be less easily interpretable to an audience without a statistical background. I would potentially be interested in giving this another go, but I don't want to go through again the frustration and disappointment of getting excited about it and then no one doing it.

This is kind of insane when I think about it, but I'm pretty sure I've been playing tabletop RPGs for 6+ years now. I know compared to some people that's nothing, I just mean that it still feels like I just started but 6 or 7 years is a long time. Technically I had a few non-starters prior to that, particularly with D&D 4e, and when I was much younger I was actively involved in a whole bunch of play-by-post free-form forum RPGs about things like X-men or Megaman Battle Network, but that's a whole conversation in its own right. 

But ya, about 6 or 7 years ago I started playing D&D 3.5 with some friends, and our first campaign lasted about a year. None of us except the GM had any experience, and in many ways I remember him being a really good GM, although it was very obvious to me even back then that he and the rest of the party carried certain sensibilities that I did not, and for as much fun as I had fun with that group, I don't think I ever really got what I wanted out of tabletop with them. They wanted traditional fantasy, and I don't mean to sell their narrative sensibilities short, but they were more interested in the character-building and combat tactics than telling a story or building a world. I didn't know tabletop could be anything besides that, but I also knew that wasn't quite right for me.

Then I ran a 3.5 campaign of my own for a year that was in so many ways a horrible mess but I think on the whole we had fun and it was definitely an informative and humbling experience. I tried to include way too much homebrew that often didn't work and my players never wanted it anyway, and the setting was a very early prototype of Phantasmos, but in part because I was a terrible worldbuilder and storyteller at the time, and in part because my group had no interest in anything besides traditional fantasy, it didn't quite work. But again, I think we had fun on the whole. There were moments of greatness or potential greatness in there. Anyway...

We then switched to Pathfinder, which I think as of now is the pinnacle of that style of play, and for the most part I'm over that style of play but I can remember why I enjoyed it and there are moments when I think about giving it another go, maybe Starfinder or the upcoming Pathfinder 2e. With pathfinder, we had one shorter, more experimental game that was a fun concept but we never finished, and another one of the guys took a stab at GMing another year-long traditional fantasy campaign. I think of our three main campaigns, we each brought something a little different to the table, and for as little as that style of game or style of play interests me anymore, I look back fondly on those experiences.

The last game I played with that group (certain people came and went, but mostly the same group) was a short Mutants & Masterminds 3e campaign that I GMed, based on a superhero setting I haven't posted about on the blog yet but is arguably my #2 main setting after Phantasmos (and at one time was my #1 setting). M&M 3e is not a game I have much interest in playing again, but I appreciate it for what it is and I think it served as a good transition game for me. It had the crunchy, character-building stuff that at the time I thought was critical to tabletop, but it taught me that crunch and game mechanics don't just have to be about combat tactics, that game mechanics can serve another purpose, such as to facilitate story progression or storytelling, and when we hit out groove about halfway into the short campaign, it was the first step towards changing how I thought about tabletop. I would consider this campaign the first one where I felt like I really got what I wanted out of it.

This was around the time I moved out of state and started grad school, so for nearly a year I didn't game at all. However, this was also around the time that I started exploring r/rpg. While I've been frustrated with that community on the whole lately, I have to appreciate that r/rpg really opened my eyes to all sorts of new games, and new philosophies about games, and I feel like I am so much more personally and creatively enriched for having found that community, and I can't even imagine who I would be if I hadn't been exposed to all of these things.

In that time I learned about rules-light games and storytelling games, and at first primarily latched onto Numenera / Cypher System. The high production value and science fantasy setting was what brought me in, but the Numenera core book spoke to me on multiple levels. In retrospect the setting is, on the whole, fairly tame (although I still think it has some cool stuff), but they really did an excellent job of baking into the book a tutorial on how to effectively build a Weird world. Outside of reddit and the blogosphere, the original Numenera core book probably most influenced me in terms of my techniques as a worldbuilder. For all of the fiction I had read or science I had learned, and all the ideas I had in my head, prior to Numenera I had no idea how to coherently put it all together (although if I'm being fair, some might argue I still haven't figured that out). Anyway, I eventually grew to appreciate the Cypher system itself as well. 

While I've recently been trying to delve much more deeply into both storygames and OSR, as of now I think Cypher System might be my overall favorite RPG. I think many people misunderstand it or don't give it a fair chance. First I played in an online group for a year, not set in Numenera but using Cypher, and while again I don't think my sensibilities were 100% in-line with that group, it was the first time I played an RPG where we were playing the characters and telling the story first, and playing a game second. After so long of reading all of these reddit posts and blog posts and RPG books but not actually playing, it was so rewarding to put all of that new knowledge to the test and feeling like it had paid off, and feeling like I was tangibly closer to getting what I wanted out of gaming in a more reliable way than that first success with Mutants & Masterminds 3e.

Eventually I was able to start a local group, again using Numenera / Cypher, set in Phantasmos. Unfortunately I think that group may have officially died as of this summer (we were so close to my intended "end" too :/), but that was an extraordinary experience. My second year of grad school was really miserable for a whole bunch of reasons, and I don't think I would have survived it without my Phantasmos campaign. Over the course of those two years I became such a better worldbuilder, storyteller, and even game designer (although for me the "game" part of RPGs is and will likely always be tertiary to worldbuilding and storytelling). I broke the campaign into several narrative arcs, so even though we never finished my intended "end" arc, we had several "full" story experiences. It taught me a lot about how to work flexibly with mechanics to get what you want out of them, to manipulate them to develop the game or story experience you want, and other general principles about worldbuilding, storytelling, and gaming. Start small, build out as needed. Plant lots of seeds and let your players water them. Let some seeds grow in the background. You'll look like you had a master plan but really you developed the "master plan" as you went. Encourage the players to contribute to the world, to think about what their characters want and how they fit into the world. Don't just roll to hit, describe the awesome thing you did. Don't worry if you have the ability to do that on your sheet, we can find a way to make that awesome cinematic super move you just did make sense with the materials we've got. Whatever story you have in mind, make your characters a tangible part of it; this is tabletop, not a videogame.

During that time I got to try out some of my micro-settings, mainly using FATE. I think FATE is a great system if you want to tell a full story in a one-shot, and I think it's a cool and different way to frame game mechanics that can make you a better worldbuilder and storyteller, but on the whole I don't love it. I was already more or less doing what Aspects in FATE do within Cypher but in a more free-form way, and I really don't like the probability distribution of FATE dice (although I respect the elegance of it for what it was designed to do). I'm by no means done with FATE, but I don't think it's surprising that it's been receding in popularity lately- I think most people already got what they wanted out of it, and I don't know if there is anywhere for it to grow, but I hope I'm wrong.

More recently, mainly in the time since I've started my blog, I've been primarily delving into the Old-School Renaissance/Revival/Revolution/whatever the kids call it (OSR), but also to a lesser extent into Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA). I think the reasons for this were two-fold. Part of it is that I think the storygaming scene seems to have moved away from FATE and consolidated around PbtA. Part of it is that it seems like many people are just moving altogether away from storygames and into OSR. Specifically what interested me about OSR is the whole community, primarily around Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP), who seem to share my sensibilities towards worldbuilding. This community seems to have the same or similar Weird sensibilities I have, building fascinating worlds I have never seen, and coming up with interesting game mechanics and ways to think about gaming. Like with Mutants and Masterminds 3e and Numenera, the OSR/LotFP community has really changed how I think about things. There are certain aspects of OSR that I can respect but don't necessarily appeal to me, like player skill vs. character skill, or high-lethality, or the sandbox. Again, I can respect that philosophy and understand why people enjoy it, and I do enjoy it as an alternative experience, it's just not my primary interest.

That being said, as I've been playing more OSR recently, what I'm finding is that actually I can basically run it in the way that fits my style, that many of the sensibilities I developed from Cypher and FATE work just as well with OSR, and it's just a solid framework. In fact, more so than any other system, even Cypher, it makes me want to become more of a game designer and not just a worldbuilder or storyteller. The more I play OSR, the more I really want to revisit my Decyphered Hack, which I think has potential to be my ideal game. Unfortunately, I don't think it's anyone else's :/, but maybe if I find the right way to bring it all together, other people will grow to appreciate it as well. 

I think I talk a little bit about why I love Cypher so much in that hack, but I should probably do a whole post on that at some point. In brief, I think it finds an excellent balance between setting or character flavor flexibility, mechanical depth, "gamey-ness", and "narritive-ness", and has some unique features which I don't think I've seen in any other system, or not done as well, that provide useful data to the GM and the party, which as a data scientist I appreciate.

I do want to play more PbtA too though. I've played a small amount of Uncharted Worlds and Dungeon World, both of which are fun, but I don't think fully leverage the system (or I didn't understand how to fully leverage the system). Like with FATE, it sometimes feels like PbtA is codifying things I'm already doing in a way that feels cumbersome, but I do think games like Masks or Monsterhearts could maybe give me some new insights or make me a better storyteller or character builder, just as some of those other systems I've mentioned have. I've been reading Space Wurm vs. Moonicorn, and I don't think I'd ever actually want to play it per se, but it's a fascinating beast that is once again making me think about gaming in a different way, and it makes me think that it would be foolish to write off the storytelling game philosophy altogether, even if that style of play isn't your primary interest.

Anyway, for now, those are my thoughts. Let me know what you think!