[WARNING]

If the layout of this devlog feels horrible and the images are all over the place, try getting the article as PDF from the download section. It's free :)

[/WARNING]

I originally wrote this article in 2015 on a blog I don’t maintain anymore. It’s here though, if you are curious. In 2018 the article was still relevant to various discussions I was having, so I updated and reposted it elsewhere too. Now it’s 2022 and I still find myself in need of linking it in discussions. Thus, I’m re-reposting it as an itch.io “DevBlog”. But this time around I’ll also update it, rewriting it for clarity and legibility, but also because “stuff has happened” in the 7 years since its original inception. Enjoy.

[ cover pic unceremoniously lifted from here :) ]

TL:DR

The article was originally written from a specific perspective: 

• I like modern RPGs
• so I would love to see them grow and spread and be played by more people
• I expected this to be fast and easy, thanks to the many innovative features that make them very accessible, immediate and varied
• But after 15 years (2000-2015) they still seem to be a niche of a niche struggling for its right to exist. Why?!
• And why do traditional RPGs keep on being the mainstream regardless of some obvious drawbacks?

To answer that, I first introduce a bit of context about why I had the expectation that modern RPGs should be more popular.

Then I analyse the structural design of both modern and traditional games, comparing them to highlight how they handle the dynamic of player acquisition and training.

SPOILER: modern designs kinda shoot themselves in the foot, while traditional ones go “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” :P

Finally I ponder on what could make this status quo change. What could help modern RPGs break out of their little club? Become more mainstream?

I come in peace

Through the 2000s and even early 2010 the simple existence of modern RPGs sparked ferocious flame-wars against traditional roleplayers. Things were handled poorly on both sides, to say the least. Come 2015 the situation had started to cool off, moreso in 2018. Now that 2022 has begun, there are even players that have no idea of the toxic blood shed in the past. It’s great to be able to talk about games of all kinds and designs without jumping to each other’s throats :D

But some still bear old scars and will jump to alertness whenever some topics are brought up. To them I say: peace. This article is mainly a critique of modern games. The comparison to traditional ones is used just as a mirror, a tool for self analysis, a reflection about different ways to handle the same activity. 

Context

A slooow change

It has been my observation that RPGs with a coherent design have been changing the global RPG culture for the better. This is something anyone can see by looking at the latest editions of the most famous mainstream games: Dungeons & Dragons, with its 4th and 5th editions, has oh so slowly evolved its design, and many other titles have been following suit. Maybe it’s too little, too late. Maybe it’s just a marketing move to try and look fresh. But it’s something, and it is influencing the overall tabletop RPG culture. On the other hand, games like Fate Core, various Powered by the Apocalypse derivatives and many other modern games big and small keep on pushing the limits of what RPG design can do, and are also starting to appeal to a broader audience of both new and traditional players, setting their own (indie-sized) trends.

That said, I have been feeling perplexed. These changes are definitely positive but... why haven’t they spread further? Why aren’t they the new norm? Why hasn’t coherent design already “conquered the world”?

The New Frontier

In 20 years of System Does Matter (from about 2001 to 2021) a lot of games have been developed that can be played without a GM, or with just 2 participants or even solo. Games that can be played to satisfaction in a one-shot session or even just a single hour. Games that don’t need prep work, bookkeeping or even play supports (such as dice or character sheets). Games that offer more accessible texts, with clearer instructions explaining simpler procedures. Even “nano-games” that offer a complete system, rather than the frustratingly insufficient “roll dice like this or that, then the GM will figure the rest” of traditional rules-light titles, in as little as a business card format! RPG design has evolved to make play effortless, to safely touch on difficult topics, to experience bleed, to explore emotions other than mere escapism and power fantasy, or to offer escapism and power fantasies in a more personalised and engaging way. On top of all this, more and more modern games are maturing from a state of amateurish self-production to that of proper indie or small-press publication: professional level editing, layout, illustrations and even crowdfunded bells and whistles.

[2022 note: this was true in 2015 and more or less in 2018 too. But things have progressed in the following years and I’ll mention it later on in the article.]

Basically every limit that stood between people and their desire to sit down and play is being tackled and somehow overcome, while new design solutions and techniques keep on being devised, as the RPG medium finally matures and becomes more self-aware. Testing, exploring, experimenting, progressing, innovating, revisiting, learning.

Still, to my personal perception, modern games are a small niche within the roleplaying niche within the boardgame niche of the tabletop segment of games. Why?

[2022 note: This feeling has started to relent a bit in the past couple of years, but it still lingers...]

Traditional RPGs are still the most widespread and played kind of RPG despite their lack of... all the features listed above. Why?

Analysis

Hardcore vs Casual

One reason for the success and longevity of traditional RPGs lies in the fact that they facilitate a social structure that empowers a specific kind of person: the one passionate enough to put a lot of effort, time and energy into getting what they want from a game that, in many ways, works against them. This is a person with enough motivation and enthusiasm to buy an expensive book, read through its 300 pages, and study and do prep-work just to play a game. It’s a big task that creates a big sunken cost, something hard to just let go to waste...

This person then needs others to play with, putting in more work to sell people on the idea of a 4-5 hours game. Then, they work more to teach their new group the salient bits of the 300 pages they studied. Very often this heroic person is also the one that ends up taking care of the logistics needed to play, that day, at that hour, once a week. This person is almost invariably the one that will fill the role of GM. Play activity, as shaped by the design of rules and procedures of this type of games, further reinforces this asymmetric structure where one person provides most of the effort needed to produce an enjoyable game session.

In other types of media they would be called hardcore players. In my personal experience not all hardcore roleplayers are GMs, but pretty much all GM are hardcore roleplayers (at least until they burn out due to the heavy toll such way of roleplaying demands, but that’s a different article alltogether).

Now let’s look at modern RPGs: to whom are these games appealing? Who do they empower? Who is their target audience?

Sidestepping the fact that most were created with no target at all, being born purely out of love and passion for an idea, the very first coherent designs originally came into existence to offer solace to people experiencing problems with traditional games: disgruntled players, burnout GMs, grown-up players with not enough time and energy for the hobby, players fed up with trying to squeeze pathos and drama out of bluntly action-oriented mechanics. A niche of ex traditional roleplayers. This momentum then veered away from just “fixing” and went towards “exploring”: what else was possible once one stepped outside of the dogmas of traditional design?

These roots made modern RPGs into something not exactly appealing for the average person that enjoyed traditional RPGs, as they defied most of the expectation that “the average roleplayer” had in pre-2010 years. By and large this was still the case come 2015, although a tiny pool of people that learned to roleplay on modern rather than traditional games had started to appear.

So, if not mainstream roleplayer, who are these games for? The answer seemed to be “casual” roleplayers: people that might happily sit and play, and might get a really good time from it, and might also be damn good and creative players... but in the end will hardly put effort to organise the game, to read the rules, to explain them to others, to be the first one suggesting “this evening let’s play an RPG instead of doing other things!”. A wider and unbiased audience, sure, but also a much less motivated one.

But here comes the rub...

Modern vs Traditional

I’m starting to realise that the very nature of modern games (so far) has made them LESS friendly for casual players than traditional ones. How?

• Many modern designs present simple and easy to learn rules. But they also need all players to learn them. Maybe not perfectly and not immediately, but they do have to fully engage with them, sooner rather than later. Traditional ones make the GM to BE the rules, sparing everyone else from making the effort. Sure, some GMs resent “ignorant players” on the mid/long run, but during onboarding it’s a great advantage, which might drag on quite a while, and even indefinitely if the GM doesn’t mind the extra work this implies for them. 
• Most modern designs are very different from one another. Great! But it also means that players need to put learning effort anew every time they try a new game. Traditional ones all use the same base structure and procedures. Sure, specific rules (that the GM will handle for you) can change wildly, but the overall how-to is fundamentally identical from game to game: what you’re expected to do as a Player/GM is functionally the same from D&D to Cyberpunk2020 to KULT to Dark Heresy to GURPS to Risus. There is a reason why “GM Advice” is always offered as universal, no matter which game one is running. Some tips might be unique to this or that game, or different “styles” might be suggested, but the core know-how never changes.

• Most modern designs require active and constant creative involvement from all participants. They also provide plenty of tools, guidance and support to do it as effortlessly as possible, but to someone not used to it it can still feel like a lot. Traditional ones just don’t require much creativity at all, and then only from time to time. Sure thing, a “good Player” is always creative and engaged... but one can easily go by playing the semi-passive role of interactive(ish) audience for the GM’s story/show. Again, this gets frowned upon the more the game progresses, as it demands more and more effort from the GM, but lots of groups accept it for quite a long time.
• Most modern designs, by virtue of their structure and procedures, unveil and highlight immature social behaviours. This is a precious feature that leads, if leveraged, to healthier social dynamics. But it also calls people on their shit, asks them for a modicum of emotional maturity and responsibility. Honestly, anyone is capable of it. But (again) it requires some effort. Traditional ones just... don’t. The GM is expected to “handle” social problems for everyone. This presents the risk of promoting exceedingly toxic behaviour, de-responsibilising Players while charging the GM with being sensible, understanding and responsible for everyone. But they too are just another person at the table, they too want to “just play”, they too could be prone to behave badly, especially if they are put in the abhorrent position of having to “police” their friends. Still, for all the problems this structure potentially causes, it means that new / prospective / casual Players are again asked to put next to no effort to enter the game.
• Most modern designs offer an emotionally challenging kind of entertainment (charged human themes, self expression, hard choices, triggering topics). The overwhelming majority of traditional ones offer flat out power fantasies and escapist entertainment. Anything else must be added “manually” by dedicated Players and GMs. Nothing wrong with this! But it does mean that casual gamers are offered a more easily digestible kind of entertainment.

Taken together, all of these elements sum up to a pretty clear picture:

1) Traditional design attracts and then grooms hardcore roleplayers by putting them on a high pedestal, investing them with social power and clout within their gaming circle. This ego boost has a high cost in terms of personal effort, which only reinforces the mythology of the GM as a “super player” above other normal players, something difficult but satisfying that not everyone can be good at. Which also plays into the whole “git gud” rhetoric so common in many gaming subcultures, RPG related or not.

2) Each hardcore roleplayer allows whole groups of casual/non-roleplayers to experience the hobby with little or no effort.

3) These new players are then exposed to way of roleplaying that self-perpetuates itself:

• On the one hand GMs are idolised, presenting their excessive workload as desirable, a brand of honour and ability, the mark of a true roleplayer... “get good and maybe one day you’ll be a GM too”.
• On the other hand the play activity trains them in “the one” underlying system they are going to encounter in all other traditional games, further lowering the entry bar for future traditional gaming.

Conversely, most modern games hope against hope that casual/non-roleplayers will do what hardcore ones do: buy, study, recruit, facilitate. Sure, with a MUCH lighter workload and lots of effective tools to assist them, but we’re still talking of hardcore-like or at least hardcore-looking investment.

Not only that, but they are supposed to do so without any special social empowerment, as coherent designs tend to be radically democratic in their play approach: the GM, when present, is “just” an asymmetric Player performing different tasks within the confines set by the true authority of the game. The rules. Arguably a much healthier social and play environment all around, but also markedly less glamorous and appealing.

And THEN those few that do go through this, often end up frustrated by the lack of commitment from everyone around them exactly because they are playing with casual/non-roleplayers that, once the game is over, have little to no interest in committing time and effort into a game, let alone sustain and propagate it to others. Luckily there are many exceptions, but this is a dynamic I have personally experienced, and have been told about, enough times that I must recognise it as an endemic problem.

Breaking Out

The Holy Grail

In light of all this, I feel much less perplexed by how slow the “indie world domination plan” has been progressing. I believe that modern design will naturally become the norm, for simple darwinian reasons. Even the biggest publishers are already starting to change the way they develop RPGs, with traditional designs incorporating more and more modern techniques, structures and general approaches, even while retaining their strong GM-centric nature. Even Old School Renaissance games show a strong tendency in this direction, which is baffling but also kind of makes sense. It will take time, but I’m confident. No reason to hurry this process.

But the holy grail of finding a way to turn random people into roleplayers, and then to groom them into hardcore enthusiasts is powerfully alluring, the ultimate challenge, to find a way for modern RPGs to go viral above and beyond the confines of their usual spawning pool, as well as for RPGs in general to become truly mainstream in general. So I can’t help but ask myself, HOW?

[2022 note: in the original article I ranted a bit about some ways to target a younger audience of casual players with a few shaky ideas about social-network RPG for teenagers and vague visions of RPGs for children. They were poorly written and thought out, so I’ll cut them from this version of the article. Instead I’ll provide a new answer to the question. It’s a cynical one, possibly disheartening but also possibly liberating and hopeful. Feel free to fight me over it, or to say “DUH!” because I just finally discovered hot water. This is merely the place I am at now.]

Turns out, the answer to reaching a broader audience was not design. It was money :P

A small note on this, before going on with a few examples of why I see things this way:

• money is not magic, it can be spent badly and turn in a very expensive pile of nothing
• money is truly a stand-in for work, which means time and effort and skill
• my argument is not meant to downplay the merits of people pouring years of work and passion on projects they believe in
• my argument is that money matters more than design when it comes to reaching a broader audience
• which makes me horribly sad, as I used to believe that the opposite could be true, with design being the driving force that would then draw new blood to the hobby, and with them money too

HASBRO

HASBRO has owned WotC and D&D since 1999. Unhappy with selling figures of 3.5e and 4e – just think about it, D&D revenue was abysmal by the standards of a company such as HASBRO, while at the same time it was orders of magnitude bigger than that of any other RPG in existence – HASBRO was about to “kill D&D”. The 5th Edition was devised as one last attempt by WotC to save the D&D brand, somehow making it profitable for the owner company. To this end they did what had never before been done (at least not since the golden 80s, before AD&D2): they invested a ton of money in marketing and advertising. 5e design has certainly merits, but in their own time all D&D editions had been “the best D&D yet” without reaping the same success as 5e. This time around the company splurged on hype, public play events, influencers, famous actors, media representation, etc. They invested in growing the brand and its IP. 

[And they are still doing it today, as mentioned in a recent Dungeon Craft episode commenting on the new CEO hired by WotC. At 5:50 the host literally says “The reason D&D is as big as it is, is because of the IP, not the rules.”]

It’s not a coincidence that during the development and testing of 5e in 2012 and 2013, D&D was still something for roleplayers only... then all of a sudden, with the publication in 2014, “the D&D phenomenon” exploded and then kept on growing in subsequent years. Which leads us to...

Critical Role

Critical Role, a show with high production values: a studio, lighting, makeup, costumes, props, multiple cameras, the staff to operate it all, professional editing, and of course a cast of professional actors to play D&D5. Totally legit, mind you, they were already friends running a normal home game of D&D4 and then Pathfinder when Felicia Day invited them to “perform” on G&S! The point is that it didn’t matter until money came into play in the form of producing a professional show. Critical Role aired from 2015 to present day, and in 2019 it ran a Kickstarter that raised 11.3 million dollars to produce a 10 episode animated series (now on Amazon Prime).

THIS put D&D, but I would argue RPGs in general, back on the map of normies and pop culture. Money. I mean, D&D had “organically” been featured in TV Shows before, to no great effect (Futurama in 2008, Community in 2011, The Big Bang Theory in 2012, to name a few). But after 2014 its media presence increased tenfold, both as a reference in high profile shows and as the focus of dedicated media: Stranger Things, HarmonQuest, Rick & Morty, and a bucket load of web shows featuring famous celebrities: some were old time players, some discovered the game recently, but while before 2014 this was just a random piece of trivia no one cared about, after 2014 it became an identity marker.

Avatar the Last Airbender

Then there is Avatar Legends, a Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) RPG by Magpie Games that in 2021 has run a Kickstarter backed by over 81k people. For context:

• it’s the 4th most backed tabletop game project in KS history
• the 1st being Exploding Kittens, with 219k
• the 2nd is Bears vs Babies, with 85k
• the 3rd is Frosthaven, with 83k

The PbtA framework is arguably the most “successful” example of modern design to date, with a myriad of games adapting it into a wide variety of settings and system structures. But until Avatar they just managed to gain ground within the inner community that already appreciates modern design anyway, plus a few hearts won amidst the traditional crowd. A positive shift within the RPG pond, but in regards of the “external” world they tended to mostly achieve the same lacklustre results described previously: casual players enjoy them, but rarely become themselves hardcore supporters perpetuating and spreading the game on their own power and initiative.

Until Avatar Legends.

Maybe.

The game itself has not been finalised yet. It has not reached its backers (save for an early quickstart) nor the broader market of book stores and game stores. We still don’t know what its long term impact will be. Will normies that bought the game start playing? Or will they shelf the manuals as yet another piece of Avatar memorabilia? Will the passion for the show translate into passion for the game, and then for RPGs in general? Will more companies “risk” giving space to modern games instead of yet another D&D clone or supplement?

Be it as it may, to me the current result speaks again of money. Avatar the Last Airbender is a very famous IP worldwide that probably could have been slapped on any RPG, good or bad, modern or traditional, and it would have been equally successful. I am extremely happy and excited that a game with a modern design has been the focus of this success. It could be a game changer for our little subculture. But I can’t shake the feeling that what made it possible was not the quality of the game, its design, but rather the quality of the commercial product, all the things that the money can buy, the IP, the gadgets and merch, the logistics needed for it all, and most of all the advertisement: pre-KS, mid-KS, and even continuing now post-KS.

Again, there is merit in what Magpie did. Other publishers bought the rights to some famous IP, slapped it on their RPGs, and then squandered the opportunity by spending their money in ways that did not properly support the initial investment. Kudos to Magpie for pulling off a great project, made possible by all the past years of good work that, I’m sure, allowed them to have the positioning and the resources needed for this endeavour.

Is Design Relevant?

What does this whole rant mean then? That game design is irrelevant? Well, kind of, it depends.

Commercially I am more and more convinced that yes, design is largely irrelevant. The mainstream RPG culture has grown in such a shape that a punch in the gut would still be considered “playable if you have a Good GM”, you just have to package it properly and it will sell. It’s all a matter of factors other than design.

Culturally design is everything. Design does affect play activity, which in turn affects gaming culture: habits, values, traditions, fashions and taste, advice, trends, the perception of what is “good” and “bad”, normal or weird, acceptable or not. Crafting yet another example of traditional design contributes to the (current) status quo. Crafting one more experiment in modern design inherently contributes to challenging the (current) status quo.

Proof is all around: from the strange advent of neo-trad games, to the games within the OSR galaxy that start to feel at the same time the very opposite AND very akin to modern designs, to modern games toying with a strongly GM-centric structure tempered by coherent mechanics and procedures. Lines are blurring, culture is shifting. So while the Holy Grail is probably out of the reach of game design, game design itself is still critically vital to the present and future health of our beloved hobby.

And then, if marketing is blind to design, then it also means that one could choose to invest money in a design they deem more worthy (for whatever subjective reason) and still be successful. Magpie’s Avatar is hopefully just the first of a series of commercially impactful projects. Already Mana Project Studio, in collaboration with Don’t Panic and Sunrise, intend to Kickstart in 2022 the Cowboy Bebop RPG using the Not the End system, an italian modern RPG.

Final Words

The takeaway I get from all of this is: follow your heart. “It doesn’t matter” also means “you are free to do whatever”. If you are a small indie designer, just explore whatever weird fantasy inspires you. Design for yourself. Design to bring into existence the games you would love to play. Because, actually, THAT still matters.

For most this will sound obvious (and quite cheesy).

But I also know many new and old game creators that are disheartened because they see commercial success and broad adoption as the only ways to make a difference, because they unwittingly equate design quality with product quality and, because of this lie, understand their lack of commercial success as a sign that their design is “bad” and that they should give up... slap a setting on a D&D clone and be done with it, stop wasting time with fringe ideas that won’t make them a buck.

I disagree.

The heart of this article is for them.