RPG Medium

Cast Away, written by by Joe O’Brien & Reilly Qyote, is a survival RPG. Your characters are survivors of a disastrous event, anything from a shipwreck to a zombie apocalypse, and must manage their health, fatigue, food, and shelter in a hostile aftermath.

The system is quite good at what it sets out to do. This is a game of struggle and strife, fighting to survive, and every mistake you make or failure you suffer results in more trouble for you down the line. Failures beget failures, and death for your character is permanent. This game is so good, in fact, that it brings up a significant question about RPGs in general:

This is a difficult game. You’re not expected to survive; not without some serious luck. You’re going to fail, fail hard, and you’re not even allowed to roll up a new character. This game is hard, and if you fail you’re done.

Does that sound like fun to you?

A two-fer, eh? Okay, let’s go!

The Great Ork Gods is an RPG made by Jack Aidley. It’s a one-shot comedic game, designed to be played and forgotten about in an evening. At its most basic; the players play brutish nasty hate-filled Orks, as well as the Orkish gods who hate the Orks as much as the Orks hate them.

One Wrestling Ring to Rule them All (stylized as 1WR) is a Wrestling RPG by Dice Kaptial. The players play as wrestlers who must fight and compete for the entertainment of the onlooking audience. A bingo-card of nine “goals” increase the audience’s score as they are met, including things like one of the wrestlers doing a heel-turn, or performing a specific move during a specific round.

Blood Red Sands, by Galileo Games, is an exploration of Competitive RPGs.

I must admit, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game quite like it. When I talked earlier about Competition in RPGs, I focused mainly on the idea of what competition meant in a largely collaborative medium. I talked about how characters might fight each other, but the players themselves never should, and the differences between seeing RPGs as “Non-GM Players vs. GM,” or “Players vs. the Adventure,” or even “Players vs. the Story.”

Now, here comes Blood Red Sands, an RPG that throws out those rules and gives the players Victory Points.

Victory Points!

Ars Magica is a bit of an odd duck in RPG land. It was one of the early RPGs, with the first edition released in 1987. The early days of the RPG medium were curious ones, with an interesting mix of experimentation and cloning successes. Games like Atlantis copied D&D, while games like Champions went off in strange new directions.

Ars Magica, despite it’s formulaic pitch (the players being Magic-users in a medieval fantasy setting) is one of the experimental systems.

There is a lot I could talk about with Ars Magica — its magic system is creative and robust, to put it mildly, and the political interplay between magical factions and mundanes plays a huge part in its well developed setting — but what I want to talk about, as you should be able to tell from the title of this piece, is that this is the first system that had a Troupe style of play.

Sunderwald, made by Long Tail Games, is a Legacy RPG.

Legacy, as an RPG term, has come to mean a game that is focused less on individual characters. Legacy RPGs are generally about regions, families, factions, or generations. The stories develop over in-game years, rather than days or weeks. Players may find themselves playing multiple different individuals over the course of a single campaign, if not a single session.

This is not the kind of Legacy game Sunderwald is.

Strike! is a tactical wargame SRD, without much in the way of world to justify its system. It’s the same combat used in the marvelous Tailfeathers RPG, full of interesting tactical choices and clever little tricks that keep it fresh, fun, and fast.

It also clearly and proudly supports reskinning.

“Re-what?”

Reskinning. This hobby is full of creative people, and one of the major selling points of roleplay is the ability to exert your will on the gamespace in a way rarely supported in other mediums; naturally, players often want to change things to suit them.

Ascendancy, by Gemworks, is a “Sparked by Resistance TTRPG for 3-5 players, set in a cyberpunk city in a distant future, after the empire that ruled the world for centuries has fallen.”

The “Sparked by Resistance” system originated with the Spire and Heart RPGs, and is similar in many ways to “Forged in the Dark” systems. To take action, players roll one to four d10s, and take the highest to decide how successful, or not, their characters were.

As a system, Ascendancy does a lot of other interesting things with the system, all building on the narrative of ex-weapons trying to survive a post-war cyberpunk world.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the system, or at least the thing that is done rarely, is Ascendancy’s dual-class feature. When creating your persona, you choose not one but two classes for your character.

Dungeon Crawl Classics, created by Goodman Games, is an OSR-adjacent game, inspired in part by “Appendix N.”

What is “Appendix N?” It’s the Appendix in the original D&D Dungeon Masters Guide that listed sources of inspiration for GMs. Is there any stronger claim to the OSR name? DCC is inspired by the same fictions that inspired the original D&D. It encourages the same OSR sensibilities that other games champion. It is a game where, quote: “Each adventure is 100% good, solid dungeon crawl, with the monsters you know, the traps you fear, and the secret doors you know are there somewhere.”

Which makes it fascinating how different DCC is from the old-school rulesets.

Dice are important to RPGs. I’ve talked a lot about the arbitration between narrative and mechanics, but whatever balance a specific RPG system strikes, it is a nearly universal rule that the mechanics require some form of randomization. The traditional method; dice.

This is a very long-winded way of saying almost every RPG uses dice to help decide what happens in the game.

“What happens next?”

It is, perhaps the pinnacle of the medium. All the preparation, all the imagination, all the dice and chips and conversation all depends on that one procedure, that game-loop, that single question.

What happens next?

We answer the question in a myriad of ways with a myriad of tools. We think of our characters, and what their emotions or worldviews might push them to do. We think about the story, and what might be fitting. We think of ourselves, and consider what we would find interesting or exciting. We think of our dice, and decide what actions are most likely to succeed. Sometimes, we are simply inspired.