RPG Medium

So you may have noticed — I certainly have — that I’ve generally use Fantasy and Horror games for examples in this treatise. Of course there are more genres and styles than those two, but it does bring up a fascinating dichotomy in the hobby.

Let’s look at the RPG Sins. Heavily based on the Storyteller System used in White Wolf games like Exalted or Werewolf, Sins casts your persona as an undead being recently wrenched back to some form of self-awareness. Protecting humanity from an otherworldly horde known as the Brood, your character must maintain a balance between their humanity and their monstrousness, or else fall to ruin. It’s body horror and blood, hive-minds and howling from beyond the black. It’s 28 Days Later: the Masquerade.

Cairn is, according to its website, quote: “an adventure game about exploring a dark & mysterious Wood filled with strange folk, hidden treasure, and unspeakable monstrosities. Character generation is quick and random, classless, and relies on fictional advancement rather than through XP or level mechanics.”

Aesthetically, Cairn is a fantasy D&D-like, with swords and spells and goblins galore. Mechanically, it’s an interesting mix of new and old-school rules. Random rolling of character stats is from the early era, when new characters’ long-term survival was neither expected nor reliable. On the other hand, its combat system is rather new, starting from the assumption that all attacks hit and the only randomness comes from a weapon’s damage dice.

Rules-light and focused on ordinary people, the center of Endure as a survival RPG is, quote: “Its Endurance economy. Endurance helps characters succeed and keeps them going, but is always depleting. If you are out of Endurance, you have to rely solely on your cunning and luck of the roll — and often it is not enough to survive. You need time and resources to recover Endurance, so the game ebbs and flows between tense action and quiet downtime.”

Paris Gondo - The Life-Saving Magic of Inventorying is tongue-in-cheek to be sure. Designed as a storytelling game with no prep and only a few dice, the game is a gentle jab at an aspect of RPGs that has gone by the wayside in recent years; the inventory.

Now, that’s not entirely true. Almost every RPG acknowledges that characters can carry things, keeping them in their pockets or backpacks. Many don’t bother keeping careful track, however, opting for the adventure-game route of hammerspace or bottomless pockets. Your inventory is not supposed to be “realistic,” its supposed to be full of single-use assets that get you past the next obstacle so you can continue the game.

Burnout Reaper is a dark and bloody cyberpunk game about the murderous gig economy: rich people need organs, and thanks to the omnipotent forces of supply and demand, your job is to acquire them from people who haven’t finished using them yet. A Grand Guignol style bloodbath relishing in the horrors of late-stage capitalism, Burnout Reaper is a brilliant, if blunt, exploration of Economy.

Each gig you take rewards you with Cyber Crypto, or CC. CC can be converted to Authority Credits, or AC, after each gig. The exchange rate is random, meaning your pile of CC could be exceptionally valuable, or practically worthless; You can puchase a few necessities with CC, but your bills have to be paid in AC.

Sacrifice is a universal RPG system, though only technically. In practice, Sacrifice is a deconstruction of the entire RPG medium and dramatic storytelling.

There is, in fact, only one simple set of rules: your character can do anything that the narrative has established your character can do. When they want to do something that the narrative hasn’t established they can do, then they roll 2d6. If they roll a 12, then they succeed. If they don’t, they fail… unless they sacrifice something.

.dungeon is a pretty simplistic RPG in a lot of ways. With a MMORPG dungeon-crawling aesthetic, the game taps into virtual RPG simplicity. You assign dice to your stats and roll the dice any time you want to do something. Roll high enough, and you do. Roll lower, and you don’t. Pretty simple rules-light stuff.

But there is one specific difference: .dungeon’s ludo-narrative taps into the meta-narrative of the game. Put simply, the real world affects the game-world.

Noblesse Goblige is a competitive GMless RPG based in Verdibog, a cosmopolitan goblin city in a swamp. In it, you play as a scion of one of five major goblin clans, each of which has a claim to the title of Gob-Boss after the current Gob-Boss, Lady Stinkworth, died without naming a successor.

Each player plays a character from a different clan, each with the goal of manipulating their way to the top of the successor list, bringing power, prestige, and lots and lots of money to their clan. Only one can be crowned, so political backstabbing, frontstabbing, and actualstabbing is in everyone’s near future.

Mission Accomplished is an RPG inspired by shows like Archer, The Venture Brothers, and Better Off Ted. It’s a game about being a team of super-spies who save the world on a weekly basis, usually in 30-45 minute increments. You drop into dangerous situations, mix things up, and then get out of there and back to HQ, a job-well-done.

But that’s only half of the game. The second half is the HR meeting, where the complaining, bickering, and blaming happens. The cooperative game of saving the world suddenly becomes the competitive game of credit-stealing and finger-pointing.

You Awaken In A Strange Place is an RPG.

Juuuust barely.

I mean, take a look at it; there’s barely anything there. The core tenet of the game is that everyone comes to the game unprepared. If you want to play this system, the first thing you have to do build the system itself. I mean, you have to call it a sandbox, don’t you? There’s nothing to railroad. The GM is given five minutes after building the characters to make notes before the game officially starts, like some perverse scholastic speech-and-debate competition.