RPG Medium

So far we’ve covered how RPGs guide or encourage certain player behaviors from a lot of different angles: Games have rules, stories have rules, worlds, characters, and improv all have rules. Are there any other ways in which RPGs have rules?

Let’s go back to Of Grub and Grain for a moment. I mentioned cooking as a generally ignored aspect of RPGs, something we tend to just wave away.

What happens if we base a whole RPG around this oft ignored activity?

To describe the world of the Troika! RPG is to do it an injustice. It is surreal and macabre, a mixture of Neil Gaiman and Terry Gilliam, full of hilarious horrors and unbearable fantasies, akin to a drug-fueled homage to Jim Henson, Planescape, and 70s adult cartoons. It is a bizarre pastiche of a thousand different fevered imaginings.

The system itself is as unworldly as its world-building. Character classes are randomly chosen from a list, with each being little more than a short suggestive paragraph, a list of skills, equipment, and perhaps a single special ability. There is no established skill-list, you might know anything from sword-fighting +1 to bathing +3 or grilling +2.

You’ve probably heard of Call of Cthulhu if you’re involved in RPGs at all. Released in 1981 by Chaosium, the system is based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Usually set in the early 1900s, the game centers around investigators, artists, professors, and other similar protagonists of H.P.’s stories, discovering and hopefully thwarting the machinations of cultists, Old Ones, and horrors from beyond. It’s famous for having a high body count; do not fall in love with your characters, they will die or go mad with remarkable speed.

MΣTΔ is, natch, a very meta RPG.

I have a bit of a problem discussing MΣTΔ as a game, because the interplay of meta content and non-meta content in the game makes it somewhat difficult to pin down exactly what is and is not meta about the game.

Okay, deep breaths, let’s start at the beginning: what is “meta” anyway?

Meta, as a prefix and an artistic concept, deals with an interaction between a discrete body of work — whether a painting, book, game, movie, or other medium — and the audience of said work. “Meta” occurs when both work and audience are both aware of and able to address the body of work’s existence and the external expectations of said work.

Mythic Mortals is, quote: “an action-focused role-playing game that lets you and your friends engage in over-the-top fights and epic battles. Inspired by The Avengers, 300, X-Men, Devil May Cry, and so many more; Mythic Mortals aims to bring that fun, explosive experience to the table top.”

The mechanics of Mythic Mortals — a narrative-focused card-drawing strategic-combat system — are certainly worthy of discussion, but it’s the next line in the introduction that is most interesting to me: “You and your friends will play as yourselves, suddenly granted incredible powers.”

King is Dead is, quote: “A print-n’-play role-playing game about a family of giants, their feuds, and a prophesy that may spell doom. Will you follow your father’s wishes and swear fealty to Branwen, or revolt and fight against the tide of destiny and take what you think is rightfully yours, or perhaps you will find another way?”

Mechanically, the game uses the AGORA system, which was designed for a game that (at time of writing) has yet to be released. The structure is fairly simple, with stats, jobs, (read: skills) and assets. Lots and Ego are methods for rerolling dice and getting bonuses, respectively. An interesting Quirk system allows you to take a -1 die on any roll that relates to a personality trait, in exchange for a +2 die bonus on a later roll that relates to the same trait. This, in essence, gamifies the narrative structure of a character “flaw” causing issues early on, only to be pivotal to success later in the story. All in all, its a pretty interesting system.

Runaway Hirelings is a comedy RPG about the squishiest and most inconsequential characters in the whole of the RPG medium: the hireling.

Hirelings served a very specific role in the early era of dungeon-delving RPGs. Players often found themselves lacking certain abilities: perhaps no one was playing a lockpicking thief, or they needed some method for carrying and extracting all the loot they scavenged from the dungeons. One of the original uses of Charisma in 1st Edition D&D was to limit how many hirelings you could command at once, and how likely they were to stick around. At higher levels you were gifted a stronghold along with a specific number of followers that you could bring along on adventures, to help mitigate the rising difficulties of the dungeons.

Fiasco is an RPG, though it certainly doesn’t look much like one compared to the old RPGs of yesteryear. There are no stats, no challenge rolls, no character sheets beyond a single note-card. There are scenes, yes, and players act out their roles to advance a shared narrative, but no one ever rolls a die to see if they succeed at charming their way past a guard or pushing past a bouncer into the club.

d1 RPG is a joke, right? Of course it’s a joke. Reading the rules makes it abundantly clear that this is a bit of a spoof. A parody what it means to play an RPG.

Isn’t it?

I mean, it has charts! Table A tells you the results of each side of your d1: if you roll a 1, your action succeeds. That’s it. No failures, no complications, nothing but success.

Parselings has a early millennium action-webcomic aesthetic and tone, where players take on the role of the titular Parselings; ordinary folk who have become infected with strange ink-like entities that bond with their hosts and tattoo words on their bodies. Caught between humanity and dark linguistic monstrosities, the Parselings use the magic of these words to heal or harm the infected world.

The world of Parselings is deeply thematic, drawing on ideas of mutual aid, internal versus external definition, freedom versus self-control, and the complexities of communication when others may have already labeled you differently than you label yourself.