The 2023-24 Fantasy RPG Mad Scrum is ON!

Anyone else feeling a bit of RPG industry déjà vu? 

 

At this point, there doesn’t seem to be much WotC can do to put the genie in the bottle.  The whole OGL fiasco has been a self-own of 4e proportions, and now everyone else in the biz is being pushed by a realization that the OGL is no longer a safe harbor AND scenting blood in the water of that no-longer-safe harbor. 

 

In short, we should see a flood of new fantasy RPGs out this year and into next.

 

Free League Press was already set to release the English version of Drakar och Demoner (which is being called Dragonbane).  Kobold Press has their Black Flag project (be patient; their web site is getting pounded), which I’m expecting will be as close to 5e as the lawyers will allow, but which I hope is more Sword & Sorcery than that.  There’s a new version of Sword & Wizardry coming, but that will simply be the game we know with any actionable trace of D&D language altered. 

 

The one I’m really curious about is Critical Roll.  If WotC hasn’t already locked the CR team into a contract to run 6e next year, they’re bigger fools than I thought.  So far CR has only released a fairly anodyne “we standby creators” statement.  That could mean WotC already has them roped in, or it might just mean that lots of their add space in their streams has already been purchased for D&D Beyond.  (I’m hearing that the episodes being released now were filmed last month, so they won’t have pivoted that quickly, nor do I know how far in advance they’ve sold advertising for.) 

 

If WotC doesn’t have CR locked into a contract already, Mercer & Co. have a huge opportunity ahead of them.  D&D might have the biggest name recognition, but their outreach is barely existent when compared to Critical Role.  Yes, a movie and a TV show will help if they are good, but that’s not really the way to bet based on other popular properties that have made it to streaming recently. 

 

If CR goes their own way and releases their own RPG (and it’s good), they’ll be a serious contender against D&D, the same way Pathfinder was for 4e.  If they sign on to play someone else’s game, that could be even more dangerous for D&D, wedding CR’s outreach with another company’s publishing experience and team of creatives. 

 

The big issue here is, which game would they pick?  It’s well known that CR started playing Pathfinder but moved to D&D because it worked better with the streaming format.  That means Pathfinder 2e is not a likely choice.  I think it also knocks the Cypher System and the AGE System out of contention for similar reasons.  Fate and the Forge games do odd things with storytelling that I don’t think would work for what CR does.  The dice mechanic for Savage Worlds might be a bit too difficult to follow on a show.

 

I’d love to see them play an OSR game like NeoclassicalGeek Revival or Old-School Essentials, but I suspect there are folks already bidding for CR’s attention with lucre that no OSR game could match.  If Kobold Press was willing to stray a bit from the 5e formula and tweak things to better serve a streaming show, they could have a shot. 

 

Whatever happens, WotC has shown weakness and memories of’08 are still fresh enough that everyone is slavering at the jaws for a chance in the ring with the king.  I fear most will try to play it safe and come out with something that’s as close to 5e as possible, but I’m hoping we’re about to see a deluge of creativity and variety that the RPG industry has never seen before.

 

It's going to be an exciting year.

 

 

Solving the DM-drought with the VTT

While responding to Dennis “What a Horrible Night to Have aCurse” Laffey, I suddenly thought of a way to promote DMing via the planned Virtual Table Top they’re working on at WotC.  My first ideas were nothing big, just offering some freebies to DMs, like tokens redeemable for personalized digital items you can use in your adventures.  But then I thought, well, how would they know I was DMing?

 

Obviously, you’d log into the VTT as a DM in order to have access to the DM tools, sorta like you do with Roll20.  Well, how do they know I’m actually DMing and not just futzing around?  They’d count the players as well, and to make sure you and some friends are not just sitting around logged in while you do other things, the VTT can track interactions: dice rolls, moving minis, interacting with your character sheet, etc.  So you’d end up with some sort of algorithm that calculated the number of players, the number of interactions, and the number of hours you played, and gave the DM running the game a score in tokens they could use to buy stuff from a digital store.  They could measure the tokens in Waterdhavian coins or something. 

 

But why stop with digital goodies?  Rack up enough “DM EXP” and maybe you get a physical patch, t-shirt, or dice branded to tell everyone what a dedicated DM you are.  (There will almost certainly be digital “badges” and achievements and the like; that stuff is low-hanging fruit.  I’m thinking what they could do to make everyone sit up and take notice.)  Maybe you get access to exclusive chat boards where you can converse with the designers and get sneak-peeks into upcoming new rules or adventures, and maybe even take part in polls to influence the final shape of the content. 

 

If DMs are, in fact, a bottleneck in the hobby, and WotC can get their VTT off the ground, there are all sorts of cool ways they could encourage people to DM.  And more DMs mean more players paying a monthly subscription to use the VTT and other digital goodies they’ll have on offer.  Yes, there are all sorts of ways to game this system, but this is one area where having a lot of ex-Microsoft people around can be very helpful. 

 

Will WotC do something like this? Damned if I know.  If their marketing data indicates that a lackof DMs actually is a problem, I imagine they’ll at the very least have badges and achievements you can festoon your profile with.  But I have no idea what sort of market research their doing this time, or what they see as their biggest hurdles. 

Is D&D Under-monetized?

 

Is D&D under-monetized?

 

Hell yes. 

 

Listen, D&D has insane levels of brand recognition.  Everyone knows what it is (or thinks they do) and it defines its niche the way Kleenex and Coke define theirs.  This should be a huge cash cow.

 

And nobody has figured out how to monetize it.

 

During the TSR years, all sorts of crazy schemes were tried, and one of them, pushing out lots of product, was a big part of what killed TSR.  (Here’s a dirty little not-so-secret of the RPG business: the more you publish for your RPG, the worse it gets.  Every book makes it that much harder to get into and that much harder to run as a GM.  That’s why in early 5e under Mearles & Co they had a PHB+1 book rule and they dripped out new official material slowly.  If you really needed new stuff, there was Unearthed Arcana, but that wasn’t official, and if you were not feverishly mainlining D&D, you probably didn’t even know it existed.)

 

This weekend, my wife and I played B/X D&D, using some house rules and the same blue-and-red books I got for Christmas back in the early ‘80s.  Thanks to the OSR, there is now so much material for that edition of the game that I doubt anyone could possibly play all of it.  I don’t have to ever buy another D&D book ever again, and I can have untold hours of fun playing the game.

 

Is D&D undermonetized?  Hell, yes, and the disconnect between playing the game and WotC cashing in is a big reason for it.

 

Publishing new books is bad for an RPG, but publishing books is about the only way anyone knows to monetize an RPG.  This is why WotC is casting about for some other way, any other way, to monetize D&D.  If past performance is any guide, when 6e comes out, roughly half the current player base will adopt it, and the other half will stick with 5e.  Because the 3e OGL exists, someone will likely create a 5e emulator and suck up all those “abandoned” players and do to 6e what Pathfinder did to 4e. 

 

You can’t grow your income via printing new books, and you can’t really grow it by not printing new books.  So how to monetize D&D?  You can try to sell the IP, but what is the D&D IP?  It’s mostly the beholder.  Sure, it’s also the mindflayer and some named gods and Elminster, but the mindflayer looks like a sci-fi refugee, nobody cares about gods who isn’t playing a cleric, and Elminster is Gandalf but randy (and he’s not all that randy since Greenwood stopped writing him). 

 

So what does that leave?  Squeezing some pennies out from licensing?  Been there, done that.

 

The current crew running D&D has a lot of background in Microsoft, I think?  Doesn’t exactly bode well for innovation.  And now people are paying attention to D&D, which makes real innovation even scarier.  Maybe they can make the digital push work this time? 

 

I really don’t think WotC is planning to do what the gloom-and-doomers are wailing about right now: going all digital, micro-transactions to get all the core rules, etc.  I doubt they’re going to do much to the OGL (though I fully expect them to include digital resources in it, and methods to sell through their new online portal thingy).  The kind of money they are “leaving on the table” is the sort Hasbro loses in its couch cushions. 

 

I absolutely see them pushing the “lifestyle brand” thing.  There’s no reason for them not to, and if it takes off, they’ll be able to move a lot of merch.  But I don’t see that having any effect on the game itself; I doubt there will be a drinking-shots mechanic added to the game in order to sell official D&D bar accessories. 

 

That being said, I certainly did not expect the debacles leadingup to the release of 4e, so I could be completely wrong here.  However, I’m not overly concerned.  Turns out, my 40+ year-old B/X books still play just fine, and signs are promising for a whole lot of new content over thecourse of ’23.

Answering JB

 JB, author of the awesome B/X Blackrazor blog, calls me to task for making unsupported arguments yesterday.  So here are my attempts to answer him:

 

Okay, so...my understanding is that 5E has a LOT of fans, including a large proportion that played some prior version of D&D (including many folks who, at one time, might have been classified as "old school" or "old edition" gamers). When you say you think MOST 5E fans are going to LOVE 5.5 you have to be a bit more explicit: what specifically is it you think is going to appeal to "most" 5E fans? What's the draw? The anime/storytelling thing? I don't get the sense that that's the reason "most" folks play 5E.

Gotta' give me more as an explanation for your conclusion.

 

First of all, let me say that there is a lot of guesswork going on here.  However, it’s not completely groundless.  My first source comes from WotC.  That said, WotC isn’t exactly an uninterested observer and has all sorts of (mainly financial) reasons to shade this data.  And I’m fairly certain some of it has come from very unscientific public surveys. 

 

With those caveats aside, let’s look at the data we do have.  We’ll start with this infographic published by WotC back in ’21. 

 

Ok, assuming most of us started playing around age 10 (4^th or 5^th grade in the US), that means people who started playing with TSR-era D&D at most make up 27% of their current players.  Even if we say only half of those played before 3^rd edition, that gives us better than 1-in-10 grognards amongst 5e’s fans.  That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it also means at least 70% (and it’s more likely closer to 80%) of people playing D&D missed the TSR era simply by being born too late.

 

Of course, just because they missed it doesn’t mean they’ve never experienced it.  Thanks to the OSR, it’s not impossible that they have had a taste of OSR play.  So, how are people playing D&D?

 

And here, I’m really gasping: a Reddit poll.  In this particular poll, Wild Beyond the Witchlight came in first, an adventure notorious for being so light on combat you can actually finish it without spilling a drop of blood.  Also in the top 10 are the investigation-heavy Dragonheist and the atmosphere-heavy Curse of Strahd.

 

Of course, you can also counter that the “hard core” (kinda-sorta but not really) hex crawl Tomb of Annihilation came in 2^nd and the chock-full-of-TSR-goodness Ghosts of Saltmarsh came in 4^th.  I can counter that WotC doubled down with Strixhaven, but then you can counter that WotC has published a lot more Stormgiants and Frostmaidens than Strixhavens. 

 

My final datapoint is the popularity of CriticalRole.  People keep linking D&D’s success to Critical Role’s.  I have no idea how correct they are; after the collapse of what had been the “conventional wisdom” of RPG.net over the past 20 years, I’m hesitant to lean too heavily on the new conventional wisdom.  That said, having seen the lines (and the money-generating power) of Critical Role and Acquisitions, Inc., I’m not going to believe that these streaming games haven’t had an effect on how people play the game.

 

None of these are silver bullets, just a collection of data points that nudge me towards believing that the build-your-own-furry combined with a build-your-own-background-based-on-your-eight-page-backstory is something that will please most D&D players these days. 

 

But just because it’s a scientific wild-ass guess doesn’t stop it from still being a wild-assed guess.

 

 

 

 

The Return of Gleemax!

So if you watched the trailer for the next “edition” of D&D, now called One D&D, you’ll have noticed that half of it was devoted to their upcoming virtual tabletop.  (For those of you playing developer-speak bingo, it was described as “robust” but they did not actually use the word “scalable.”)  With DRAGON emagazine vanishing once again, you’d be forgiven for thinking this feels awfully familiar…

I, for one, welcome our new digital overlords!  One of the big disconnects in the RPG hobby has been that the publishers are called publishers for a reason; they make their money selling books, not necessarily by getting people to play the games.  Appealing to the collector/completist has been a financially superior strategy over people actually playing the game.  

That this is a horribly bass-ackwards way to run an industry should be obvious.  If WotC can pull off the VTT this time, it might not revolutionize the industry, but it ought to revolutionize the publishing plans for D&D.  We might even see the books become loss-leaders, funneling people towards the monthly subscription of Gleemax 2, where the real money will be made.  

In addition, while One D&D might smack of the same sort of marketing BS as D&D Next, Ben Milton thinks they may mean it this time.  The more they integrate the rules of D&D into their VTT, the more expensive it will be to change those rules.  They’ll also avoid bifurcating their audience (which, according to Ryan Dancey, was what happened every time they released a new edition during the TSR era).  And, as Milton points out, if Curse of Strahd is still a viable adventure in 30 years, they can release a big, deluxe anniversary edition for the nostalgia sales with little effort or expense.  

However, just launching a successful VTT won’t be enough.  Lots of groups have already invested the time and effort to learn how to play via Roll20.  TaleSpire already has the 3D virtual minis thing going strong and has alliances with virtual market heavyweights like Heroforge.  I am absolutely certain WotC can lean into D&D’s domination of the TTRPG market to overtake those competitors who’ve already stolen a lap from them, but I suspect it won’t happen overnight.  

I just feel really sorry for One More Multiverse, who just announced full integration of the 5e rules into their VTT the literal day before this all dropped.  The timing on this has got to smart.  

Eating 6row?

 

I’m on record as saying that there’s no 6e for D&D on the horizon because it keeps selling like hot cakes.  But then Tasha’s came out, and then the expanded publishing schedule, and I started thinking that, whether they liked it or not, they were going to force themselves into 6e.  And yesterday…

 

Well, it might not be 6e, but there’s going to be a new… something in 2024?  Mike Mearls said thisabout a new edition 6 years ago:

 

I really don't like doing a new edition. IMO, new editions of D&D would focus on cleaning up trouble spots, applying lessons learned in design, and sticking to the core elements that made a thing successful in the first place.

Basically, a new edition asks people to re-learn the game all over again. It has to be worth that effort.

 

But that was before D&D showed so much growth and possibility.  Mearls has left the building, and his wisdom about “too much product killing D&D” has left with him. 

 

They are using the word edition, but they’re hedging things as well.  For instance, the next thing is supposed to be fully backwards compatible.  That makes it sound more like a 5.5 rather than a 6.  I honestly would not be surprised if they try to keep the 5 and we end up with some sort of “Pentium III” nonsense.  Probably something like 5+ or 5Next.

 

They did announce a reformed monster statblock yesterday that basically moves attack spells out of a monster’s spell list and moves it into their attack options, limited to once-per-day or with a rolled “cool down” mechanic like for dragon’s breath.  So this new version could potentially be all about quality-of-life improvements.  That being the case, here are some other things I’d expect to see:

• Simplified action economy that looks an awful lot like Pathfinder’s.  This will likely require heavy modifications to Rogues.  (I also suspect we’ll see an integration of pets/familiars/etc. into this new system that makes them more useful.  Maybe you can make a second or third attack with a pet without suffering penalties?)
• Changing the level names for spells, so instead of having their own levels, the spell’s level will now be the level at which you get the spell.  So fireball will become a “5^th level spell” because you get access to it when your character reaches 5^th level.
• Further tweaks to tool skill rules. 
• A heavily re-worked character sheet that makes it easier to understand how the different numbers relate to one another. 
• Milestone advancement becomes the default; the Players Handbook might not even include a leveling-by-EXP chart, relegating that to the DMG. 
• An attempt to resurrect something like 4e’s skill challenges.  It will faceplant as hard as the 4e system did. 
• The Artificer will be in the PHB.  I suspect we’ll see at least one new class.
• Classes that try to leverage the difference between short and long rests will do that less.  I expect the only class to see more changes than the Warlock to be the Ranger. 

I really wonder if the WotC crew realizes what sort of fire they’re playing with here.  5e is beloved; it’s the first system for literally hundreds-of-thousands of new players.  This is akin to doing open-heart surgery on the goose-that-lays-the-golden-eggs, and precedent has been set for competition from past editions.  Here’s the really crazy thing: Critical Role is publishing their own books now.  They don’t need WotC.  If WotC doesn’t bend over backwards to court them, and Critical Role does with 5e what Paizo did with 3.5e, it could get really ugly.   

EDIT: Mr. Brannon is more sanguine about this than I am.

Stat Blocks and Table Space

On a post from 2015, Ruprecht recently asked:

I'm curious what people think about the way the modules are handled. They just say Knight (for example) and the DM is expected to look up the Knight statblock in the back of the monster manual. This is brilliant to save space but seems less useful at the table.

This is easily one of the areas where OSR publications stomp all over WotC's stuff: ease of use at the table. An A5 size book with a good binding is easy to use and doesn't eat up nearly the table real estate that 5e's core books and adventures take up. Plus, in the best OSR stuff, the stat blocks and maps are all there on one page for you.

Compare to trying to run an official 5e adventure. You'll have the adventure itself, a big coffee-table tome with the adventure itself. And you'll be flipping back-and-forth because the maps are pages away from the keyed descriptions. And, as Ruprecht points out, you'll also want the MM with you to look up any foes the PCs might encounter.

But wait, there's more! Because you'll also need the PHB so you can look up the details on the spells everyone is going to be casting. And maybe Xanathar's as well, if someone is using stuff from that book. Luckily, you'll only need to flip back and forth in the MM if the encounter includes more than one type of monster. You'll be flipping a bit in the adventure book, and a LOT in the PHB. (Gift idea for the DM in your life: a pad of post-its they can use to mark important pages in all these books!) Which means your DM is going to be taking up twice to three-times the space of a player. Oh, wait, but we forgot about any notes the DM might have written down. Or space to roll dice!

This is extremely sub-optimal, but unlikely to change. Current RPG tastes dictate the complex stat blocks and rules, as well as the honkin' big books as the standard for AAA RPGs (and this is after WotC made a big deal about simplifying D&D).

Due to the extreme unwieldiness and generally meh contents, I've not felt the need to run one of the official adventures. But I do know people who are, and I can probably get some more info from them on how they're finding it.

Wherefore Gorgeous Hardcovers?

Noisms asks, “How did the publishing model for RPG books, particularly OSR ones, become so skewed towards high-production values and hence high costs?”

For the larger industry, the answer lies in the fact that most professional RPG shops are really more book-publisher than game-maker. The glossy, full-color, door-stopping coffee table tome looks more like quality than the thin booklets or magazine-like specimens that dead-tree RPGs have alternatively looked like. You can get away with charging $50 for these coffee-table monsters; you couldn’t do that with thinner, “cheaper” books, forget PDFs. And, while the coffee-table tomes are more expensive to produce, they’re not that much more expensive to produce. On top of that, the industry is so comfortable with this sort of thing, both as publishers and consumers, that nobody questions the choice and everyone feels they know what they’re getting into. So if you want fancy downtown Seattle office space and medical insurance and full-time staff, this is your tentpole product. It may not be the only way to go, but it’s where the “smart” (meaning “cautious and not-rocking-the-boat”) money is going to go.

But what about the OSR? Well, therein lies a tale. Actually, many tales, which can still be read on the old blogs, including Noisms'.

Return with me now to those heady days of yesteryear. WotC had saved D&D from the sinking ship that was TSR but something just wasn’t right. The 15 minute workday, the assumptions of a combat-focused design erected on a foundation that really didn’t support it, the terribly demanding math of encounter design that resulted in a single fight taking up a whole evening of playtime. There was a vague sense of dissatisfaction. Something wasn’t right. It was probably ’03 or so when I first heard someone say they’d rather be playing B/X if they could. (And Ferrus Minx, if you’re out there, you were a man ahead of your time!)

But then 2008 happened, and with every sneak peek at what D&D 4e would be, someone new experienced a visceral recoil from what they were seeing. The to-the-foundations transformations of not just the rules, but the setting info, of how parties were built and what adventures were about was bad enough, and it was coupled with an insulting ad campaign that literally drove people to seek other options. It had been fun back then. It wasn’t fun now. What had changed? Could we recapture the magic?

Yes, as it turned out, we could. And, when you read those old blogs, there’s a sense of shock and wonder when the old games were dusted off and played, followed quite often by a sense of betrayal and anger. It wasn’t something TSR or WotC had purposefully set out to do. They’d simply tried to improve the game, but they’d done so based on a set of assumptions very much not shared by fans of those older games.

The OSR knew that the old games were better (for certain definitions of better, sure, but as far as the OSR was concerned, those were the definitions that mattered). And the OSR wouldn’t just bring those games back, they would do it better than the Industry was doing! The rules would be better, the adventures would be better, and yes, the production values would be better.

James Edward Raggi IV was one of those making the most noise on this front. He was vociferous in denying all the “conventional wisdom” of the time. And he was right to do so; there was a lot of BS floating around that everyone “knew” was true about the hobby. (And keep in mind, among these was that RPGs were a dying hobby that could never recover; eventually, it would all be cheap little pamphlets printed from home, or deluxe luxury products like Ptolus, following the same pattern as the slow decline of the model railroad hobby).

James was determined to outdo the big companies, especially WotC. And, to him, this meant tossing aside what was expected. His books would be works of art. When his printing of McKinney’s Carcosa came out, it was shocking! Here was a beautifully bound book. The embossed cover felt decadent in your hands. The endpapers were not blank, but had hex maps on them. The high-quality binding meant it stayed open to the page you turned it to, and it didn’t crack and loose pages (like a certain PHB and MM of mine have done, not naming names, *cough*5e*cough*). It wasn’t full-color, and yet it still felt luxurious compared to the industry standard at the time (or even today, to be honest). It was a book that was meant to be used at the table and look gorgeous on a shelf. This was a book that was special, and you could tell that just by looking at it.

And Raggi wasn’t alone in this. We were told you could only hope to break even with six-digit print runs; OSR publishers printed high-quality books in the handful-of-thousands. We were told that print magazines were passé so Fight On! and others were created. We were told that boxed sets were too expensive and had lead to the death of TSR, so we got the Swords & Wizardry White Box, two boxed sets from Raggi, and, finally, when WotC got into the act, their boxed set looked like this!

The books of the OSR were experiments in usability, shrines for what we considered to be important in our hobby, and shots across the bow of a staid industry wallowing towards obsolescence. Probably the ultimate expression of this was Raggi’s hard-cover Free RPG Day offerings, each chock full of new, never-before-seen material, when everyone else was sending meager quick-start rules or thin pamphlet adventures.

I think there’s still a lot to be done with the book. I think Kiel’s Blood in the Chocolate is an amazing start, but I think we can push the functionality of the hardcover even further. I also think that electronic formats have been neglected by the OSR, and there’s lots of room for amazing things in that arena.

As for Noisms, he appears to see the high prices for these books as a gauntlet to be taken up. I very much look forward to seeing what he does as a shot across the bow of the rest of the OSR.

Retail Déjà Vu

This is going to look familiar to those of you over 30. You may remember when D&D was sold in Sears stores. I actually never got any of my stuff from Sears, but I did buy the Sear's exclusive poster from Larry Elmore last year at GenCon.

If you needed any further proof that D&D is experiencing a Renaissance, I think this Target exclusive boxed set is another hefty data-point to consider. This, on top of the Stranger Things box, means there are now three different "beginner" boxed sets to get you into D&D. I'm wondering if we're going to see a Critical Role boxed set soon?

I'm also curious if the rules are different from the Basic pdf. The ad copy implies that they've been re-written from the other boxed sets to now "on-boards players by teaching them how to make characters". And that implies that it doesn't use pre-gens. If you've got more info on this box, I'd love to hear about it.

War and Remembrance

On this day, 11 years ago, the 2008 Fantasy RPG Wars began. And we won.

By “we” of course I mean everyone who plays RPGs. Paizo shocked WotC into going back to basic principles and discovering that their fans don’t want 80 lbs of rules, nor is a new giant stack of character classes, etc. every few months or even every year a good way to support an RPG.

And now D&D has shocked Paizo into improving their games further, seeking to be the more mechanically complex game, but streamlining it to make it accessible to new players. At the Paizo booth at the GAMA Trade Show, one of the Paizo folks said, “We want Pathfinder to be the game you graduate to.” That sounds like a good place for them to be.

I used to think that WotC would eventually sell the license to D&D in order to keep the IP alive and save themselves the expense of making the game. I no longer feel that way. D&D is healthier than ever, and this rising tide appears to be lifting most, if not all, the boats.

Make the most of it, folks.

Art by Wayne Reynolds.  The genesis of Pathfinders goblins can be read here.

Let the Good Times Roll

Just got back from the GAMA Trade show, and the big news this year is… that there’s really no big news. Certainly nothing on par with the bombshells dropped by WotC and others on the state of the RPG industry last year. WotC told us that ’17 was the best year for D&D in its entire history and that ’18 was even better, but beyond that didn’t give us anything new in terms of details. We’ll be seeing more alternative covers. They appear to be sticking with the take-it-slow publishing strategy.

What about the influence of the OSR? Well, in addition to The Forbidden Lands (more on that very soon, but maybe not until next week), everybody’s gotta have a boxed set. Most of these are intro starter sets, but even these are getting beefier and beefier; the one coming for Cubicle 7’s Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying (itself very much a call-back to the original version of the Warhammer RPG) sports more than 100 pages of rules and campaign material, suitable for running as an entire campaign or using as a segue into their (very OSR) The Enemy Within “director’s cut.”

R. Talsorian is back. They’ve got The Witcher tabletop RPG and are working with CD Projekt Red on their new Cyberpunk 2077 (based on Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk 2020) as well as the “Cyberpunk Red” tabletop RPG which Pondsmith is crafting to bridge the timeline between the two.

Production values continue to inch upwards. Cubicle 7’s new boxed sets promise lots of neat handouts. We’re seeing the design decisions of the OSR/DIY bunch leaking into the mainstream, things like maps on the endpapers. They haven’t quite embraced the focus on ease-of-use-at-the-table, but they’re sliding that direction.

And we’re seeing a lot more openness in mechanics. I think that’s coming from a strong interest in making the games textured but simple. By “textured” I mean delivering more than just a core mechanic, an equipment list, a spell list, and a bestiary. Mechanics that serve to deliver an experience or tactical flexibility at the table. Things like rolling for depletion of consumables in The Forbidden Lands or Pathfinder 2.0’s new action economy and how it interacts with the spells. (For those not keeping up with it, you get three actions every round. Many spells now come in three flavors: a one-action version, a two-actions version, and a three-actions version. So you get to decide when you cast a healing spell if you want to heal yourself with the single-action version, someone you can touch with the two-action version, or send out a wave of healing energy to everyone in 10’ with the three-action version.)

We’re seeing a lot more variability on ICv2’s list of top five best-selling RPGs. (The Autumn 2018 list replaces Pathfinder with Lot5R. Yes, I’m serious.) They say that RPGs are selling well. Renegade Games, a relative newcomer to the RPG scene, sold through their original printing of Overlight, a very high-concept RPG.

So no big news, just lots and lots of good news. Our hobby appears to be doing quite well. There appears to be lots of room for big and flashy projects like Invisible Sun and little experimental things like Mothership. The Golden Age is rolling along apace. Make the most of it!

5avnica: OMGWTFOSRDIY

Well, this was unexpected. People have been yakking about crossing the M:tG and D&D streams since WotC consumed TSR. While both games involve high-magic fantasy universes, there’s never really been much overlap between them. And it’s no mystery why. M:tG is a competitive (usually one-on-one) game based on a complex, multi-state version of rock-paper-scissors. D&D is a cooperative game built around niche protection.

I could go on and on about how the five-sphere structure of M:tG magic poorly maps with D&D magic. I wish 5e’s magic system was as atmospheric and evocative as M:tG’s, but to bring them together would mean a serious overhaul of the 5e schools and how they work. I don’t expect them to do this. I expect them to gloss it and make handwavy noises about Green magic being analogous to druids and rangers while White is cleric and bard magic, if that much. That’s kind of a shame, because the ten guilds of Ravnica are based on really clever pairings of the colors, and that, I suspect, will get shoved into the background. Oh, they’ll still talk about the culture and resources and modes of the guilds, they just won’t touch much on the wellsprings of those things.

But what they are talking about doing really caught my attention. Mike Mearles, at about 5:35 in this video, says:

And then what’s really fun, what I think is the real interesting thing that the book is trying to pull off, is that the Dungeon Master looks at the players, looks at the guilds they’ve selected, and then we give you an entire adventure and campaign building system based on the guilds. You can look at the guilds the players have selected, and the book has suggestions for good adversarial guilds. Then each guild gets a section on building adventures that are driven by it.

Sound familiar? This looks very much like it’s taking a page from David McGrogan’s Yoon-suin the Purple Land, Zak’s Vornheim, Kiel’s The Hell House Beckons, Kowolski’s Scenic Dunnsmouth and, maybe to a lesser extent, Jacob Hurst’s Hot Springs Island book. Though I think the comparison to Yoon-suin is the strongest; this is an adventure and campaign-building set focused on the guild conflict of the setting.

This is an adventure book, from WotC, that has no plot.

The plot has been replaced by an “adventure and campaign building system” that guides the DM in crafting and improvising a bespoke experience for their players based on the choices the players make.

Is your mind blown yet?

The only thing that could make this more OSR/DIY is if they’d set the damned thing in the City-state of the Invincible Overlord.

What Hath Raggi Wrought?

So there was some chatter on G+ recently about what it would take for another Lamentations of the Flame Princess to happen. And by LotFP was meant the publisher, not the game; there are a handful of neat second-generation OSR games out there now that are on par with LotFP as regards rules. That said…

Raggi’s main claim to fame is that he never gives us something we’ve seen a dozen times before. There is no LotFP goblins-in-a-hole-in-the-ground adventure. Instead, we get things like Death Frost Doom (horror movie that can result in a zombie plague), Blood in the Chocolate (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with all the body-horror and implied cannibalism no longer implied and turned up to 11), and Broodmother Sky Fortress (a combination of gaming manifesto and an adventure designed to blow up beloved segments of your campaign). Even when he does something we’ve seen before, he does it differently. The best example of this may be Scenic Dunnsmouth, which doesn’t just give us a cursed village with a dark secret, but a generator allowing us to produce an endless series of cursed villages.

This is one of the reasons Raggi runs towards controversy. “Fantasy fuckin’ Vietnam” was a pejorative way to describe the Old School style of play. So of course James gave us not one but two different variations on that theme and, in the process, not only gave us the amazing Qelong from Ken Hite but also completely defused the phrase as a verbal bomb. If something is controversial or otherwise scary for publishers to associate with, well, that’s low-hanging fruit for Raggi. He knows he won’t have any competition in that space, so he goes for it.

(This is one of the things I adore about Raggi. You simply can’t attack the man. Any rhetorical ordinance you lob his way will get repurposed as grist for his publishing mill. That which does not kill him literally makes his publishing house stronger.)

But it’s not just topics and themes where Raggi pushes envelopes. Damn near every aspect of his business is involved in giving us stuff we’d never seen before. The LotFP game doesn’t just take incumbrance and make it useable at the table, he weaves it into the rules. Everyone knew that boxed sets killed TSR and that nobody would publish boxed sets again, so Raggi of course published his core rules in a boxed set (twice). He publishes books that aren’t monster coffee-table books but handy little reference books designed to be used in the heat of play, with sturdy bindings and covers, satin bookmarks, and endpapers full of important bits you’ll want to find quickly during play. He read along as Kiel Chenier excoriated the poor information design of WotC’s books and then challenged the man to put his money where his mouth was. He listened as Zak ranted about dice drop tables and making every inch of surface on a book a valuable source of at-the-table utility and published Vornheim with a dust jacket that’s more than protection for covers with drop-tables on them. He’s worked with people everyone knew he couldn’t work with, published stuff everyone knew you couldn’t publish, pays what everyone knows you can’t afford to pay the creatives, and thrived doing it.

And then there’s the art. This is probably the most obvious difference: the bare-breasted snake thing on the cover of the original LotFP boxes, the gross-out horror of the interiors. But again, what Raggi’s giving us is stuff we’re not getting from anywhere else. In any other publisher’s work, the duel between a man and a woman (especially a woman who’s one of his game’s iconic characters) would naturally result in the female winning the fight, delicately skewering her foe with a modicum of blood (if any at all). Not so LotFP: Alice gets stabbed in the face, right through her eye. The eponymous Flame Princess gets her leg eaten away by some sort of horrid slime beast and goes through most illustrations hobbling about on a peg leg. The medusa isn’t just a coy coquette, she’s in the midst of a ménage à trois when she petrifies her lovers.

Now flip through the closest RPG book to hand that’s not LotFP and you’ll see art you’ve likely seen a million times elsewhere: the grip-and-grin hero just staring ahead without background, the line-up of heroes striding towards the viewer, someone fighting a skeleton, someone healing a comrade, someone hiding up in a tree, someone riding a dragon. The quality will vary, depending on the publisher, but it’s the same stuff you’ve seen over and over again since the Easley/Elmore/Parkinson days of D&D. Hell, even they were not nearly so cliché as the stuff you’re most likely to get today.

What does Raggi give us? In the first boxed set of core rules, the illustration for the cleric shows our hero using his divine magic to burn elves. The halfling in the race-as-class description for them is hidden amidst the death and slaughter of a post-battle scene, Waldo-like. Where the art isn’t setting the heavy metal/Hammer Horror tone, it’s demonstrating how the rules for LotFP are different from the games you’ve played before. Sometimes it’s doing both.

Raggi’s the guy who gave Zak carte blanche to write and illustrate Vornheim when everyone would have said Zak’s style was completely wrong for RPGs (and most especially Old School rpgs). He’s also the guy who told Kiel that his style wasn’t yet up to snuff and teamed him up with Jason Bradley Thompson for the art. Raggi has a vision and he’s not afraid to pursue it.

And none of this is secret. James is loud and proud about what he does and how he does it. So what’s it going to take for their to be another publisher like LotFP out there? Simply this: someone with James’ chutzpah, honesty, vision, and the skills to see those through into finished products. When that person appears, I suspect James will be their loudest cheerleader.

The Golden Age Goes to 11

On Tuesday, March 13th, at the GAMA Trade Show, WotC announced that D&D 6e won’t be coming out any time soon.

Ok, that was not an official announcement. What they officially said was that 2017 was the biggest year for D&D ever. That they sold more copies of the 5e PHB in 2017 than they did the year it came out. That Xanathar’s Guide to Everything was the fastest selling product (I believe the word was “product” and not “book”) in D&D history.

In short, they’ve no reason right now to invest in a new edition. Everything is coming up roses (or, at least, as close to roses as things get for the publisher of D&D).

They also mentioned that Hoard of the Dragon Queen has been printed seven times (or was that seven reprints?). Reprints can be a mark of how badly a publisher predicts the popularity of a book as much as its popularity, but seven seems pretty large regardless.

Some other numbers they tossed out: 38% of all D&D players identify as female. 40% of all D&D players are college age or younger.

I don’t trust those percentages because I’m pretty sure they come from those polls they link to on their web site, so it’s very much a not-scientific poll. That said, it doesn’t appear they need to retool the game to appeal to a broader audience.

They blame live-streaming games like Acquisitions Incorporated and people publishing videos of themselves playing on Twitch. (More numbers they tossed out: over half of new players were inspired to play the game because they saw a live-streamed game.) Again, not entirely sure I buy it, but I also don’t have a more likely suggestion. (It would mean that another piece of conventional wisdom, that there’s nothing more boring than watching other people play D&D, has just been gored to death by reality. So that’s amusing to me.)

Now, admittedly, the GAMA Trade Show is where manufacturers and distributers are wooing stores to carry their product. Everyone’s going to paint as rosy a picture as they can. But everyone’s talking the same thing. The folks at Gale Force Nine talk about how spell cards are flying off the shelf. Folks at Monte Cook Games talk about how sales for Numenera and No Thank You Evil are rising. Numenera is a 5 year old game. That’s ancient for an RPG. It should be deep into its shrinking long-tail assuming it has one. Instead, they’re doing everything they can to reassure everyone that Numenera Discovery and Destiny are not a new edition. In normal times, they’d be at the point in the lifecycle where a new edition would make a lot of sense, assuming they wanted to keep the IP alive. Outfits that haven’t published RPGs before, like Renegade Game Studios, are getting into the market. Renegade is mostly known for family-style games like Clank! and The Fox in the Forest. This year they’re releasing three RPGs: the second edition of Outbreak: Undead, the Stranger Things inspired Kids on Bikes, and the high-concept Overlight.

But it’s the attitudes and interests of the retailers that is really telling. One couple told me their store went from sometimes having a Wednesday RPG group to having at least one group nearly every night. I saw another get excited when he learned that Cubicle 7’s Adventures in Middle Earth was written for 5e. If it’s compatible with D&D 5e, he wants it in his store.

Are we about to kill another bit of long-held conventional wisdom: that the boom days of the late-‘70s and early-‘80s are never to return? I don’t think it’s going to be that good, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong. We keep talking about it being a Golden Age for RPGers. Maybe we’ll soon need to be talking about a Platinum Age?

Why You Should Pay for Xanathar's Guide to Everything

Which isn’t to say that you must go out and buy it today! This isn’t a review of Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. If you’re curious and want to know if the stuff in the book is good for your campaign, well, the first hit is free.

Those links don’t go to torrent sites or dodgy Russian pirate servers. They go to official WotC D&D pdfs. Specifically, they go to what are called Unearthed Arcana articles. They’ve been cranking these out on their web page for years now and while some are fluffy bits of “here’s what’s happening in our campaigns,” most of it is new not-yet-official material to be trialed by players. The WotC team follows up occasionally with surveys asking what folks think of the content, in addition to reading what folks say on forums or just straight email to them, and stuff that needs and warrants it will get revised and republished in a new form.

This, of course, is a huge boon for D&D. The WotC team keeps in touch with their players, material gets a strong shakedown before “official” publication, and the players who want it have a constant stream of new material to inject into their games.

So what’s this got to do with the Xanathar’s book? Just about all the content in that book has seen the light of day before, either in free pdf format (like the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion) or as Unearthed Arcana articles. Which means, technically, you could cobble together your own copy of Xanathar’s from the various free sources still available from WotC.

So why buy the book? First, you’d have to do a lot of hunting for the stuff you wanted, plus you’d have to make sure what you find is the latest version. Second, there have been some “tweaks” to the material before final publication. (Just how serious those tweaks have been, I can’t say, but what I have seen mostly looks fairly minimal to me.)

But more than that, you’d be supporting the ongoing effort to create the content for the book.

Way back when, Mearls told us that they were tossing the old hardback-a-month game plan in the trash and exploring alternative methods for supporting an RPG line. What they have adopted appears to take full advantage of the diversity of D&D players.

Traditionally, we’ve seen two sorts of D&D players. The first set are the young folks with lots of time and no money. These are your pre-car teens and your college students, who have very flexible schedules, lots of time on their hands, and lots of people in their social circles in the exact same situation. These folks are perfect play-testers for the Unearthed Arcana material. Most play at least once a week minimum. It’s easy for them to keep up with the latest UA articles and pump tens of hours into playtesting what’s new.

Of course, it costs WotC money to do this. Material needs to be written and published. Feedback needs to be solicited and combed through for useful data. Then revisions need to be made and republished, and the cycle begins again.

So WotC collects this tested and improved material, commissions art for it, and publishes it as a book. And the other sorts of players, usually older fans with jobs and families and such, who have lots of money but not much time, can pay for all the UA work by buying the book.

I personally love this system. The lots-of-time-and-no-money folks get lots of free content, though they have to deal with the fact that some of that content isn’t ready for prime time (or is, in fact, kinda bad). The no-time-and-lots-of-money folks get a book full of play-tested material focused on content that players can actually use in their games. WotC is using their customers who have cash but don’t have the time to generate tons of their own content anymore to support the games of players with lots of time to try new ideas, crash those ideas hard, and help cobble together better ones from all the bits. And the gamers with cash get the benefit of these improved ideas to plug right into their game.

It’s too early to tell if this is the sort of virtuous cycle you can build an empire out of, but it’s certainly a better way to support an RPG. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with next.

Abandoned Territory

DRAGON magazine #154 was published in February of 1990. It’s largely a forgotten issue (the theme was war, but wargaming was out of vogue in the RPG world at the time, so it mostly talked about historic examples of military conquerors, feudalism, and heraldry) except for an editorial by James Ward entitled “Angry Mothers From Heck (and What We do About Them).” This was the infamous article in which Ward explained that the 2nd edition of D&D (published in ‘89) lacked half-orcs and assassins and renamed demons and devils in order to avoid the negative publicity that had dogged the game through the ‘80s. The article loudly trumpeted the fact that D&D was about good, heroic characters and teamwork, and would feature “wholesome” content that would be beyond objection.

The result? Well, causality isn’t an easy thing to trace, but in ‘91 we got Vampire: the Masquerade, the game where you played a blood-sucking undead slowly losing their humanity. V:tM was wildly popular (though we don’t have numbers to know if it was Pathfinder-levels of popular) and brought lots of new faces (especially female ones) into RPGs and LARPing.

When a successful RPG publisher states, “This we will not publish,” what they’re doing is abandoning territory to their competition. They’re making it easy for you to find customers they’re not servicing (or to peel off customers they’re servicing poorly). WotC did something similar at the dawn of 4e, basically stating that they were no longer going to publish material in compliance with 3e’s OGL and abandoning those customers to Paizo. (You could say a similar thing happened at the dawn of 5e, but licensing issues and a perceived lack of popularity have prevented much of anyone from capturing the old 4e audience, to the best of my knowledge.)

Of course, everyone has their limits, and it’s interesting to note how Paizo has quite purposefully positioned themselves just a smidgen outside what WotC considers acceptable. While what is considered acceptable isn’t always easy to pin down philosophically, most of us can recognize where something falls on the spectrum when we see it. D&D looks like this, Pathfinder looks like that, and the thing over here with the penis-slugs has got to be LotFP.

This is what makes an article like Kotaku’s “Dungeons & Dragons’ Gradual Shift Away From Monster Boobs” interesting. While it’s not an official pronouncement from WotC about what will and won’t appear in D&D, it’s pretty close, including lots of quotes from Senior Manager Mearls and Lead Rules Developer Jeremy Crawford.

While at first blush it appears to make enough genuflections to political correctness to warm the cockles of any HR manager’s heart, that’s almost entirely from the author of the piece, D’Anastasio. If you read the words of Mearls and Crawford, you get a very different message. Here’s a list of quotes plucked from the article and out-of-order to make it clearer what I’m getting at:

“We’re equal opportunity cheesecake merchants,” Mearls added. “We don’t assume heterosexual male players.”

In an e-mail, Mearls said that nymphs were simply unpopular monsters among Dungeon Masters. 5th edition was designed after crowdsourced playtesting, and over 175,000 responses from early testers confirmed that gamers prefer elder brains and beholders, apparently, to monster boobs.

“When we considered the audience, we tried to think of how men and women would react, and make sure the reaction we elicited was in keeping with the monster’s character and the design intent,” Mearls said.

Bare breasts are absent from Volo’s Guide, the latest supplement to the Monster Manual out in October of this year, in what Mearls says was a conscious effort to “make sure that the art we presented was as appealing to as wide an audience as possible.”

“I think there was a feedback cycle where the inner circle of fandom was mostly male, that group gave feedback on what they liked, and you had art that delivered what they wanted,” Mearls said.

The Mearls quotes almost seem to backpeddle on the promise of the article’s title: “No-no-no-no-no! We’re not removing the cheesecake, we’re just recalibrating it to appeal to a wider audience. Calm down, owners of Hasbro stock. We know sex sells; we’re just making sure we use as broad a scatter of titillation as possible.”

It’s an interesting dance, one in which WotC attempts to both cater to current corp-world pieties while still promising to satisfy the entertainment-hungry customers. Of course, it’s mostly for show; as the article makes clear, D&D’s days as part of a counter-culture are over. Nobody turns to D&D manuals for titillation anymore. The idea is laughable, like someone saying they get turned on by perusing O’Reilly programming manuals.

Which means there’s lots of abandoned territory there. And I mean LOTS! Venger Satanis has staked out his claim to part of it, with his focus on campy, ‘70s comedy mashup of Benny Hill and Star Crash. Raggi’s planted a few flags on the hill of sex-as-body-horror, but he’s hardly saturating that market.

And that, to the best of my knowledge, is all there is, really. Both Numenera and the new Blue Rose give a wink-and-nod to sex-as-empowerment, but their love-as-thou-wilt (pun intended) ethos is rather lacking in friction or heat.

Compare that to where popular fiction has taken the subject. The obvious point of reference is Game of Thrones. You can probably get there from the new Blue Rose (there are some intriguing relationship mechanics in the game I haven’t had the time to deeply explore yet), but it’s not the direction Blue Rose is pointed. You can probably tack that on top of D&D, but WotC has no interest in helping you out. Pathfinder would love to point you in that direction, but they won’t go there with you.

And that’s not even touching the real 500 lbs gorilla in the marketplace: romance. Monsterhearts is a (small) step in the right direction, but also an understandably timid one that’s a bit mechanically complicated in all the wrong places. (The fact that it started out as a lampoon of Twilight that morphed to embrace Gingersnaps and Jennifer’s Body says a lot about why the game stumbles. When we get a game that openly embraces Twilight without a hint of irony, then we’ll know we’re on the right path.)

I should add, I say this not having played Monsterhearts, so if someone’s got a more experienced opinion on this, please speak up. Also, if there are games out there that I’m missing, please say something. The market’s so broad now, it’s easy to completely miss huge swaths of it.