Deathbat's 2023 Best and Worst in Tabletop Gaming (and VTT)

 I got to try a variety of different new RPGs this year which was nice....I didn't stick to my usual barrel of tried-and-true regular games entirely, and as a result some interesting gems such as Mork Borg and Vaesen rose to the surface. I did a lot of collecting and reading this year, but much of it was focused on indie zine RPGs (see that series I have temporarily been ignoring!) and I managed to get aquainted with an entire subset of the hobby that I consider to be a movement toward hyper-focused, art zine style minimalist RPGs with a goal toward simple but effective rules and exotic, creative settings. This style of RPG is essentially a reproach to the modern obsession with giant books, huge campaigns, lavish color paintings for art and big price tags. I also got heavily in to collecting and reading the many offerings of Swedish gaming giant Free League Publishing, which relies on its own special brand of game system (the Year Zero Engine) to build various RPGs. 

What I didn't do this year was make a clean break from D&D though I did do so, fairly decisively, with Pathfinder 2E around --I want to say March?-- of this year. An inter-player conflict and a generally negative response toward the way Pathfinder 2E plays (using Roll20) from about half the players left me with a really bad taste in my mouth for the whole experience, which was made worse by the fact that I as a GM was really enjoying the system from the GM perspective. I subsequently got to be a player in another game, and while I did enjoy it, I found the excess tedium , of the mechanical gravitas of PF2E less to my liking as a player. Now that the new books are out, I am considering a re-entry, but I am also a bit gunshy.....and I know that choosing Pathfinder again may mean some players simply won't show. 

Anyway, here's my take on the Best and Worst for 2023!

RPG of the Year for 2023: Basic Roleplaying System

The new edition of BRP (5th edition) brings lots of minor tweaks and clarifications and a tighter focus, while still containing all the content of prior editions and the framework for any number of BRP powered genre adventures. It does not incorporate the Call of Cthulhu 7E changes as such, so that's about the only issue one might have with it (if you love the 7E changes, that is), though it does remain compatible and you could easily mesh the two iteratons together with minimal or no effort (as I have already done). So this is my Book of the Year overall!

Best RPG Discovery of 2023: Mork Borg

Sure its been out for a while, but Mork Borg was new to me! Sort of....I think I got the RPG a year or two ago, but found it perplexing as to full intent and set it aside. Following the OGL kerfuffle in January I decided to start exploring other RPGs (and simpler ones following the March meltdown as I call it), and Mork Borg rapidly grew to the #1 place on my list as I was able to finally grokk its deceptive emergent complexity out of a simple mechanical premise, and its elaborate yet deliberately obscure setting. Mork Borg may or may not be an ideal system for long term gaming, but it is most definitely a game you can pick up and play at any time and have fun with (as long as you enjoy brutal, grimdark Swede-punk eschatonic nightmare worlds, that is!)

Worst RPG Trend of 2023: Eternally Delayed Books 

There's a BattleZoo Book that was supposed to release months ago (EDIT: literally hours after writing this I got a notice the book "Strange & Unusual" is shipping today, so I guess this one is off the list). There's An Esper Genesis book that's like three years or more past due now. I'm still waiting for the Mothership 1E boxed set and it may not be out until March or later. For my own purposes, I've cut back on backing Kickstarters. By the time the books arrive I am often completely disinterested in the game at that point, having played and finished with it, and the new product is not enough to engender new interest. For various reason 2023 has felt like a tipping point for me: I am done with wondering if or when these products will ever manifest, time to stop pre-ordering or backing these uncertainties once and for all.

In a sense this issue has been around for many years and is as old as Kickstarter, but with one exception all of the delayed books I am waiting on are pre-orders or an ordinary sort, so I guess for me at least 2023 is the year this issue hammered in to the old noggin that its a bad idea.

Best RPG Style of 2023: The Zine RPG

I've spent a lot of time blogging about it this year, so it is no surprise that I think the new style of RPG fostered over the last few years has finally become its own cottage industry and now holds it place as a special subset of gaming in contrast to more mainstream RPGs. The focus on creativity, artistic exoticism, minimalist design and a very conscious effort to foster ad hoc play styles are all fairly unique to this new style of RPG, and those elements which are not unique still get realized in new and unique ways.

Worst Flub of 2023: Wizards of the Coast's OGL Kerfuffle

I won't belabor the issue, but WotC's attempt to destroy the OGL and force third party publishers into draconian contracts where they get a cut of the take backfired and caused the core supporters and fandom to lose trust in WotC. While the giant can no doubt continue with a broader casual fanbase, it will be interesting to see how this impacts them next year when the next edition of D&D arrives, ready to push people into WotC's online D&D Beyond playspace, located just west of micrtransaction hell, I am sure. What we're seeing here (I think) is the idea that D&D as an RPG may now be transcendent to RPGs as a hobby...the hobby will continue on and find new corners and darlings, while D&D itself becomes more, just, "D&D the hobby" and very occasionally a D&Der might be tempted into seeing what the whole other "tabletop are-pee-gee" hobby is all about. Honestly? It's kind of already like that, but the really interesting things is going to be whether or not the concept space of D&D Beyond and a focus on online microtransaction-based VTT gaming can sustain in a hobby who's key appeal has traditionally been that you can socialize around a table. Maybe, in the end, this just further bifurcates the hobby.

Best VTT Environment of 2023: PlayRole

I have to say that Role20 has done a lot to improve this year, so its a good VTT to play with, but my accidental discovery of PlayRole.com was rather profound, and our experimenting with it has proved to me that it is not only a viable place to run games, but preferential to my style of play. We're about to start a full fledged Mothership game tomorrow using PlayRole, so I expect to have a lot more to say about it as we go forward, but my current experiments with OSE, Mork Borg, Dead Mall and UVG has so far been rather satisfactory. 

I'm out of "Worsts" so is one more "Best" to ponder:

Best Revision of 2023: Pathfinder 2E V2    

Not much to say here, other than the new books (Player Core and GM Core) are considerably better organized and laid out, and I really appreciate that. The color scheme is nicer on the eyes, the focus on a new player experience is better, and the minor changes (Mainly extracting OGL content) are non-invasive for the most part. It is enough to tempt me back to trying Pathinder 2E again even though I've had a string of unfortunate incidents with it leading up to March when I abandoned the system entirely due to disgruntled player issues.   

I'll mention a runner-up: Swords & Wizardry Complete was revised by Mythmere Games (and is also back to publishing it), and the revision is very nice indeed! It's mostly the familiar system, but a bit more exposition and some minor but relevant additions make for an even more complete 0 edition retro experience.

2024 Expectations

So for 2024, what do I foresee? 

I'm focused on trying out more of these cool games I have read and discovered in 2023. I want to try out the Mork Borg spin-offs (CY_Borg, Death in Space, Vast Grimm and Pirate Borg) if opportunity presents itself. I want to use Liminal Horror to run The Bureau module, and Runecairn (or regular Cairn!) look fascinating.

I am 100% on board for 2024 with a not-too-distant BRP powered supers game, and I want to play a straight up Open Quest 3 game, especially now that Open Quest Dungeons is out. I am ready for ducks and mallards alike, because I still want to run Dragonbane and am disappointed the chance never presented itself in 2023. I would like to try the Alien RPG and Blade Runner RPG as well, but we'll see; I have never been as good at running IP-property-based games as I have more original fare. Most importantly though I plan to run a ton of Mothership and Traveller 2E, and I predict 2024 will be a big year for me when it comes to science fiction RPGs. We'll see!

I also want to chill out on collecting next year. I did a pretty good job this year, overall, but probably not by volume (I still bought as many books as ever, just many are smaller zine RPG books). I still need to reduce my overall collection, or my descendants will be cursing me in the future with the mess I leave behind. 

I may not get another chance to post before 2024, so see you all in the New Year!

Houston, we have an OGL

Morrus talks about it more here, better than I could, but it's an interesting beast: a more conventional OGL/SRD for the usual stuff, and a special online publishing arrangement through WotC that lets you use IP-infused content for Forgotten Realms on their website. Funky and blows my prediction last week to tiny bits!

Here's where the new OGL and SRD is. 

Wow.

Suddenly this year got a lot more interesting!!!

UPDATE: having had a chance to look at http://www.dmsguild.com/ I think it is official: D&D has been crowdsourced, big time. I don't know if it's a good thing or not, but it's definitely a new turn of direction, that's for sure. We're going to see a lot of weird stuff from here on out.

UPDATE 2: I've had a chance to browse through the OGL and SRD a bit. Of note is that while it's more complete than the free D&D Basic stuff, each race and class is still limited to one key option....so fighters still only have a champion option, for example...warlocks are only offered a fiend pact. I'm unclear on where this places use of the SRD to create content that wants to use the additional options in the printed books; iirc this was something that D20 licensees dealt with a lot in the 3.0 era, but the work-around was to go full OGL.

2015 Gaming Year in Review Part II: Kickstarters and OGL!!!

This was the year a lot of Kickstarters came to fruition, and also the year Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls finally materialized. It was also a major year for consumers to finally wise up and start scrutinizing wayward Kickstarters, especially serial offenders like Ken Whitman (alias Ken Whitless) thanks especially to Erik Tenkar's research efforts. Some highs and lows...

HIGH: Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls arrives

It almost missed 2015, but it did finally see release, and the Deluxe T&T core rulebook was a real pleasure to read and look at, a definite labor of love for both the authors, artists and fans.

LOW: The Ken Witman debacles

Not something I wrote about, but Tenkar's Tavern did a great deal to expose this serial con artist and his rampant abuse of crowdfunding, part of a long history of swindling and chicanery, it turns out.

HIGH: D&D 5E Gets Some Kickstarters

First Frog God Games did it in late 2014, with the fruit of their efforts coming out early in the year. Later 5E Kickstarters included Primeval Thule (which should be in my hands now if the Post Office can figure out how to forward mail....Sasquatch, remember to ask backers if there's an address change before shipping!!!), Tome of Beasts from Kobold Press, and more Frog God projects that seem to be experimenting with how much 5E interest there is (hint: a lot, but you need to make the Kickstarters easier to figure out and less risky).

Unfortunately all of the 5E books mentioned so far are produced on a more conventional fair-use basis because....

LOW: Still no OGL

I thought we'd see one by now, but maybe heavily modified with a lot of legal protection in place. Instead, we have no OGL going in to 2016, no word from WotC, and some suggestions from Kobold Press that maybe WotC is happy people are publishing without it, taking a bit of pressure off of the company to figure out how to support the game.

It's not bad in some ways; most 3PP have figured out now that you can produce your own content and publish it anyway, or are using the original OGL and just being careful.

LOW: Call of Cthulhu 7th

Call of Cthulhu 7th is not here. Backers might see it soon, in early 2016, but only because Chaosium is back on life support and breathing steadily, it seems. Will this Kickstarter come to pass? Was the Runequest 2 reprint another way to rob Peter to pay Paul (or whatever that expression is)?

LOWEST: Goblinworks Almost Goes Belly Up

Yeah I beat this dead horse last post, but it's worth mentioning because no one seems to be overly worked up about the fact that the Pathfinder Online game had two big, costly Kickstarters and ultimately ended up crashing Hindenberg style when Goblinworks admitted it missed its funding goal for completion by 75% and laid everyone off.....did Kickstarter backers ever actually get fulfillment on what they paid for? It seems to me this was not happening, not even close. For many (like myself) this was not a surprise....anyone who follows video game development could tell Goblinworks was designed to fail in their expectations and promises, but both Kickstarters had promised lofty goals, and I suppose did so cleverly....with one promising to fund a demo, essentially, and not the actual game. The other one fulfilled lots of print book promises, which apparently was what the backers really wanted. The Kickstarters ultimately felt very shady, in a "we met our obligations --technically--" sort of way....but if Goblinworks had been, say, Paradox Interactive or CDProject Red I think they would have been slammed, badly, for how they handled all of this. (Of course neither of those publishers would have done such a stunt in the first place).

PREDICTIONS: well, more Kickstarters loom (duh), as despite the bad ones there are many more success stories....and Kickstarters now are doing a better job of qualifying themselves by demonstrating prior successes. We will probably see CoC 7th in print but if there's still not CoC7 by the end of 2016 then I'll suggest it might be because Chaosium folded.....but the success of the RQ2 reprint Kickstarter suggests that shouldn't happen if they are careful. Meanwhile I predict that it will be shocking if Pathfinder Online is still, well, Online by this time next year.

Next: the more things change...

Formal work on the Realms of Chirak, 2nd Edition has begun

I am ready to tackle it. I feel my familiarity with 5E rules is reaching a comfortable point, and the ease with which one can design monster and NPC stat blocks is greatly appreciated. Realms of Chirak 2nd edition will be designed initially for use with D&D 5E and I will use the same publishing scheme I used previously to publish it (as an OGL resource), similar to the method used by Frog God Games and Goodman Games....unless WotC manages to produce an OGL of some sort before I am finished, anyway.

I'll post some rules stuff on the blog as I go to try and vett ideas to the general crowd. I've done a bit of this already....some 5E designs on Chirak races are already up here and if anyone wants to provide some feedback I would welcome it. Players in my group will likely already offer feedback; my next planned Chirak campaign in 5E will be a "one year later" revisit to the fabled Espanean city of Corlione, a locale which the prior adventuring crew all but trashed in their rise from level 1-15 in Pathfinder, before sailing south to the remote lands of U'al for some serious high level gaming.

So yes, their level one 5E characters will get to roam a city still rebuilding from the destructive wake left behind by the prior adventurers. That same campaign even had a grand plot involving time travel using a legendary "Pillar of Eternity" (no relation) which when united with a planetary convergence that happens only once every 2500 years allows for those with the know-how to slide up and down the time stream, to reappear at the exact point in the past --or future-- that the last or next convergence takes place. That campaign witnessed the birth of the Final War and the death of all Chirak at the hands of the cosmic fiend Molabal. It also destroyed Molabal, presumably changing the future history they witnessed.

Anyway....the new Realms of Chirak book is going to focus more tightly on the Sea of Chirak region to start (plus a couple key locales such as Sabiri, Xoxtocharit and Kasdalan), and then I'll work on expansions that focus on the other regions of the setting, since each one alone would merit a book in its own right. I figure this will keep me motivated for some time.

I was considering a Swords & Wizardry Complete editon as well. This requires both more and less work: 5E philosophy of design is much leaner and easier to work with than prior recent editions, and closer in spirit to the classic 0E retroclone, but in terms of "what you need" to run S&W it's still more detail than the original game demands. As such, it would be a matter of refining and paring down that which is not needed and replacing those rules and stat blocks with the slimmer and more frugal classic 0E design. But worth it; both games have a lot in common, and being intensely fun to run and play is top on the list. *

I wish I had the energy to work on a Pathfinder version of Chirak...I certainly have the detritus of such lying around to assemble something. Alas, much like the reason a D20 3.X era version of the game never came to light (despite my personal guide to such used from 2000-2008) the simple fact is that the raw mechanical rigor of that iteration of D&D is just not fun for me to mess with. There are many who love that rigorous approach to the game....I am not one of them. You'd literally have to pay me, quite a bit, to do it, because it feels like a job, not fun to mess with 3.X era stat blocks. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I ever Kickstart this (a possibility once I have a finished manuscript in layout and edited, if only to secure money for decent art) then a Pathfinder version could be a stretch goal or something. Or maybe not, I'm really not much of a masochist....

*On the other hand....I have this idea for doing (yet another) revision to a different setting, one with a grim old school thematic that I think might fit really well with S&W....Sarvaelen, the one I developed on this blog a while back, first for T&T and then later for a medley of BRP/MW/Legend. I only ran one campaign with it so far (in Magic World) but for various reasons I felt like the world wasn't quite "clicking." In my original T&T edition, initially done for the fun of it, I still presumed a world with elves and dwarves and hobbits/halflings...but with the darkness of a Howard/Lovecraft sword & sorcery feel. I later questioned the need to include Tolkienesque tropes in the world, which oddly was both liberating and limiting...in the sense that focusing on humans only helped develop the world as a more grounded and realistic locale, but it also carved out a lot of what at the core of a D&D world makes it D&D for many people (the fantastical elements are permitted for players as well, at least in so far as elves and dwarves are still fantastical, sort of). So now I'm debating the idea of going back to my original conceptualization, and reintroducing more elves and dwarves and such, albeit perhaps in new and darker forms...more mysterious and remote, ancient races withdrawn from the world which only recently saw fit to re-emerge when the empire of Camrinal destroyed itself. Orcs and goblins may surface as well, as a malfeasance boiling out of the damaged earth in the wake of Camrinal's fall, forcing the dwarves to interact with surface dwellers again. We'll see....there's a lot of room in this world for all of these races, as is fit for any good D&D world.

More to come on this, but once I started thinking about how S&W would fit Sarvaelen and the Watchers of the Sullen Vigil thematically it was like that setting finally "popped" for me....I think it's the final piece of the world-puzzle that that setting needed. More to come on that, probably soon.

The 2013 Year in Review Part II: Was the DDN Playtest Courting the Wrong Crowd?

I've made an assertion on prior occasions that one of the key factors which I feel will determine whether Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition can make a comeback is if it's presented as OGL (open game license)....specifically, goes back to the 2000-2003 style OGL and SRD setup that 3rd edition spawned, and not the GSL of 4E. When you look at rpgnow.com and other online ebook retailers you can still see the fruit of the OGL, rife and pervasive. Not a day doesn't go by that we don't see a new Pathfinder tome, some D20 variant, or OSR module or retroclone being released. Some might argue that this is evidence that the OGL did lasting and permanent harm to the D&D brand by allowing it to fragment (in such a model 4E would just be the nails in the coffin) but I would argue that moving away from the OGL was what really let it out into the wild.

In 2004-2005 we saw the D20 bubble bust, when the glut of D20 based products reached critical mass and store owners couldn't dump their product fast enough. A handful of the most creative and resourceful third party publishers managed to swim when everyone else started sinking, and we know who most of the survivors are today (Green Ronin, Monte Cook, Paizo, Crafty Games and a couple others). The market didn't evaporate wth the arrival of 4E in 2008, however...all it did was spawn new paths or directions by which new 3PP could arrive on the scene, and the GSL was an effective deterrent against keeping with the brand-name D&D; in pharmaceutical terms we suddenly had a spawning of generics in the market: Pathfinder and the OSR movement being the top dogs in this creative venture.

Most people in RPG publishing are in agreement that had 4E stuck with the OGL then it is likely there would have been more buy-in and support from the 3PP. Odds are we'd have at least seen a better effort at adopting (and fixing/appending/expanding the options for) 4E D&D if that had been the case, which would have fed into a possible synergy for the game between it and its potentially expansive 3PP options, allowing the fan base to look to more choices than it actually got in reality.

Of course what did happen instead is someone else (Paizo and the OSR crowd) grabbed the OGL by the horns and kept it alive, with new brands. Pathfinder and its process is obvious, but if you look at the OSR as it's own umbrella brand, under which rests a bunch of little connected and mostly compatible efforts, all also OGL, it's fairly obvious to see where all the creative effort in publishing went...and remained.

So it's with some curiosity that I realize that in 2013, D&D and Wizards of the Coast spent a great deal of time courting the player base that was interested in play testing, but as far as I can tell it did nothing to try and court the interest of the other side of this equation: the 3PP support. Sure, it's easy enough to say that Hasbro's lawyers have WotC on a short leash about this, and I imagine someone at Hasbro must imagine that the OGL had long term damage on their brand and sales (after all, someone buying a 3PP product is not buying a WotC product), but surely they must realize that the problem lies not in ignoring the OGL, but accepting the realities of the Pandora's Box they opened nearly fourteen years ago, right? That the way to grab the audience for D&D and bring them back into the fold is to embrace both the consumers and the creators of content....that the 3PP sales are not something people buy in lieu of official content, but something they get in addition to it. The health of the game will be determined by the ability of its fans to partake in the process, and a structured OGL environment is far and away the most effective legal process I've seen in this hobby by which one can creatively partake of it (and occasionally make money doing so).

I have a mostly complete revision of my Realms of Chirak book sitting around waiting for me to decide what to do with it. I have a Pathfinder-statted version which I use for my own game tables since I formally embraced Pathfinder, and I have a more generic version which might like to nestle in with D&D 5th Edition, if only I knew whether or not it was worth the effort. A year or more before 3rd edition D&D ever arrived on scene WotC was courting interested 3PP with the prospect of having ready-to-go content right out the gate for the new edition, and it was a gamble which paid off in spades. I doubt they will even dare to attempt such this time around, but I can safely say that a failure to embrace the creative content-producers of the hobby is going to backfire on them. In a world where you have Pathfinder and it's full OGL toe to toe against the fresh and somewhat uncertain D&D 5E, supported by an immense volume of old product online but otherwise locked in.....if WotC doesn't see that they're about to find out if the gaming world can handle the equivalent of a PC vs. Mac split......(and yest the Indies are the Linux OS in this analogy)...well, then I just don't know what to say except: Please make it possible to support your game through the release of my own products. I want to be on board with the next D&D, but you guys need to own up to your greatest triumph: the OGL. Without it, I don't see how you can do more than flounder at the edge of the hobby.