Why I Love TTRPGs

Sometimes I think about what I like so much about tabletop roleplaying games, and recently I've thought of maybe using a blog post to sort those thoughts out a bit. So, this is that.

The Background

Shortly after finishing college and getting married, I moved to a new town where I knew nobody, and managed to meet a group who got me into playing Magic: the Gathering (on which I was instantly hooked). As it turns out, one of those players was also in an RPG group, and offered to have their GM introduce our Magic playgroup to D&D 3.5 (probably; it was three-point-something and houseruled to hell and back, so I'm speculating). Then 4E dropped and my new group tried it (though the veteran GM bounced off due to the sheer scale of unfamiliarity), and then I promptly moved again.

But I was already hooked.

I found ways to dabble in 4E in my new (new) town a bit, then discovered Pathfinder 1E. It grabbed me in a way that D&D 4E hadn't, and I dove in fully. I got deeply involved in the game, the forums, the organized play campaign, everything. However deeply involved you're imagining, I was more involved than that (unless you were imagining "actually hired by Paizo," in which case it's just one degree below that). However, after several years, I began straining against the defects of both the game itself and its player base (or more like, its GM base). So when D&D 5E came out, I left for what I thought would be greener pastures. Its apparent smoothness was appealing, and I even published some splatbooks for it, but it soon revealed itself to be an extremely small game, in a sense.

During my (comparatively brief) 5E phase, I also found myself exploring other experiences in the TTRPG space—everything from Blades in the Dark to Magical Kitties Save the Day. My D&D bubble had popped, so to speak, as I discovered that not everything had to work the same way. This is also around the time I got onto Twitter and started connecting with other TTRPG folks. My horizons expanded rapidly, and I became enamored with everything the medium could do outside of adventure fantasy. I started reading and internalizing all the thoughts I could find from indie players & creators, and even served my time in the fishknife mines, publishing emotional and narrative-focused titles that stretched my understanding of the medium.

However, for all my zeal for indie TTRPG values, I found myself with less and less drive to actually play. I didn't even like my own published titles enough to play them. The magic was gone, and I didn't know why. I was too busy trying to "build my brand" or some bullshit like that to really think too hard about not liking TTRPGs anymore, but that changed abruptly when someone targeted me with a harassment campaign that ultimately led to me taking down all my work and deleting my online presence. (That's why I don't use my real name online, and why I didn't tell you what I published.) Suddenly I had plenty of time to think about it.  

Since then, I've been on the slow (and often painful) journey of re-learning why I ever fell in love with TTRPGs in the first place, and moving toward that source of joy. Here's what I've come up with.

The Thoughts

For starters, it turns out I just really fuckin love fantasy. Favorite genre. It's a bit of a hop down from there to the runners-up of spaceships and superheroes, and then my interest really drops off. But fantasy? I was born for that shit. It's kinda wild how I just happened to start in my favorite genre and then wandered off, and that's probably because of cultures and counter-cultures. Like, D&D has a problematically-large footprint in the TTRPG space, leading to a weird phenomenon where there's lots of people who are only playing it because they've never tried anything else. But then you get a culture of opposition which assumes that this is the only reason anyone is ever playing any fantasy game. So when I got deep into online indie TTRPG spaces, I internalized the idea that there are no "real" fantasy enjoyers, just immature D&D sheep, and it took a while to unpack that. I could probably write a Whole Thing™ about indie culture's defects on that point, but that's out-of-scope so let's just say "do better, jackasses" and move on.

Another thing that I originally fell in love with was customization (this is probably why that first 3.X game hooked me, and why PF1 so easily yanked me away from 4E). With most types of games, every player role is predefined: every Monopoly player has the same available game actions, for example. This means that players are sort of... interchangeable, I guess? Like, yeah, for non-game-related socialization it matters who's in the chair next to you, but in terms of the actual gameplay, two people of similar skill levels are going to engage similarly, to some degree. But when I got to make my own character to bring, suddenly I had a way of putting my own unique fingerprint on the whole group's play experience (and they got to put theirs on mine). For various reasons, including childhood trauma that I won't go into detail about, it blew my mind to suddenly be able to be more than just a disposable seat-filler. It mattered that it was me who showed up, instead of anyone else who could have been there instead. A game whose play is impacted by pre-game customization lets the players "meet" each other in a really unique and special way. This is probably one of the main reasons that I bounce off of low-customization, rules-light TTRPGs outside of the occasional low-investment one-off.

The third aspect is that TTRPGs let me scratch the "What if?" itch in a really special way. You see, I'm the sort of person who, after watching a movie or something, likes to ponder other possibilities. Sometimes it's about obvious plot holes ("Why didn't that character do this obvious thing?"), and other times it's just curiosity ("How would that event have panned out if that character did this instead?"). Either way, the answer is that the actions were selected by the author, from outside the fictional universe, to create a compelling story. But I always wonder, from an in-universe perspective, what would happen if things were different and events played out according to cause and effect. How does Avatar change if Toph hadn't been conveniently written out of the fight at the end of season two, for example? TTRPGs gave me an opportunity to explore these possibilities: I could enter an imaginary world and interact with it authentically, without the constraints of storytelling. Instead of wondering "Why didn't they just do X?" I could just say "I do X" and see what happens—not what an author thinks should happen for a compelling narrative, but what actually happens. No other medium lets me do that like TTRPGs do. (Unfortunately, much like with the fantasy thing I discussed earlier, the TTRPG community taught me to abandon this and instead reduce TTRPGs to just another storytelling medium, costing me years of my life trying to get back to my joy. Once again: do better, jackasses.) 

Finally, it seems I really like adventure-oriented games, with lots of physicality to the way characters interact with the world: exploring, fighting, messing with stuff, that kind of thing. I love encountering a situation, looking at the characteristics of my environment, and coming up with ways to use my character's capabilities to interface with that environment to produce outcomes. This probably aligns a bit with OSR play, though I've never tried it so I can't speak with certainty there. By comparison, I tend to bounce off of games where your stats/rolls are based on what kind of approach you use instead of the actual parameters of your character or your actions. ("Oh, nice idea using the [noun] to [verb]. Roll plus Clever, exactly as you would have with any other idea.") I likewise get little satisfaction from games where rolling to perform a given action can generate unrelated complications. I don't want this whole world of imagination reduced to set dressing and flavor text, you know?

The End

So yeah, that's what I'm into. Bye.

This Is Not a Daggerheart Review

First of all, like most people at the time of this writing, I haven't actually played Daggerheart, just read portions of it.

Second, I mean it when I say this isn't a review, but I know how you are, so I'll tell you this: based on first impressions from reading, I think Daggerheart is pretty well designed for its intended experience, and also I have zero interest in ever playing it. Do with that what you will.

But I do want to talk about Daggerheart. There are basically two things I want to talk about. Maybe they should be separate posts, but they're not going to be.

Daggerheart Gold

Let's start with how Daggerheart handles cash. The Daggerheart SRD says that its gold is "an abstract measurement" of wealth, which is reflected in the units presented: handfuls, bags, and chests, rather than units of currency. It goes on to explain that 10 handfuls add up to one bag, and 10 bags add up to one chest. This "replaces" the traditional mechanic of having your wealth measured in pieces of copper, silver, and gold, with 10 coppers adding up to one silver, and 10 silvers adding up to one gold.

Yeah, it's literally the same mechanic, they just changed the names on the denominations. Nothing's actually different. This is fascinating when you consider how many people are praising the "new system" for making things "less fiddly." Hell, traditional fantasy games had already moved on from triple-denomination currency to the much simpler decimal gold, so Daggerheart is actually a step backwards toward detailed tracking of each denomination. Yet here we are.

There's so much about the TTRPG community that we can unpack from this. I've often noted that people have been critiquing bookkeeping (whether of gold, arrows, rations, etc) for decades while their alternatives added wrinkles instead of smoothing anything out. Now with Daggerheart Gold, where it's literally the same thing under a different name, we have an especially concrete—and, importantly, highly visible—example of this. It is revelatory that so many people will complain about a mechanic being too fiddly but then praise alternatives that are even more fiddly. Obviously, it means it was (for these people, at least) never really about a process being fiddly, but that in turn means a couple of other things that are more interesting. 

One is that if it's not about being fiddly, it must be about something else. What could that be? I can only speculate, but my best guess is that it's about identity. Some folks in the TTRPG community mentally associate "knowing how many coins and arrows you have" with a certain type of person, experience, or play culture that they don't want to engage or be associated with. Give them an alternative with a different "feel," like a vague-sounding name change or a step-down supply die, and now they feel sufficiently separate from that out-group. Again, this is speculation on my part, but it tracks with the kinds of in/out group dynamics (like deeming every fantasy adventure TTRPG to be guilty of all of D&D's crimes) that are rampant in the space.

The other thing is the lack of perspective. I think people really honestly believe that they're seeking (and finding) simpler, less-fiddly alternatives to the "change a number" mechanic. This suggests a mixture of two things: a lack of game literacy (to recognize the similarities and differences between mechanics) and a lack of self-awareness (to recognize one's own reasons for gravitating toward one mechanic over another). If we're being honest, the TTRPG community has room for growth in both areas, so this tracks as well.

Clarity of Intent

What I've observed of people's reactions to Daggerheart is that they're very polarized. Some people are looking at it and saying "what the hell is this" while others are singing for joy. I think there's a good reason for this split, and it has to with the difference between the definitional nature of RPGs, and what Critical Role actually does with RPGs. They're not the same thing, and that's where this fork in the road comes from.

You see, roleplay-gaming—that is, the act of playing a roleplaying game in the straightforward sense—is about stepping into the shoes of a person in a real-to-them world, and using their authentic interactions with that world as the conduit through which gameplay (the literal playing of a game) occurs. By contrast, what Critical Role has been doing all this time is to repurpose an RPG into a sort of scaffold for improv theater, something to be performed. To put it another way, roleplay-gaming is about gamifying your proxy experience as an inhabitant of a world, while Critical Role is about performing unscripted theater while some game elements are sprinkled in for spice.

The two are fundamentally different, and you could see the tension all the time. There was a constant give-and-take between the nature of games, rules, and roleplay on one hand; and the interest in having enough control to craft a compelling and performable narrative on the other. So when the CR team decided to publish something of their own, which direction do you think they'll go? Will they make an RPG and continue to strain against it, or will they create something that's designed to do exactly what they've been trying to do all along? (It's the latter. Please tell me you understand it's the latter.)

As I briefly mentioned at the top of the post, Daggerheart seems (from an initial reading) like it knows what it wants to do and isn't shy about doing exactly that. And what it wants to do is to give a little structure and support to folks who are trying to collaboratively create fantasy adventure narratives to be performed as improv theater. You know, like Critical Role does.

And that's where the community reaction split comes in. If you're like Critical Role, if you too are a Theater Kid™ who's been trying to master the art of making an RPG get out of the way of your improv theater, then Daggerheart is extremely exciting to you! Instead of needing to fight against the rules of a game and the internal consistency of roleplay, Daggerheart platforms your creativity and invites you to wield it. However, if you're more used to roleplay-gaming, if you want a playable game and a tangible world, then Daggerheart likely feels like a big nothing-burger, as there's not enough connective tissue to do anything with it if you're not filling large amounts of space with your own improv.

Done Talking Now

Bye.

Human To Do

Humans do things.

Humans do things for lots of different reasons.

We eat, drink, and sleep because our survival requires it. We go to work as part of a transaction to get things we need or want. We fix things that break so that we can keep using them. We rest so that we can continue to do things later.

But there are some things we do that don't have such practical, productive, or transactional value, but they still have worth, and that worth is inherent. There are things we simply do because we are human. It's human nature to do them, therefore they have worth. They don't derive their worth from productivity or practicality, they have "human worth." Social bonding is human to do. Learning and exploring is human to do. Telling stories is human to do. Making art is human to do. The list goes on. Doing these things requires no justification, because simply being human means these are the things you do.

To put it another way, suppose that through some hard-fought victories we managed to end scarcity and exploitation within your lifetime. Your food, shelter, health, and safety are all guaranteed with minimal daily effort. Nothing else requires your attention. What would you do with yourself all day? The things you would find worth doing after the world was fixed, the things you do when you don't need to justify what you do—these are the things that have human worth. These are the things that are human to do.

And if it's worthwhile enough to do when the world has been fixed, isn't it also worth doing now, if you have the opportunity? If we say that our goal is a world where people are free to do these things, but we demand justification when someone carves out time for these things right now, then we are hypocrites. Fundamentally human activities require no justification.

It is with all of this in mind that I want to talk about games, and how we relate to them.

To be clear, I am not talking about the broader concept of "play." Play is indeed very natural; humans aren't even the only creatures to do it. It's a very broad umbrella, covering pretty much anything done recreationally—one might even argue that it's not so much a thing to do as it is a way of doing things. By contrast, game-play is a specific activity. Play doesn't become game-play until you've opted into the constraints of a game: a set of rules that puts made-up obstacles between you and a made-up goal for no other purpose than to structure your play around them.

The playing of games has "human worth." Games need no justification, because playing games is simply human to do. It is therefore tragic that so many people try to demand that justification, and it is further tragic that the usual response is to try and offer such a justification (which in turn wrongly validates the demand).

Sometimes I see people demand that games be leveraged as a communicative art to send a message, that games must Have Something To Say. Others will respond that games should be allowed to not Send A Message, because they offer "escapism," a vital respite from a weary world. They will argue with each other about this or that game and whether it is sufficiently justified by Message or Escape. However, the argument of "which justification is enough" is itself invalid, because games have human worth and do not need justification.

Certainly it is possible for a game to send a message, or offer an escape to another world, or tell a compelling story, or provide beautiful imagery, or any number of other lovely things. Many games do! But they don't need to in order to be worth making and worth playing, because playing games is simply human to do. Games have human worth all on their own.

We see evidence of the denigration of games in other ways, as well. For example, a decades-old problem in the video game scene is that many people think of video games as needing to feel like movies in order to be good. We have culturally acknowledged cinema as a valid artform (but not animation, hence all the bad live-action remakes of good cartoons, but I digress), and thus video games must aspire to emulate movies—this is part of where the graphical fidelity arms race comes from. Although there's nothing wrong with a given game emulating movies, it's wrong to think games as a category need to do so. No artform's peak lies in the emulation of a different one, and games are no exception. Games have human value on their own.

Speaking of movies, our cultural disrespect toward games also manifests in a version of the "talking over a movie" problem. You see, even among innately human activities, nobody likes all of them in equal measure. This means that sometimes, for example, someone might join friends on movie night but care less about seeing the movie than about hanging out with their friends. The movie is effectively just a backdrop for social conversation, rather than an object of interest on its own. That's how you get people talking over movies. Thankfully, we have largely normalized the idea that such people have a responsibility to consider that others in the room might be interested in the movie itself: if someone talks over a movie (without making sure everyone else is cool with it first), it's widely accepted that it's the talker who's the jerk. We don't blame the movie-enjoyers for having weird hangups and getting worked up over nothing.

Unfortunately, we have yet to fully establish the same norms for games. In physical games—meaning games where there's no computer to automatically enforce the rules—the people who don't like games as much often feel culturally empowered to narcissistically assume their priorities are the norm and disrupt the game in pursuit of their other priorities. Those who were interested enough in the game to resist that disruption are often treated as "picky" or "obsessed" or "missing the point." That we can have the same behavioral dynamic but with opposite conclusions about Who's The Asshole is illustrative of how far we have to go in terms of culturally acknowledging the human value of games.

I hope someday this changes. I hope we can start seeing the humanity in games enough to stop demanding their justification, to stop seeing them as emulations of "better" mediums, and to stop treating interest in them as a character defect.

Maybe someday.

Yakko's TTRPG List

 This morning I was stricken with the insane whim to answer someone's "Other TTRPGs besides D&D and Pathfinder?" question over on BlueSky by listing about 100 of them to the tune of the "Nations of the World" song that Yakko sings on Animaniacs. 

Since I went to the trouble of doing that, I figured I may as well transcribe it here, where it will be ever so slightly less ephemeral than on BlueSky. Enjoy.

< Verse 1 >

Lancer, Ryuutama, Fabula Ultima, anything PbtA;

Ironsworn, Tidebreaker, Against the Darkmaster, Cyberpunk, Journey Away;

Dungeon World, Dragonbane, Vampire the Masquerade, Mothership, BESM;

Avatar Legends and Over the Edge and Forbidden Lands, Smallville, Lumen!

There’s Shadowrun, Sword World and Stars Without Number and Star Wars and Star Trek and Masks;

There’s Worlds Without Number and Tails of Equestria, Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast

< Verse 2 >

There’s Mutant: Year Zero and Wretched-and-Alone and OSR hacks black and white,

There’s Sentinel Comics and Mutants-and-Masterminds, Apocalypse World and Firelights

The Quiet Year, Daggerheart, Break, Basic Roleplay, Deadlands, Coyote and Crow,

Dungeons: the Dragoning, also The Dragon Prince, Dungeon Bound and Wanderhome

There’s Marvel Heroic and Edge of the Empire and Shadowdark and Gubat Banwa,

There’s Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer Fantasy, Heroic Chord and Those Who Wander

< Verse 3 >

There’s Legend of Five Rings and Animon Story, Knave and Cairn and Into the Odd

Stacks of Goblins and GURPS, Tales of Myriad, Locus and Cortex Prime, Diesel, Stonetop

Against Fall of Night and Five Torches Deep, there’s TMNT-and-OS,

Urban Shadows, Exalted, Pendragon and Earthdawn then Blades in the Dark and Vortex

There’s Burning Wheel, Elric and Scion and OSRIC and Mork Borg and Earthdawn and Cypher

There’s Mage: the Ascension and Golden Sky Stories and Megalos and Terminator

< Verse 4 >

Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and Dungeon Bitches, in charity bundles galore

Monsterhearts, Genesys, Magical Kitties, and Rangers of a Broken World

Take 5 and Traveller, Remarine, Rolemaster, Gumshoe and Songs-and-Sagas

Solarcrawl, 13th Age, Fist, Hard Wired Island, and Heroes of Cerulea

There’s Aether, Godbound, Armour Astir, and Beacon, Core 20, Bolt, Quest, and Arise

Leverage, Fellowship, Fate Core and iHunt and…

His Majesty the Worm, 

Monster of the Week, 

Feng Shui and 

Foxfire and 

Mouseguard and 

Runequest and 

Solo But Not Alone 5!

Understanding SNES-Era RPG Mechanics

Let's talk about old-school RPG video games—specifically, what made them tick, what made their gameplay so compelling back in the day. I'm writing this partly because game-related trivia can be fun for its own sake, but also because I think a lot of people looking back at SNES-era RPGs wildly misunderstand how they worked. This is because some of the SNES-era mechanics have since been pulled out of their SNES-era contexts and repurposed for other roles in modern games, leading people to (mis)interpret old games through the lens of modern design. For example, the random encounters and XP-based leveling that is often maligned as just artificially padding the play time actually used to have an important role in the overall design. Curious? Let's dive in.

The Gaming Landscape

As long as we're talking about understanding things in context, let's look at the bigger context of video gaming as a whole. This was before everything was 3D open worlds and first-person shooters. Heading into this era, the non-RPG games were mostly stuff like Mario and Street Fighter, in various forms and IPs. There were a few outliers (notably Zelda, which is probably part of how it took off), but for the most part everything was jumping and punching. Even the crappy movie tie-in games that came out every year were mostly platformers.

I couldn't tell you whether it was intentional or not, but RPGs served as a foil to all the real-time dexterity-based gameplay dominating the field at the time. It was long-form gaming. Instead of giving you two minutes of testing your input skills and reaction time where one or two screwups would spell doom, they gave you a long series of interconnected decisions across multiple axes, whose consequences were cumulative rather than immediately catastrophic. Other games were threatening Game Over if you screwed up a couple times in 90 seconds. RPGs threatened Game Over if you had accumulated too many inefficient decisions over the past couple of hours. That's the paradigm you need to keep in mind to understand these games.

The Core Gameplay Structure

The RPGs of yesteryear had a pretty consistent play structure. You would be In Town, where you can refresh all your various resources, and then you would Venture Out (whether across the map to a different town, or to an important dead end and then back to the original town). In other words, gameplay is about getting from one "refresh point" to the next before the resources that you had refreshed became fully depleted. Where this gets interesting, and indeed the "meat" of gameplay, is the variety of resources and how they all intersect with each other.

The Resources

• HP — You can think of HP as the most foundational resource, because it's the one that determines if when you've lost. When a character is out of HP, they're unusable. When the whole party is out of HP, it's game over. Every time you engage in combat, even if it's easy, you're going to lose at least a little bit of HP, putting you at least a little bit closer to losing.
• Actions/Turns — As I'm sure you already know, these RPGs were using turn-based combat. Do you use this character's turn to attack? Heal? Set up a buff? Use an item? If it's a long fight, a buff could yield great dividends, but in a shorter fight it's a wasted turn. Healing might be what one character is best at, but if you're paying enough attention to know that the fighter almost killed that monster, maybe it's better to have the healer smack 'em and remove that source of HP drain from the fight.
• Mana/PP — The ability to do things. This presents the possibility of "running out of gas." In most RPGs you had a "normal attack" with no cost, but it's a single-target attack that's often your least powerful option for most characters. Usually somebody has an attack that hits every enemy, or is more powerful, or gets a bonus against this enemy because it's the right element; but it costs Mana and you only have so much. If you use it now, this fight ends faster, making you lose less HP, but that's also true for the future fight that it becomes unavailable for if you use it now. Which fight do you use it in to minimize your overall attrition?
• Status — You might not think of status conditions (or the absence thereof) as a resource, but they sort of are. If someone is debuffed to only deal half damage, then you can't defeat the monsters as fast, so they get more rounds to attack you, so you lose more resources. If someone is poisoned, then your HP loss per round has increased, so each round counts for more attrition. If someone is muted, they can't use their special abilities, which (depending on the character) might lengthen the battle and thus cost you more HP. How much loss does each of these cause you? Is it more or less than the loss incurred by spending someone's turn (and an item or MP) to clear the condition? Is it likely the condition just comes back right after you clear it, meaning you wasted a turn? Do you play those odds?
• Items/Money — "Refresh Points" are usually towns that include an item shop, where you can buy consumable items. The most basic is the health potion, which directly restores HP, making you last longer. Likewise, Mana-restoring items are potent because they extend the usage of your entire suite of abilities (as a result, they're often expensive or hard to acquire). You can also get items that clear status conditions, which presents an important set of decisions for the player: if you buy a status-clearing item whose associated condition doesn't come up, you wasted money that could have been used on a more relevant item. But if you encounter a status that you can't clear, you're going to accelerate your attrition for the rest of the dungeon. What do you buy, and how many of each?
• XP/Money — You gain XP from battling enemies, and that XP makes you more powerful. Effectively, you suffer attrition in exchange for eventually reducing your rate of attrition. Similarly, you gain money from battles, which you can then convert into the aforementioned items (or upgraded equipment), creating a second way that you trade attrition for future resilience against it. An interesting difference, though, is that a level up will immediately improve your performance, while money will be completely worthless until you reach the next Refresh Point, making it more like an investment for the future.

Example: Viridian Forest

Let's put all that together in a familiar example so you can see how all these threads tug on each other. We'll use Pokémon, partly because everybody's familiar with it, and partly because it lets us set aside things like party dynamics and area attacks so we can focus more on the foundational resource exchanges. So let's examine a classic trek through Viridian Forest. (We're going to assume original Red/Blue games for this, since they were released closest to when this type of RPG's popularity and formula was at its peak.)

You're starting in Viridian City, which is a Refresh Point: there's an "inn" (the PokeCenter) to heal your party and an "item shop" (the PokeMart) to buy supplies. Your objective is to travel through Viridian Forest and reach Pewter City on the other end. Just like Viridian City, Pewter City is a Refresh Point, so if you reach it then you're safe; you have "cleared the dungeon." You fail if your whole party is out of HP before you get there.

What are you up against along the way? Along the path from end to end, you have to fight several trainers. Some are avoidable, but they're also your only source of money and your best source of XP. Additionally, most of the path is through long grass, meaning random encounters (wild pokemon) will occur many times, but the number of encounters and what exactly you'll face is unknown.

The roster of enemies is significant. The Caterpies are pretty basic, presenting minor HP attrition. The Weedles have the chance to poison you, which vastly accelerates the attrition (and in early games, keep depleting HP outside of battle). The Metapods and Kakunas don't present any direct threat to your HP, but they have high physical defense that rises every turn, costing a lot of PP to defeat. That said, they also offer lots of XP compared to other enemies.

So let's imagine you're halfway into the forest by now. You have a random encounter with a Weedle. What do you do? You could use your Normal attack that you have (or, "had") 30-35 of, but it will take two hits to finish it. That will add up over the course of the dungeon. Not to mention, Weedle gets to strike back in between the two hits, and it might poison you. Do you play the low odds? Do you decide it's fine because you brought an antidote (or because you picked Bulbasaur, who can't be poisoned)? Or do you decide not to risk it and use your limited supply of Embers/Bubbles to one-shot it? (Do you know yet whether Bubble will one-shot it?)

Of course, maybe a wild Weedle's little bit of XP (and zero cash) isn't worth spending an Ember or two Tackles or an Antidote, so you want to run away. But your attempt to run away might fail, and if it does, the Weedle gets a free attack, which will deplete some HP and possibly poison you—exactly what you were trying to avoid. Do you try anyway? If it takes you 2-3 tries to run, then you've suffered the same attrition as fighting, but without gaining XP. If you fail to run once or twice and then switch to fighting, you've achieved the same result as fighting in the first place but with additional losses. Are you sure you want to try to run?

Oh! Now you've encountered a wild Pikachu! Do you want to catch it? It's a very rare encounter, so it seems a waste to pass up this opportunity. But what does the catching process cost you? You would have to hold back and carefully lower its HP without knocking it out, letting it hit you in the meantime. Then you start throwing PokeBalls (each of which represents a Potion or Antidote you didn't buy), and each time it breaks free it gets to hit you again. And throughout this process, every time it hits you, there's a chance it paralyzes you. That means your enemies always get to hit first (faster attrition!) and sometimes you lose your turn (longer battles, more attrition!). Can you afford that, based on how close to the end you are and the current state of your party?

Hm, you're pretty deep into the forest, but your party is looking rough and you're low on items. Do you double back, return to the original Refresh Point, and try again? On the one hand, any trainers you fought don't refresh and you might be a higher level now, so maybe a second go is easier. But getting out means walking through more random encounters; can you make it, or are you close enough to the end that it's actually better to keep going? Also, what's the state of your item inventory? You haven't made enough money to resupply, so your second attempt will have fewer resources. What happens if you get poisoned as soon as you return to the forest but you've already used all your Antidotes? Do you just keep restarting over and over until you get lucky enough to not get poisoned for an entire run? 

Long-Form Give-and-Take

As you can see, there are lots of decisions to make. What's important to note is that none of the decisions are about whether you can win the current battle. A game like Street Fighter asks "Can you defeat this opponent?" That's not what a SNES-era RPG asks. It's not asking "Can you beat a Weedle?" over and over again. It's asking "Can you defeat this dungeon?" and the Weedle is just one component. The challenges exist on the dungeon scale, not the individual fight scale. If you wanted to continue the analogy with Street Fighter: an RPG fight doesn't correlate to a Street Fighter match, it correlates to a single move in a Street Fighter match. An entire RPG fight, start to finish, is the equivalent of a Street Fighter player reading the current situation and then selecting and executing the correct move. Failure worsens your position, and it's not until you accumulate enough failures that you finally lose.

Unfortunately, sometimes games inherit as "legacy mechanics" the things that were refined for use in SNES-era RPGs, but without the full, systemic context they were developed for. In some cases this is new games repurposing old mechanics, sometimes it's an existing franchise making "quality of life changes" that remove a mechanic without accounting for the ripple effects of that change.

It doesn't take much of a change to deflate the whole thing; that's the nature of a multi-faceted system. For example, scroll back up to our Viridian Forest example and reread it with a change in mind. What if your party fully healed after every fight? What if you didn't have PP and could always use whatever move you wanted? What if things like running away or catching had a 100% success rate? Take any one of those changes and plug it into the example, and you start to see the consequences cascading down through the whole play experience. Games are about making decisions, and changing even one thing in this system starts to make a whole lot of decisions cease to be decisions.

That's why you're so tired of this or that RPG mechanic. Not because the mechanic is bad, but because it's been disconnected from its purpose. It matters how a mechanic is used. It matters how it fits into the larger play structures of a game.

So That's That

I don't really have a fancy conclusion, I just wanted there to be someplace on the internet where someone could read about how some of these weirdly ubiquitous RPG mechanics got their start and how much sense they made in their original context. Hope you enjoyed!

Game Comparison: Super Mario RPG vs The Thousand Year Door

Today I'm going to compare an old video game and a less-old video game. Not because anything really needs to be said about them, but because I played them both and couldn't help analyzing them in my head. And since I have a blog, I'm making that your problem.

The very-old game is Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (SNES, 1996). I played the hell out of it when I was a kid, and I have replayed it multiple times during my adult life. The less-old game is Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (GameCube, 2004). I had never played any of the Paper Mario games, but this one got a remake on the Switch so I played that. (Incidentally, SMRPG also got a recent Switch remake, but I haven't tried it because I still have an old cartridge and my childhood SNES.)

The reason I couldn't help comparing these two games while recently playing the latter is because it was pitched to me as a spiritual successor to the former, and thus it was suggested that liking SMRPG made it probable that I would also like TTYD. They're both RPGs (well, maybe), they're both full of colorful characters and wacky antics, and so forth. SMRPG was Mario's first foray into RPGs and TTYD inherits some of that DNA.

There's a general comparison to be made that applies across pretty much all subjects, so we'll start there and then apply it to various facets of the games. Here's the two games in a nutshell: Super Mario RPG has a strong core with some flourishes on the side; The Thousand Year Door is more like a large collection of small bits.

The Story

SMRPG has a strong narrative theme: the status quo has been disrupted and must be set right. Not just in terms of the world-saving stakes, but as a core theme throughout. Lots of lives have been disrupted by the inciting incident, and you help them each on your way to your larger goal of fixing the world. The core characters—Mario, Peach, and Bowser—had a status quo of kidnappings and rescues that was disrupted mid-cycle and we get to watch them cope with it by joining forces to return to that status quo. (It even shows at the meta level: the events that form the premise of all Mario's platformers gets disrupted so now he has to do his first RPG about it.) Yes, unrelated things happen along the way, but there's a certain consistency at the core.

TTYD is more like a collection of vignettes with some stakes in the background. You go to a series of self-contained locales with distinct themes and no connective tissue. Your magic map says "go to spooky zone next" and you hop in the pipe to spooky zone and clear the spooky dungeon and then your magic map tells you the next zone. Each of these is sectioned off as a "chapter" that feels very compartmentalized, siloed off from everything else. The reason for even doing all this stuff in the first place keeps changing (from "treasure hunt" to "find the princess" to "save the world") without really affecting what you were going to be doing anyway.

The Characters

SMRPG has a core cast of five characters: the classic trio plus two new friends, Mallow and Geno. You've got all five in your party by the time you reach the halfway point of the game, so you have plenty of time to get to know each of them. They all have their own personalities that you get to see as they interact with Mario, NPCs, and even each other. They all have their own ties and investments in the core story. I'm not saying they have incredible depth (it's still a Mario game) but they're fully individualized and they have time to develop.

TTYD has something like 8-ish companions for Mario: one for each chapter, plus a bonus one I got in my playthrough. Each one has a defining quirk and initial conflict when you meet them, then they get absorbed into your party and kind of stop existing. They don't really interact, and dialogue with NPCs is just the same lines performed by whoever you happen to have out at the time. This makes them functionally interchangeable as characters, defined primarily by their gameplay mechanics (see below). Goombella is a bit of an exception since her Tattle ability gives her lots of extra dialogue to get to know her, and Vivian stands out for having an actual multi-chapter story. But they're the exceptions.

The Gameplay

SMRPG has consistent core gameplay—or more like two cores, since the game is a direct hybrid of RPGs and platformers. In combat, you have a pretty traditional setup (attack, magic, item, defend), with the twist that instead of crits you can press the button again to boost your damage/effect. A handful of spells use different action commands, but most spells and all basic attacks and defense use the same core mechanic. Outside of combat, you have light platforming elements. Mario is known for his jumping, and uses that to get around a lot. There are several minigames, and some of them have unique mechanics (like the Yoshi race), but others build on the core platforming element (the second half of Midas River, or the hill on the way to Marrymore). So like I said earlier, a core with some flourishes.

TTYD has an incredible number of mechanics. In combat, every attack has its own unique control inputs. Multiply that by the number of characters, plus also your Star Specials, and it's a truly staggering number of mechanics to learn. And that's to say nothing of customizing your build using Badges! Outside of combat, I wouldn't call TTYD a platformer, as jumping serves only to climb stairs. Instead it's a little like old-school Pokemon, where basically you just walk around but then you unlock certain abilities to let you access new areas. So like if Pokemon had 15+ HM moves—one per partner and a few for Mario. Having so many means each is used only a few times; basically they each get used in the first dungeon where you get them, then unlock one item in Rogueport, then get used so infrequently thereafter that I often forgot I had them. Also TTYD has the equivalent of two different types of Korok Seeds to collect, because everything needs collectibles now I guess.

The TLDR

So yeah, it really is "core with flourishes" versus "pile of small bits" all the way down. So I guess if you know which of those styles you like better, you know which game you're likely to enjoy more. Personally, I like Super Mario RPG more than The Thousand Year Door because I like that core-with-flourishes model better than having a million things that are mostly forgettable or interchangeable. Maybe you're the opposite, which is fine. And to be clear, I did still have fun with TTYD. (Shout out to my girls, Goombella and Vivian.) But I probably won't replay it, and I'm glad I played a library copy instead of buying it.

P. S. — Odds & Ends

Both games keep Mario basically mute, never putting his dialogue on screen. SMRPG has him explain things via shapeshifting pantomime, while TTYD uses a simple "I'm explaining now" hand gesture. The former was charming and fun, the latter was admittedly more efficient.

Holy hell, TTYD spent a lot of time on tutorials. I almost walked away before Hooktail's castle because I was spending so much time on tutorials for mechanics that hadn't really created any interesting gameplay yet. I stuck it out and it got better, but oof.

Both games let you take a shower, which is probably one of the most bizarrely specific similarities in the games. In SMRPG, you walk into a separate room that you don't see the inside of, and the shower happens behind closed doors with no details. In TTYD, Peach takes a shower behind a small curtain, and the game makes sure to show you that she's naked and lets you know when she's toweling off, which seemed weirdly horny (at least by Mario Game standards). It's also not the only time the game makes sure you know Peach is naked.

Relatedly, in TTYD, things get a bit harem-y. Nearly every woman except Peach kisses Mario at least once, and two different women (again, not Peach) are on the verge of love confessions toward him by the end. 

TTYD door did EarthBound's friends-along-the-way final boss powerup thing. EB's was better.

When I finally looked up whether there was a way to increase my inventory limit in TTYD, I discovered I needed to hit Floor 50 in the pit. I had already been in the pit and stopped at 40 for no particular reason. I always do this. I missed Hestu in BOTH Zelda Switch games. Why am I like this?

SMRPG has you traveling around to collect seven important stars, so it gave me a chuckle when I realized I'd be doing the same thing in TTYD.

Am I the only one who thought that one X-Naut lieutenant guy looked like Dr. Robotnik?

Sword World: What If D&D Didn't Matter?

This post is me suddenly realizing that I could Simply Write About something I've repeatedly alluded to in replies on social media: 

"If you've ever been curious what a fantasy adventure TTRPG might look like if it hadn't developed under the massive shadow of D&D, then you should check out Sword World."

I probably don't need to explain the shadow of D&D and how it warps the TTRPG landscape. It's the game everyone has played, it's many people's only game, and it's the game everything else is compared to. But the interesting thing is, that's not true across the whole world. In Japan, for example, D&D never got that initial foothold (something about dice availability, if memory serves) so the TTRPG scene developed in its own ways. Even now, D&D is simply Another Game That Exists. It's not the most popular one (that's Call of Cthulhu, interestingly enough), and it's not even the most popular one in the fantasy adventure genre: that honor goes to the subject of this post, Sword World 2.5.

I want to be clear, because the internet has (rightly) learned to be wary when an American wants to talk about something Japanese. This is not a post about how perfectly awesome Sword World is, or how it's better than "western" RPGs, or anything like that. This is about the fact that we have a genuine example of a fantasy adventure TTRPG that was under no pressure to compare itself to D&D, which feels a little like peeking into an alternate timeline. I, for one, find it fascinating to compare and contrast. Maybe you will too.

So let's talk about One Real Example Of What Fantasy Adventure Looks Like When D&D Ain't Shit.

Sword World 2.5

Just as a quick introduction, Sword World is the top fantasy adventure TTRPG in Japan. It's currently in edition 2.5, which is what I'll be talking about here. There's no official English version, so I'll be using a fan translation, which you can get for free HERE. There are three core books; I've looked at Core Rulebook I, which covers the general gameplay rules and the basic races and classes, along with a few monsters. My understanding is that Core Rulebook II and Core Rulebook III include some special additional rules and advanced classes, but I haven't looked at them yet. Trust me, there's plenty of interesting comparisons to observe just in the first book.

Classes & "Skills"

I'm starting here because it's one of the first and biggest differences someone like me would notice about SW2.5. It has classes and skills, but they don't work the way we're used to. Your classes are your skills. You don't put points into skills, or have your class grant you skill proficiencies that scale up automatically. No, when you make a skill check (or spellcasting check, or attack roll), you roll 2d6 and add your level in the relevant class. Most (but not all) checks have more than one class you could use, so you use whichever one you have the higher level in. If you don't have a relevant class at all, then you just roll a blank 2d6 (you don't even get your ability modifier).

As you may have inferred from the preceding paragraph, multiclassing is normal. I don't mean it's "allowed" or it's "not a variant rule" or it's "common." I mean it's the expected default. Every character is a mix of a handful of different classes, likely each at a different level. If that sounds overwhelming, that's because you're imagining "classes" that are much bulkier than the ones in SW. You don't have a five-page spread of abilities for each class. Your class is like... a paragraph or two. For example, the Fencer class explains that as long as you're using light weapons/armor you get an improved crit chance, and... that's it. Add your Fencer level to your combat rolls, just like anything else, and you're ready to rock and roll.

XP, Advancement, and Adventurer Level

While SW2.5 does have "experience points" and "levels," it doesn't work like how you're used to. Instead of reaching the next XP threshold and gaining a level, you spend XP to purchase levels of individual classes. The XP cost of purchasing a level depends on whether it's from a "major" or "minor" class, and how high your level already is in that class specifically. Have a look at this chart:

Brand new characters start with 3,000 XP worth of levels, so you might start the game as, for example, Sorcerer 2, Fencer 1, Scout 1, giving you magic as your primary focus but with a bit of melee ability for flexibility and a wide array of utility skills. Someone used to D&D would call this a 4th-level character, but in SW it's actually a 2nd-level character. This is because your "adventurer level" is equal to your highest class level, not your total number of class levels. Which makes sense, because we're on tight 2d6 math for everything, so we want to be measuring power by what's getting added to the roll, not by how many different things you can do.

How you gain XP in the first place is also a bit different than the D&D model. You automatically gain XP at the end of each session: 1,000 XP if you achieved your objective, or 500 XP otherwise. That's basically it. There's some bonus XP if you defeated monsters, but it's pretty small: 10 XP per level of the monsters defeated. The example in the book is if you win a fight against a 3rd-level monster and their four 1st-level minions, that's 7 levels total, or 70 XP. You also get 50 XP if you manage to roll snake eyes on 2d6 (a 1-in-36 chance). Both of these are a drop in the bucket compared to the base session XP.

But in addition to XP and classes, your advancement also includes "Growth" of ability scores. At the end of each session, you— wait a second, I haven't told you about ability scores yet, I'd better do that!

Ability Scores

Characters in Sword World have six stats. Which is funny, because if an American designer said that, many people would assume they had never seen a game other than D&D. But that's objectively not the case for SW2.5, and in fact there's a very specific reason to have exactly six ability scores: Growth. Your six stats are numbered 1-6 on your sheet, and at the end of each session, you roll a d6 twice, pick one result, and increase the corresponding ability score by 1. But wait, it gets even more interesting.

You don't add your ability score to rolls, you add your Ability Modifier, which is exactly what you think it is. This is even funnier than having six stats—people would call you a liar right to your face if you claimed that you had a score/mod duality for any other reason than D&D-brain. And yet, here we are. Anyway, you get +1 mod per 6 points of score. Most starting mods will be +2, some will be +1, and very very few will be +3. But this connects back to growth: if you have a score that's close to the next multiple of six, you can try to steer your growth toward it and get that next +1 (eventually, dice willing).

But growth isn't the only way that SW2.5 makes ability scores more relevant than in D&D. Weapons and armor, for example, have minimum Strength requirements. (Proficiency by class isn't really a thing, for the most part.) You use your Vitality score for calculating HP, and your Spirit score for calculating MP. I haven't found anything similar for Dexterity, Agility, or Intelligence, but still, the scores are getting more use than in D&D at least.

Side note because I know you're wondering: yes, you roll your ability scores. In order. That said, there's some amount of control: your choice of background gives you a set of flat numbers that your rolls are added to, and you also roll three full sets of scores and choose from among them. This model, alongside the growth mechanic, point to an interesting middle ground of guided chance in between the extremes of raw luck from old-school D&D and full control of modern point-buy.

I Am In Love With "Fellows"

In video games, sometimes an NPC will temporarily join your party, following you around and helping in combat but staying in the background the rest of the time. In some tabletop D&D-alikes, you can get hirelings that work similarly. In Sword World, you can do this with other people's player characters.

Want to share your character with the world? Make a Fellow Sheet, which summarizes their stats and includes a random roll chart for a few combat actions, and—get this—you even have to write down lines of dialogue your character would say when doing these combat actions. You can then post your Fellow Sheet online, such as in a fan forum, where people you've never met might pick them up to take along on their adventures.

Fellows stay in the background, contribute according to your custom random table during combat, and cannot take damage or die (in the event of a TPK, they're assumed to miraculously escape). Here's the adorable part: after using a Fellow, the book explicitly encourages the player(s) to contact the Fellow's creator (probably just a post online) both to thank them for their help and to give a recap of their character's little side adventure.

Power Tables

Remember I mentioned the issue of dice availability as part of the reason D&D didn't catch on right away in Japan? Well, SW2.5 is fully d6-based, and that includes rolling for damage (or healing). But apparently they didn't want everything to deal Xd6 damage, so instead they created Power Tables. Your weapon or spell will specify a "Power" rating. Find the row for that Power on the table, and roll 2d6. There will be a box corresponding to your result which tells you how much damage you deal. (You also add bonuses from things like your STR mod, but that's after you're done with the Power Table roll.)

At first I was surprised. Requiring a reference to a table on every single instance of damage is a bold move, though maybe you get used to it if you're referencing the same Power rating every time. Also, it does present an interesting solution to the need for variable damage output using only d6s and without too much range from the bottom to the top. I don't know if I would have the guts to do this in a design of my own, but I see what it's offering.

Relatedly, this method of damage calculation means everybody's always rolling 2d6 for damage, and SW2.5 takes advantage of this. Your chance of a critical hit is based on the dice result of your damage roll rather than your attack roll, scoring a crit when you roll your weapon's crit threshold or higher. Lots of weapons put this threshold around 10-11, but the Fencer can reduce this by 1 (at the cost of halving your STR score for the purpose of weapon and armor requirements, which means less power in the first place and also less defense). Also: crits can explode. When you crit, you record your rolled damage, and roll again. If that's a crit too, just keep going.

Three Combat Systems

So, you know how in D&D (and similar games), there's differing opinions on tactical combat versus abstracted combat? There's grid-based model, battlefield zone models, here-there-elsewhere models, all kinds of stuff. They all have advantages and disadvantages, and often it's a major decision point for which game(s) someone is willing to play.

Well, Sword World just sidesteps the issue by having three different combat systems with different levels of complexity and depth. The idea is that you bounce around between them, depending on which one serves the needs of a given fight. You can use the "advanced" mode (full tactical grid) when you have a big, complicated fight with interesting terrain and want to have a really robust experience. But if you want a quicker fight, you can use the "simplified" mode, where you just abstract the battlefield into three zones (the melee "frontline" and two ranged "rearguards") and leave it at that. The stats on weapons and spells (range, area, etc) are designed to accommodate both modes.

There's also a third mode that splits the difference between simple/advanced, but I honestly don't see the point of it. Maybe I'm missing something and I would get it if I actually played it? Who knows. But hey, it exists!

Okay Okay I'll Wrap It Up

There's plenty more interesting points of comparison to talk about (like how dwarves are fireproof and elves are perfect swimmers, or how there seems to be an assumption that adventures are short and serialized instead of campaign-length megaplots), but this is getting pretty long already. Anyway, the point is, Sword World is solidly in the adventure fantasy genre without being a "D&D clone," and this makes examination of its design choices absolutely fascinating for fantasy fans who live and breathe the inescapable dominance of D&D. If design comparisons are at all interesting to you (and if you got this far into my blog post, I assume they are) then I highly recommend that you go have a look at SW2.5 for yourself. And by all means, hit me up with your observations! I'd love to hear about them!