Why I roleplay

I’ve recently played in a few very average tabletop roleplaying games, sessions where if I was completely honest, I wasn’t enjoying myself. That has led me to think about what I like about roleplaying, and how I can make sure I get more of it.

RPGs - some better than others

The bad games

So here’s a quick description of some of those games.

• The one that was a string of battles: A Marvel Heroic Roleplaying one-shot which was basically three interconnected battles.  No miniatures, but not enough table banter either.
• The one that was a miniatures game: A mini-campaign using D&D5e, where we had to clear out three caverns of baddies. Basically, a series of fights. (I’ve noted before that when combat starts D&D 5e basically becomes a boardgame. I like boardgames, but not when I’m roleplaying.)
• The one that was a sandbox: A Lamentations of the Flame Princess one-shot where we (the players) poked the scenery with sticks to find the adventure.
• The one that was a simulation: A mini-campaign which was brilliantly internally logical, but was actually rather boring, had little plot and created no interesting decisions.
• The one where I played the wrong character: My only experience of Symbaroum, and the GM put lots of characters on the table for us to choose from. I chose unwisely—as my character’s skills did not suit the planned adventure.

So I clearly don’t like combat. And I’m not that keen on sandboxes—especially in one shots. I like to see a plot.

The good games

And to balance it, some of the good games:

• The one where I felt I was in a movie: Set in the world of Werewolf: the Apocalpyse, but using Fate Accelerated, this one-shot really felt like we were in a movie – complete with cut scenes, montage and a spectacular climax.
• The one where we talked to each other: One of the striking things about my only experience of Hillfolk is how often the players conversed with each other rather than the GM. I like games with lots of in-character chit-chat and banter.
• The one-shot that became a mini-campaign: An unpromising Shadow of the Demon Lord one-shot that became a short mini-campaign filled with memorable player characters.
• The one-shot with the clues in plain sight: An investigative one-shot set in the near future with an alien invasion – and a key plot point was on the table in front of us from the very start but we didn’t realise until part way through.

(And if you think it’s all GM related, there are two GMs on both of these lists …)

So in summary

I like dramatic plots that mean something to the characters, interlinked characters with backstory, characters that suit the scenario, and interesting decisions.

I don’t like pointless combat, playing a boardgame instead of roleplaying, boring sandboxes, and characters who don’t fit the scenario.

I don’t mind combat in my roleplaying games, but as long as it’s combat with a purpose.

An aside: It frequently amazes me that roleplaying caters for such a wide range of tastes. I don’t enjoy the system mastery that comes with dedicating yourself to something like D&D 5e—but some do. I have little time for character advancement or levels. I don’t like getting the miniatures out. I don’t particularly enjoy fantasy settings. But others do, and that’s great. But it’s probably best if I don’t join their games (and maybe they wouldn’t enjoy mine).

What do I like when I roleplay? #1: A Plot

So I like a good plot in my roleplaying – and frankly much of the time that can be summarised as: “a bad guy with a goal” (as Fate Accelerated puts it). That need not mean simple stories - even plots as complex as Masks of Nyarlathotep or The Lord of the Rings can be summarised as a bad guy with a goal.

Inevitably I’m less keen on sandboxes where it’s up to me to decide what’s important. I’m sure there’s a point where the sandbox absolutely rocks – but I don’t have the patience to get there.

What do I like when I roleplay? #2: Characters must be important

This may seem like an obvious thing to say – but the characters need to be key to the story. If the characters don’t care about the plot, why should they engage? They also need to have skills relevant to the upcoming session.

Unfortunately it’s all too common to sit down at a one-shot and be presented with a bunch of pre-generated characters that look like they’ve been taken from the rulebook, with little or no attempt to tie them into the story.

What do I like when I roleplay? #3: Players that talk to each other as characters

I can often tell how good a one-shot will be within 10 minutes of starting. That’s because the best one-shots always spend at least 20 minutes creating good bonds between the characters. If you dive in without creating that, then you just have a bunch of strangers at the table.

That’s why I like the bonds/strings/history in the PtbA games, Hillfolk character creation, and why I spent time trying to create DramaAspects. (I now use a combination of PbtA’s bonds and Galileo Games’ Backstory Cards.)

When the player characters have strong backstories and bonds, then they start with a shared history which makes it easier for them to talk in character.

Is that really it?

And that’s it. I don’t mind which system I play—I have my favourites but I’ll play anything if someone can tell me which dice to roll. In fact, I don’t mind if we don’t roll dice—I find that often happens in my games.

As long as I’m playing someone that matters in a story with a plot with plenty of in-character chat, then I’m happy.  I’m not sure why I don’t get that as often as I do.

Freeforms

It turns out that what I am looking for in a tabletop roleplaying session, I get in a freeform. Plot—check. Characters tie to plot—check. Players talking to each other—check.

When I started thinking about what I like (and dislike) in tabletop roleplaying I didn’t imagine that I’d end up comparing them to freeforms. But maybe that was inevitable. 

Although I had a fifteen-year hiatus from tabletop roleplaying, I never fully left the hobby as I was playing (and running, writing and publishing) freeforms instead.

I don’t know whether my love of freeforms influenced what I like in my tabletop games, or whether I love freeforms because they feature all the things I like—I suspect it’s somewhere in between.

What next?

Now that I have worked this out, I wonder if I can use it to my advantage and use it to improve my enjoyment of the games I am playing in. 

In particular, I shall try to I talk more often to other characters rather than to the GM. I’m sure I’ll still have to put up with boardgame like combat and sandbox games – but hopefully I’ll enjoy them more.

Revisiting some old friends

I’ve been spending some of this time in lockdown taking the opportunity to re-read some of the books that have been on my bookshelves for a long, long time. Some of these I bought when I was at school - the newest here was published in 1992.

The Bug Wars, Robert Asprin

I originally bought this at school, but I’m not sure why I kept it. This is the NEL edition published in 1980, with a great Rodney Matthews cover. (I have no doubt that it was the cover that caught my eye.) 

I was 15 when I first read it. Amazingly, it isn’t awful. It’s a not too demanding tale of a race of giant lizards waging war on giant insects. But that’s about it.

Lunar Descent, Allen Steele

Originally published in 1991 and set in 2024 in a lunar mining base. This is proper hard science fiction with proper hard NASA-ish technology and science. 

But being published in 1991 it misses the internet and what’s going on with computers. So key documents are faxed, the moonbase sound system uses a wobbly cassette (not even a CD!) and there’s no sign of tablets, ebooks, email, social media or anything that would actually be present if actually set in 2024.  But the overall story is still great - blue-collar workers on the moon. 

Of the five books here, this is the most recent and also the thickest (probably because it almost certainly wasn’t written on a typewriter).

The Goblin Reservation, Clifford D Simak

Simak was once one of my favourite SF authors, and I remember this tale fondly - it has teleportation, sinister wheeled aliens, trolls, goblins, a sabre-toothed tiger, a neanderthal, Shakespeare, a ghost, time travel, and a crystal planet. Some nice ideas - wheeled hive-insect aliens, a crystal planet that (somehow) came from the universe before ours (this is a big-bang > big-crunch > big bang universe). But it hasn’t aged well and I won’t be keeping it.

This copy is 1987 (originally published in 1968), so I may well have been at university when I read it.

Interestingly, the characterisation feels very different to more modern fiction. Everyone is pretty much decent - the only true villains are the alien Wheelers. There is only one murder, and that happens before the book starts (and is committed by the Wheelers). I’ve noticed this with other early SF books in this list - characters seem to be more decent than in modern fiction. That may just be the changing tastes - I’m not sure.

Monument, Lloyd Biggle Jr

Monument is one of my favourite novels from my youth. I remember being drawn to the striking Tim White cover in Woolworths, but I didn’t buy it then. I eventually picked a copy up in Exeter’s Read & Return bookshop for 60p (I know this because of the stamp in the front of the book).

Monument is the story of Cerne Obrien’s plan to save the paradise world of Langri from greedy developers, and ends with a striking court case. It’s still very readable, and while the style has dated the overall concepts haven’t.

The characters are stronger in Monument than they are in The Goblin Reservation, but the same general decency of the characters remains. While there is corporate corruption in Monument, the government bodies (typically scout and naval captains) are decent men (mostly men!) and abide by the law.

A Wreath of Stars, Bob Shaw

70p of 1976 SF goodness, A Wreath of Stars is set in the far future - 1993! Set in an unstable African state of Barandi, it involves an anti-neutrino planet detected using the newly developed magniluct lenses. The planet misses Earth, but disturbs the orbit of an anti-neutrino planet hiding inside the Earth.

This is classic Bob Shaw - he takes an idea (magniluct lenses and anti-neutrinos) and then runs with it. He does the same in Orbitsville (a Dyson sphere), Other Days, Other Eyes (slow glass) and others. It’s a bit dated now (inevitably), and has a slightly odd, wistful ending that always leaves me feeling a bit melancholy.

In terms of technology, A Wreath of Stars has a moon colony (briefly mentioned), the magniluct lenses that drive the plot. But it’s 1993 and so the lack of laptops, tablets and mobile phones isn’t an issue.

My edition was published in 1978, but I think I read it in the early 80s. I saw Bob Shaw at the 1987 Worldcon in Brighton. He was giving one of his “serious scientific” talks, and I can’t remember laughing so much in a long time.

(A Wreath of Stars is also the name of David Langford’s 1996 obituary for Bob.) 

To keep or not?

I’m keeping Lunar Descent, Monument and A Wreath of Stars. Maybe I’ll read them again in the future. 

The Bug Wars and The Goblin Reservation haven’t aged so well and are off to the charity shop.

Free RPG stuff

I’ve been playing with Google Sites recently and I’ve put together a small site with pdf downloads of short adventures for Fate, Call of Cthulhu and other games.

You can find it here: www.stevehatherley.com.

My New Tales of Terror blog brims with creepy ideas for horror RPGs.

And while I’m here, I shouldn’t forget Freeform Games (my games business with Mo Holkar) and Great Murder Mystery Games (a related murder mystery games site).

Running published RPG adventures. Or not.

I've been thinking about RPGs and I've noticed that I mostly run my own adventures. And when I say mostly, I mean almost exclusively. And certainly, since I came back to roleplaying from the wilderness, they have all been my own adventures.

An aside: I'm fairly late to the awesomeness that is John Harper’s Lady Blackbird. But the second thing I thought was "How can I do something similar?" Not "I want to run this," but instead how can I make my own copy... (My first thought was "I want to play this.") Thinking about it now, that seems a bit odd. But it's clear that my desire to run my own stuff is clearly deeply ingrained.

So which published adventures have I run?

I've had a good think about this, and the only published adventures I can ever remember running are:

• Annic Nova
• Murder on Arcturus Station
• Chamax Plague

And I think that's it - three Traveller adventures. I can't remember running any published Call of Cthulhu scenarios. I played in a couple, but all I can remember of my own scenarios is stuff that I created myself. (I may have run The Haunting - I can't remember. I have memories of that as a game, but I can't remember if I was a player or the Keeper.)

Making it my own

While Annic Nova didn't require any Referee input, I still added a rival band of adventurers to add some conflict. (Otherwise it's just wandering around some empty rooms.)

The other two adventures are interesting in that they both require some Referee input.

• Murder on Arcturus Station is a murder mystery - but it gives you the suspects with motives, and lets you decide who the culprit was.
• The Chamax Plague is an Alien/Aliens scenario - a crashed ship with a strange alien beasty to hunt. But the adventure gives you the deckplans and explains the creature's biology and lets you decide where the creature is hiding.

Early DIY Traveller scenarios

That's a common theme among many of the early Traveller scenarios - the idea that the Referee will do some of the work to turn it into a full adventure for the players (see Kinunir, Twilight's Peak or Leviathan). Similarly, one of the most popular features of the GDW in-house magazine (Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society) were the Amber Zones - short adventure seeds that required a fair bit of work (or improvisation) before hitting the table.

Over time Traveller's scenarios became more precise and structured. But I have fonder memories for the early scenarios that required me to put some effort in. (The sunk-cost fallacy may be at work here, making me value those scenarios more precisely because I put the effort in.)

The effort I put into those early Traveller scenarios did mean that I owned them, and probably led me to creating my own scenarios (as it turns out to be really easy).

Another aside: Thinking about, most of the games I've played have been created by the GM. I don't remember playing through many published scenarios. My sample size is very small though and I've no idea which is more common though - creating your own or using published adventures.

So why buy adventures?

I am aware of the hypocrisy in writing RPG adventures (and having some published) but only ever running my own, however. But of all gaming material, I prefer to read adventures - partly for ideas, but also because they give a clear demonstration of how a game is meant to be played. (One of the challenges I find with PbTA games like Urban Shadows is that I can't visualise how they are meant to be played.)

But yes - why buy adventures if you're never going to run them? Because they're chock full of ideas to steal and often they're a pleasure to read.

(That approach was one of the drives that led to Tales of Terror, as I explain here.) 

A new goal for 2020

So now that I've identified this blind spot, I'm going to try and run a couple of published scenarios before the year is out.

Things I'm enjoying - The Road to Somewhere and Patrick Willem

More things that I'm enjoying. (Or have enjoyed recently, as it's been a while since I've done one of these.)


Patrick Willem

I’ve been enjoying Patrick Willem’s YouTube videos. I’m not a natural movie critic, but I like how he analyses movies - he’s both a movie and a fan. His Paddington review is delightful, and I like his thoughts on Alien Covenant as well (he is more positive about it than I was). He also has quite a lot to say on Star Wars.



The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart.

I read this in January, on the approach to our formal exit of the EU (and before coronavirus changed everything). The Road to Somewhere argues that Britain is now split into Somewheres (who identify strongly with where they are from) and Anywheres (who are more mobile and identify less with where they are from).

This short video explains it better than I can:



So Somewheres outnumber Anywheres, but the Anywheres have dominated politics for years. And with Brexit, the Somewheres found their voice.

I had a few thoughts on reading this:

• Somewheres and Anywheres cross party and class lines, but sometimes that doesn’t come over clearly in The Road to Somewhere and it sometimes feels a bit class-centric.
• Somewhere/Anywhere is obviously a spectrum. I’m more Anywhere than Somewhere, but I’m not an extreme Anywhere.
• Like my brother and sister, I went away to university. While I moved to Yorkshire in 1990 and pretty much stayed here, they’ve lived in various parts of the world. Right now, we’re all over 200 miles from where we grew up.
• During my first term at university, I went home for a weekend. It was very strange. Even though I had only been gone for five weeks, there seemed to be a huge gulf between me and those who had stayed. I didn’t do it again.
• You can see the Somewhere/Anywhere divide in the strangest of places. Take hot-desking. That’s a very Anywhere thing, but I much prefer to have my own home desk, surrounded by people I know.. Which is much more Somewhere. (Although I've now been working from home for eight weeks and as I expect to continue doing so even when coronavirus is past, having a home desk in the office may be a luxury that I have to give up.)

Having read The Road to Somewhere, I've started seeing the Somewhere/Anywhere divide in all sorts of places.

Virtual Peaky

Normally at this time of year I have just come back from Peaky, the annual freeform-writing weekend. This year, with the lockdown, Peaky has been postponed. But with everyone now having a free weekend, we decided to try a virtual Peaky.

TL:DR - It went surprisingly well, with about 16 people and four writing groups. Only one game was ready to be played on Sunday, which wasn’t a surprise. The technology generally worked well. We played lots of boardgames.

In advance

It was clear that the usual Friday pitch session at Peaky wasn’t going to work this time, so we formed games in advance (thanks to Clare for the hard work coordinating this).

• About three weeks in advance, we started pitching ideas for games that we wanted to write. We did this on the mailing list and FB group, and Clare kindly collated everything.
• Clare then prepared a Google Form, which we completed the weekend before.
• After the weekend, Claire, Heidi and I looked through the data and tried to fit everyone into groups. There were four clear groups, plus a few people who didn’t fit in.
• I then posted the results to the list, checking that everyone was happy with the groups and asking those who didn’t fit in which group they were interested in. There was a bit of discussion and one person decided to drop out.

Virtual Peaky Space

In advance of the weekend I set up a Virtual Peaky page on the Peaky Games Wiki with a rough agenda for the weekend, along with links to Google hangouts which I gave Peaky-esque names like “the comfy chairs” and “in the kitchen”.

I also put a link to a Jitsi, which we used for the big meetings (more than 10 people), but it was occasionally a bit hit and miss. I found Jitsi slowed everything down for me - but I didn’t find the low bandwidth setting until Sunday. We used Google Hangouts as well, and I found that more stable (but it has a 10 person limit).

We used Jitsi because of some of the security concerns around Zoom, although it appears that Zoom is fixing those.

We opened Peaky at 6pm in Jitsi. Here’s the agenda that we drafted in advance to keep the meeting short:

• Welcome to Virtual Peaky
• Groups: is everyone clear on which group they are in?
• Expectations: keep them low! We genuinely don't know if this will work.
• Take breaks for meals, real life, exercise and keeping those you life with happy.
• There's no pressure to write a game for tomorrow. It would be lovely to play something sometime, but it doesn't have to be tomorrow.
• How many people are you writing for? That's up to you. If you're thinking about writing a game that can be played in lockdown then we have access to plenty of players who I'm sure will be happy to join in.
• Check-ins - Jitsi. These are purely so we can get together once a day to make sure we're all okay. They're completely optional. (This first one is the only one that has an agenda.) We're using Jitsi because it can cope with lots of people.
• Check-ins - Hangouts. The Google Hangouts are even more optional - a place to spend a few minutes catching up with friends. Times are suggested purely to add a bit of structure - but the hangouts are available 24/7.
• Announcements - if we need to make any announcements over the weekend we'll use Facebook or the mailing list.
• Boardgames - if you want to play boardgames, some of us will be on boardgamearena over the weekend.
• Peaky rules - this isn't a normal Peaky, so the normal rules about being a member don’t apply, but we would like to develop and (possibly) publish the games as normal.
• Have fun!

It's a good job the check-ins were optional, because I missed most of them on Saturday...

Brainstorming

Friday night we (Julie, Roger, Suey and me) brainstormed. That normally means flipcharts and marker pens (sometimes with post-it notes). We used Trello, a project collaboration board. It worked really well - we had columns for characters, plots, setting and mechanics, and created (and moved) cards to suit.

Our Trello board

We didn’t go much deeper than that - but we could have added more description within each card. I was a bit concerned that we would then have to re-type everything, but I found that you can export to a json file (and then convert that to csv). It’s not perfect, but it means you could use Trello for more than we did. But for what we were doing, it was fine.

Writing

We briefly considered using MS Word and Dropbox before moving straight to Google Docs, which is a much more intuitive collaborative tool. Google Docs worked seamlessly for us.

At one point on Saturday afternoon the exercise felt just like Peaky. I had our hangout open in a tab but wasn’t looking at it, so as I was typing away I could hear the others typing on their bits and asking the occasional question.

I didn’t do as much writing as normal - mainly due to the additional distractions and chores with being at home. As a consequence, we didn’t get our game ready in time, but it should be ready for playtest in a week or six.

Unfortunately I haven’t been gripped by the subject of our game, and that also slowed my writing output. We’re writing Bridgetown Blizzard, a 1931 game set in rural Minnesota, which came about because we wanted our game to incorporate a “barbed wire telephone system” (which would be replicated by Skype or Hangouts or Jitsi or Zoom). It’s an intriguing idea, but I think I would have been more inspired had we chosen to transport the idea to another setting.

(Although I think one of my biggest difficulties was spending even more time at what is now my work desk.)

Sunday - more writing and a playtest

With only one game ready to play, Sunday morning consisted of more writing and then a playtest of Soooocks in Spaaace (written by Graham W, Tony and Heidi). In Soooocks in Spaaace we all played socks who had to save the universe from the evil gloves. It was very silly, but there were a few things to note:

• I liked that you could tailor your character in every way - the type of sock you chose to use as your sock puppet influenced their character. (So black socks are considered boring, and so on.)
• Technology was a bit of a challenge. One player got locked out because we had hit the Google Hangout limit. This arose because the game was designed so that we all needed to get together to agree a plan. With 8 players and 3 GMs, that pushed us over the 10-person limit, so a GM dropped out. It wouldn’t have been an issue if we’d been using Jitsi throughout - but it’s worth remembering as a design function for online freeforms.
• I’m not sure Soooocks in Spaaace  was a fair representation of the best of online freeforming though.

Other thoughts

Some other thoughts about Virtual Peaky that didn’t fit in anywhere else.

Other thoughts:

• We had an international group consisting of Megan in the USA, Adrian in Australia, and Rich in the UK. I didn’t hear much from them - I hope it went well.
• We played a lot of boardgames, as always. Instead of physical games we used boardgamearena.com.
• I don’t know how often the hangouts were used, but I found Jerry in one of them at one point. I used them quite a lot in the run up to the weekend, and I expect to use them going forward.
• We had a couple of drop outs, but that was inevitable. Jerry turned up mostly to hang out and help with the playtest, and it was lovely to see him again.

Things to take away

I think Virtual Peaky was a qualified success. We caught up with old friends, did some writing, and even played a game. I’m not sure that anyone is in a rush to do it again, though.

Here are some final thoughts:

• Virtual Peaky was definitely worth doing. We didn’t get as many games written, but we got more written than if we had let lockdown get to us.
• Online collaboration was surprisingly easy. The stars for me were Trello and Google Docs.
• I found Hangouts generally better than Jitsi (which slowed my laptop down a bit). Jitsi copes with more people in a call however. We didn’t try Zoom.
• Next time (if there’s a next time), I would post to UK Freeforms that we will be playing games on the Sunday and that there may be spaces, as that lets us open up the games a bit and allows us to write bigger games.
• Forming groups in advance worked was a bit fiddly, but it worked in the end. It helped having three of us looking at the results from the survey and forming the groups. I’d definitely do that for another Virtual Peaky, and I might be tempted to also do it for a normal Peaky as the Friday night pitch sessions aren't improving. 

For the future

I’ll leave the hangouts and jitsi in place on the Virtual Peaky page so people can go back and use them if they want.

It was nice to see people, and maybe we can have a Peaky evening when we catch up with progress and talk bobbins. I’m going to work on games and it would be nice to have a bit of company, so I may post on FB or the mailing list to say that I’ll be in the hangouts while I’m working.

System doesn't matter. Except when it does.

Gaz and Baz in the recent What Would the Smart Party Do? podcast talked this time on the tricky subject of "does system matter" in tabletop RPGs. They are clearly in the "yes" box.

I'm not so sure.

Why system doesn't matter (to me)

Aside #1: There's no wrong way to play. This post is why system usually doesn't matter to me. If it matters to you - great. I subscribe to the Risus approach: there's no wrong way to play.

I had a bit of hiatus in tabletop roleplaying, that ended in 2011 or so when I started going to conventions again and I started online playing. When I think of the games I've played since then almost all of them were played in the same way: the GM presents a situation, the players respond. Occasionally dice are rolled to determine the outcome of an action. Mostly play consists of questions and answers, with some banter between the players. Dice aren't rolled as often as a read through the rules would suggest.

That applies to 90% of the games I've played (or run) since my return to tabletop gaming: Fate, D&D, Liminal, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Monster of the Week, Cthulhu Dark, Blades in the Dark, The Cthulhu Hack, Shardland, Call of Cthulhu, Owl Hoot Trail, Spirit of 77, Shadow Hunters, Dungeon World and no doubt several I have forgotten.

Taking some recent examples, when Guy ran Shadow of the Demon Lord it didn't feel very different to Neil's D&D game. Sure the background was different, and I played a clockwork robot instead of a dwarf. But the character sheets and mechanics were been pretty interchangeable, particularly to someone like me who isn't familiar with either.

Similarly, my Other London modern urban horror-fantasy is very similar to Liminal. There are differences in the background and the setting, but I don't think my players would notice if I ran Other London using the Liminal rules, or vice versa.

Often when I'm playing a game, I'll think about the system we're using and try and figure out how it's different. And often it isn't - not really.

So from this perspective, system doesn't matter.

I like the things I like

We all like different things. I'm not a big fan of crunch, and so my games tend to be fairly fast and loose. Similarly I prefer GMs who run their games that way. Others are different.

I've had both good and bad games of D&D, and the difference is often in the GM. (And GMs can be uneven - we all have our off days.)

Ken and Robin talked about system in episode 373 of their podcast (I made a note because I knew I was going to come back to it). They're game designers so obviously they think that system matters, but they did acknowledge that more important than the rules is the GM. They have most influence.

They also noted that some people don't like learning new rules. That's me - I don't like learning rules. (I'll play anything, but I'm relying on others (usually the GM) to help me with the rules.)

I don't like learning new rules because for most of the time* I know I will run a game pretty much like any other. I suspect my running of Trail of Cthulhu would be almost indistinguishable from Call of Cthulhu. So why learn the new rules if it it isn't going to make a difference?

* That "most of the time" is important. We'll come back to that.

System mastery

If the system doesn't matter, surely that makes system mastery irrelevant?

There's (at least) two aspects to system mastery. One is knowing when to use the correct ability/mechanic for the situation. When I'm new to a game I expect the GM to help me there. For example, when I run Fate, it's not always clear to new players that in a combat against a tough foe they need to create advantages that other players can use - so I will remind them of that. It's not fair to punish them because they're not familiar with the game.

The other aspect of system mastery is when you've internalised the rules so that you often don't need them and they fade into the background. You can roll the dice and have a pretty good idea if you succeeded or not.

In the Smart Party podcast, Gaz and Baz talk about their frustration with people who say they like Chaosium's BRP because it fades into the background - to the point where they no longer use it. Well, once you've mastered a system it should always fade into the background - most of the time you don't need it any more.

"In an RPG, the fun happens between the rules"

In a blog post that I can no longer find (it may have been moved), John Wick makes an interesting point: "In an RPG, the fun happens between the rules." I agree. For me, the fun is in the story and the banter, not the rolling of dice. And with few exceptions, the system is always about the dice, not the story or the banter.

I think it's one of the reasons why I prefer RPGs with few rules - they have more space for fun than those with many rules.

Aside #2: RuneQuest MGF. I think the only time I played RuneQuest was with some Glorantha fans in Sheffield. But we didn't use the system - we used something they described as "maximum game fun". You picked three things you were good at, one thing you were bad at, and a secret. And that was it. I don't remember if we rolled dice or not. System? What system?

Invisible rulebooks

Then there are the invisible rulebooks we all carry around in our heads. S. John Ross talked about them, but that post is no longer on his site.) Essentially we all have our own view of how the world works and our game decisions are filtered by those rulebooks. And those are the rulebooks we consult when the players try to do something that's not in the official rules.

I freely admit that I make extensive use of those invisible rulebooks. Back in the 90s, when I was doing masses of roleplaying, I ran more than one multi-session game with nothing but 2d6 and my invisible rulebooks.

I mostly still do that. Except that I say I'm running Fate Accelerated (a very light system) because I'd never get anyone to play in my games if I told them what I was really doing.

A melon stall in D&D?

The Smart Party talk about running a melon stall game using D&D, and note that while there are lots of combat rules in D&D, there's nothing about running a melon stall. They're not against running a melon stall using D&D, but note that if the did that they'd probably use a different ruleset.

If the melon stall arose naturally out of the game, then I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But I do concede that if you want to run a melon stall game then D&D would be an odd choice of rules.

Boardgames and RPGs

If you did want to run a melon stall game, you might be better off with a boardgame. I can't think of any specific melon stall games, but there's plenty of trading games in that general area.

I don't play boardgames the way I play RPGs. When I sit down to play Villagers, I play Villagers - I'm not trying to apply my internalised Cosmic Encounter rules to Villagers. So Villagers is a very different experience to Cosmic Encounter. Or Tiny Epic Galaxies, or Rhino Hero Super Battle, or Ticket to Ride.

RPGs aren't like that. You can do anything in an RPG (S. John Ross describes this as tactical infinity), and often that's what the players want to do. And when they do that you need to consult your invisible rulebooks because there's no game rulebook big enough to cover everything.

When system does matter

And then there are the games where system does matter. Yes I said it. Sometimes, system does matter. Even to me.

For me, there are two reasons that systems matter:

First, it matters if I accidentally join a game with a system-heavy group or GM. I probably won't enjoy myself as much. That's not what I enjoy, and I'm in the wrong place.

Second, some RPGs really are doing something different. Everything I've described above probably comes under the heading "trad" (or traditional). But there are (a few) exceptions.

Here's my list (these are just the games I'm familiar with - I'm sure there are others):

• Hillfolk - it's roleplaying, but nobody would call it "trad". I've played Hillfolk once, and I'd like to do it more.
• Monsterhearts - in my experience a lot of PbtA games are played in a traditional style, but not this one.
• Cthulhu Dark - Cthulhu Dark is played much like Call/Trail of Cthulhu - but it's much, much bleaker. There's no fighting the monsters, and no happy endings, and the system helps drive this.
• Follow - a GM-less game by the designer of Kingdom and Microscope. None of them are traditional RPGs.
• Fiasco - another GM-less game.

Cthulhu Dark - when system matters

Looking at the list above, with the exception of Cthulhu Dark, all the games have a strong player-v-player element. So they play very differently to traditional RPGs and that's probably why the system matters so much.

Aside #3: Two games of Hot War. I've played Hot War twice - both of them one-shots. Hot War is a game of relationships, paranoia, factionalism and betrayal. It's also set in this crazy 1960s post-apocalyptic setting of a shattered London haunted by crazed Soviet monsters. 

My first game used the setting and a bit of the rules. It was a perfectly enjoyable investigation that ended up with a confrontation with a grotesque creature below London. But we could have been playing Call of Cthulhu.

My second game used the Hot War mechanics and translated it to a SF setting (which felt a bit Outland in tone). It used the Hot War mechanics to create a wonderful player-v-player game where my character lost everything.

Both games were great. Different, but great.

So in summary

For me, system doesn't matter in tabletop RPGs. Except when it does.

 Note: I've edited this a little from the original to correct an error.