Save Vs Rant

Today on Save Vs. Rant, we’re going to talk about Warhammer, the most popular fantasy wargame franchise of all time. Our episode today focuses on the hobby aspect of the game – the world created for the game, the miniatures and other aspects that don’t directly relate to the rules of the game.

I’ve been thinking about orcs lately and their transformation throughout the annals of fantasy media. The first incarnations of fantasy orcs (a term that originally interchangeable, to some extent, with goblin) was J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In that series, they’re the corrupted descendants of elves, twisted through the magic of Sauron. Tolkien created them as an unambiguously “always evil” antagonist that the heroes could slaughter en masse without having to stop and ponder who this man was and what his life had been. He was an orc: his life has been an brutal amoral scramble for the top of the pecking order.

The earliest incarnation of orcs in D&D was, of course, essentially a copy of Tolkien’s orcs, but with a strong reminder that they are tribal or live in villages. Since the primary focus of orcs was being physically powerful (with the drawback of being intellectually and emotionally weak), it was only a matter of time before someone wanted to play a character with orcish ancestry, prompting the introduction of half-orc as a playable race, cementing the fact that not everything orcish is always evil, but that having such ancestry did tend to push one in that direction (possibly because when you are very strong but not very clever, you become accustomed to solving problems with your fists).

A bit thereafter, Games Workshop put their own spin on orcs in Warhammer Fantasy (Hey! That’s what this episode is about!), making them a sort of animal-fungus hybrid that is sorted into castes according to size, solidifying, codifying and modifying the Tolkein link to “goblin.” They also arranged them so their heads jutted distinctly forward in a constant hunch to emphasize their primitive predatory gait and made them distinctly green (prior to that, orcs were more commonly described as brown, gray or black with only periodic references to green skin, usually as a comparison to goblins). They also reverted, more or less, to the always evil version of the orcs.

Warcraft (the PC game) was originally meant to be a Games Workshop licensed Warhammer adaptation, but the plan, for whatever reason (and there seem to be contradictory accounts) proved to be both impractical and unnecessary, with Warcraft seeing a release in 1994 without direct tie-ins to Warhammer Fantasy, further cementing the brutish green-skinned orcs in our collective unconscious (and propelling orcs into popular culture).

Back up a few years to 1987, and orcs (styled as “orks”) are ported into a science fiction setting in Warhammer 40,000. This incarnation of orks retains most of the recognizable features of orcs as a concept (brutality, physical superiority) as well as the Games Workshop specific features (Gork and Mork as their chief deities, jutting forward-facing heads, fungal propagation). In addition, to make them fit into the space setting, the psychic power of the orkish collective unconscious makes their unlikely technology not only work, but also behave as their twisted whims expect (“the red ones go faster,” “the purple ones are sneakier”). The contradictory whimsy, brutishness, playfulness and cunning of the orks gives them a surreal, alien feel that works well in the grimdark setting while also providing unlikely opportunities for comedy relief.

1989 rolls around, and Shadowrun gives its own personal spin to orcs in a modern setting, this time plopping them in a hyper-urban neoliberal cyberpunk dystopia invaded / infested with magic. Wow! Honestly, one of the most original use of the increasingly cliché fantasy monster (and, with this modern spin, the most thorough discarding of the “always evil” trope with its fantasy racism baggage).

Bright, the 2017 Netflix original starring Will Smith sucked, and used orcs as an explicit stand-in for racial minorities in the United States, which is approximately the most lazy thing you can do with orcs. I’m not saying that we don’t need allegories about racism (it’s pretty clear that we STILL don’t get it), but that doesn’t mean that every allegory is useful or that some aren’t ham-fisted clumsy and unentertaining. This one is that last type.

Rolling back to orcs: the primary role that orcs occupied for the majority of fantasy media has been “unambiguous moral evil embodied in primitive sentience,” a role that exists because, for most of us, D&D (and roleplaying in general) serves, periodically if not primarily, as a way of stepping into a world with a simplified spectrum of moral choices. In a world with clear-cut good an evil, you don’t have to worry about who you’re hurting when you wage a war, or who you’re robbing when you assault an orcish stronghold. They are evil – objectively so – and, as such, can be killed without guilt, shame or hesitation (along with a slew of other associated creatures). Likewise, in Warhammer Fantasy, they play the role of (with a few specific named characters acting as exceptions) functionally interchangeable minions that can be thrown in crashing waves against armies who can, in turn, slaughter the primitive fungal beings en masse.

On the flip side, we all want to believe that with sentience comes choice and that, at the end of the day, anything that has the power to reason, think, dream and create art (which all orcs do, albeit in many cases menacing art made from cruel components) has, by extension, the power to make moral choices. Bonus – in most cases orcs DO have this power, they just exercise it so seldom that we can lazily declare them “always evil” without particular regard for these exceptions.

Tolkien expressed regret at making the orcs unambiguously always evil – even within his vision of a world with an epic conflict between good and evil, he recognized that this is not how any sentient creature can be reasonably expected to exist. Furthermore, since we all model things on the societies we see, his vision of orcs as a combination of grim industrialization and ignorant violence creates some recognizable features in the dim orcish reflection that, in turn, perhaps bring us uncomfortably close to imagining groups of humans who were “always evil” in real life.

But roleplaying games are, in a very real way, about setting aside the real world, even when we choose to play in an analog of it. They are a place where we can make bad, dangerous or even evil choices without fear of ruining our very real human lives. They give us the opportunity to interact with worlds of magic, mystery and fantastic beings that exist with psychology and physiology that defies the limitations of our real world and, as such, that we can relate to in ways that we cannot the living, breathing creatures in our own world.

So whatever role orcs play in your campaigns (or video games, or war games, or novels, or films, or whatever media you choose), it can be helpful to know the history of these strange creatures. Perhaps in an upcoming episode we’ll do a more thorough examination of the roles of common fantasy creatures (sentient and otherwise) in the evolution of fantasy media. For now, we’ll simply leave you with the knowledge that it’s vital you know what you and the other players involved want to get out of the inclusion of this quintessential fantasy creature in your games.

Today’s episode is about the game behind (and beyond) the game – the metagame! It’s hard to imagine what a game without a metagame would even look like, and yet so frequently we only speak of “metagaming” pejoratively. Today, we’ll be discussing what the metagame is and how you can view it with appreciation rather than apprehension.

Let’s talk about metagames! No, not any of the metagame stuff we’ve already discussed in today’s episode – I’m going to blog today about the many strange and wondrous metagames to be found across the world of competition and in all its forms!

Take, for example, the fighting game genre of video game. As far back as the old school arcade game Street Fighter 2, players have recognized that characters can be rated on a tier list indicating their relative power as typically measured by how frequently the very best players win tournaments with those characters. The characters Sagat (a powerful sub boss character with devastating attacks and high combo potential), Vega (a fast character who also features devastating combination attacks) and Dhalsim (the character with super stretchy limbs) are highly regarded as the best characters, with Soviet bear wrestler Zangief falling to the very bottom, in part because he’s slow and partially because his most devastating attack is alarmingly difficult for a human player to pull off.

Tier lists, by and large, exist solely for competitive play. Sure, it helps to know, even if you’re just playing with a few friends, that you’ll have much more of an uphill battle playing a match in Tekken as Kuma the bear against Raven the ninja, or that Smash Bros’ Luigi may have difficulty overcoming Fox (especially given the infamous “No Items / Fox Only / Final Destination” setup stipulations the very worst kind of Smash player insists on*. Ultimately, though, any character can (and does) beat any other character given the right circumstances, a disparity of skill and maybe a little luck.

Although we mentioned this in the episode, I want to elaborate a bit more on iterative games and the inherent metagame of knowing not only that you will play another match against a given player, but that they will play other matches that don’t involve you, and have records and expectations to consider. When I played Magic: The Gathering, I was once told that in tournament settings where you have already lost a game and, therefore, the chance to progress, and you are playing a match against another player who has not yet lost, the thing to do to cement friendship and goodwill is to forfeit so they can continue. I have a strong viscerally negative reaction to this, even though there is no prohibition against it. In a more personal and less hypothetical example, whenever my brother finishes in the top 2 of a tournament, he immediately offers his opponent the opportunity to call a draw and request that the prizes for first and second place be split evenly between them. This is, apparently, common enough practice that nobody seems to think it’s particularly odd even if they do it themselves. In a sense, the social expectations of the game become a metagame as well.

If you think, for whatever reason, that professional sports are largely free of this sort of manipulation, you would be wrong. Consider the match-fixing scandal that rocked professional sumo wrestling in 2011.: players with nothing to lose threw matches against players with opportunities for promotion, analogous to what Magic players do.

Other less obvious examples of sports metagames include:

• the psychologically dubious tradition of having a pink locker room for visiting football teams (under the belief that this will emasculate them and damage their performance)
• NASCAR mechanics who come up with novel methods of skirting regulations (e.g. having extra thick, extra long fuel lines to carry additional fuel)
• the pitching metagame in baseball (where pitches are varied to prevent players from becoming too accustomed to a single variety of pitch)
• the extremely unsportsmanlike “Hack-a-Shaq” strategy (wherein star center Shaquille O’Neal would be repeatedly and often violently fouled with the understanding that he performed poorly at free throws and superficial injuries from repeated fouls might impair his play)
• the fact that the US World Cup Soccer team has to assume that if they’re in the lead the refs will award an excessive amount of time (no really this still pisses me off so much even after years)

On a more tabletop game related note, something that we didn’t really have time to cover in today’s episode is the unique susceptibility of party games – especially those of the “social deduction” and “please the judge” genres – to metagaming based on the personalities of the players involved. When playing with a group of strangers, I’ve noticed that it’s not usually long before you get a feel for everyone at the table and find that, instead of choosing the safe option, you start to feel out their personal tastes and learn to play to their expectations.

Remember – metagames are inextricable from gaming as a concept. Being aware not only of the existence but also the ramifications of metagaming will lead to a more rewarding gaming experience. We hope we’ve inspired you to think more of the game outside and beyond the game itself.

* You will NEVER see me backpedal on this. People who play Smash this way are actually outlandishly bad at the game. Playing Smash like this is like playing golf on a completely flat fairway – the whole game becomes “who is best at a single fundamental skill that comprises only a fraction of the game’s full scope,” which isn’t golf at all.

Today on Save Vs. Rant, we’ll be discussing two player games – tabletop duels! These games let you focus exclusively on the other player, be they an ally or nemesis, and make for very personal gaming experiences!

A quick rundown of the games we discussed this episode:

Fog of Love is one of our favorite roleplaying lite games. It’s basically playing a mini romcom, and it’s a lot of fun!

Monophobia is a collection of 2-player roleplaying adventures for the Call of Cthulhu system. It’s been said that it’s a bit unforgiving (kind of the nature of only having access to a single player character, though).

Morels is a fun game of amateur mycology that now has an expansion called Foray that permits more than two players.

Jaipur is a card matching game. Meant to be played in a series of best-of-three, the game plays quickly, maintaining tension throughout.

Onitama is a chess variant that starts with the only random element – the selection of martial arts forms – and, from there, is a deterministic game of trying to corner your opponent’s master.

The Duke is a chess variant that starts with the only deterministic elements of setup and from there introduce only random elements to the game.

Mouse Guard: Swords and Strongholds and Tak are two player abstract games that I completely forgot to bring up in this episode, but bother are delightful inasmuch as they were introduced in fiction and then brought into the real world!

Tash Kalar is a sort of Go variant where players create patterns to summon creatures to do battle with one another. It kind of brings to mind, in that sense, The Stars Are Right, which is also a pattern matching game, but without Go.

Hive is a gorgeous game involving weighty ceramic hex chips that you use to try to surround your opponent’s queen. Very deep but fast gameplay.

Patchwork is so much fun! Not only is the quilt aesthetic adorable, but the resource management and direct competition gameplay is reliably enjoyable. The game is simple to pick up, but difficult to master.

One great reason to have two player games at your usual game night – ESPECIALLY the ones that play quickly – is that they can give players who aren’t participating in the current game something to do between rounds. Any game that features player elimination – especially fairly early game – can leave players out of the action for a long time. Having games permitting two players to play can give players something to do while they wait for a larger game to open back up.

Beyond that, gaming with a single other person can be a very personal and even intimate experience. You can learn a lot about someone by how they compete with you and what sort of experience it creates. Games that have truly personal touches (deck customization in Magic the Gathering, for example) can give you insight not only into a person’s thought process, but also their sense of aesthetics and how they approach competition.

Many of the oldest games known to man were designed to be played by two players, and even in our ever changing world of complexity and interconnection, I believe we will continue for the foreseeable future to create and player these games.

Today on Save Vs. Rant, we’re discussing ways to improve as a DM. In this episode, we present tools, strategies and techniques that will help you grow and improve as a DM, ultimately resulting in a better experience for both you and your players.

I’ve joked before that DMing is a subtle form of performance art where you trick a room full of people into thinking that they’re playing a game, and while that’s a rather drastic (and more than a bit pretentious) description of DMing, the ideal is to have the parts that you’re just making up blend as seamlessly as possible with the parts that are set in stone, or exist as part of the game’s shared reality. To that end, we offer 5 more essential tips, each of which is something we ourselves once had to learn.

1. Use Cheat Sheets

One of the most important things that must be true for self-improvement to even be possible is that we need to know where we can improve. If you find yourself looking up certain rules or consulting the exact wording of a spell, it’s probably something you should make a cheat sheet for. In high school and college, this process was often called “taking notes,” and the concept is largely the same. I find, personally, that almost every cheat sheet I make becomes naturally obsolete a little while after I make it. With no effort at all, the things I use on a regular basis internalize and I start to be able to anticipate what results I’m going to find on my cheat sheet until I find that I’m no longer consulting the cheat sheet at all.

Except grappling. I’ll never remember the d20 grapple rules.

2. Use a DM Screen

You know a convenient place for your cheat sheets? You DM screen! Every DM screen in history has had a bunch of useful tables printed on it, and every single one has had something (or even mostly things) I’ve found to be unnecessary for one reason or another. An especially egregious example is the Pathfinder 1st Edition DM Screen, which had the XP progression by level (as if your players aren’t going to obsessively track how close they are to the next level!). By comparison, almost every iteration of the Storyteller’s Screen for the World of Darkness had the rules for fire and electrical damage. Although these weren’t exceptionally complicated, they weren’t perfectly intuitive and having them handy made it a lot easier to mitigate electrical and fire damage when they happened to occur unexpectedly (which, more often than not, they did).

But more than a convenient place for cheat sheets, a DM screen is a great way to organize and shield your notes, giving you the ability to peruse them with confidence, knowing that your secrets are safe from the (often accidental) prying eyes of your players. And while we at Save Vs. Rant are neutral in the war between the fudgers and the never-fudgers, nearly every game will periodically benefit from the ability to make a roll in secret and conceal the outcome from the players.

Secrecy is a form of suspense building, which can be a very good thing.

3. Realism Isn’t Consistency (and Neither Is Automatically Good)

I admit that this is a mouthful, and without getting too postmodern in this semi-lighthearted gaming blog, I want to expound on what we mean by this. Almost every attempt at granular realism – the realism of having charts and numbers and percentages and bell curves and ideals – is thwarted by the reality that the world is a complicated place where counter-intuitive outcomes are common. Alan Pinkerton – one of those human beings blending a less than charming mix of genuine bravado and reprehensible morals – was a rugged soldier who died from an infected tongue.

I’ve learned not to say, “No one,” because I cannot possibly anticipate the staggering diversity of personal preference, but few indeed are likely to be interested in a game where your character might be one of the greatest swordsmen in the world, but is felled by trenchfoot-induced gangrene. Fewer still are excited about games where you have to track the ongoing status of mundane equipment. Even such necessary bookkeeping as tracking rations and supplies might detract from the best parts of the gameplay experience.

There’s a reason that one of the most common innovations in roleplaying games has been abstraction of success and tracking. For many of us, the experience of playing D&D – tracking hit points, calculating attack bonuses and considering positioning in light of movement – is at the sweet spot for this kind of concrete empirical presentation. One common “innovation” that I used to see get bandied a great deal was having some sort of “fatigue pool” for fighters to limit how much they could fight, and while this is an interesting idea in theory, every implementation I’ve ever seen has turned one of the most straightforward gameplay experiences into a chore. Don’t chorify your game – Realism isn’t the one thing you should be hanging your hat on.

And while there’s a lot to be said for consistency, don’t convince yourself that having a 100% internally consistent world is the same as having a world that you can play in. Even a casual sociological or geopolitical analysis of virtually any of the most popular campaign settings will usually unearth some pretty glaring inconsistencies or mind boggling omissions by writers or characters within those worlds, but they remain popular nonetheless for good reason. The most important question I ask when I look at a new setting or game is: what stories can we tell with this that we couldn’t tell in any other game system?

4. Use Your Senses

In our episode on Read Aloud Text, we discussed how much time you have to describe the environment to your players, and the answer is: not a lot. Make your descriptions count! Engage all the senses! For the majority of players, sight and sound will provide the majority of the atmosphere both for the players (who will listen to the DM and observe the props and miniatures they present) and their characters (who will rely primarily on their eyes and ears to learn about their environment).

Don’t neglect the other senses, though! The sense of smell is most strongly linked to memory – even described smells can bring memories bubbling to the surface. Touch moments need to be things the players feel intentionally – changes in temperature, pressure and airflow are entailed in this sense. Even taste can have a place in the dungeon, putting the metallic tang of blood in the character’s mouth after a jarring fall or the dirty taste of airborne dust.

Finally, consider the obscure senses. Equilibrioception  is the sense of balance, and it can be thrown not only by unexpected or sudden movement, but changes in noise, pressure or footing. Proprioception  is the way we detect where our body is without looking at it. Kinaesthesia  is our awareness of movement, sometimes triggered unexpectedly when, say, an adjacent train starts moving while we are sitting still. While these more obscure senses might not come up as frequently (and please don’t invoke these too often), they can add a special punch to atypical situations.

All of this, ideally, is done without telling your players how they or their characters react. Instead, let them dictate what the characters do and how they feel. Tell them what they experience and let them tie it to emotion and action. And, speaking of emtion…

5. Know Your Player’s Limits and Boundaries

We’re going to talk about limits, boundaries and consent in gaming a lot here at Save Vs. Rant. Why? Because they’re important issues that have not only historical significance in gaming’s shaky culture of inclusion, but keep coming up in contemporary settings. In June of this year, a DM running a game at UK Games Expo ran a particularly nasty scene (CW if you wish to look into this further: sexual assault scenarios) that should not have been conducted without enthusiastic consent – much less without a warning! Beyond showing that this DM cannot be trusted with players (his name is Kevin Rolfe, and I would NEVER play with him after that), those players now have to carry the baggage of that appalling experience with them into other games. An implicit bond of trust has been broken, and they might have difficulty enjoying other games with DMs they don’t already trust.

No one should feel that they’ve been tricked or coerced into an uncomfortable, unpleasant or hostile experience. Players – and DMs as well! – should feel that they’re in a safe place with friends where they can explore the stories they enjoy with themes they find agreeable. This might, for some groups, include extreme or disturbing content. As a general rule, I encourage people to explore topics they might find uncomfortable, difficult or scary in the context of a roleplaying game, but I never want those players to feel trapped in something they don’t want to be a part of. For me, roleplaying has on many occasions been a chance to explore themes, ideas and fears that I otherwise would be largely content to ignore or avoid, and I really feel that this has been a force for positive change in my life.

There are no one-size-fits all solution that can be applied to every roleplaying group. Different people have their own triggers. Some of us don’t even know what crosses our lines until we see it. That’s why we recommend not only clearing the most controversial, taboo or difficult themes and scenarios from your game or character background with the rest of your group in advance, but also having an X card on the table and be ready to interrupt the action if a player is uncomfortable or in distress.

You can find a link to Monte Cook Games’ excellent Consent in Gaming publication HERE. The resources is free and well worth the read. Don’t ruin a convention. Don’t hurt your friends. Don’t alienate your players. Let’s create memories and experiences that everyone can enjoy and appreciate.

Oh, shucks! Today we’re talking about one of the worst official D&D modules ever published: Castle Greyhawk. An enduring part of TSR’s post-Gygax legacy and an enormous letdown and slap in the face to everyone who gave a single flying frick about the legacy of the setting or the lore of one of the most famous D&D landmarks of all time.

It’s been a weird few years in a lot of ways, but most salient to Save Vs. Rant is the sort of weirdness we see in the gaming world. Gaming has always been a landscape dominated by the strange and niche, and the current decade has certainly been no exception, but today I would like to draw your attention to the fact that Wendy’s (yes, the burger chain with unnatural square burger patties) has released an RPG.

It’s a joke, of course. And it’s an ad, of course. And… it’s a fully playable game with a ruleset that permits characters to go from level 1 to level 5 along pre-designed advancement paths in one of four different “Orders” (yes, I understand the joke). The attribute system is a classic OD&D style “roll for your stats” system, and the standard roll to generate stats is a 4d4 roll (4 for $4 (yes, I understand the joke)). The story of the provided campaign involves an evil jester that wants all beef to be frozen and features monsters based on various fast food items NOT features at Wendy’s (a monster based on the happy mean and another based on the third piece of bun from the Big Mac). There’s a simple campaign setting with allusions to other fast food chains that may, in fact, someday be expounded upon.

This game is silly, of course. It’s a free game created as an advertisement, so it’s bound to be bizarre, but from the perspective of the puns, tone and humor, it’s still better than Castle Greyhawk, and the included art is pretty phenomenal. No, really. There’s not a lot of it, but flip through it when you get a chance and just look at the work they commissioned for it.

But Wendy’s kind of sucks. I mean, let’s ignore the socioeconomic issues inherent to being a fast food restaurant (which are myriad) and just focus on this one thing they did. First of all, tell me who wrote it – use only the actual “Feast of Legends” rulebook. I’ll wait. Expand your search to the website. Still nothing? The only credits I’ve been able to find in the whole thing is the Maps and Illustrations, which, yeah, totally deserve credit because they’re fully professional quality… just like the writing… and the rules… and the playtesting that no doubt went into this.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a multibillion dollar company to credit their talent. I understand – though do not agree – that the business of commercials, despite being significant creative works, do not, by default, credit anyone involved in them. This, however, isn’t just an ad. It’s a game experience. Let’s compare and contrast the RIDICULOUS Burger King commissioned Xbox 360 game Sneak King, which contained credits for everyone who worked on the project and, furthermore, ended (if you would ever finish this rather lackluster game) with a full credit sequence. Because creators deserve to be credited for their work.

I’m not trying to make a mountain out of a molehill here, but I’m so exhausted of the gig economy dystopia wherein some of the most successful companies in history get to direct the creative energy of incredibly talented writers to turn what could be decent projects into ironic advertisements you play with your friends, then, to add insult to injury, don’t openly credit the writers who made it possible. Perhaps some are delighted by the notion of companies actually trying to court them based on their interests, but regardless of how well put together it is, how cute the puns are or how interesting the rules, I don’t see myself playing a Wendy’s RPG any time soon, doubly so if they’re not going to clearly and openly credit the creative forces behind it.

Next up – DMing 103! More advice on how to maximize the fun you and your players have.

A little more than a year ago, we posted our look at the playtest version of Pathfinder 2nd Edition. Now that the full final version is out, we’re pleased to give you our first impressions of the new edition of the now iconic successor to D&D 3rd Edition, and one of my favorite roleplaying games.

There are a million blogs, vlogs, subreddits, forum threads and YouTube videos about the new edition of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, many of which do a more thorough analysis of the new rules than, perhaps, I am likely to offer, so I’m not going to spend this blog doing a rules comparison. Our episode today and our previous episode regarding the playtest are going to be the sum total of rules explanation I do at this time. Likewise, revisiting Golarion, one of my favorite Kitchen Sink roleplaying game settings, would probably be extraneous. Even a discussion of the system’s art is something I’ve already done.

So, instead, I’m going to talk a bit about my perception of the game’s design philosophy. What’s interesting about Pathfinder as a roleplaying game, is that it does virtually nothing new. What strange praise for one of my favorite game of all time! “Almost everything about it has been done before.” If I had to point at something truly unique about the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game without citing the setting, I would be hard pressed to find much of anything apart from how it arranges its elements.

Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE originality. Monsterhearts and other Powered by the Apocalypse are always welcome. FATE has such a refreshing approach to setting creation that I constantly want to crib bits for my other games. The unique offerings of the one-page roleplaying games never fail to delight me. Originality is great! Innovation is beautiful!

And Pathfinder is, by and large, primarily innovative in how well it blends together disparate but established elements of roleplaying. My earliest recollection of what we now call feats was the system of perks from the Fallout video game series that, in the first three games at least, functioned almost exactly the way Feats do in D&D 3rd Edition. Those have been carried over into every subsequent d20 variant. Mandating feats that are related to a character’s ancestry and skills (rather than simply offering such feats) helps to make characters feel interesting without forcing characters who want more practical and non-combat skills and abilities to feel pressured to keep up with better min-maxed characters and is, itself, partially cribbed from D&D 4th Edition.

Skill allocation in PF2e likewise resembles systems like World/Chronicles of Darkness, Fate and other systems where a point-by-point breakdown of skills is eschewed in favor of a simpler system in fewer tiers. Despite the fact that the math behind skills in d20 games is simple, it can still be stressful and overwhelming for some players to have to record so many numbers, and simplifying it to a one-word description makes the game more comfy for these players.

Having 3 actions and 1 reaction (without the differentiation between move, standard, quick and free as developed in 3rd edition) is relatively innovative for a d20 game, but has existed in numerous video games for a very long time. Likewise, giving only some characters a reaction that allows them to attack moving and disengaging enemies (the Fighter’s ability to take what were previously freely available Attacks of Opportunity) is innovative for a d20 game, but has also been part of both video games and wargames for a long time.

To me, it really feels like the developers of Pathfinder 2nd Edition wanted to learn from and integrate some of the better mechanics of the growing list of D&D variants and successful roleplaying games in general. The result is a game that is intended to carry over the spirit of 3rd Edition D&D (the reason that it’s still a VERY crunchy game) but with the lessons learned from the other editions and, importantly, with an eye toward avoiding the foibles of those games.

Due to an inexhaustible supply of cynicism, I suspect that this edition will probably one day succumb to the level of rules creep present in the 1st Edition of the game even as I enthusiastically await the upcoming material that will push them closer to that point. Thank you.

As a final note, really appreciate that all the goblinoids actually look like goblins now. Seriously – it’s always felt less like hobgoblins and bugbears were only tangentially related to goblins, kind of like how horses had these doglike ancestors that really didn’t look like horses at all. Now, they all feel like distinct flavors of goblin that would be at home living and working in goblin villages rather than creatures with very little relation that just happen to co-occupy the same territories peacefully.

Today on Save Vs. Rant, we are giving our review of Dungeon in a Box, a monthly service that sends you everything you need to run a brief adventure that combines with 11 others in a series to create a coherent campaign for D&D 5th Edition.

Happy Labor Day! …it’s still technically Monday, so let the record show I posted on time.

Review episodes are always prone to fall victim to the dread specter of subjectivity, so let the record show, we do NOT think Dungeon in a Box is a bad product. The price is fair, the material is good, the props are excellent quality and well-selected. It’s simply not for us, and even though it’s only tangentially related, that’s what I would really like to blog about right now.

One of the most liberating things I have realized in my 20+ years of gaming, is that I don’t have to like everything. Not only do I not have to like everything, but me not liking something does not make it bad. Furthermore, everyone doesn’t have to like everything that I do, and that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Everything is not for everyone. Very few things are. Most things are for a lot of people. Some things are for a few people. All of these things can still be ok or even good even if they aren’t intended for everyone

Don’t mistake this for saying “everything is good, actually,” because there are things that are bad. There are products that are poorly designed. There are materials that are ineffective. There are games that are cumbersome, boring, poorly designed or offensive, and that’s all on a sliding scale, of course.

Some things aren’t good, but it can still make sense to enjoy then. I hate Monopoly. Monopoly is not a good game – even if you play it correctly, it can drag on for an uncomfortably long time. There are known correct strategies to monopoly, mathematically speaking, but the game can still feel alarmingly arbitrary. Monopoly is a poorly designed game, and notably a product of a time when board games had not come into their own. Even so, some people enjoy Monopoly. Some people consider it their favorite game. I’m never going to play it with them (sorry, guys), but, honestly, have fun! I’m glad you have a thing you like!

I love Kingdom Death: Monster. It’s unforgiving, unfair, morbid, periodically gross and frequently frustrating. It is absolutely not for everyone, and while the game is quite polished and well designed, it has some features that are, perhaps, considerably less than optimal. For some things, the math doesn’t even work (if you plot it out, for example, the entire Survival of the Fittest ideology literally results in negative growth each time Intimacy triggers). But I still like it. I’m always glad when someone else likes it. I don’t expect anyone to like it, though, and recognize the myriad reasons that it’s not for everyone.

Oneupmanship, though? Literally one of the worst games ever made. Nothing about it is good. It’s an annoying game with a terrible attitude. It’s still unclear if it’s intended as a (completely humorless) satire, or if the douchebaggery is genuine. Seriously watch reviews of the game or look at the components or pull it on Tabletop Simulator or whatever. It is an incredible example of what absolutely NOT to do when designing a game. Everything about it is terrible, and if you ever meet someone who likes the game, it’s safe to assume that they are either a deeply disturbed individual or a shill for the author. Some things really are bad.

Likewise, I don’t like 4th Edition D&D as a roleplaying game. I think it could be salvaged as a pretty great miniatures combat game, but as D&D, it doesn’t feel like D&D at all. Even so, I know people personally that genuinely think it’s one of the best games ever made. It brought more people into the hobby than ever before. It was substantially easier to teach and learn than D&D 3rd Edition and followed a strict separation of gameplay and narrative*, which made it play more consistently. So, if 4th Edition is your jam, I get it.

Nobilis is weird. The rules are kind of awkward and half-baked. The setting and narrative are silly. The prose is sophomoric. Those are only opinions in the sense that it’s hard to objectively pin down those things, but I think it’s fair to say that they’re opinions that almost everyone will share about it if they were to look. If you like Nobilis and enjoy playing it, I’m happy for you. Whatever sparks joy, as Marie Kondo says.

FATAL is bad. I’m not going to link to anything it involves. It is literally the worst roleplaying game ever made, and its author is either a small-minded racist sexist jerk or a humorless troll. It doesn’t matter. It’s bad. If someone likes it, they’re either deeply misguided or they themselves are bad.

Saying that enjoyment is subjective doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as bad (or evil for that matter). What it does say is that just because I don’t enjoy something or don’t find use from it does NOT mean that people who do are somehow not as good as me. One thing I do when I look at things is try to understand WHY someone might like them. Almost everything that exists was designed deliberately by people who genuinely wanted to make something others (or even just they themselves) would enjoy, and if something is bad, we can usually understand why it’s bad. This is why I enjoy learning and talking about the Flavors of Fun and Save the Cat and top down vs. bottom up design – because I don’t just want to know what I enjoy, and I don’t just want to know what other people enjoy, I want to know why we enjoy the things we do. What are the underlying causes of enjoyment in these things?

Knowing not only what makes you happy but why you enjoy it is a major step not only toward being able to make better decisions about your choices in entertainment and leisure, but also in understanding and appreciating the past times and hobbies of others, and being open to new experiences and respectful of the interests of others are not only admirable character traits to cultivate, but it is my belief they are one of the important keys to living a happier more fulfilled life.

Today on Save vs. Rant, we chronicle Jeremy’s annual vacation to Gen Con, North America’s largest game convention and a perennial favorite destination of ours. For four days every year, the latest and greatest in gaming can be found in one large complex in the heart of downtown Indianapolis. Join us as we discuss Jeremy’s experience – what he enjoyed about the convention, what stood out to him, and what loot he returned with when it was complete.

We’ve already talked about GenCon twice before here at Save Vs. Rant, but it comes every single year, so it should be no surprise when we bring it up yet again next year and the next and the next and the next and so on and so on because there’s nothing quite like being in the presence of 60,000+ dedicated games, 500+ vendors and a vast array of special guests, presenters and performers.

I don’t really have a lot to say in today’s blog post. I’m just delighted by the growth of tabletop games as a hobby and the increased general acceptance among people who may not even consider themselves gamers in any sense. There was a time when proposing a board game night to my non-gamer friends or coworkers would be met with groans of dismay or begrudging sighs. Nowadays, proposing a game night can trigger excitement in people eager to see what we’ll be playing this time – a social deduction game? Perhaps a drafting game? A bluffing game? Anything is possible, and tabletop gaming is more accessible than ever before!

Our hobby is wide open, with new innovations and ideas appearing every single year. The quality of components, clarity of rules, tightness of gameplay and, most importantly, approachability of the games combines to make this the golden age of tabletop games, with something to appeal to everyone both in aesthetics and experience. It is our sincere hope here at Save Vs. Rant that tabletop games continue to offer us the chance to have enjoyable experiences with our friends, coworkers, acquaintances and ever the friends we haven’t met yet!

Today’s episode deals with the various genres of RPGs, where possible giving examples of games set in those genres. Join us for our discussion of the themes and ideas underlying the games we play. Also, welcome back from GenCon, to all those who attended the convention!

As an excellent example of our postulate that genre means different things to different people, I just finished read the excellent book Save the Cat Writes a Novel, which has its own unique take on genres. Rather than categorizing the stories by the setting or the broad themes of the stories, the genre system author Jessica Brody suggests is one where the theme of the story – that is, the arc it follows – is what determines which category it occupies. Some of the examples include the Superhero (an extraordinary hero in an ordinary world), the Rite of Passage (a hero enduring hardship due to the common challenges of life), the Golden Fleece (a hero goes on a “road trip” in search of something) and the Fool Triumphant (an underdog hero perseveres against the establishment). While it would be foolish to try to use these genres to categorize the broader games and settings of roleplaying games, I don’t think there’s a DM alive that could not benefit from expanding and refining their repertoire by considering the nature of the stories they want their players to be part of, and a treatise on novel writing might well be a great place to do so.

But back to our more common definition of genre: when we think of the most common role playing games – D&D / Pathfinder, World of Darkness, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, Starfinder – it’s generally easy to categorize them (Fantasy, Horror, Cyberpunk (with Fantasy elements), Cosmic Horror and Sci-Fi, respectively). While crossover genre games are possible, the focuses are pretty tight. Generic systems like GURPS, FATE, d6, Unisystem and Savage Worlds all fit into whatever genre the group decides they want to play, which is a mixed blessing, since games tailor made to specific genres tend to do a better job of representing the tropes and most common elements of those genres. These games are approachable, accessible and have fairly large online and offline communities of players.

However, one thing we hope to do here at Save Vs. Rant, is to convince you to step out of your comfort zone and try something new, so I’d like to take a moment to suggest a few genuinely unique (and unusual) RPGs that fall outside the common narratives.

Cavemaster is a Stonepunk RPG (yes, that’s right – stone-age punk) that uses unique resolution mechanics. While the game is a complete RPG with all the elements one would expect, it features some truly original ideas and an amusing tongue-in-cheek premise for its system: the game is intended to be playable using only things that our early homo habilis ancestors would have on hand and, as such, is a diceless RPG that requires no written language to play. The basic resolution mechanic involves concealing stones equal to your total attribute in your right and left hand and having your opponent pick one hand.

Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy are both set in the Grimdark world of Warhammer 40,000, a game about the distant future of mankind. Set in a universe replete with cosmic horror, fearsome aliens, terrifying demons, sadistic orks and cruel commandants, the games are different in their focus (Rogue Trader being about the titular unaffiliated merchants while Dark Heresy is primarily about The Empire of Mankind’s Inquisition), they feature the same general vibe and simultaneous sense of the importance of the player characters in relation to the events of the story but complete unimportance in the grand arc of the universe itself.

Paranoia, originally by West End Games and more recently revised by Mongoose Publishing, is a classic dystopian sci-fi game where the players take on the roles of Troubleshooters working in Alpha Complex under the watchful eye of the all-knowing Computer. Troubleshooters are literally there to shoot trouble, whether that trouble be wayward mutants (which they troubleshooters almost certainly are), members of secret societies (also things the Troubleshooters almost certainly are), and other threats to the livelihood of the complex (which the Troubleshooters almost certainly are).

Gamma World is a humorous take on the post-apocalyptic setting, and plays things both bizarre and awesome. While I often rag on 4th Edition for miserably failing to be D&D, the 4th Edition-derived revision of Gamma World was not only exceptionally playable, but also had some of the most amusing randomized character creation rules I have ever seen (in what other game can you roll up a character that’s a sentient swarm of kittens that can shoot lasers?).

Fiasco, as we’ve mentioned before, is basically a Coen Bros movie played as an RPG (with an upcoming card-based adaptation still up for backing on kickstarter as of the publication of this blog post). Coen Bros films are somewhat famous for both mixing genres (Burn After Reading, being a Spy-Dark Comedy-Farce-Drama) and playing them straight (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs runs the gamut of Western). That experience can be captured as well in a good game of Fiasco, which is streamlined for satisfying one-offs.

Whatever games you decide work best with your group, we hope you’ll consider trying something outside the usual. Weird is wonderful, and we think everyone could use something a little different from time to time.

Today we will be discussing a classic setting that dates back to the origins of Dungeons and Dragons – the Forgotten Realms, fantasy writer Ed Greenwood’s personal setting originally created when he was but a lad. While it is not our favorite setting here at Save Vs. Rant, it is an integral part of gaming lore and an iconic setting that changed the fantasy roleplaying landscape forever.

I had the pleasure of seeing Ed Greenwood (as well as R.A. Salvatore and the incomparable Larry Elmore) play celebrity D&D at GenCon 2010 and still treasure the autographed copy of the module he played in that day. I’ll be the first to make the extremely corny admission that, as roleplaying in general and D&D in particular has had such an important and formative influence on my life, watching these titans of gaming play in person was something akin to a religious experience.

Many of the older D&D settings were homogeneous. Let’s get that out of the way right now. Forgotten Realms is a setting that is solidly Western European, with only secondary influences outside of that pastiche. In a sense, it follows a very Tolkien formula in this respect, emulating that progenitor of the western fantasy tradition.

Greyhawk and Blackmoor were the very first D&D settings, created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson respectively. Gygax’s setting was built from the bottom up (see our episode on Worldbuilding for more about this) around Castle Greyhawk and the early megadungeon beneath it. Blackmoor, meanwhile, was largely intended as a setting for Dave Arneson’s fantasy wargame Chainmail, and only became a D&D setting as an accident of evolution in that respect. These were about as vanilla as D&D settings can get, and represented the only settings that existed before the Forgotten Realms was published.

So when we criticize the setting as being homogenous western fantasy that established the existence of godlike super-NPCs and created several concepts that would subsequently become cliché, we also recognize that doesn’t make it bad per se, and that it’s also kind of the point. It’s an original setting – one of the earliest – and when original settings were being created, it was all breaking new ground.

What I always find myself asking when I talk about new games or new settings is the simple question, “What stories could I tell in this setting / game that I could not tell in another?” What are the things that make the setting unique? Forgotten Realms is a setting that assumes that someday the player characters will be incredibly powerful and, as such, lends itself well to running games at very high level. It is also a setting with an immense history in novels, video games and published material.

The Dragonlance campaign setting – one of the settings with which I was most familiar – differed from Forgotten Realms inasmuch as it largely assumed that the players would be playing through the War of the Lance (the Dragonlance Saga) and, if not playing those modules specifically, would at least be focused on that period in the settings history, with that incursion of evil as a backdrop. The Forgotten Realms, meanwhile, underwent several historical permutations, all of which it is theoretically possible to use as a setting to this day (and, doubtless, some groups out there still do).

At some point, we’ll no doubt discuss some of the truly homogenous D&D settings such as Al Qadim, the Arabian setting, Dark Sun, kind of a less cringe-sexy version of Gor or John Carter’s Mars, Planescape, the hyper-reality grab bag setting, Spelljammer, D&D IN SPACE, Birthright, the setting ruled by magical bloodlines, Rokugan, a fantasy vision of Japan through the lens of strict interpretation of bushido, and several other settings that were designed to depict one concept and one concept only.

Personally, I enjoy the fantasy kitchen sink settings, not only because of the flexibility they give the DM to include largely any elements they desire, but the flexibility it gives players to do the same. Once upon a time, I disdained 3rd Edition D&D for making monks part of the core setting. Nowadays, if a player wants to play a catfolk samurai or android kineticist in an otherwise vanilla medieval European-style fantasy setting, I welcome the opportunity to include the unusual element in an otherwise simple world.

If I had to choose a single title for my evolution as a DM for fantasy roleplaying games, it might be The Fantasy Kitchen Sink, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variety.