May RPG Action

 

With Variable Dave running his DCC interlude campaign - next session this weekend - it's a weird feeling to not be the one prepping stuff. I had forgotten how much less there is to do to be ready for a game as a player once you have a character ready to go. I mean, I'm relishing the chance to just play, especially with some of my regular crew, but it is a change in perspective. I think it's good for a GM to get to play every once in a while to get a refresh on how that feels but it has been awhile since I've had the chance. Being a party of 1st level DCC characters I expect there to be some carnage but it will be fun regardless.

That said there's always some level or prepping going on - right now the plan is still to run Necessary Evil as my next campaign so I've been skimming back through the Savage Worlds rules and powers. Then I'll hit the Super Powers Guide and the NE book itself. There is a pile of RPG books on the to-be-read shelf but I'm trying not to get distracted beyond reading back through the DCC rules and the Savage Worlds stuff.

Really trying not to get distracted by this ...

It is nice to have a steady group going - we always have a game running even if we skip a week or two here and there. Consistency is hugely important to keeping a group connected. Everyone knows that the default is "there's a game Saturday night" and exceptions will be discussed in advance. For me now it's nice to know I can hand things off to someone else and play and keep things going too. 

Anyway, more to come next week.

The Perpetual Golden Age of RPGs

 

This post is driven by some YouTube stuff I saw recently but it's been  showing up anywhere people discuss RPGs - forums, social media, reddit ... everywhere. The "it" is the shocking discovery that there are a lot of other games out there besides D&D! Really? Incredible!

I know that new people come into the hobby all the time and that's a good thing. I know that D&D is the first encounter for a lot of people - which is cool, it was for me as well. I just don't understand how people could spend, say, months getting into D&D and looking into it online, and remain blissfully unaware that other RPG's exist. I mean you have to run into references to, discussions about, and ads for things like Pathfinder, right? Shadowdark? You'd at some point hear that there is a Marvel RPG, or a Star Wars RPG, or a Star Trek RPG, plus various other pop-culture relevant games too, right?

There is a similar thing with Warhammer players too when they first notice/discover/get into other miniatures games, especially other genres. "Hey did you know there are miniature rules for WW2 battleships?" Yes, yes I am quite aware and I've even played some.

I think the latest surge of this is probably due to the 5E changeover to 5.5E - an edition change is always a good place for people to jump off the bandwagon - as over the past year or two the game that so many people were attached to became less of a stable, settled thing. I suspect that 5E D&D was the only game that was big enough to support blogs, YT channels, Discord channels, 3rd party companies, and the like as far as running a single-focus channel. Even Pathfinder seems to have trouble supporting narrowly-focused media. As that monobloc is shaken up, cracked even, people start looking around and realize there are other options and the (re?) discovery process begins. 

One example: I actually played my first session of Dungeon Crawl Classics over the weekend. I've run it a fair few times over the years but I've never gotten to experience it as a player. You'll see people mention it when they find it as if it was a hot new OSR game. It's been out longer than 5E has! DCC came along in 2012 and has been continuously in print the entire time, supported by a stupidly huge line of adventures from the publisher and a pretty good pile of 3rd party support as well. It's cool when you see someone discover it but it's weird when they act like it's new. Sure, it's new to you, now, but it was there the whole time while you were caught up in 5th Edition.

One of the older covers - not the oldest, but it's up there

Another example where this happens a lot, at least on the internet roads I travel, is Savage Worlds. I feel like Savage Worlds might be the king of this. D&D players and groups are excited to find a game that works completely differently to D&D - although they do often struggle to grasp the mechanics - they can tell that it's a cool thing and want to give it a whirl. While it does get some coverage online there is not anywhere near the blather on this game that there is on D&D. I guess this makes people feel like it must be new - it's not! It's over 20 years old now! And it stings to say that! Because I remember when it was new and radical and we were all just figuring it out and we had the email lists and google groups to help us along! But no, SW has been around for over two decades and with a few rules tweaks along the way is still pretty much the same game now that it was then. 

You don't see much about this one anymore

I think maybe this being the first big edition changeover since the juggernaut of 5E D&D becoming a modern media centerpiece might be why so many people keep proclaiming it as "the golden age of RPGs". My beef there is with the "the". It's easily "a" golden age of RPGs but every decade has a great run of new or revitalized games that earn that title for that decade all over again. For example, what are the big games now besides D&D itself?

• For fantasy we have Pathfinder, Shadowdark, OSR games...
• In the 80's besides D&D we had Runequest, Tunnels and Trolls, Chivalry and Sorcery, Pendragon, Warhammer Fantasy RP, Fantasy Hero, GURPS Fantasy, and a bunch of small press games that were tweaked versions of D&D. 
• In the 90's we had most of those plus Earthdawn, a resurgent Palladium Fantasy RPG, and possibly Torg and the various White Wolf games depending on how you want to count those.
• For Science Fiction we have versions of Traveller, a Star Trek game, a Star Wars game, Cyberpunk Red, and the various Alien space-horror games.
• In the 80's we had various versions of Traveller, we had a Star Trek game, we had a Star Wars game, we had other takes like Other Suns, Star Frontiers, Space Opera, plus GURPS Space and Star Hero and, of course, original Cyberpunk
• In the 90's we had a new Star Trek game, a new version of Traveller, a new version of CP,  and increased multi-genre weirdness like Rifts, Shadowrun, and Torg
• We have superheroes both name-brand (Marvel, Justice League) and do it yourself with Mutants and Masterminds, various FATE and PBTA games like Masks, Icons, and others.
• In the 80's we had a Marvel game, a DC game, and do it yourself games like Villains & Vigilantes, Champions, and Heroes Unlimited
• In the 90's all of those were still going with new edition and we added GURPS Supers, Aberrant, and the awesomeness of Underground to the mix as well. 
• For more universal systems I'd say Savage Worlds is exhibit A today, plus maybe the Cypher System from Monte Cook, the AGE games, and maybe even BRP making a late comeback these days
• In the 80's it was Hero, with GURPS coming along late
• In the 90's it was definitely Hero, GURPs, and then maybe BRP even then as a third. The White Wolf games were kind of a multi-genre system as time went on but not really one for playing normal people. 

Man this makes me want to drag this game out again

So RPGs have always inspired people to make something new, whether it's "like D&D except for ..." or "nothing at all like D&D". Anime is way too popular now and has inspired multiple games but even in the 80s & 90s when popular anime was mostly "robots and spaceships" we had Mekton for generic giant robot type games and Robotech for your licensed robot/spaceship game, and then BESM for everything else by the late 90's. Post-Apocalyptic games feel less popular but we have a new edition of Twilight 2000 for the rougher edges of post-nuclear life, Mutant Crawl Classics to keep the spirit of Gamma World alive, and a newer version of Rifts via Savage Worlds to keep that particular flavor of 90's cross-genre game going into yet another new decade. The more things change ...

Before the cartoons ... before the movies ... this was already a thing...

So when I hear proclamations of a new golden age I just shrug my shoulders. Sure, there may be some innovative mechanical approach. There may be an awesome new setting. That's all good but those of us who have been at this for a while have seen a lot of it before and it's weird. I do want to see the expansion and innovation continue and I want to see the next new trend but we have had interesting choices and options with RPGs since the late 70's! It's not going to stop anytime soon but it didn't just start this decade!

The last 50 years have been a Golden Age for RPGs and the fun rolls on ...

Campaign Pondering: The Rest of the Year

 

As the Time of Crisis proceeds - I know I haven't kept up with it here, I'll get around to it at some point - I've really started to think where we might go after it ends. One of the advantages of starting off a new system with a sort of mini-campaign like this adventure is that it does end - and that gives us a chance to think about what we want to do next. Warning: blatant thinking-out-loud post ahead ...

My original plan was to use this run to get everyone up to speed on the setting and the mechanics and then roll into a more traditional supers campaign for the rest of the year. We've had 8 sessions and will probably end up with around 12 total by the end and while I think everyone is enjoying it I'm not sure there is enough energy there to keep everyone excited and interested for another 6+ months. I have asked them to think about it as we play through the last chapters of the adventure so we will see.

In case they want to do something different then I've been working through a list of other options. I figure these will still be useful down the road when we start talking about next year so they are not a complete waste of time even if we stick with M&M.

• Some kind of D&D type fantasy - it's always a popular choice and knowing this I've been contemplating all kinds of things. 
• System-wise it could be another round of Tales of the Valiant, D&D 2024, 13th Age 2E, Pathfinder 2E. Might be a side-step into DCC, Dragonbane, or WFRP. I might even run some older edition if enough people want it. An AD&D 2E Realms game sounds like fun to me lately, though that's with zero details worked out.
• Setting-wise I've been thinking a lot about an old-school Dalelands campaign set in the Realms, which we have never played in this group. Zhents, Myth Drannor, Drow poking into surface business ... it's almost a cliche at this point but if you've never played it, just heard about it, well then it's not truly a cliche is it? I'd also love to do something with the Scarred Lands. I've been looking at the MTG books for D&D - Ravnica and Theros - and considering what those might look like. Heck, I might even consider running an Eberron game and that's just not a thing I've ever really considered before.
• We all love Savage Worlds here and it does just run. I might turn 2026 into a year of supers and a year of finishing old business by running Necessary Evil to completion. I've started it twice and never finished, much like Time of Crisis,  so it would be a solid victory to finally see that happen.  Beyond that Savage Rifts is always high on my people's lists and some kind of fantasy campaign using these rules has come up before as well. 
• Games I have never run for this group: There are 3 ...
• Shadowrun - Blaster was just talking about magic systems other than D&D and this one would certainly open up his mind to other possibilities
• Gamma World - Wild post-apoc. Might use 2nd, might use 4th, have to nail that down later.
• Twilight 2000 - Brutal post-apoc. Probably use the latest rules to see how they work.
• Wild Cards: Stars Without Number, Cyberpunk, the 40K RPG, the Trinity Continuum games ... there are a few that pop up now and again but never seem to have enough interest to draw in the whole group.

Nopes: No one talks about Star Wars or Star Trek these days here so I'm not going to push them. Same with Traveller. I could happily run any of them but the home team just is not crazy about these for some reason.

Part of the challenge is that unless I frame it as a limited run campaign or a tryout everyone knows that we are committing to at least six months of a particular game, typically more like a year or two to get to  a finishing point. I think this causes them to weigh things out from a different perspective than a limited run. Mine also tends to be the only game that's running on a regular schedule so you have to think about whether you want, say.  "Lancer" to be the only regular RPG in your life through 2027 versus D&D or Savage Worlds.

The first thing to do is get a read on continuing M&M and then see how we all feel about going in different directions. Whatever the preferred mechanics, I probably have a setting, and whatever the preferred setting I probably have a system that will work for it. It's a good problem to have regardless.

RPG Numbers: What 's the Third Biggest RPG?

There was a decent discussion on EN World over the past week about indie RPGs - and it seems anything outside of WOTC or Paizo qualifies as "indie" to some - and the conversation turned to numbers, as in "what are the biggest games out there?" This got some wheels turning and turned into this post. 

First up I will say that if you're running a tabletop game with your friends none of this probably matters. If I am running say Mongoose Traveller or FFG Star Wars or 2d20 Star Trek then sales figures or popularity numbers of those games or any others really don't matter and they aren't going to affect what I do each week. People seem to be very interested in scoring or ranking these kinds of things but it really has very little impact on playing and running games*. 

When people get to discussing this aspect of the hobby I think it is very important to distinguish two things:

• There is the biggest selling game at any given time.
• There is the most played game at any given time.

It is completely possible, and I would say likely, that there are two different answers to those. Well, aside from "D&D" which tends to dominate both regardless, followed by "Pathfinder". The other part of the question is "how do we measure either of those?" How do we come up with numbers on what people are playing and how do we truly know what's selling?

People in the business side of the hobby are probably more concerned with the sales question but the problem is that no one really knows. Individual game companies know what they are selling. Individual game stores know what is selling for them. Amazon knows what's selling. There is no industry-wide reporting with any real data. 

I know about ICV2 and their quarterly reports. They've been around for decades and they've been cited as some kind of industry standard for a long time but their data is so flawed and incomplete that I feel it's incredibly misleading to draw major conclusions from it. The two biggest players in the RPG market are WOTC and Paizo and both of them have significant direct sales to consumers - heck Paizo built their core business model on it. None of that data is included in those reports. Amazon sales are not a part of those reports. I believe DTRPG is also not included in their data. Their miniature game reporting has a similar flaw in that Games Workshop does significant direct sales and maintains their own chain of retail stores around the world yet none of that data is included in ICV2 reporting. When a major chunk of sales for the biggest players in the industry are not covered that's a major flaw. That's just the start of my problems with that data and that reporting.

So we don't have a real big picture view of RPG industry sales. We have a lot of anecdotal stuff and we have companies mentioning that, as a fictional example, 2025 was the best year ever for Deadlands! Great! What does that mean? It tells us nothing in comparison to other games. 

Then you get into the how we would differentiate the games even if we had more data. Do we track everything for Savage Worlds and rank that? Do we break it into the various game lines like Deadlands, Savage Pathfinder, Savage Rifts? What about 3rd party products - do they add on to the  total for the whole game or do they count separately? Do all of the Free League's games count together? Are the Year Zero engine games grouped up separately from say Dragonbane? It's tricky. You might get a significant number of people playing Year Zero, or Savage Worlds, or 2d20 as systems but the individual games might be too small rank very high. There's a lot to consider, even if you had complete information, when it comes to "what is the number 3 best selling RPG right now?".

And again, how relevant or important this really is to anyone other than those trying to sell them is debatable.

Then we get to the question of what people are playing right now - which I think is regularly very different than what people are buying right now. A fair number of RPG players tend to be wrapped up in ongoing campaigns of varying lengths which means a book that you buy today may not hit the table for weeks or months or even years. 

A personal example: I added the Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide 2 to my shelf recently. I ran Tales for a year and a half but it ended in November. I'm not sure when I will run it again. I'm happy about the purchase but I'm not playing that game right now. Conversely I am running Mutants and Masterminds right now and will be for at least a little while longer, maybe the rest of the year. I haven't bought a book for it in quite a while ... looks like since the Kickstarter for the Reprint Extravaganza which was summer 2023. Astonihsing Adventures Assembled was that same summer so either way that was my last pick-up. I did back the 4th Edition Kickstarter so maybe that should count - we're back to "how do we count these?" with various editions of a game now entering the mix. 

This also touches on Kickstarters - there's a potential built-in delay there too as it often takes time for the rules to come out, even PDFs with some games. Even once it funds it might be weeks or months before anyone can even try to play it and not everyone will do that. 

People do try to look at online play platforms to see what's popular but many of those cater to certain games more than others and there are still a whole lot of people who do not play online so at best you're getting another limited snapshot of what's being played. 

I've seen others bring up convention numbers - what games are being offered? What games are filling up?  It's another limited data point. For example if I went to a convention this weekend I suppose I might sign up for an M&M game, but if I signed up for 3 games over the course of a weekend I am 100% sure that the other two would be something else, and at least one might well be something new that I have not played before. Does a one-off count as "playing"? It should count for something as that means interest and engagement but it's not exactly the same as a game being used in a running campaign.

So I have far more questions than answers here and a lot more obstacles than solutions. For a relatively small industry it is very challenging to draw any useful conclusions from the available information. 

*I do wonder if some of this is driven by people who don't have a current game but want to sound informed about the scene so they need to be able to say "Hey did you know XYZ is the 3rd biggest RPG right now"? Maybe it's something else but my preferred response there is "And ...? What do you play?". 

NYE 2025 - Looking Forward to 2026

 

It's been a bit since I did one of these so I don't have one from 2024 to look back on but things are a little calmer this year and this kind of post helps me collect my thoughts for the future, so here goes ...

I ran 32 sessions of Tales of the Valiant in 2025, wrapping up in mid-November. My plan in 2026 is to run zero. Not because it's bad or we don't like it but because that particular campaign is done for now and it's time to do something else. 

The main focus for '26 is going to be Mutants and Masterminds. I plan to start with the oft-started Time of Crisis adventure and finally finish it this time, this year. It should only take 5-6 session at the most. Then I plan to roll into an ongoing supers campaign with it and run that as far as my players are interested. The main theme there will be "comic book type stuff that I like and that I think my players will enjoy" which is all I really need right now. 

I haven't done a real ongoing superhero game with this group of players so it's time. I've been reading a lot of Champions stuff lately as far as rulebooks go and it's tempting to use that for a campaign but they are more familiar with M&M and with a new edition on the way I want to get some good time in with it anyway. There are a lot of other good supers RPGs out now - with even more on the way - but I want some crunch and some easy supporting material and M&M has both. I would like to run it in my own city setting but today I am leaning towards using Freedom City and just tweaking and focusing on the arts I like - I'm not set in stone just yet on this.

I considered a few others - I really thought about  Necessary Evil as another campaign that has a beginning/middle/end but I'm going to hold off on that for now and stay with M&M.

I'm sure a few other games will work their way in at some point during the year as one-shots or tryouts with a starter set but this will be the main game. I may end up running DCC (a zero level funnel) this weekend as not everyone may be available for the M&M kickoff and I'd like them to be. Just have to see how that goes. 

I'm sure I will have no need of this ...

Beyond the new campaign I have also acquired a projector and so we will start trying out that whole projecting-the-map-onto-the-table thing. If I'm going to have a laptop at the table anyway for HeroLab, why not try some other new approaches? More on this as it develops.

That's also a lead-in to another potential change in how I run things as Blaster may be relocating for Career Opportunities this year which -if he does-  will be a good reason to run an online game for the first time ever. I figures I might as well start getting familiar with some digital map tools so we will go projector for now and then see about the rest later. 

So while 2025 was pretty stable I'm not sure 2026 will be but we will roll with it one way or another

Another Weird Little Thing After Playing These Games for Decades

 

I'm reading some reviews of an RPG and someone says something like "I've been playing RPGs for over 15 years so I know a good game when I see it" and all I can think is "15 years? My kids have been playing longer than that!"

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Most-Anticipated RPG of 2026

 

EN World is doing their annual most-anticipated poll right now and I figured I would post some thoughts about some of the entries. Many of them I have no real opinion on but there are a few worth mentioning. It's a long list so let's just go alphabetically ...

• 7th Sea 3rd Edition - I always wanted to like this game but I've bounced off of it hard every time I've tried it. I owned 1st edition for a while but it's one of the few RPG's I've sold off after realizing it was just never going to work for me and my crew. I know 2E had a disastrous crowdfunding situation that hurt it badly from the start - maybe this one will set things right. I think my biggest problem is that the setting is super close to history, but pushes itself just far enough away to make it weird for a history buff (that would be me) but doesn't add enough fantastic elements to make it feel truly different. Something closer to, say, "Warhammer Pirates" for a setting would grab my attention, or strongly historical pirates, like Pirates of the Spanish Main for Savage Worlds, is viable. Right no I probably would just use Savage Worlds for something like this. I wish them luck on it though and I'll keep my eyes on it. This is easily the most I have ever written on 7th Sea on this blog so I have to watch it now.
• Apocalypse World Burned Over or "3rd Edition" - I have been interested in this game since I first heard about it and I have played -briefly- some other PBtA games but I'm curious to see what the originators of the system do with it now. It's definitely one of the most influential systems of the past 20 years so I want to check it out. I backed the Kickstarter- one of my few in 2025 - so we will see how it goes.
• Dark Conspiracy - I really liked the 90's version of this game, especially once they went with a d20 over the original d10 approach - but I'm not sure I really liked Mongoose's multi-era approach so this is another wait and see for me. Could be a lot of fun with an updated approach using new/old Traveller mechanics, could just be an excuse to dust off the original version.
• Diablo - Is there really that much demand out there for a tabletop Diablo RPG? Aren't there a dozen other systems out there that could do this without a licensing fee? 
• Discworld - love my Pratchett books but I've never felt the need to run it as an RPG. I suspect most of these will be shelf-dwellers for Discworld fans but hey, if someone can pull it off more power to them. I just don't see how one could capture the energy of the books short of having Robin Williams GM your game and, well, that's not happening anytime soon. 
• Dungeon Dwellers - yeah this is that one from the Kickstarter I backed in 2023. I have the PDFs. No I'm not particularly "looking forward to it" at this point.
• Heroes of Might & Magic RPG - I love the early versions of the computer game but I never really felt it was all that compelling of a setting on its own, especially for a tabletop RPG. There were very take-able ideas in them - monsters, etc.- but so much of it came from D&D that I don't know what it adds as a standalone RPG. Maybe if it emphasizes building/running/defending a kingdom as its main differentiator it could stand out but short of that ... I don't know. 
• Horus Heresy RPG - I'm a huge fan of 40K but I don't know what they're going to do with a HH RPG game line. The era certainly has potential but I'd say it needs to be designed as a war story from the very beginning and that could be tricky. I'll watch it but I'm probably not a day 1 guy here.
• Indominant - this is a superhero RPG that might be below a lot of peoples radar but it does look interesting.  I do tend to pick these up as I am a sucker for a new superhero game. They do seem to think they are doing something really new and different but ... we will see. 
• Invincible Superhero Roleplaying - well I like the show.  I've not read the comic to avoid spoilers for the show. There's really nothing in the show that would make me want to run an extended RPG campaign in the setting as it all seems to fit in pretty easily with any superhero system. I'm also not sure Free League's system is one I would have picked for a supers game but I should probably play around with it more to get a better feel for it. The weird thing here is that in interviews the people working on it keep referencing TSR's Marvel Super Heroes. Now I love my MSH but a lot has happened with superhero RPGs in the last 40 years so I wonder if that's really their primary reference point? Anyway it could be interesting so I'll be watching it.
• Justice League Unlimited  - yes, three superhero RPGs in a row! This is an odd one as there is not a ton out there about it yet and I suspect a lot of that is because it's being developed by a Brazilian company. I'm not sure it's even going to be translated to English or sold in the U.S. but I hope it does come here at some point. The other oddity here is that despite the name it's not based on the animation - it's tied to some kind of crisis event in the DCU and then the game picks up after that. I want to see where it goes but I don't read Portuguese so I'm going to have to rely on others to keep up with this one.
• Oath Hammer might be an interesting take on the Fantasy RPG using dice pools and it also sounds fairly Warhammer-ish so it could be fun but it's another fantasy RPG when I am feeling overladed with fantasy RPGs so I'm not going to make this one a priority.
• OSE Updated and OSRIC 3E - It's weird that these things start out wanting to be a reorganization or re-presentation of an older D&D rulebook but they just cannot resist the temptation to start modifying said rules. I don't get it but it keeps happening - Labyrinth Lord just came back from years of silence and is doing the same damn thing too. Not my cup of tea at this point and I have my originals if I want to go retro.
• Pioneer - It's Expanse-level Traveller, early tech, single solar system. I'm sure someone could make a really good game with this ... but it won't be me. I'm curious about how it will do though.
• Storypath Ultra - well I did the Kickstarter on this one in September 2024 because I like the modern Trinity system and figured I should keep up with a revised version. Not sure I still feel that way but one of these days it will show up and I'll take a look at it.
• WFRP 5th Edition - I played a lot of 1st, own almost all of 2nd, skipped 3rd, and held off on 4th as I just wasn't feeling it, but I have brushed up against this RPG multiple times in the last few years so I am interested in this one. I will probably end up with it and with The Old World in spite of the likelihood being that only one of them will get played but that happens sometimes. Actively watching this one.

One thing that struck me going through this list is how many of them are crowdfunded - it looks like most of them. Given my recent experiences with Kickstarters and Backerkits and the like that does not thrill me. I know it's just how a lot of this works now but it's still disheartening in some ways. There will be a lot more "wait and see" here for this kind of thing.

The other thing I realized is that no one nominated Mutants and Masterminds 4th edition! No one! Not even me! I'm on this site pretty regularly and anyone can nominate but it just never occurred to me. Maybe because I already had the playtest document? Not sure but that's a huge miss for a lot of us as this is my most-interested-and-anticipated RPG release for 2026! 

Anyway there is my take on the list! Here is last year's top ten list if you want to compare.

Wrapping up the Year

 

Note - I will get back to posting the rest of the Temple campaign soon - it takes a while to sort those out and edit them and with a week off for the holidays I wasn't going to burn all of that time doing it. At one point I had a plan to get it all posted up by the end of the year but that will probably shift to "End of January" now. 

2025 was a good year here. I wrapped up a great campaign, worked in some other game time here and there, got some mini's painted along the way, read some good books, and watched some decent shows. What more can you ask for? I also spent real time with the wife, the kids, and the grandkids, along with most of my friends.  

Most of my gaming hobby time was spent on the ToEE in ToV campaign which was a lot of fun all the way through. There is always another game though, so I'm happy to be prepping for the next thing. More on that later. I think the only other game I ran this year was a Cyberpunk Red try-out game and that's unusual for me - I usually manage to work in multiple one-shots or some short side treks into something but this year was all about completing the temple so it was pretty focused. I need to think about that when planning the new year's objectives.

I will end the year having read about 60 books this year, about the same as last year, but only ten of them were RPG rulebooks which is low for me and roughly half of what I did in '24. Maybe it matters less when you have a set campaign going the whole year. 

Over the course of the year various Kickstarters came in so I added Adventurer-Conqueror-King 2E, Dolmenwood, and 13th Age 2E to the "need-to-read" shelf - which is a  pretty huge pile of D&D-ish fantasy RPG stuff, probably more than I needed to have coming in all at once. I do pick up smaller games on DTRPG pretty regularly and I did get Lancer, though I have yet to read it. I should probably talk about those more here but my preference has always been that I'd rather talk about a game after I have run it, at least for a session, as herding some players through character creation and then through an introductory scenario of some kind will tell you a thousand times more about a game than just reading it. Sometimes that takes a while though so maybe I should at least write something up about the read through and then refer back to it when I do run the thing. Sounds like a good policy for '26!

There were other RPG acquisitions - more for the 40K RPG, more Marvel, I'm catching up on Pathfinder 2E rulebooks, and I should probably fill in the rest of the 2024 D&D 5.5 books though my enthusiasm for it is at an all-time low. Not RPGs in general - just D&D. I liked Tales of the Valliant's take on an updated 5E so I'm not really feeling the need for another version of it which is why I haven't felt the need to dive into the other alternate takes on "updated 5th". If I run anything fantasy next year I'd say the odds are it will be 13th Age's new edition or the aforementioned PF2E, or possibly The Old World RPG. Odds are better though that I won't be running anything fantasy, at least as the main campaign. More about that later.

So so-long to 2025! I'll have some thoughts about the year in miniatures here tomorrow and then a look at plans for the year ahead as well.

GURPS 4th Edition Revised Announced

 

Another unexpected RPG announcement - and another one I am happy to see even if I am not really doing anything with GURPS or planning to anytime soon. This edition of GURPS is 20 years old at this point which I suppose means it has lasted longer in its current form than the legendary Third Edition which truly put GURPS on the map in the late 80's and through the 90's. It's weird. GURPS was a standard reference in any wide-ranging RPG discussion back then, both for the universal mechanics and for the universal coverage (and high quality) of its supplements. Even if you didn't play it you knew about it and may have used some of its books to craft a campaign in something else. It was a significant part of the RPG landscape. 

These days, despite the longevity, I feel like GURPS is an obscure reference in most discussions I see online if it is mentioned at all. It is fairly crunchy and we know tastes have moved on from that over the past decade +. People who think 5th edition D&D is complicated might keel over at the site of a GURPS weapons table and spontaneously combust opening GURPS Vehicles for 3E. Sometimes though the complexity is worth it -whether you call it realism or verisimilitude or whatever. GURPS has definitely filled a niche but that seems to be a smaller niche now. The 3rd edition was a big deal, then 4th edition came out and it felt like GURPS just faded away within a few years. I bought all the hardcovers as they were published as I assumed we would get around to playing it at some point ... but we did not. SJG had a hard time keeping them in print, Munchkin became their main focus, and it felt like the line just dried up. Other places online, where GURPS was a normal part of the conversation, seemed to forget that it existed or only spoke of it in past tense. It's similar to the Hero System which was once a major player and has been continually in-print for decades but has largely faded from popular conversation within the hobby.

I was still surprised that this was an update and not a full new edition. It's been 20 years and that's a pretty good run for any edition of an RPG - is it not time to reboot? If you're going to go through this much work, that is? From the discussion in  the forums it sounds like they are doing a pretty extensive retouching of the two Basic Set books from art to text edits and even adding in some new material, all while bending over backwards to keep the page number references the same. That's going to put some significant limits on what you can or cannot do. It also sounds like money is a limiter here and I totally get that. I appreciate the goal of not making the books people own obsolete but I do have to ask - if the game isn't making you any money right now why make this partial, limited update? Why spend that money on meeting modern standards on layout, art, and language to go part way? Why not come out with a new edition and get some attention? Run a Kickstarter like everyone else is doing and emphasize the 20 years of buildup and support and say you're making an edition for the next twenty years? 

I ask this because doing an update now effectively closes that door for years if a major goal is to not anger your existing GURPS fanbase. I could see putting something out as a stalking horse to see if people want a new edition but a partial re-doing of the core rules might as well be a new edition in gamers' heads. Doing v4.5 in 2026 means you'd better not be doing v5.0 in 2027 or 2028 as "we just bought new rulebooks" is all you're going to hear at that point. I mean maybe there are no problems to solve with 4th edition. I haven't read it in years but I doubt that nothing has really come up in two decades of play. 

Also I'd say they need to call it the "core rulebook" if they are updating and consolidating it into one volume. That's what people are calling these things now. If it's an appeal to the younger generation then stop calling it the Basic Set, which is a total 80's throwback reference they mostly won't get, and for those of us older members of the crowd that term used to mean it came in a box, and GURPS did, for a while, but not for 30+ years now.

Always liked this cover

The other thing GURPS needs is a setting - a big, popular setting. Being the serious RPG nerds' toolkit is a fine enough niche but if you want to attract some attention you need a reason for people to get excited. 

• D&D has, well, "D&D" in the name, history, and a bunch of published settings some of which have novels and miniatures and video games built around them.
• Warhammer has a lot of the same attractions as D&D
• Basic Roleplaying has Runequest which has Glorantha
• Hero System has Champions as its flagship and is still probably what most people call it
• Savage Worlds has Deadlands

Most game systems have some kind of setting that plays into their strengths. GURPS major perceived strength in the past was world books which covered a lot of historical ground, some fantasy, and some science fiction but there was never one setting that was purely "GURPS" the way Champions defined the Hero system. It needs one, because settings are what really lock people into a game. You don't need to change the essence of GURPS like making it a dice pool or a d20 based game. You do need to get something out there in the world that gets people's attention and gets them interested in your game. I rambled on about these same issues 8 years ago and I don't think much of anything has really changed.

I hope this goes well for them - I'd like GURPS to survive at least. But I would really like to see it thrive again.

Monsters, Challenge Ratings, and Encounter Balance in RPGs

 

It's a quirk of the modern RPG scene that there is so much concern over "Balance". It really falls into two areas - 1) Character Balance and 2) Encounter Balance. It's almost an obsession in some corners of the internet and while bouncing back and forth between various Supers RPG and running a D&D style campaign I thought it was worth discussing here. We did Characters yesterday so let's talk about Encounters.

Thinking back to the beginning early D&D didn't really care about encounter balance - the most we saw there was making sure a given dungeon level had monsters that matched that level which meant that it should be appropriate for characters of that level. Other early RPGs really didn't address much beyond this either. Runequest, Gamma World, Traveller, and Star Trek were all pretty light here. The idea mostly was "well, here is the setting, here are some potential opposing forces, drop your characters in and see what happens." There was also an assumption that your players knew to run when things got too hot and that might even require some extra effort like throwing out rations to distract pursuing monsters or having the chief engineer make some warp drive engineering roles to push the ship above it's normal maximum.

Later we get to D&D 3E and we first start to see encounter balance as a concept introducing challenge rating and encounter level as part of the game. I don't think this is a bad idea but I think it's doomed to  disappointment much of the time as one tries to codify a certain mix of hostile capabilities versus a generic player character power level. 

This is from the 3.5 DMG. Find the encounter level you want on the lefthand side, then decide how many creatures you want in the encounter moving to the right and it will show the CR you need to aim for to create a balanced encounter. Theoretically anyway.  

This is the Troll statblock from the 3.5 MM. Now trolls aren't particularly complex most of the time - though in this edition you could give them class levels and that could get weird fast. The only complication here is their regeneration - it's ignored by Fire and Acid. This version was a little more complicated but later editions have it so that taking any fire damage in a round shuts off the Trolls regeneration for that round - period. So if your party has a bunch of fire or acid type attacks then the troll's regen effectively does not exist. Challenge rating is affected by special defenses so the reason this guy is a "5" is at least partly because of that. Maybe if you ignore his regen he should only be a "4", maybe even a "3" which immediately wrecks the math, especially if you have a group of them. Considering in later editions wizards get fire bolt as a standard attack power, clerics get sacred flame, and flaming oil isn't hard to come by you can imagine this is not a particularly difficult thing to overcome. It's come up a lot in my current campaign and so I discount the rating for trolls a bit as they are effectively just like an ogre for the most part. Even one character landing a fire attack that round means all of the other characters normal attacks "stick" - just like any other monster. This is the kind of thing you have to do as a DM to keep these numbers relevant. 

I mean, he shouldn't be happy about this ...

This also ignores things like terrain, light conditions, weather, etc. There's a big difference between encountering something in a set of 10' wide corridors vs. out in the open country.

So taking these kinds of systems on faith is a mistake - if you really care about this stuff. I'd say 4E D&D did the best job with its math but even then I had to eyeball a fair amount of things. I did love the process of determining what kind of area this was, what kinds of encounters would be present, using the numbers to build an encounter and then tuning it up for my party - it was a great way to organize setting up a ruined city waiting to be plundered. 

Ultimate balance ...

But once you go outside of the D&D-O-Sphere there just isn't much like this approach. For point based systems (mostly supers for me) you could use the points but mostly you just use the power caps (active point limits/power levels) as a guideline. There's no larger framework though for calculating numbers for multiple opponents vs. party size. A few examples:

•    Looking at some superhero games there just isn't much math. 
• Icons is great talking about creating adventures and campaigns but doesn't burn any pages discussing encounter math.
• The Sentinel Comics RPG covers a lot of this as well and does talk about timing and challenges - the Green-Yellow-Red thing is important here - but it doesn't get into "enemy math" either.
• The M&M main book doesn't talk about numbers at all - it discusses encounters as part of an adventure or how they fit into a villainous plot. The Gamemaster Guide though, actually has a few paragraphs on balancing encounters and actually does mention power levels - every 2 PL increase means they are roughly twice as powerful so a PL12 villain is a good fight for two PL10 heroes. That's as far as the math goes.
• The Marvel Multiversal game is one of the newer entries and while it does have a page and a half on balancing encounters the only number advice in the entire section is to put your players up against opponents of the same tier - of which there are six. 
• Beyond strict superhero games entries like Savage Worlds have no real encounter guidelines. The only notes are that some creatures are wild cards but the game doesn't stick ratings on it's monsters beyond that.
• Star Wars!
• FFG Star Wars mentions that when using multiple opponents they should be a die or 2 lower on their abilities. That's about it.
• d20 Star Wars, Saga Edition specifically here assigns a challenge level number to every monster/npc entry in the game and this is used to determine both encounter balance and XP awards. Not terribly surprising with it being heavily 3E/4E based.
• d6 Star Wars - 2E Revised and Expanded in this case - has no time for encounter balance. The designing adventures section talks about pacing, different types of encounters, and "making it Star Wars" but does not put any numbers on opponents or award XP based on that kind of things. 
• The Trinity Continuum system has no encounter guidelines either. There are levels of threat as in minor-major-colossal, etc. and there are caps on their dice pools for each given level but there is no corresponding link to what level of character experience is an even match for that. There is a fair amount of material about adventure or story design but it's largely math-free.

I hope those are mostly minions ...

The one thing that many of these systems do is provide a two to three-tiered framework for opposition with normal opponents, minions or mooks, and then maybe some kind of master level opponent that is stronger than normal and possibly designed to take on multiple PC's. Mooks, almost universally, are designed as massed opponents that drop out of a fight with a single hit.  That can give a different flavor to a combat encounter and saves the GM a lot of work. Bosses tend to get extra actions or some kind of fate points to help them mitigate bad rolls or to guarantee success. Saving the complexity for the medium to boss level encounters helps a lot in running a game while letting the players feel like they are accomplishing something. 

Not a minion!

So this emphasis on encounter balance and the numbers associated with tracking and measuring that is pretty much a D&D thing. Other games don't worry about it much if at all. The only game that definitely has one on this list is the version of Star Wars published by the D&D people. Why don't more RPG's use this kind of approach? I will close with a paragraph from the M&M 3E Deluxe Gamemaster's Guide that I think sums up my feelings on it really well:

Character Balance in RPGs

 

It's a quirk of the modern RPG scene that there is so much concern over "Balance". It really falls into two areas - 1) Character Balance and 2) Encounter Balance. It's almost an obsession in some corners of the internet and while bouncing back and forth between various Supers RPG and running a D&D style campaign I thought it was worth discussing here so let's do Characters today and Encounters tomorrow.

Character Balance shows up in a couple of places and in a couple of ways.

First up I see a ton of discussion around this with D&D 5E-style games. Playtest classes for upcoming expansions, new classes for new games like Tales of the Valiant ... as soon as something comes out there will be immediate numerical breakdowns of damage per round and similar CharOp metrics at different levels and given certain feat or weapon choices and honestly these days it's just tiresome most of the time. It's not as important as you might think.

 This kind of thing mainly got going during D&D 3E and became it's own mini-industry for some people while completely ignoring the RP part of the RPG. This became especially evident in mid to late 3E when "experts" were recommending ridiculous combinations of classes and prestige classes as the "optimal" choice that were never going to happen in any real game with an actual DM trying run even a semi-coherent campaign. They were only even slightly likely to be achievable via one of the Adventurer's League type games where there was no central DM and no need to play out how your human fighter/cleric/ranger managed to join and train with the elves' arcane archers. You still see a degree of this even now with some of the multiclassing recommendations that get posted as the optimal build for today's games. Again, what DM is going to just let that happen in an ongoing campaign?

It also tends to ignore the non-combat abilities of a character and class and that's a huge miss in my opinion - it's not just about combat! We do other things too! At least 5E made some effort to categorize three areas of the game with combat, exploration, and socialization within the rules. Whether they succeeded is something people like to debate but they at least put it in the book and hopefully 5.5 is doing an even better job. If you are playing in an ongoing campaign, with a steady group of other players, in a setting that is supposed to be a "real" fantasy world with some internal logic, then DPR and other number-crunched metrics are one of the least important things to worry about. Because once in the game who cares which character does more damage by a few points here or there? Why does that matter? You're not competing with the rest of the internet and you aren't really competing with your own party members - you're supposed to be on the same side most of the time when a fight breaks out. Are you happy with what your character can do in a fight? Are you happy with what they can do outside of a fight? If so then you probably made a good choice - regardless of what the various forums, Discord channels, and social media groups say. 

Point-based games are kind of built around this concept - the points are mainly for the PCs. The DM doesn't have to use them at all. If all  the PCs are using the same points totals then they are all equal on some level within the game system. That said this type of game, even more than D&D style games, need DM supervision to reign in extreme character choices. Things like active point limits in Hero and power level limits in M&M help, but there are still ways to break things - with the great freedom that point-based games give you comes the need to work within the framework of the specific campaign. Not everything needs to be optimized. Not everything needs to be a variable power pool or a multipower or put in an array. With this type of game if one character does more damage than another that should be the result of deliberate choices on the part of those players and there is nothing wrong with that. 

If this stuff matters in your group it can be discussed in the good old session zero - "I really want to play a tank this time" or "I want to play a sneaky DPS guy" - I think most people get what this means now. My group still discusses classes and races (if applicable) when we start a new game and possible roles within the group if it's a less-structured game like Savage Worlds but it's done in a very open way and we don't really have anyone that thinks there can be only one of a type or class within the party or that wants to compare DPR numbers. They will find combos and they will absolutely break classes but it's not a competitive thing because they don't care who is the "best" most of the time. That said the cleric and the paladin in my current game trying to top each other's armor class has been pretty entertaining. 

Then of course there are games that absolutely do not care about balance between different classes or character types. Old school D&D doesn't care much at all, certainly not math-wise. Traveller doesn't care - one character might have 4 levels of "Bureaucracy" and "Pistol-0" if they're lucky while another may have Combat Rifleman - 5 and Cutlass - 3. Both are viable because combat isn't the only thing in the game - personal combat is only one of several options for combat - and it's a big universe with a lot of things to do. Getting your guns onto that  planet with law level 9 is going to take some Bureaucracy skill - probably some Bribery skill as well.

Really any game where random rolls are a major feature of character creation has an inherent lack of concern for character balance. If I end up with an 18 strength and you end up with an 8 we are headed in different directions with D&D combat. D&D, Traveller, Villains & Vigilantes, Cyberpunk, Gamma World, Runequest - all of these have random character generation, many beyond just determining ability scores, and yet we played them all, sometimes for years, and no one argued about this.

The game most openly, brazenly even,  unconcerned with balanced characters in my opinion is original recipe Rifts. Random stat generation then your race/class choice dictates everything else and on no level are they balanced. In a game where you could play a Glitter Boy, a more general robot or power armor pilot, a juicer, a wizard, or a dragon hatchling I have seen people choose to play the Rogue Scientist - sort of a post-apocalyptic Indiana Jones who's signature feature is that they get a lot of skills. No special combat abilities, no extra luck, no magic, no power armor, and the same standard equipment options everyone else gets. 

People make choices in these games, even when given obviously more powerful options, to play the things they want to play, the things that call out to them. My take on the "truth" of character balance is that as much as it's a feature of online discussion and debate it really doesn't matter all that much in actual play in an ongoing campaign. Sure, people will optimize or power game some things sometimes but they tend to do it with character types they are already interested in beyond whatever the numbers say. The prospect of living with the same character for months or years brings perspective that goes beyond the numbers.

The First Five RPGs I Played

I was thinking this could be a fun exercise for anyone who has made a hobby of RPG's, recent or not. For me it's not recent but it's good to revisit the classics occasionally, right? All the talk of new editions of things has me looking back a bit so here we go:

The book cover, not the box, because we used the book a whole lot more than the box

1. I started with Holmes Basic D&D, and over the next year or three moved into AD&D and Moldvay Basic and then Expert. I'm lumping them all into one item because that's how we played it. This is where it all started with hand-drawn character sheets on notebook paper and maps on graph paper with boardgame pawns or coins on pieces of paper to show locations for some fights. So many things we consider "essential" now from miniatures and Chessex mats to laptops, tablets, and the internet were either not a factor back then or didn't exist! Sometimes it's good to remember you don't actually need most of this stuff - just a game and some friends ... and probably some dice.
   
   
   

   

   Such a distinctive look with these

   
   
2. The next RPG I became aware of, bought, and ran was Traveller, the old 3-books-in-a-box edition. I had a friend at school that talked about it constantly an so I started looking at it in the local mall hobby shop and and ended up getting it. It's hard to express how much this expanded my horizons with a very different method of character generation, a skill system, no levels, ship construction, solar system generation ... it was incredibly eye-opening coming to it with D&D being my only other experience.
   
   
   

   

   Maybe the first big Elmore cover?

   
   
3. Following closely on my Traveller expansion was Star Frontiers which was a pretty big deal at the time but has mostly vanished into the mists of history these days. Sure, I still have my stuff and there are fans out there even now, but I don't think a lot of players coming in from the 90's on even know it existed. It had a very different approach from Traveller with a sort-of class system but still using skills but they were percentiles not a straight number like Traveller ... it was sci-fi but a different flavor of sci-fi. 
• The coolest thing about it was probably the poster maps and counters that came in the box that were used for a lot of other games for years in lieu of miniatures - including Traveller.
• The worst thing about it was the complete lack of spaceship rules. That was a terrible decision. I'm sure they thought it made sense at the time but I think it really hurt the game in the long run.
  
  

  

  I still love this cover.

  
  
4. The fourth RPG for me was Champions - I loved Champions. So eye-opening in so many ways. My first experience with point-build systems. My first superhero game. My first time to realize that we could do anything with these rules. I suspect a lot of us independently discovered the concept of running a fantasy game using Champions, running a  science fiction game using it, and as Champions II and Champions III came out it only made that more possible with rules for creating vehicles and then creating bases. It was the anything system! And it still is ...
   
   
   

   

   Loved that 1st edition ruined city cover art but this is where I started

   
   
5. The fifth RPG I dove into was Gamma World. My first post-apocalyptic setting with a system that was very much like D&D but with random powers and weird races mixed in. Growing up as cold war kids this kind of game really spoke to some of us, as did the realization that here was a game where you could have superpowers and modern to futuristic weapons with no alignment and no rules or responsibilities to limit how your character could act. Would you play a hero, even without rules? Would you be a warlord or a despot or a bandit? Or would you just be a simple man trying to make your way in the universe? Here the rules weren't really the big deal - it was the setting and all of the possibilities it enabled. 
• Also one of the few RPGs where I have used nuclear weapons, definitely the first of those, and that's something that sticks with you.

As a follow-on to these I believe my 6th would have been Boot Hill, rules-wise more of a miniatures game than what we would call an RPG today but we played it like an RPG for sure. The highest and best use of this game was to send your characters into a D&D module using the rules in the DMG and we loved that.

I mean it's not a Larry Elmore painting but that's still a pretty evocative cover

My 7th would have been the Star Trek RPG from FASA. So much here to love when the Trek universe was much smaller and less complicated and the only real setting switch was "are we using the animated series stuff?" which the FASA trek game did by default. Character generation was a little like Traveler but used percentiles for skills and the system used action points to resolve combat actions. Plus there was so much lore in one place! A super cool ship combat system with charts to run the main kinds of ships we knew about at that time! Deckplans! There was so much good stuff in this game! I'm sure to modern eyes it would look dated and limiting but it was just amazing and it was very playable. 

Iconic. What more needed to be said here?

On a final note I see posts online - a lot of them lately - where people are opining on the golden age of RPG's we live in and what an exciting time it is and then go on to cite six different flavors of D&D that either just came out or are about o come out this year and just wax on about how great it is. I don't want to rain on someone's joy and sure, I like my D&D variants too, but ... come on. Those 7 games I noted above all came out roughly 77-83 and they could not be more different and they were all popular at the time to some degree and there were a bunch of other games at the time that I was aware of but not playing. Out of those 7 three of them have dropped out pretty completely (Star Frontiers, Gamma World, and Boot Hill - notably all old TSR games) but the other 4 still have a current version in print today. Sure, some are very different, particularly the Trek game, but you could pick up an old campaign without a ton of effort for any of those. 

I also wonder, given some of the things I see (like the above) do people think that D&D and RPGs are a new thing? Do they get how long we've been doing this or how many different games have been published in all kinds of genres over the decades? Rifts, Shadowrun, and Vampire brought in the new wave of the 90's and those games were all wildly innovative on some level and decidedly not D&D and they're all over 30 years old at this point. For the early 2000's we had Savage Worlds and Cortex and FATE - what's the 2020 version of all of these? Maybe the Apocalypse World-based games? I get that your first game outside of D&D can be a huge experience especially given how dominant 5th Edition has been but a lot of the new doesn't really seem all that new if you've been exploring this hobby for a while. What's the big eye-opener for the new generation of players?

The 90's gave us this gem too - let's not forget that.

All of these games had a heavy influence on me very early on so I wanted to put them out there and acknowledge them and anyone who worked on them - you've given me a lifetime of entertainment with these. Thank you.

Enough rambling here. We can start looking forward again next time.