# About Me: Tabletop Game Template Edition
tags: #thoughts
![[About Me - Tabletop RPGs (illo).jpg]]
I'm not generally one for jumping on the meme train, mainly because it's more work than it has to be, and I usually get frustrated by the limitations of the form. But this one is complex enough to put something together and make it look right that I'm going to take the time to go through it.
This is a big grid of RPG covers, and it's going to be interesting to figure out what I want to put in it. What you won't see is, I'm sure, the couple of hours I spend agonizing over what's going in and what isn't, plus putting together the actual image collection.
The best thing about using my own digital garden to post this is that I can put in links to all of the games and not just post a single image, which gratifies my need for proper documentation.
| Prompt | Game | Reasoning |
| -------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Favorite Game | *[[Ironsworn - Starforged\|Starforged]]* | This doesn't come as any surprise to anyone who knows me or has followed anything I've written for the last year or more, but *Starforged* is very much my favorite game. Being able to run both solo and co-op with zero prep and with what to me are very intuitive mechanics in the move system, I just really enjoy it a lot. It's certainly one of the best game designs in the last five years, and possibly the last decade if I were pushed. |
| Best Lore | *[[Ars Magica]]* | Mythic Europe is a massive pile of lore. Not the least reason being that you can leverage off of actual European history and even world history when you're putting together your inspirations for play. The sheer amount of game text is almost obscene if you take all of the supplements for fifth edition together, which might explain why my favorite edition is second edition. But good luck getting all that together in one place. |
| Best Art | *[[Lancer]]* | Absolutely stunning work from the artist who did the comic *[Kill Six Billion Demons](https://killsixbilliondemons.com)*. While I have my issues with the *Lancer* mechanics, mainly because they can be really, really crunchy, it is a game that sold itself to me, firstly because of the art. I say that as someone who loves mecha games in general. |
| Best Mechanics | *[[Ironsworn]]* | I hate to repeat myself in this table, so I'm not going to. I'm just going to go to the initiator of this game line with *Ironsworn*. I actually find the mechanics in *Starforged* a little bit better and more refined, but we have to acknowledge the pioneers. With the updates found in the most recent Lodestar supplement, the gap between those mechanical implementations has narrowed, and I'd have no problems playing it with others. |
| Biggest Personal Impact | *[[Call of Cthulhu]]* | It was the first RPG I ever ran, and it was perhaps not the most frequent RPG I ever ran, but damn close. No matter what my current feelings about the BRP system are today, it was the firstest with the mostest for me, and I still appreciate the Cthulhu mythos all out of proportion to reason, which is pretty sensible since I have 0 SAN now. |
| Overhated | *[[Dungeons and Dragons\|D&D]] 4th Edition* | I'm going to be brutally honest with you. I would probably turn down an opportunity to play in a *Dungeons and Dragons* game at pretty much every turn. I am utterly uninterested—unless it's a 4th Edition game. I think it's the best edition of the lot, and everyone online screamed at the top of their lungs when it came out in absolute hatred and revulsion. That response continues to this day. I think it's unnecessary because 4E knew exactly what it was and what it wanted to do, and it did a pretty good job of it. While *D&D* is not and will never be among my favored games, 4E at least has my respect. |
| Underrated | *[[Sorcerer]]* | Hear me out. Most of you have probably never heard of Sorcerer, though you may have heard of the Forge and GNS theory. Sorcerer was one of the games that kicked off what is really now the indie RPG side of the hobby, and discussions around and about it are responsible for some of the most popular mechanics being published right now, both powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark. But I'll bet almost none of you have read or even seen a copy of Sorcerer. You should. Whatever personal flaws Ron Edwards may have, he is very talented at articulating why he believes the things in game design that he does. It just so happens that Sorcerer is a great game design on top of everything else. Vastly underrated both as a game and as an inspiration. |
| Overrated | [[Dungeons and Dragons\|D&D]] 1E | Look guys, I'm just going to put it out there. *Dungeons and Dragons* 1E is vastly overrated. It's not that good. It's not a well-designed game. I'm sorry, it's just true. It's at best a tolerable man-to-man squad level wargame, and that's all. At worst, it's an intolerable mess of inconsistent mechanics which don't really hang together and only accidentally facilitate roleplaying when they're not tripping over their own dick and getting in the way of it. It's true. The further game design got from being *D&D* adjacent, the better the technology of role-playing became. This holds true even to this day. The best pseudo-*D&D*s are the ones that reluctantly give up everything but the old school name. |
| Criminally Overlooked | *[[Universalis]]* | If *Sorcerer* is underrated, then *Universalis* is definitely criminally overlooked because where *Sorcerer* took an almost moderate approach to the tabletop RPG experience by maintaining a central GM authority and sticking to a very traditional way of thinking about settings. *Universalis* throws all of that out and reimagines an entirely different basis. Actually narrating the world into being with narrative authority distributed around the table based on what you can bid and your tokens being gained from other people challenging your ideas and you winning conflicts? Absolutely insane, but inherently something that triggered something in my mind when I read it, which I have been chasing in one way or another ever since. |
| Has Aged Well | *[[Blades in the Dark]]* | As the deliberate initiator of an entire branch of the evolutionary tree of indie games, *Blades in the Dark* continues to be a perfectly solid game design. In fact, I would argue that the original core publication of *Blades* is quantifiably better than the updated mechanics given in *Cold Cuts*. The focus on a sort of dynamically player-driven, mission-based experience with the GM simply not rolling dice but acting as a sort of universal arbiter is coupled with some of the best GM advice ever written. It's hard to believe that the first time anyone saw this was in 2017 because it feels even more modern than that. |
| Needs a New Edition | *[[Bliss Stage]]* | This is another game you've probably never heard of, yet was so cunningly wrought that it made a huge impact on me. This is one of the games I have repeatedly run at conventions, and which always is an absolute banger — once you get past the necessary complication of character generation. It's complicated not because of any kind of super detailed mechanics, but because the relationship of one character to another is critical to the experience. You have to go through how your character feels about every other character at the table for every character. That's just a start. However, if you're looking for a giant robot game set in a world which is mind-blowingly different and has all sorts of unsavory and unnatural overtones, *Bliss Stage* is great. I wish that it had really seen the final edition that it deserved. |
| Not Usually My Thing, But… | [[Happy Birthday, Robot!]] | You might think this is a beautiful and loving children's game intended to guide them into thinking about sentence structure and mildly competitive storytelling. You would be correct, but if you put it in front of a bunch of adults with perverse minds and twisted wills, it can turn into some absolutely beautifully filthy fun. I've done both of these things, using a big piece of poster board for people to write on with markers as they develop their story, inserting carrots and extra words above and below things. At the end you have an artifact which everyone had a hand in. Kids love it during the day. Adults love screwing with each other at night. It is, I kid you not, a perfect convention and game store game. Pick up a copy in hardback and stick it in your bag to go with you wherever you do. Also grab a set of Fudge dice.[^1] |
| Current Game | *[[References/Running Breathless\|Running Breathless]]* | It's probably cheating to make this the game that I literally just got published on Itch a few days ago, but here we are. I suppose it would be somehow very wrong for it not to be my current game. Part of the plan right now is to get some actual play of this posted, whether it be some solo run stuff or an online group if I can pull one together. It might happen! I also have some ideas for a fistful of setups which didn't quite make it into the book as it currently stands. [Go pick up a copy](https://squidlord.itch.io/running-breathless). You can have it for pay what you want. You really should.[^2] |
| First Game | [[Robotech]] | The cover quality of this particular inset might not exactly fit with the rest, and that's because I don't have a copy in my digital library. I ran it strictly from hard copy because we didn't have ebooks back then. I ran a ton of it and justly developed a dislike of the Palladium system despite my love of *Robotech*. My personal copy has a ton of scribbling in the margins as I worked to figure out new ways and means of making the system work. You can only imagine the amount of joy in my heart when I got my hands on a copy of *[[Mekton]]*, which replaced it nearly across the board. |
| Game Everyone Should Play | *[[Wushu]]* | Since I would consider it a moral failing to pimp myself by suggesting that you absolutely must play *Running Breathless*, and I have resolved not to repeat myself anywhere in this table, I have to go with one of the other games which I have absolutely adored since it came out, and which almost no one knows anything about. Amusingly, unlike almost everything else I recommend, it has a GM. Though the mechanics are considerably lighter and more open than you might expect. In *Wushu*, if you say you do it, if you've narrated you've done it. That's what happened. The mechanics only exist to determine how effective what you did was. This alone is such a monumental, groundbreaking approach to roleplaying that if you've never done any sort of fiction-first gaming before, this should be your introduction because it will simultaneously bake your noodle and let you feel free as a bird. Absolutely one of my favorite games, and one everyone should play. |
There we go. More than you ever wanted to know about me and what I think about things, and yet shockingly fun to write. What you can't see right now is that I have written up the table first, and now I'm taking a deep sigh before I head over to Affinity to go and do all the image editing to do those insets.
Good times. Yes, good times.
[^1]: For extra comedy value, you can see me, or at least hear me, and my gaming group at the time, playing *Happy Birthday, Robot!* in this video and all of the other videos in [that particular playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPds0FG8uEYRA3OotuUKrqd9mNWLecV0B). When I say it was extremely popular with us, I'm not underselling it at all.
Man, it's really been 13 years since I posted that. Time does fly.
[^2]: I want to be clear about the fact that I hate pimping myself. And yet, I think maybe you would enjoy this game. I'm torn.
I think it's all right, even if it has my byline on it, but I don't want to push it on you. The eternal conflict of the digital creator.