We discuss table top roleplaying games and how they have moved on from the inspiration for the original Rogue, with Marc Majcher, Sam Dunnewold and Andrew Doull.
You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Synopsis & Useful Links
- We discuss table top roleplaying games and how they have moved on from the inspiration for the original Rogue, with Marc Majcher, Sam Dunnewold and Andrew Doull.
- Darren has a new challenger for the amount of swearing in a single episode.
- How small the table top role playing game industry is and how the whole scene is effectively indie — excluding Dungeons & Dragons.
- An article on fantasy heartbreakers from the Forge.
- The difficulty of recording the history of table top role-playing games because of the primacy of oral storytelling and play.
- The three podcasts mentioned: Design Games, Dice Exploder and Read the Fucking Manual.
- Why Marc and Andrew can’t watch actual plays and what they are.
- The three types of fun.
- The multiple failures relating to the traumatic in-game experience that Andrew retells, and how they could have been addressed instead of playing a game of math with “friends”.
- Andrew hot take incoming: If you want to make a roguelike TTRPG it should be GMless. Marc agrees that a GM is much better than procedural generation but only if they’ve had a good night’s sleep and maybe a nice afternoon nap.
- A discussion about roguelike procedural generation, both of dungeons and narratives, ensues. Spoilers for an upcoming Roguelike Radio episode. Apocalypse World.
- The difficulty of retelling tabletop game experiences.
- Ultraviolet Grasslands. Not mentioned in the show, but the B/X Misadventures in randomly generated dungeons is apparently one of the ur-texts of the OSR movement. Cairn 2nd edition was mentioned.
- Andrew’s theory of “Modules are actually the game.” activates Sam’s trap card for 4D6 damage.
- Quintin Smith’s review of Delta Green and Impossible Landscapes and the paywalled Rascal News review of the same module which includes discussion of the Pasión de las Pasiones play through.
- The system is not just the rules of the game, the system includes everything at the table.
- You can kind of cut the line anywhere in a table top roleplaying design because the culture at the table will usually be able to handle the gaps.
- The Six Cultures of Play article that Sam hates.
- The problems with discord, and Andrew pining for 2007’s blogosphere.
- Sam recommends that you play table top roleplaying games. Everyone agrees that they’re easy to make and that you should be releasing early and often.
Type 1 Fun - You go to the beach where this is lots of people, looking to have fun hanging out on the beach, playing in the sand under the clear sky
ReplyDeleteType 2 Fun - You go to the beach with a few people, taking a dip in the ocean and swim out a fair distance. Looking back and feeling a bit tired, you realize just how far away you are, having to exert yourself quite a bit to get back to the shore.
Type 3 Fun - You go to the beach with a friend, during a time when the ocean is a little choppy, and swim out a fair distance. Getting extremely tired, you realize you are unable to swim back to the shore, and need the help of your friend to safely get back and avoid drowning.
I would call all three instances fun, in that you can look back at that memories of those situations, and take a hint of wisdom from them. No permanent tragedy or hardship of any real concern was truly experienced, nor is it a haunting nightmare that hangs over you the rest of your life.
I think you are severely downplaying the size of the roguelike development community here.
ReplyDeleteI have not been on IRDC2008, but it was more than "5 people". RogueBasin lists 9 attendants, and it does not seem accurate -- David Ploog was apparently there, but somehow he is not mentioned.
The 9 people mentioned in RogueBasin are all from Germany/Poland, except Ido Yehieli from Austria and Jeff Lait from Canada. Clearly only a small part of the online community (mostly those who lived very close to Berlin, and only some of them) decided to meet in person for the first time in history.
I have found my small rgrd archive from 2007 (containing posts from about 1 year), it has over 300 different e-mails. Over 100 with at least 10 posts. I would assume that the opinions of the authors of the Berlin Interpretation would be a summary of the discussions held in the community that involved more people. To compare another (better) roguelike definition not created by a single person, the Wikipedia roguelike article has more than 100 named authors until 2007.
And the classic "1% rule" says that only 1% users create content while the rest only lurk. It would not be better if more people talked anyway. It would be unbearable, just look at discords of popular games (as mentioned in the episode), or comments on viral YouTube videos or Twitter posts.
The current size of r/roguelikedev is 60K. I do not visit it regularly, but it seems most of the discussion is "traditional".
7DRL 2021 has about 200 entries. 7DRL 2008 had 25 entries. More, but not explosively.
The (traditional) roguelike player base also seems to be bigger than many people think. Mostly because of various biases in video game media. Pixel Dungeon had 5M downloads on Android, and lots of reviews, that's a lot, more than supposed huge hits like Slay the Spire.