Episode 165: Tabletop RPGs

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.

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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.