RPGaDay 2023, Day 7

Ye gods, one week already?

Technically, when I only had one RPG to play with, namely GDW’s Traveller, it was both the smartest and the dumbest RPG I had ever got to play. There literally was nothing to compare it to.

Now, I’ve seen many RPGs float by me on the river - BRP (d100), Shadowrun, World of Darkness and games, Chronicles of Darkness and games, and Atlas Games’ offerings, so very Nineties, like Over The Edge and Unknown Armies, capturing the feel of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles and Zenith, and that movie from the Wachowskis that was big and green and Keanu being the Messiah in 1999.

Well, he still is in 2023, I swear.

Rick Astley.

So, I’m stuck here. So many choices. Which one is the smartest? How do you define what is smart, anyway?

Presentation? A well-presented game doesn’t have to be big and flashy and fancy. In fact, it can be the opposite. Traveller’s LBBs, the original R Talsorian v 1.0 Cyberpunk (which felt like a hacker manual in its first incarnation, and was hilariously set in the year 2007!), and Berin Kinsman’s DoubleZero and Foragers Fantasy books give lie to the assertion that you need glossy pages and fancy artwork to make memorable books.

Oh gods, Star Trek Adventures books make me retch just looking at the interiors.

Rules? Some games have smart rules, but they’re almost unplayable. I’m thinking about Iron Crown Enterprises here. Others have dead simple rules, but again they’re unplayable because the mechanics are, frankly, ugly as hell.

Setting? Sometimes, a game only continues to exist because of the setting it is tied to. Kelestia and Columbia Games are still fighting like junkyard dogs with a scrap of meat over the Harnworld, but you don’t need to own any of the products sold by either game to play your game on Harn itself - just the map, which is basically free from one of the publishers.

You don’t have to use Harnmaster or Harnmaster Gold to play on Harn. You could get away with using the rules for Foragers Fantasy for the basic game play, maybe the character sourcebooks, and ignore everything in the HM books. You could buy the Harnworld and Harndex books, because they explain everything about life on Harn without delving into crunch. But you can also get them very cheaply, if you search online.

There are the World of Darkness of Vampire: the Requiem, Mage: the Ascension and Hunter: the Reckoning, but again you only need to know the basics about what the world’s setting is about. Basically, it’s this world but with supernatural beings.

Can you run a modern game where all your characters are vampires, and forget the baggage of having to know what a Nosferatu is and why they’re different from Malkavians and Lasombra, or even Daeva and Mekhet if you’re into playing the 2004 Chronicles of Darkness instead? Yes … yes, you actually can.

Can you play a Traveller game set in the Spinward Marches, only using DoubleZero or Comae Engine? Yeah, you can.

Will it feel different? Hell, no. You’ll still be creating characters who skulk around graveyards and drink blood, or witches who harvest shadows from crossroads during a full moon, or who look out the viewport of your Free Trader at some strange new sun in your sky, only if you’ve got the right rule set, you’ll be able to enjoy immersing yourself in the setting far more than if you’re worrying about whether or not your +1 weapon can damage that shambling dead thing coming towards you, or those random thugs trying to lure you into a dark Startown alley for some sort of gunfight.

“No thanks, pal, I’m trying to cut down on the bloodshed. Try the next Free Trader crew. They’ll be along in a minute. I’m only here for the anonymous sex.”

But all of these are really beside the point. What is smart? Why are we even discussing the “smartest” game?

Because each game I mentioned has some sort of element which catches your imagination. In DoubleZero it’s the versatility of settings, but the core game genre being espionage, a really sexy genre. In Comae Engine and M-Space, the thrill comes from knowing that there is no setting; there are no expectations as to what your characters are supposed to be doing. e.g. doing heists, fighting wars, *sigh* delving into dungeons secret abandoned laboratories on airless moons.

You can run anthologies with M-Space, like The Twilight Zone. Or your characters can explore the worlds of Wyndham or LeGuin - imagine your characters exploring the themes of The Dispossessed or The Midwich Cuckoos. Or Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain.

In my personal view, then, what makes a game smart has to be whether or not it offers that element that makes a fan out of you. For some, it’s something they give to the players. For some, it’s something for the Guides / Storytellers / Referees, like the setting.

All of the above games mentioned offer something. They are all, in their way, smart. It’s perhaps no great surprise that I have not mentioned anything owned by Hasbro, Renegade, or Modiphius, for all the reasons I have mentioned above. Just because they’ve got the license for a product, it doesn’t make those games playable, smart, or even pretty. *retches in Modiphius*