Tag / Ideas

by Moreau Vazh

On Criticism and TTRPGs

After some amount of reflection, I have decided to stop reviewing RPGs.

At least for the foreseeable future.

There are a number of motivators behind this decision but the first and foremost is that I am burned out to the point where the sense of fatigue has begun to filter over into other areas. Having finished the first section of my Call of Cthulhu campaign, my recent series of reviews, and a smaller game that I was running alongside these two things, I have reached the point where I am struggling to find the motivation to come up with another game to run. I sit down to write and nothing comes. I sit down to read a rulebook and I find myself either looking at my phone or drifting back to a novel. It’s a strange kind of exhaustion—like the light’s still on but the room’s empty.

Clearly, I need a break and I am to blame for this… I took on too much, I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, and I allowed my priorities to become inverted: I returned to writing in public as an excuse to engage with stuff that would then filter back down to my game and I allowed myself to get into a position where I was running stuff in order to write about it and no good was ever going to come of that as the tail should never wag the dog.

While I am obviously fatigued and in need of a break, this fatigue has given me reason to pause and re-examine what it is that I am doing with this blog and, in truth, I am no longer sure that reviewing RPG stuff is a good use of my time. For want of a more emotionally nuanced phrase, it is too difficult.

This is a post about those difficulties, how they impacted me and why I suspect they may be impacting other people too.

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by Moreau Vazh

A Ritual of Dismissal

Last week, a prominent YouTuber named Quinns released a video about the ENNIE award-winning RPG Triangle Agency. As someone who a) doesn’t regularly watch Quinns’ videos and b) has not read Triangle Agency, I am in no position to speculate on the soundness of Quinns’ remarks but I was dismayed by the reaction to the video.

In an excellent post attempting to make sense of what happened, Thomas Manuel suggests that substantial discussion of Quinns’ post may have taken place behind closed doors but the most common online reaction appears to have been existential bafflement at the idea that one might proffer an opinion that does not end in an invitation to spend money.

Obviously, there is a (much) longer post to be written about how consumerism and para-sociality have hollowed out online discourse but I was more unsettled by the well-worn objection that always seems to surface when someone tries to start a conversation about reviewing RPGs:

“You Can’t Review a Game without Playing It”

This claim may or may not be true, but it’s rarely made in good faith—and almost never when the review ends in praise. It surfaces whether the critic played the game or not, and the reasons why such reviews might be unacceptable are seldom explained. It isn’t a position. It’s a ritual of dismissal: re-invoked to ward off criticism that serves a purpose beyond purchase or praise. In form and function, it closely resembles the No True Scotsman fallacy.

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by Moreau Vazh

The Hollow Valley Method

There are already too many RPG books.

Shelves groan with unused settings, unplayed supplements, and dice that have never been rolled. Never known mercy. Never tasted fear.

We buy them for inspiration. For hope. For the sense of possibility that comes with a new world in shrinkwrap. And then we leave them unread. Waiting to be forgotten.

This is not unusual. The hobby rewards acquisition over use. Hype over engagement. It is easier to buy a world than to run one. Easier to read a setting than to let it unravel at the table. What we accumulate is not just product, but a backlog of potential.

This piece offers a way to use that backlog. Not as it was intended, but as something to be misread. Rather than struggle to approach settings by the paths their designers intended, what if we explored them from the outside? What if we played characters who do not belong—who wield no power, decode no lore, fulfil no canonical arcs… and yet pass through the world anyway?

The Hollow Valley Method is a way of playing where the protagonists are not chosen ones, trained operatives, or destined heroes. They are small people from a small place. People with their own rituals, their own gods, and no real understanding of the wider world.

The twist is that the world isn’t theirs. It’s someone else’s. One you already have on your shelf: Ravenloft, Planescape, Glorantha. You take that dense, dust-covered lore and treat it not as canon to master, but as a world to misread. The characters enter it as outsiders. They interpret it through their own logic. They survive not through strength, but through stubbornness, kindness, mistrust… and the occasional lucky pie.

It’s a style of play that resists consumerism, power creep, and lore worship. It says: you don’t have to know everything to walk through a world. You just have to keep walking… and hope that the world doesn’t notice you.

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by Moreau Vazh

On the Ambiguities of Harold Bloom, Dickless Lemmy, and the Hanson Brothers

So I know a guy who is a guitarist and whenever he encounters another guitarist, he asks them to play a lick before returning the favour. Sometimes it’s a well-rehearsed melody, or a fragment of a guitar solo, or maybe it’s just a slick chord progression that they’ve been playing around with. The idea is to give someone an opportunity to show off while promoting the circulation of ideas. Nothing as involved as a song or even a melody… Just a lick.

As an experiment, I thought I might try something similar and share a technique that I use regularly in my games: I’ll start by explaining some of the thinking behind this technique and then demonstrate how it works in practice by showing how a couple of NPCs came together in my most recent campaign.

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by Moreau Vazh

Home and Away – On RPGs and Community

One of this blog’s recurring themes has been the sense of culture clash I have experienced a) upon returning to the hobby after some time away, and b) engaging primarily with the Anglo-phonic RPG scene when a lot of my formative memories stem from a time when I was primarily engaged with the Franco-phonic RPG scene.

I could say that this left me feeling like a fish out of water but that feeling never seems to go away regardless of what I do and so I suspect that this is one of those cases in which ‘the call is coming from inside the house’. Obviously, my experiences are not yours and it is quite possible that you find the online RPG community to be ceaselessly inspirational and supportive, in which case all I can say is that I envy you.

I started this blog with no great desire for communion with other gamers… I wanted to get back into writing for fun, I wanted the sense of structure that comes with publishing stuff at regular intervals, and I wanted the space to think through various sources of inspiration and creative decisions as I worked on my own campaigns.

For the first few years of its existence, I told nobody of this blog’s existence and it was only when I tagged a couple of other people and got noticed by a couple of people on Reddit that the numbers started to go up. Nowadays I am back to forgetting to mention this blog’s existence to other people. I do the work because I enjoy the work and that’s that…

Back in January, I wrote a piece about my growing sense of frustration with the OSR and how the gradual ossification and social capture of the scene’s process of discovery-and-recommendation meant that I was struggling to find any OSR adventures that I actually wanted to bring to the table. Since then, my sense of frustration has only deepened and I want to think a bit about how I visualise the broader hobby and what (if anything) I actually want from it.

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by Moreau Vazh

System Matters, Explicit Mechanics Less So.

Way back in 1980, someone named Glenn Blacow submitted an article to Different Worlds magazine. The piece was entitled “Aspects of Adventure Gaming” and it was an attempt to address creative tensions at the table by recognising and categorising the existence of different types of players with different sets of needs and expectations.

As Jon Peterson explains, Blacow (and some of his contemporaries) would go on to refine the original article quite a bit but the hobby’s tendency towards a) boom-and-bust economics, b) high rates of participant churn, and c) disregarding its own history ensured that Blacow’s article would eventually disappear from view. Though Blacow’s words were swiftly forgotten, his assumptions were not and the hobby has spent four decades periodically re-discovering the idea that there might be different types of gamer.

In the late 1990s, the Threefold Model argued that gamers were either game-oriented, drama-oriented, or simulation-oriented. In the early 00s, GNS carved gamers up into Gamists, Narrativists, and Simulationists but injected some nuance by talking less about ‘types’ and more about ‘creative agendas’ which were philosophical postures that somehow existed in both people and the games they chose to play. Nowadays we talk less about types or agendas and more about cultural silos and cultures of play but that initial urge to create taxonomies persists…

I must admit that I’ve never really gotten on with any of these taxonomic systems as I either struggle to see myself in them or struggle to understand their underlaying stasis: Surely players adapt their approaches depending upon the company they keep? Do games not get interpreted on their way to the table? I don’t believe that taxonomies are useful unless they’re like the fictional taxonomy created by Jorge Luis Borges in Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge and types of gamers are said to include ‘suckling pigs’ and ‘those who from afar resemble flies’.

I feel that – with the notable exception of people who have read enough RPG theory to develop an ideological crust – gamers are defined less by their commitment to grand aesthetics and more by the quirks of their personalities and how these things translate into differing levels of interest in and tolerance of various forms of conflict resolution.

My view of RPG design is that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between systems and mechanics and that mechanics are a means of dealing with social problems. The more mechanics you take on, the less consequential your social difficulties but taking on more involved mechanics means increasing the cognitive load and so people’s taste in RPGs can be understood as an idiosyncratic trade-off between the perceived robustness of a group’s social systems and the individual players’ ability to assume cognitive burden.

System matters, but system is not the same thing as explicit mechanics.

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by Moreau Vazh

Photography, RPGs, and Art-making

When Jennell Jaquays passed away earlier this year, a number of venues paid tribute to her long career as one of the most influential artists and designers from the early days of Dungeons & Dragons (Shannon Appelcline’s piece is typically engaging).

Nowadays, Jaquays is best known for the non-linear approach to dungeon design that unambiguously bears her name but she also produced memorable covers and some of the most iconic pieces of internal black and white illustration in the history of D&D.

However, while there is a lot to love and appreciate about Jaquays’ artistic legacy, the piece that leapt out at me was the cover to a 1979 Judges’ Guild collection of mini-dungeons entitled The Book of Treasure Maps:

I cannot speak to the book’s interior as I am not in the least bit familiar with its contents (though it has, of course, been reviewed) but I am struck by how unusual and striking it is to see an RPG book with a photograph for a cover, especially when the book’s credited author was a legendary Fantasy artist in her own right.

I would love to know the story behind the decision to use that picture for the cover. Rumour has it that the picture includes Jaquays as a model and that it was taken during a LARPing event rather than as part of a planned photo-shoot. Either way, I find the picture really quite charming.

This got me to thinking about the place of photography in RPG-adjacent art and how taking pictures can help us not only to prepare and run more interesting games, but also to relate to RPGs in a more fulfilling manner.

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by Moreau Vazh

ITO: Joy and Devilry in the Films of Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer

Into the OSR is an occasional series in which I write up some of the creative decisions I have made in the preparation of my old school sandbox RPG campaign. The rest of the series can be found here

What can be learned from a series of half-forgotten foreign films in which a pair of scumbags eat beans, buy fancy clothes, and blow shit up because it’s more fun than working a steady job? EVERYTHING.

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by Moreau Vazh

Origins: What I mean when I talk about being Good at RPGs.

Origins is a series of posts in which I reflect upon my relationship with RPGs as well as the events that shaped my tastes and understanding of games. The rest of the series can be found here.

We talk too much about how to be a good GM and not enough about how to be a good player. This is a piece about what I think makes for a great player of RPGs and how I came to those beliefs.

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by Moreau Vazh

Not Golden like Gold. Golden like a Stone.

The current era of D&D is coming to an end: Sales of the core books are continuing to drop, new source books are failing to gain purchase, and once brand-loyal influencers head for the exits.

Wizards of the Coast may protest that the suite of rules currently undergoing playtesting will not constitute a ‘new’ edition but it’s pretty clear that we are coming to an end of an era.

Given that D&D’s second, third, and fourth edition all saw ‘not a new edition’ re-launches that not only failed to turn back the clock but also heralded the arrival of terminal market collapse, it seems reasonable to suspect that there may be trouble ahead.

For reasons that I will explain at some length, I don’t really care but I must admit to being puzzled by the number of people referring to this era as a Golden Age for not only D&D but also TTRPGs as a whole. As a result, I now find myself in the unfortunate situation of having to ask: What the actual fuck are you talking about?

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by Moreau Vazh

Into the OSR – Post Zero

Into the OSR is an occasional series in which I write up some of the creative decisions I have made in the preparation of my old school sandbox D&D style fantasy RPG campaign. The rest of the series can be found here.

What is the OSR?

OSR stands alternatively for Old School Revolution, Old School Revival, or Old School Renaissance depending upon whom you ask and when it is you ask them. The term OSR dates back to the mid-00s when people on a number of online forums began trying to re-connect with a style of gaming associated with the origins of the hobby and the earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

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by Moreau Vazh

Thoughts on Adventure Design and Nephilim’s “Les Veilleurs”

Looking back over the scenario reviews that I have published on this site, I am struck by the fact that most published scenarios seem to miss my personal sweet-spot when it comes to the trade-off between providing content and empowering GMs to create their own content: Those scenarios that go long on detail feel restrictive and that sense of restriction makes me second-guess and resent the author’s creative decisions. Meanwhile, those scenarios that are short on detail under the guise of allowing GMs more freedom to write and/or improvise often feel thin, poorly structured, and a waste of money. I would argue that this sense of dissatisfaction is inevitable and unavoidable.

The problem is that every group has its own energy and every GM has their own creative workflow. Indeed, before we even address the question of what constitutes a ‘creative workflow’ we need to recognise that while some groups are happy taking action and driving their own narratives, other groups will be much happier sitting back and allowing GMs to narrate a story around them. Back in the day, we would have said that the first group were simply better or more experienced players but my time in the hobby inclines me to think that this is as much a reflection of personality as it is of experience. Either way, a group of people who are happy to have a story told to them are going to want something very different from a scenario than a group that wants to create its own stories. There is no such thing as a one-size fits all published scenario. Even the greatest and most legendary of campaigns is likely to fall flat if your group don’t vibe with the type of story that a campaign contains.

Moving beyond the players to the people running the games, I think that different GMs have different levels of comfort with the idea of a mutable text. Even GMs who do enjoy improvising will sometimes struggle to deal with groups that depart too violently from narratives laid out in published materials and some people do not want to improvise at all. Indeed, if you look at your average published dungeon crawl you will find very little room for ambiguity or the kinds of mutable narratives that are unlikely to survive initial contact with a group of players determined to pursue their own goals and create their own stories. I am even tempted to say that the emergence of a non-traditional RPG scene has allowed traditional RPG designers to double-down on the use of linear narratives. After all, if you want your players to assume control over the narrative, why not play a game that explicitly gives them narrative powers?

The best RPG sessions I have ever run were those in which the players were free to explore and engage with the things that were of interest to them. While it would be impossible to produce a published scenario that allowed for every possible narrative swerve groups throw at their GMs, it should be possible to produce published adventures rich enough to encourage player agency whilst supporting a GM’s ability to deal with that freedom. This is what I mean when I talk about my personal sweet-spot for adventure design and I find it really interesting that so few scenarios and campaigns have any interest in positioning themselves anywhere near it.

Reflecting on this point, I tried to remember which (if any) published adventures manage to get that balance right and while my first thoughts went to Gary Gygax’s The Village of Hommlet (opening chapter of his famous Temple of Elemental Evil module) I then remembered the first supplement put out in support of the original French edition of Nephilim.

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by Moreau Vazh

On Maps vs Territory

Back in November, Thomas Manuel’s Indie RPG Newsletter opened with an interesting commentary on the concept of rules.

According to Manuel, the fact that we use the same word to describe the mechanical aspects of roleplaying games as we do the oppressive systems imposed upon us by real-world institutions might account for the existence of different sets of attitudes towards RPG mechanics.

As someone with a mind that tends to slide straight off of RPG rules and whose politics skew somewhat anarchistic, I would argue that the reason the same word is used for both classes of entities is that they are in fact describing the same class of thing. The only difference between the rules governing role-playing games and the rules governing bourgeois society is that playing an RPG requires active and deliberate consent while being part of a society requires only that you exist. If you were to show me a well-behaved and well-educated liberal who goes to the gym. I would show you someone who is in the business of optimising their character build using real-world system mastery.

This being said, the idea that really caught my attention comes towards the end of the editorial:

Maybe rules for storygames are more like settings or adventures for the OSR. A good adventure or setting is praised for it makes explicit and specific (and what it doesn’t). They’re praised for their modularity (and hackability). Nobody thinks of adventures as restrictions. It might not be a perfect analogy but there’s something there I think!

I agree!

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