Hello, my lovely owl friends, and happy November! I hope you’ve all survived the tricks and treats of October and are now settling in for the decline of fall into winter. It must be said we’ve had a very wet fall so far where I am, which I’m hoping is not an omen for the amount of snowfall we’re in for.

In October, I released two new things, both a trick and a treat I hope. First we have Gryphons and Gargoyles, my adaptation of the fake game seen onscreen during the “Satanic Panic” plotline they did on Riverdale. Second we have a spooky Halloween-themed set of playsets for Dollhouse Drama, full of witches and monsters and all those good things. Even bigger, I added some tools to Dollhouse Drama to make it easy to play online, which you can read more about here! So definitely check all that out!

Project Updates

Ready for Metatopia

At the time of sending, we’re a little less than a week out from Metatopia, which you may remember I have spent most of this summer getting my next batch of projects ready to be playtested there. Well, they are ready! Both Pax Deorum and Champions of the Crystal Crown are all set to be tested, and I actually got them there pretty early in the month. No last-minute scramble for me this year! I think this actually may have been a miscalculation; it’s given me considerably more time to just worry about them without actually having any changes I want to make before seeing how they feel in testing.

I’ve talked about this before, but I’m one of those people who gets really nervous before playtests – I just assume my work is going to be awful and no one is going to like it and in fact they’ll hate it so much that they’ll hate me for making it in the first place. Is this a likely, realistic scenario? No, not really. Every time I wrap up a playtest, I think “wow, that was great, I know what I need to do next, and I didn’t need to be nervous at all” but then there I go again the next time anyway.

Blood of the Covenant Ashcan Edition

So what I’ve been trying to focus my energy on instead of worrying this month is doing all the writing for the ashcan edition of Blood of the Covenant, the completion of which was the last of my 7 goals I set at the start of the year. It’s going well, overall, I would say – I almost think I should have done it a lot sooner, because doing the writing to actually explain the game and what it is forces me to get my thoughts about that straight.

Writing is the act of organizing your thoughts – it’s one of the things I always say when people talk about using AI to do their writing for them. If you use AI, you’re not organizing your thoughts, and often I am left to assume that you don’t have any to begin with. I feel very strongly about this. And yet, every so often when I actually sit down to do my writing, I find myself thinking “god, why are these thoughts so disorganized? Why do I have to organize them through the process of writing? This sucks!”

I hit a real wall while working on the Introduction section for the Blood of the Covenant ashcan, just a horrible moment of doubt and disgust with my own work. And then I finished the introduction and moved on and the rest of it has been going pretty well. It does seem to always be that intro that kills me, though – the same thing happened around this time last year when I was working on the playtest edition for Before the Season Ends, and I had the same ugly craven feelings while working on the intro.

But why the introduction specifically? Well, let’s talk about it…

Other Thoughts

The Mortifying Ordeal of the Introduction

It’s possible that I put too much pressure on it, but I think the introduction is one of the most important parts of an RPG book. It’s one of the first things a potential player is going to interact with, and you have to sell them on the whole play experience in a nutshell. You have to explain what this game is (not in the sense of “what is an RPG”, which is a whole different can of worms) and why they should care about playing it and how to approach it, which often involves a form of explaining (even if only to yourself) why you made this game.

If I made things that were less personal to me, I’m sure this would be less of an issue. My “more fun” projects, ones like Dollhouse Drama or Champions of the Crystal Crown, don’t cause me nearly as much angst (although I DID still have some with the DD intro, I won’t lie). But most of my work is the result of me having something to say. Specifically, the initial spark or idea, the impetus to make something, is usually that I am trying to answer a question for myself – something about the world or the way I feel about it – and the creative process is how I find my answer to it.

So it feels like the introduction is there to make me explain myself – to tell you what the game is, I have to at least give you an idea of what question it’s answering for me. I don’t have to be explicit about it or go into detail as to my thought processes, but I have to tell you that Blood of the Covenant, for example, is about exploring authority and power and the attempt to uphold conflicting ideals and the relationship between the law and religion, and… that tells you something about ME too, because the work is personal to me.

So the introduction, even when I try to keep it laser-focused on the resulting game and include none of the surrounding or background, still feels revealing. It feels vulnerable. I made a joke on bsky that it might feel less embarrassing to take my actual pants off in the middle of a convention than to reveal myself through trying to sum up my games in a 3-5 paragraph introduction, but to say that it makes me feel naked is not too far off.

The subsequent sections all get easier, because the game itself – the mechanics, the structures, the procedures – are the “supporting statements” of the thesis being presented in the introduction. When it’s all put together, it makes sense and I feel confident that it coheres into a solid whole (or at least, I feel that way by the time I’m willing to consider putting it out as a public playtest). But the introduction feels like I have to say “okay, this all sounds like A LOT but trust me, it all comes together in the end, bear with me.”

This particular go-round was also rough because it coincided with a period of bummer reflections about how hard it is to get eyes on your work at this moment in the RPG scene and how the numbers are bad and it’s all very bad (discussed aplenty in previous newsletters, I won’t rehash it here). It’s one thing to go through all the ugly unpleasant work of the introduction if you think that at least there’ll be people picking up what you’re putting down on the other side. It’s quite different to feel like you’re bleeding onto the page for no one besides yourself.

Anyway, I grit my teeth and do it, because I don’t really have another choice! You make the thing or you don’t make the thing! And I want to make the thing! 

Immersion, Suspension of Disbelief, and System Interaction

So, I have two topics here, both of which I’ve wanted to talk about for a while, and extremely conveniently for me, a project was announced this week (at time of writing) that I think will let me talk about both, using this one game as a lens. Exalted Funeral has put up a kickstarter pre-launch page for a Meow Wolf licensed RPG. If you’re not familiar, Meow Wolf are a group of artists who create extensive, detailed, whimsical art installations that are meant to be explored and delved into to uncover a narrative and a shared universe between them, an immersive otherworldly narrative experience. The most famous of these is Omega Mart, in Las Vegas, but there’s a handful of others in other cities in the US. They’re a popular topic of conversation among fans of theme parks, which is why I’m familiar with them; I haven’t actually been to one myself, but I’d really like to!

A few times in the past, I’ve heard people talk about “immersive” RPG experiences, like, for tabletop roleplaying games, or trying to design “more immersive” RPGs. And I… I just don’t think that’s something I can get on board with. I don’t want to be dismissive of my peers who say things like this, but I think there’s some combination of unclear language and different viewpoints as to what an RPG “is” that make this hard to talk about. But I want to do my best here! So let’s set down some preliminaries.

First of all, I don’t know if the Meow Wolf RPG is trying to be “immersive” as an RPG in the same way that its source material is trying to be “immersive” as an art installation. But I do know that the “immersion” available in the installations is one of their main selling points, and one of the things people ALWAYS mention when they talk about it. After all, it’s a huge space full of custom props and decor and interactive doohickeys, where everything has been custom created, fresh and unique, to make you feel like you’re in another world. That rules! If the RPG specifically isn’t trying to recreate that feeling, that makes me a little less clear as to what it IS trying to do, as an adaptation.

Second of all, when I say that I don’t think the truly “immersive” tabletop RPG is real, let me give some examples of things I think CAN be immersive. One is theme parks, to a point! The word “immersion” actually always makes me think of Disney Imagineers, creating these highly-themed environments to envelop visitors in (at least until you have to actually wait in line for a ride or order food from an app – this note will come back later). Another is larping, especially the high-production-value ones where there are real standards for what people bring in terms of costumes and props, and very specific venues are rented to cultivate the intended atmosphere, but really any larp where you’re walking around embodying your character and taking action in the material world.

Those first two examples make it sound like I think immersion is just a matter of your physical surroundings – the clothing, the terrain, the props, like immersion comes from walking into a movie set. But that isn’t quite it either, because another thing that I think can be immersive is freeform roleplay! I’m always really careful to draw a distinction between freeform roleplay and roleplaying games, in a way that I think many people do not always distinguish between.

Before I ever got into roleplaying games, I used to engage in freeform roleplay with my friends, over instant messenger or forums and message boards. And I loved it! I had a great time doing that! It’s the closest thing to the kind of really free play that children do but that adults struggle with. You really can just… play pretend. No one is stopping you. No rules, no procedures, no system, just pretending. 

That previous experience is why I really hate when people act like a good roleplaying game is one where you just play pretend and rarely if ever interact with the rules. It really irritates me when people say that “the rules get out of the way” or “oh, we had a great time, we barely picked up the dice at all”. Because if I wanted no rules and no dice and no anything… I could have that. I could do freeform roleplay. That’s not what’s special about roleplaying games. If you, as a designer, are telling me “the rules of my game get out of your way”, I will not buy your game. You are telling me it will be a waste of money. I don’t need to buy any game to have rules get out of my way. I want rules that add to my experience, that create elements I wouldn’t naturally think of myself or that steer me in directions I wouldn’t intuitively go. That’s what’s special about roleplaying games.

When I hear people talk about having an immersive experience while playing an RPG, it often sounds to me like they are engaging in immersive freeform roleplay. And it sounds like the immersion is broken by having to engage with the system – looking at their character sheet or picking up the dice or drawing a card. If you’re telling me about all these wonderful things your character was doing and thinking and feeling and then you say “and then I rolled the dice”, I think the roleplaying game is not what’s immersive here. The roleplay maybe was! But I think system interaction breaks immersion intrinsically (like opening a phone app at a theme park), especially when we’re talking about tabletop games where we’re not in a big larp castle or wearing costumes or embodying our characters, where we’re six nerds sitting at someone’s dining room table with a stack of index cards and a box of pencils and our imaginations.

This is why “immersion” is not something I ever think to pursue in a roleplaying game experience. When I’m playing a roleplaying game, I want to interact with the mechanics, I want to feel like I’m playing a GAME and not just playing pretend. That certainly isn’t universal, but I’m also not alone in it either. I think the pursuit of immersion is almost certainly better done by choosing freeform roleplay without the structures of a roleplaying game system. Realistically though, I think a lot of people would struggle to GET to freeform roleplay as adults without the protective barriers of a game full of rules, without having prior experience with it. So that’s what causes this difficulty of terminology and experience.

I also think there’s a facet of this where the immersion of a theme park or a Meow Wolf installation requires some kind of overarching control that an RPG typically doesn’t have without putting a thoroughly overwhelming amount of work on the GM’s plate. Big expansive larps usually have multiple moderators and staff members working to keep things moving for the rest of the players. There is no high-budget team of Imagineers or artists putting together a typical RPG play experience – there’s just your GM doing their best. So I worry that this pursuit of immersion for the players comes at the cost of the GM’s experience, running the risk of making things really arduous and un-fun for them.

(As a sidebar, I also think then that this kind of immersion where you lose yourself in play is particularly not feasible in GM-less/GM-full roleplaying games, where you are called upon to create that kind of environment for the other players just as much as they create it for you. You’re always stepping in and out of that role, you’re splitting time as the imagineer and the theme park guest. This goes back to the beginner RPG essay and the discussion of how to build comfort with stepping between those roles)

So that’s the long and short of why I think “immersion” is neither a useful term nor a good goal for a designer to have, if you let me frame the discussion. But wait, I said I have TWO topics I wanted to talk about relating to the Meow Wolf RPG…

RPGs as Merch

I posted something a little bit salty (and then promptly deleted it) poking at the idea of asking – is this licensed RPG an actual RPG, or is it fandom merchandise shaped like an RPG? Because the thing I’m coming to see is that some licensed RPGs don’t… really function very well as RPGs. But they work beautifully as merch that is RPG-shaped, like it’s a very tangible expression of your fandom for the intellectual property it’s attached to, and “playing it as a game” is a secondary or even tertiary concern.

I get very irritated about RPGs that are great products or great merch (beautiful art, lots of pretty peripherals, high-quality printing, loving references to the source material, etc.) but mediocre at best as games. This phenomenon isn’t exclusive to licensed RPGs by any means… but they sure do show up there a lot. And when we do get these great-product-meh-games, they tend to attract a lot of attention because… they’re pretty! They’re nice to look at and nice to think about! And when you finally play them, after sitting on your shelf for years, the experience is so carried by your emotional relationship with the source material and the tactile element of all the nice bits that it takes you a while to notice that your fun isn’t actually coming from the gameplay itself.

I’ll note that this is transparently sour grapes on my part, so you can feel free to take it with as many grains of salt as you want – I cannot afford to produce anything like a fancy product with deluxe printing and twee peripheral accessories. That’s not the level of business I’m at. I wish I could! I know that the only way to get attention in this space is with a lot of glossy bits that have nothing to do with actual gameplay! And all the better if it’s tied to a known and liked IP where people will buy it with no actual intent to play it because it’s a tangible expression of their love for the IP.

What gave the game away (so to speak) on the kickstarter page, is the presence of a third-party licensing company that professes to put together brands and fandoms to make products for fans. I’m sure this is not the first time this is happening, I’m sure third parties have been involved in plenty of other licensed RPGs, but this is the first time I’m seeing it put so blatantly, and the actual language of their section of the page just grosses me out. Maybe I’m naive to prefer not to know how the sausage gets made, but it makes me acutely aware that if I back that campaign, I am buying merch more than a game.

I want to compare it to other expressions of fandom through merchandise. Like if I’m thinking about buying my favorite band’s t-shirt, I might still buy it even if it’s kinda scratchy, just to have it as a sign of “this band means something to me”, depending on price etc. My decision in this type of scenario might be based more on my relationship to the thing I’m a fan of than it is on the quality of the merch, which is a secondary concern, but not a non-existent one. But if what I actually love is clothing and fashion, and the band is one I think is cool but don’t feel strongly about, I probably don’t want that scratchy band tee at all, because my decision in that scenario has more to do with the quality of the shirt. What I actually love is games, so if a game is only kind of meh as a game – like a scratchy t-shirt that’s gonna shrink in the wash – it doesn’t matter to me how great it is as a symbol of the IP.

To be clear, I cannot and will not fault any RPG publisher for making something in this general category – a clear money maker that will (I hope) float other, more original work. Every publisher out there doing licensed IP RPGs has original games that I generally prefer and find more compelling, but that are less likely to be profitable. So this will have an audience, and I hope that it DOES turn out to be a good game! But when it comes to figuring out my own priorities and preferences for what I want to spend my money and time and attention on… merch RPGs and product RPGs aren’t it. I’m off the hype train. 

(Sidebar: another licensed RPG really got under my skin earlier this month when they said in a marketing email that their game isn’t an RPG because it doesn’t have a GM. This from a company that has made GMless RPGs before. I’m sure this was said to reassure fans of the IP who might have been iffy on an RPG based on preconceived notions. I get that. I still think it sucks. Letting myself get mad about someone else’s marketing copy is like losing at chess to a dog, but I did it anyway. Shame.)

Closing Notes

Since I really let my inner snob out in that last bit, let’s bring it back down now with my shameful confession that I have allowed myself to get Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire-pilled again. I was as disappointed as anyone by the end of the show, and I swore I wouldn’t get sucked back in. But here I am. The new show starting next year, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms looks great, and I went and read the book of ASOIAF novellas it’s based on (since it didn’t require me to go read all the books) and that was great. And then I went and read chapter-by-chapter summaries of all the ASOIAF books anyway, at which point I really SHOULD have just read the actual books (I read the first one and a half many many years ago, and then I quit).

My willingness to get baited by A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms specifically comes back to its focus on a relationship between a knight and his squire, a relationship I’ve always loved, going back to my love of the Tortall books as a kid. I went right ahead and got back into Don Quixote mode, which I am always ready to slip into at a moment’s notice like my favorite pair of sweatpants. I rewatched Man of La Mancha for the first time in over a decade, and I wept and wept, as I always do. I may or may not have started outlining a new game on the subject (I did, I’m not ready to talk about it yet, but we’ll get there).

That’s all for this month folks, we’ll catch you again next month with hopefully lots more news about my games post-Metatopia!