My Life As A Gamer: Most TRPGs Are Irrelevant

In light of this utterly fucking retarded display of incompetent by WOTC's D&D Lead Rules Designer, it's time to talk tabletop RPGs and why so few matter.

This is the LEAD RULES DESIGNER of Dungeons & Dragons, and he doesn't even know how roleplaying games work.

Your advice is bad, and you should feel bad. Same for Justice.

RPG's are not improv. (For one, no improv troupe would put up with that many rules.) Learn them, play them. pic.twitter.com/EkSjltW0YD

— Daddy Warpig (@DaddyWarpig) June 3, 2020

Let's start with a fact most TPRG publishers would rather deny: most TRPGs are irrelevant and can be safely discarded.

The reason is that most TRPGs bring nothing to the table that is truly worthy of attention. They can be--and have been--repackaged as supplements for a TRPG that does matter and do just as well or better commercially than being a stand-alone product. Why? They neither play sufficiently different from a relevant game to be notable, nor do they present a play paradigm that is done better in another medium, and both assume that what's being done is actually entertaining in and of itself.

You can, therefore, pare your TRPG collection down to three titles and cover everything of note that TRPGs as a medium offer you: Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller. In all three cases, you can even go so far as to not bother with anything but the original version of that game and do fine for the rest of your days.

The key is that all three games use separate, distinct, and novel gameplay paradigms that are entertaining in and of themselves without needing to resort to borrowing from narrative media in any way. D&D is properly focused on the exploration of dungeons and the recovery of treasure as a microcosm of exploring a frontier and claiming its resources for your settlement. COC is properly focused on investigating the paranormal and dealing with the consequences of encountering that which is beyond Man's ability to comprehend. Traveller is all about making your way as an intersteller actor in the far-future, with subsets focusing on merchant and military activities as most action involves one or the other most of the time.

Other well-known properties can be slotted into one of these three, and some hybridize them. Cyberpunk 2020 takes Traveller and scales it down into a single city. Borderlands blends COC and D&D, while Shadowrun blends D&D with Traveller. Some properties can be straight-up recreated within an existing property. (e.g. BattleTech w/ Traveller) Others offer nothing more than a novel sub-system and call itself a full game. (e.g. Champions, and superhero gaming generally)

I can go on for paragraphs, but the rubric above shows just how pointless most TRPGs are. The best thing that could be done is to identify what novel and entertaining bits a property possesses, and then rebuild it as a third-party supplement for one of those three games. (Successfully done with Legend of the Five Rings, not so well with Star Wars, both referring to their d20 System versions.) It is an expression of hubris to continue to insist otherwise when we have 45 years of data to show this to be the case, especially with regard to games chasing the D&D end of things.

This medium has shown via generations of revealed preference what works and what does not. If it were not for the lack of barriers to entry, most of these products would cease to exist by now, forcing either product redesign that conforms to the reality of the market situation or the creation of a Brand Cult that leverage the psychology of worship to compensate for the lack of product relevance.

TRPGs are products. Products exist to solve problems. It turns out that the problems solved by D&D, COC, & Traveller are what exists to be solved within the tabletop RPG medium as any other successful would-be solution ends up spinning off to another medium entirely- usually tabletop wargaming, LARPs, or some sort of videogame. This will be the case unless and until a new problem of entertaining gameplay is identified and addressed with a new, novel and in-itself-entertaining TRPG.