RPG links of the day

Mike Mearls profiles The Year Ahead in RPG Releases: 2006

The Eighties RPG, 2006 Edition: Remember that game from the 80s? It's back! Again! We changed the rules for ducking behind a platypus to avoid detection by an incoming torpedo. And you'll buy it, suckahs! We even went in and screwed up some functional rules to set the stage for the 2007 edition. Eat it, fanboi.

It's Another Game About Angst!: If mom refuses to buy you that Limp Bizkit album, if dad and his "how was school today" is just a stupid face, then this is the RPG for you. You are an outcast with great powers, but should you use those powers to do anything the suffocating world of mundanity will destroy. Yours is a dance at the edge of oblivion. Guaranteed to reinforce every damaging, self-defeating, and ego boosting falsity that you cling to! That pointless, trained monkey job you have, the one that requires minimal skills that are still beyond your talents, won't be so soul crushing once you play this game.

We Will Kill Stuff Because That's What We Like 8th Edition: 979 more ways to kill things! 372 more things to kill! 439 more things to take off the corpses of dead things! Are we having fun yet?

Cruel, cruel. I have a nasty feeling that "Pointless Licensed RPG Number Eight" is taking the piss out of something I actually own...

More positively, Troy Costisick asks: "Does Setting Still Matter?", and comes to the unsurprising conclusion that it does.

Forgeite-Narrativist games tend to emphasise system at the expense of setting, possibly a reaction against the 90s emphasis on setting at the expense of system. That trend led to games with complex, baroque settings married to often clunky and sometimes vitually unplayable systems. Can you say "Deadlands?".

I find it difficult to conceive of a game that doesn't actually have a setting, because I find it impossible to create a meaningful character without some sort of context for him to exist in. I guess this reason why I never understood the appeal of Tavern Gaming on RPGAMES.

Of course, there are a lot of games that don't have settings, but instead provide the tools to create one. The most extreme example is Primetime Adventures, where you actually create the setting as part of the game.

This makes me wonder about how much setting a game should include. How much is too much? Or two little? The history of RPGs is littered with games for which supplement after supplement added up to hundreds of pages detailing cities, nations, cults and societies, with vast numbers of canon NPCs all tied together with an all-encompassing metaplot. It all makes me wonder how much of that stuff ever got used in a typical campaign. But is it better to describe a cool setting in broad brushstrokes, and let individual groups have fun filling in the details?

These are some of the problems I've wrestled with in the Kalyr RPG I'm still trying to write....