Opening the Academy: Let's Talk About RPGs?
Academia do RPG, or RPG Academy (and there is a good story behind that name, which I will share someday) grew out of an idea to share some of what I have learned and observed after 35 years of playing and running RPGs, a hobby that I love and that, to my delight, so many other people love as well.
And, since I apparently enjoy making my life as difficult as possible, I am starting with a blog! I will publish every post twice: first in Portuguese and then in English.
When I moved to São Paulo (for work, like 100% of the people who move to São Paulo), my wife and I spent years trying to put together an RPG group with well-adjusted, fun people who, above all, did not miss games.
As with almost everything in life, when you desperately need something, it is nearly impossible to find. And once you finally do, it starts pouring in from every direction. Now that we have a phenomenal group of people playing and wanting to play with us, what we lack is enough room in the calendar to fit everyone in. More and more people keep coming into our lives saying how much they would like to enter the world of RPGs, or return to it.
So my first idea was: “Let’s create a group where players can meet!” Almost a “Tinder for RPGs.” I do not know why I was surprised to discover that other people had already had this idea and acted on it. But, after all, quod abundat non nocet. So let’s create one more!
Thus, our newborn Academy has four purposes:
To post actual play sessions from some of our favorite RPGs, new games we think would be fun to try, classics we want to share or, eventually, an RPG so bad that trying to make it work becomes funny in itself... We will go from Mörk Borg to RuneQuest and everything in between, leaving the eternal bubble of the “world’s greatest roleplaying game.”
To publish RPG content that might be useful (or simply fun) to other players, from adventures, rules and alternative options to, who knows, perhaps creating a system of our own someday...
To build a community (a WhatsApp and/or Discord group) where players can meet and form groups with other people who, miraculously, also have a free weekend! We will also share safety tools so that everyone can actively enjoy the game, creating trauma only for the PCs, never for the players...
To review and critique RPG books and, perhaps, other games, both to help newcomers make an informed decision about whether a game is right for them and to let old-timers commiserate with me about the difficulty of finding one specific rule in a Mage book...
It is this last topic that I want to discuss today: how do I review an RPG?
Let’s start with a method every GM and player should know well: creating a character in it!
We will create a character from scratch, discovering how easy (or nearly impossible) it is to create a playable and, hopefully, memorable character in the game.
Once that is done, we can move on to creating a character sheet for the RPG itself.
And what would an RPG’s own character sheet include? That is easy: Class, Attributes and Level!
Here is the anatomy of an RPG character sheet:
Name: This is the easy part.
Class (system): Here we will discuss whether the game uses one of the known systems or types of systems (D20, Storyteller, Storypath, BRP, PBTA, Borg-like, etc.) or a system of its own. Then we will talk a little about what the game is and what it sets out to do.
Attributes: Like every good RPG character sheet, this one has Attributes. I tried to distill everything I consider most important in a game, everything that might attract players to the table (or not!) and, hopefully, make a GM’s experience building a campaign as easy and friendly as possible.
Since I am old and was raised on World of Darkness, I chose a scale from 1 to 5 for each Attribute. The Attributes are Theme, System, Accessibility, Safety, Art, Design and Layout and, for books released in Brazil in translation, Translation.
Here is what the Attribute ratings mean:
0 Terrible: The exception to the 1-to-5 rule. It damages the book as a whole. You may be better off putting this game down and looking for another one. I would like to believe that I will not need to give this rating very often! Unfortunately, however, it will be my rating for any book that has no Safety tools.
• Poor: The book is truly bad at this. The game fails in this Attribute or, worse, works against the product’s own proposal or its other Attributes.
•• Mediocre: Meh. There is something good here, but the problems still outweigh the strengths. This aspect of the book did not impress me, but it does not ruin the experience either.
••• Good: This aspect of the book is not perfect, but it is functional and meets the product’s needs. It is good enough to serve GMs and players.
•••• Exceptional: Whatever this aspect of the book may be, it goes far beyond merely meeting the product’s needs. It may not reach the hall of fame of the greatest RPGs, but it certainly stands out and improves the work, and may serve as an excellent example for other games.
••••• Phenomenal: Whoever created this RPG was clearly inspired by the Muses that day! This aspect of the book makes it worth reading on its own, even if only to learn from the masters. These are the aspects that change the RPG landscape itself and become benchmarks for other games.
Let’s talk a little about what each Attribute represents:
No RPG knows what it is and what it wants to be as well as Blades in the Dark. This introduction is perfect and immediately puts anyone who reads it into the game.
Theme: How well the game “sells” its proposal and themes; how clearly it conveys the kinds of stories it wants to tell and how well it helps the reader enter its setting.
This is the best range table I have ever seen in an RPG. Mothership perfectly combines the game’s rules and themes, something even more difficult to accomplish in an “open” system without an ultra-specific setting like Blades in the Dark.
System: The game’s core rules and the subsystems connected to them are judged by how well they accomplish what the game is trying to do and, above all, by how much they support its themes.
Here we measure systems by how successfully they escape our archenemy, the dreaded ludonarrative dissonance! But we do not judge how easy the game is to learn, because that belongs under...
Creating a character sheet with a marker? What sorcery is this? In Pirate Borg, you can create a fun, (relatively) functional pirate who is ready to play in five minutes and exactly 18 dice rolls. It is a shame the company decided to exclude Brazil from its most recent crowdfunding campaign.
Accessibility: HERE we measure how easy the game is to learn! What difficulties will a new player face when trying to learn this RPG? Is it mathematically complex? Is creating a character and/or campaign easy? Does it help the GM tell a story within the game’s themes? And, above all, do you need a PhD in mathematics to understand the rules?
Although I cannot call myself an expert, I was impressed by how often Apocalypse Keys addresses safety and consent. I found this particularly interesting because it is certainly not one of the most risqué RPGs I have ever played.
Safety: Like most older players, safety systems and inclusivity simply were not concerns when I started playing. At most, we got a generally sarcastic passage saying: “This game deals with fictional themes. Please do not kill anyone because of it.”
Far more than a legal concern about “Satanic Panic,” the best recent RPGs take care to ensure that everyone sitting at the table feels comfortable, welcome and included in the fun.
One caveat: I am certainly not an expert on the subject. But I know a few people who are, and perhaps we can talk to them in the future and explore this topic in greater depth. That said, the complete absence of even minimal concern for safety tools is unfortunately still a black mark on many games.
Whatever other faults it may have, Household has by far the best art and visual identity of any RPG I have ever seen.
Art: Who is a pretty little RPG? You are! This Attribute measures my entirely subjective opinion of whether the book is gorgeous, pretty, ugly or horrible (in a good or bad way).
Pendragon has a table for everything. And I mean everything. And an index just for tables! Until you have an index of tables, you never knew you needed one to live.
Design and Layout: Unlike Art, our goal here is to determine whether the book is easy to navigate, whether the game has good indexes and everything else that can make the reader’s life easier (or harder).
We also measure how difficult it will be to find a rule in the middle of combat while frantically searching for the damage table for improvised objects found in a Victorian bathroom.
Translating and laying out this book must have been quite a saga (sorry, I could not resist). But I actually chose this page because the ability “Memórias de Outrem” (“Memories of Others”) is certainly the most interesting ability I have ever seen in an RPG book, and I wanted to share it.
Translation: I believe we'll skip this session in the English version.
A perfect example of how I assess an RPG’s Level: Mage has several ratings of 1 or 2, perhaps a zero in Safety, and still receives an 8 in my final review. It only misses a 10 because the rules do not allow it...
Level: Here we are going to steal a little from the “world’s greatest roleplaying game.” A book’s Level is my overall score for it. It is neither the sum of the previous ratings nor an exact average of its Attributes, but my personal and subjective assessment, considering:
How much I personally like the RPG;
How well it does what it sets out to do; and
How strongly I would recommend it to other players.
Unlike Attributes, Level is measured from 1 to 10, because every GM who has ever tried to run an epic-level D&D game knows that the game breaks once it gets past that level.
Of course, it is easy to talk about a review system, just as it is easy to say whether an RPG system is good or bad. The best way to make sure our system works is to test it!
And in the next post, we will do exactly that by creating an RPG character sheet for the most recent game I had the pleasure of running: ShadowDark.
Above is a little sneak peek at the prototype character sheet we will use to review games!
Over the next few days, I will share my review here. Until then: Fortes inquit, fortuna iuvat!
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