My new tabletop RPG newsletter
Welcome to my newsletter
A lot of talk about tabletop roleplaying games is grounded in history. I think there are some problems with that, but I may as well start by explaining my history with the hobby. Aside from a few failed attempts in elementary school I didn’t really start engaging with tabletop roleplaying games until adulthood. I was interested in CRPGs like Fallout and Baldur’s Gate and thought it might be worth taking a look at the tabletop games that inspired them, but the common understanding at the time was that the “magic” that made those games work was GM dice-fudging and other behind-the-screen trickery to deliver a pre-planned story experience despite the actual mechanics of the game. That struck me as silly, what was the point of getting invested in mechanics that didn’t mean anything? So I lost interest until I stumbled across The Forge, whose foundational ethos was System Matters, the idea that the system you were using (even if inconsistently) would inevitably influence the play experience at the table. The obvious next step was that if that stuff was going to matter, you might as well be intentional about it: follow the rules of the game you’re playing, and play games with rules that actually work when followed. That made sense to me.
I gained some familiarity with the games by listening to recordings of sessions that people had posted, which eventually evolved into the genre of Actual Play podcasts. I didn’t know anyone locally who was interested in trying these games, but one AP podcast I listened to was exploring the possibility of gaming via Skype (which was the dominant audio chat app at the time) and that inspired me to start gaming online. I played several games that were popular in the Story-Games scene at the time, and unlike a lot of people D&D has never really been part of my tabletop RPG play experience (although I was familiar with a lot of the mechanics due to my interest in CRPGs).
I also got interested in game design. It seemed to me that the designers in The Forge / Story-Games scene weren’t doing anything that I couldn’t do, so I got involved, first via design contests like Game Chef. For better or worse TTRPG design is an art form that I feel connected to. However, my attempts to get my games to a publishable state were my first indication that the community was not quite what I hoped it was. I haven’t been successful as a game publisher. Am I a good game designer? Who knows, probably not people who have never even read (let alone played) my games, but we live in a wisdom-of-crowds world and that’s the biggest crowd out there. It’s extremely tempting to conclude that if I haven’t succeeded by now I won’t succeed. On the other hand, there are indie designers that have had all the advantages of internet microcelebrity for over a decade and it’s not clear they’re dramatically more successful than I am. So what’s the right perspective? I don’t know.
What is TTRPG Teleology?
The general theme I expect to be writing about is how things work with respect to tabletop RPGs. That could touch on things like RPG Theory, the philosophy of games, and mechanical design, but also the social dynamics in the indie scene or the broader industry, or the economics of game making. I’m not sure that “teleology” has exactly the right philosophical connotations, but I always struggle with titles and I liked that this was alliterative and slightly rhyme-y, and the relationship between purpose, intent, and function is a theme I expect to touch on.