That’s why I’m interested in Storium, a web based card game inspired by ideas from pen and paper RPGs like Fiasco, FATE and Apocalypse World. It’s a game in which the players collaboratively tell a story and the computer only exists to do the housekeeping and ensure they play by the rules. It’s a game where everyone is an author, not an actor, and you don’t play to win, you play to find out what happens. And if none of this paragraph made any sense to you, then don’t worry, because in order to fully explain what Storium is, I’m going to have to give you a crash course in the last ten years of pen and paper RPGs.
How Dungeons and Dragons is endorsing the darkest parts of the RPG community
Note: The people named in this article have a history of harassing their critics. As such I have chosen to keep my sources and any traceable information they have given me anonymous to protect them.
Three weeks ago the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons came out. D&D is the iconic tabletop role playing game, so a new edition is a big deal. It’s one of the few times that the small, insular pen and paper community gets noticed by the rest of the world. Many game websites have talked about it, notably Polygon's piece on gender inclusive language. Yet at the same time as D&D tries to appeal to those outside the gender binary, it has been driving them away by employing two of the most toxic personalities in tabletop gaming.
Shortly after Wizards of the Coast released fifth edition game designers began sharing a picture of the credits page: a section called ‘additional consulting’. The list includes heavyweight designers like Kenneth Hite and Robin Laws but two names stand out as not belonging: “RPG Pundit and Zak S”.
While John “RPG Pundit” Tarnowski and Zak “Zak S” Smith have produced a few books between them they are more well known as bloggers and opinion formers within the RPG community. Specifically they’re part of the ‘Old School Rules’ movement: people who think everything since the earliest editions of D&D was unnecessary. I don't agree with them, but I can see the appeal of the simple dungeon crawl. The problem is that the OSR movement contains some very nasty people. Zak and Pundit are two of them.
I became aware of Pundit a couple of years ago. He's a blogger operating out of The RPG Site, infamous for his paranoid rants about how outsiders are plotting to take over the hobby and destroy it. This is not an exaggeration, Pundit literally believes that there is an organised conspiracy to destroy the world of tabletop RPGs, a group he refers to as ‘the Swine’. His original rants defined 'Swine' as anyone who attempted to innovate beyond Old School Rules, particularly anyone involved in the ‘storygames’ movement (experimental narrative driven games). To Pundit, these games represented an attempt by outsiders who weren’t ‘real gamers’ to destroy the hobby. This is not an unusual sentiment in videogames either, but it isn’t usually voiced by someone working on in the biggest game in the world.
It’s easy to dismiss this as harmless crankery, but conservative art often comes with conservative politics, thus it came as no surprise when Pundit’s Glenn Beck style rants switched targets from ‘storygame swine’ to attacking “Psuedo-activism swinery”. Again, this is not an exaggeration, one of the consultants on D&D literally believes that ‘social justice’ is a conspiracy by outsiders to ruin ‘real RPGs’ forever. Here he is comparing an expo instituting an anti-harassment policy harsh Islamic modesty laws, managing to insult both women and Muslims in one article.
Zak S is famous for two things: Playing D&D with pornstars, both on his blog and for a little while in a web series for the Escapist, and being banned from half the major RPG communities on the net for derailing any and all discussion about diversity and discrimination. You can still see a long and thorough explanation of why RPG Net banned him, and it’s a pattern of behaviour that he still engages in. Zak presents himself as a sex positive feminist, but spends all his time derailing conversations on sexism, defending sexists and attacking real feminists by painting them as anti-sex conservatives. When called out on this he defends his words with a greatest hits list of derailing arguments: ‘I know women who disagree’, ‘You’re just anti-sex prudes’ and even attempting to debate what the word ‘sexist’ means.
These are Zak and Pundit as I knew them when the news broke. It's the image most were already familiar with: angry nerdboys who spent all their time trying to gatekeep the hobby. To me that was reason enough that they should never work in a game as influential as Dungeons and Dragons. But as the picture of their names in the credits spread, more information spilled out. Seeing their names there in black and white was just too much, and people began to speak out. Most did so in private, others posted publicly but without naming names. This, I became aware, was because anyone who criticised the pair found themselves subjected to harassment, abuse and real world stalking.
Both have much the same MO. They publically attack someone for criticising them, speaking out about sexism and bigotry, or just liking the wrong game. That person then finds themselves under a sustained campaign of harassment from Zak and Pundit's fans. They pair would then feign innocence despite knowing full well what would happen and doing nothing to discourage it. Even after the initial attacks die down things are not over, they will routinely return to attack targets that angered them years ago. Cross them once, and you are marked for life.
This is where Zak excels. He has in the past posted lists of people who he feels have displeased him in some way, complete with their real names. Those people then lists find themselves subjected to sustained campaigns of harassment. Not mere internet name calling, but phone calls to people’s houses in the middle of the night that say “This is where your children go to school.” To be clear, I am not accusing Zak or Pundit of making these calls, there is no evidence for that. What they do is point out targets and refuse to admonish their fans when they step over the line.
While this behaviour is alarming, it the choice of victim that is the most telling. These attacks nearly always target women and LGTBQ individuals, mostly freelancers and independent designers. Zak and Pundit have taken pains to defend themselves against accusations of transphobia, but I know several transpeople who their fans have attacked and harassed. Zak described one of them as ‘mentally ill’, both he and Pundit told others they would be better off committing suicide. Recently, in a post defending Zak and accusing his detractors of misogyny, his girlfriend attempted to out a trans designer. (update - the post has now been edited to remove the designers new name)
Anger surrounding their inclusion in D&D 5e began to mount. The anonymous tumblr Problematic Tabletop started cataloguing some of their more public behaviour. Fresh waves of hatemail forced designers to delete and hide social media accounts to escape. At the same time Zak put his setting book on sale, using promotional quotes consisting of people calling out his behaviour. This was not unusual, Zak’s business model revolves around publically being a jerk. He is, quite literally, a career bully.
Eventually, halfway down a now deleted G+ conversation, Mike Mearls – designer of D&D 5e - responded:
If anyone has any direct evidence of racism or sexism or any other form of discrimination on the part of people attached to D&D, please drop a line to me. Email is [removed]
Consultants on the project were hired to tear the game apart and pull no punches, so being brutal was basically a job requirement.
How we present race and gender in the game had nothing to do with anyone beyond me, Jeremy Crawford, and our art director, Kate Irwin. I have read up on issues of race, gender, and inclusivity in gaming and have done everything I can to address them. Will it be perfect? No. But I pay attention to this stuff because it's important. The consultants had no role in that department.
It wasn’t the most confidence inspiring appeal, but nonetheless people leapt upon it. Told their conversations would be confidential they shared with Mearls all the stories I’ve shared with you, only with names, links, screenshots and other traceable information I have removed to protect my sources.
Days later Mearls responded. No-one had given him evidence that Zak or Pundit had not spoken any slurs, so he was throwing the complaints out. The allegations of harassment it seems, were secondary to whether they had ever spoken a bad word:
I haven't seen or received any evidence that Zak has made homo/transphobic or racist statements.
I have heard from a number of people who feel harassed and marginalized in the gaming community.
At the end of the day, the responsibility for working with Zak and RPGPundit, and more importantly *not* directly working with marginalized groups falls solely upon me
Meanwhile, Zak was publicly speaking on Mearls’ behalf, saying that WOTC had found the claims against him to be baseless. Those who sent Mearls information began to panic, had he just shared their complaints with their harasser? Mearls responded that he had told Zak the claims were baseless, but hadn’t shared any names or details with him. Nevertheless they were not pleased, nor did they feel safe. Why had Mearls consulted with Zak before replying to them? Why was it more important to re-assure Zak he was in the clear than respond to allegations of harassment? Mearls again replied, saying that he was not taking the accusations seriously because some of the people stating them where members of the Something Awful forums, which he claimed has a history of harassing Zak:
My impression is that SA folks are using gender and race issues to drive their personal grudges with people. It's very damaging for making real progress on these issues. People getting in touch with me are pointing to that site to undermine the real issues we face in gaming.
Zak and Pundit have accused Something Awful of harassment before. They take issue with the fact that they are both quoted in the catalogue of bad RPG behaviour that is
Grognards.txt (grognard means old warrior, but in the RPG community is has come to mean one stuck in the past). Meanwhile, The RPG Site, operated by someone Mearls hired as a consultant, currently contains such topics as: “Bruce Baugh can go fuck himself with a rusty spoon”, “Why I dislike feminism” and a thread defending the use of the word 'Jap' in WW2 settings.
As a privileged person, there is often an instinct to dismiss tales of harassment. We naively assume that our world is just, that someone we know couldn't get away with abuse without us noticing. Mearls isn’t alone in this belief, over the past three weeks I’ve seen similar sentiments from senior figures in the RPG community. “This can’t really be happening”, they reassured themselves,”We’d have heard something”, “Someone must be exaggerating”. It is tempting to believe that the RPG community is not ‘that bad’, but it is, it is the worst community I have ever known. Partly because it harbours Zak and Pundit, but also because so many have reacted to this crisis by playing down legitimate anger and trying to find a truth in the middle where there is none. This reached it’s height two days ago, when Fred Hicks, co-creator of FATE, shared a link defending Zak and outing one of his favourite targets (update - Hicks has apologised and stated that this was not his intent). That designer has since left the industry, worn down by years of constant harassment from Zak and Pundit, compounded by the insensitivity of Hicks and others. Hicks has since deleted the post, but he has not apologised.
In investigating this story I heard the same tales over and over again. The RPG community is small enough that almost every woman, person of colour or LGTBQ individual seems to have had a run in with Zak or Pundit. The only reason I hadn’t heard about this before is because they are too afraid to speak out. Discussions happen in private, or with the names left out, because both Zak and Pundit are infamous for googling their own names and attacking their critics. Zak even now tries to portray these allegations as prudish conservatives out to smear him due to his involvement in pornography. Yet for that to be true almost every marginalised voice in the RPG community would need to be part of a secret right wing conspiracy. At a certain point you have to accept that that is implausible.
It has been three weeks since this story began, and Wizards of the Coast have yet to make a public statement on the affair. All communication has been through private emails and that now deleted G+ thread. Perhaps they had hoped it would blow over if they refused to acknowledge it, after all the RPG community is too small and insular to get any real media scrutiny. If a videogame studio hired two people as toxic as this it’d be a public relations nightmare, but Wizards of the Coast can do so and still get credit for gender diversity.
That’s why I’ve written his article. I’m sorry D&D, you don’t get to have it both ways. If you want praise for your inclusive language, you’ll also need to answer for the people you hire.
"Yep, looks like you’re dead," I say, "unless one of your companions can heal you at the last moment. The rest of you guys, what do you do? Bob, you have healing spells, right?"
"I run away and look for treasure," says Bob the mammoth-man cleric of Thor. Kids find it really amusing for some reason to name their fantasy characters Bob. I don’t entirely get it. I mean, my father was named Bob.
"Fine," I say, "Bob runs away and abandons Aziz. Harpy, how about you?
"I run away and look for treasure also," says Harpy the elf wizard.
"Me too," says everyone else in the party.
Thanks to Evil Mastermind on the Something Awful forums for sharing this link. Kids are hilarious.
A group of veteran Lets Players decided to try their hand at RPGs, and the result is a great introduction to pen and paper in general and Dungeon World in particular.
Holding out for a Hero in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying
Pre-generated characters are the lettuce of the RPG world. Nobody asks for them but they're always there anyway, padding out the plate. "If you don't want to create your own character then just use one of these!" Exclaims the blurb. No-one ever does. Unless those characters was pre-made by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Then I'll bite.
Most superhero RPGs are clunky affairs, bloated by overly complex character creation rules. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying acrobatically dodges this problem. They already have the characters, so all they need to do is ruthlessly cut anything that gets in the way of being a superhero. No complex rules for secret bases and personal wealth, just a great big 'resource' die to roll whenever you think it might come up.
You can create your own hero in MHR, but I don't advise it. The game's great strength is how it uses the diverse cast of the Marvel Universe to teach new players how to be someone else.
A lot of that rests in the clever milestone system. Each of the pre-made characters has two sets, based on their personality, which offers escalating experience rewards for playing to type. Captain America gets bonuses for persuading people to co-operate, with a whopping 10xp if he manages to form the Avengers. Matt Murdoch gets an XP point every time he tells someone he's not Daredevil. He will likely be doing this a lot.
The results can vary. In our first game Chris, a long term comics fan, played Emma Frost and was incentivised to lie and manipulate. The reward system pushed him into the classic roll of 'token evil teammate' and stirred up inter party conflict. Tom, on the other hand, picked Captain America, but struggled to give the required inspirational speeches, relying largely on thwacking people with his shield instead.
Thankfully the system also allows for fairly simple switching between characters. If you aren't enjoying Hawkeye, you can just send him down to the West Coast Avengers, and draft Luke Cage instead. The result is a crash course in role playing, forcing new players to take on many masks, and grow comfortable becoming someone else.
This endorsement does come with caveats however. While MHR's system offers a streamlined version of classic RPG concepts like dice pools and aspects, it isn't perfect. Notably the strange hit point system, where characters receive different levels of damage dice, we found confusing and awkward. Combat seemed to be decided less by smart tactics and more by lucky hits that KOed enemies near instantly.
Neither does it lend itself that well to the other side of the Marvel Universe: the great soap opera. There's nothing to stop you playing up the 'off duty' side of your character, but if you do, you're on your own, the system is very much focused on the punching side of the spectrum. This is a Spider-man game, not a Peter Parker one.
Despite this Marvel Heroic Roleplaying is one of my go to games for new players. The use of existing characters, along with pre-made adventures based on comic book storylines, is perfect for drawing shy newcomers out of their skin. Marvel teaches us the important first lesson of RPGs, that you don't have to be yourself if you don't want to.
Due to an expired license, the PDFs of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying are no longer for sale. But you can still find the books second hand on Amazon or ebay.
In the latest Shut Up & Sit Down podcast they named Dungeons & Dragons their game of the month, and talked a little about their history with RPGs. I disagree strongly with Paul about D&D 4th Edition (more skills does not equal better!) but Quinns talks about Grey Ranks, so that's interesting.
Hello! Welcome to my new site! Lovely isn’t it? Come in, sit down, put your feet up. Mind the cat.
You’re probably wondering why I created this. Well I’ve long had a fascination with Pen and Paper RPGs (or Tabletop RPGs, or Storygames, or whatever name you want to put on them) but I never really get a chance to write about them. I’m not the only one either, I know dozens of professional games journalists who play RPGs, but none of us ever write about the experience.
Well here’s my attempt to change all that. With Fail Forward I aim to make a space where we can talk about all our interesting Pen and Paper experiences, and maybe push them into mainstream criticism, just as Shut Up And Sit Down and Cardboard Children did for boardgames.
To do that I’ll need your help! I need you all to write about RPGs. You can do this on your own site, and I’ll link to it, or you can send it to me, and I’ll publish it here. The best part? None of us have any idea what RPG writing should look like, so you’re free to try whatever style you want. Reviews, features, opinions, personal essays, diaries, interviews? It’s all up to you.
How often do we get a chance to define a new form of writing like this? I'm excited, and I hope you are too.
World building has been a part of our hobby from the very beginning. From as far back as Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor, as long as someone has pretended to be someone else they’ve felt a need to define the space in which they do it. Often at great length. With footnotes.
Microscope is an experiment in organic world building. Instead of a single GM spouting reams of detailed lore, a group of players sit down and plot out a timeline. Each takes turns to toss in ideas, suggest important moments, and act out key scenes in the history of their world. It’s a brainstorming meeting, but with rules and funny voices.
You begin by stating the ‘big picture’: a single sentence that summarises the section of history you want to explore. This could be anything from the epic “A new alien race upsets the balance of power” to the tiny “A megastore opens outside a small town”. You also get to define a ‘palette, where each player gets the chance to add things that they want to see, and things that they definitely want avoided, an excellent way to head off problematic elements before they occur. In the game I played we were dealing with first contact between humans and aliens, so the very first thing I did was scribble down "No colonialism".
The rest of the game explores that history. One player, dubbed the ‘Lens’, will pick a theme to explore, and everyone takes a turn to add something to the timeline, represented by a collection of index cards full of hasty scribblings. Players can add a period (a broad section of history), an event (a focal point within that period) or a scene (what actually happened during that event, which the players then act out). This doesn’t happen chronologically, in fact you define the beginning and end of your history right at the start. Instead you leap through time freely, potentially adding events in the past which colour those another player has already placed in the future.
Each ‘Lens’ gets a little more to do than the others, giving them a chance to explore their pet theme completely. Then the next player becomes the Lens and they begin again, exploring a completely different aspect of the world. When everyone has had a turn as the Lens, you stop.
That’s the important part. When I called Microscope “A brainstorming session with rules” earlier, I wasn’t being reductive, brainstorming sessions desperately need rules. The big problem with world building is that no-one knows when to stop, you will always want to explore your world just a little bit more. Microscope puts hard limits on how much you can add, teaching you the most important writing advice of all, how to murder your darlings.
That lack of satisfaction can also be a problem. Once I’d finished my first Microscope game I honestly didn’t know what to do with myself. I’d been so absorbed in this world, that the prospect of tearing it up and playing again didn’t remotely appeal. It’s no surprise then that many players like to use Microscope as an add-on to other games creating worlds to explore in another system.
All of which means that although I enjoyed Microscope immensely, I’m not sure when I’ll play it again. Creating a world isn’t something to be done lightly, after all.
You can purchase Microscope from the Lame Mage productions website. There is also an iOS version available.
What would you sacrifice for an extra +1? Your soul? Your firstborn? Your free will? Urban Shadows may still be in playtesting, but it's already my favourite Apocalypse World based game, and much of that is down to its fabulous ‘corruption’ mechanic.
It’s so smart it seems almost dumb and obvious in retrospect. Urban Shadows tempts you with the promise of power by tempting you with the promise of power. Embrace the darkness to gain levels. Embrace too hard and lose your humanity.
In practice, this is represented by a separate experience track, called ‘corruption’. Abuse your powers? Mark corruption. Kill a human? Mark corruption. Use dark magics? Mark corruption. Even failing to save someone marks corruption. Standing idly by is not an option.
The good news is that every five times you mark corruption you get to pick a new ‘move’, the Apocalypse system’s standard level up reward. They work in much the same way as regular levels, only they’re more powerful, far more powerful. Overpowered, arguably.
But here’s the twist. Once you’ve gained all five corruption moves, that’s it, you’re out. On your next level your character becomes a monster, twisted by their experiences into something beyond your control. Hope it was worth it.
So playing becomes a balancing act. Maybe you can just get away with a few heinous acts, then just stop and enjoy your rewards? But sin begets sin, and of the strongest corruption moves will generate even more corruption as you use them.
Best then to stay clean, refuse to mark any corruption at all, don’t even set foot on the slippery slope. But that can be a tall order. Not only do you not get the fanciest toys, but many moves will give you a choice between marking corruption and something much, much nastier, like taking a wound or a penalty to your roles. Why not take the easy option? Just this once?
It’s a beautiful gamification of supernatural morality. Every player will have their own approach to corruption, and that approach will define their character, and drive the story in turn. Right now in our campaign student wizard Devinder is trying to keep himself clean, but reckless teen werewolf Marion has no such concerns. Conflict is inevitable.
Urban Shadows is currently in playtesting. You can get the latest release for free at its Google Plus page.
Tom and Cara record a regular podcast about video games (and occasionally other kinds of game). In this special episode we were joined by Paul "Shut Up Show" Dean to talk about both Board Games and Pen and Paper.
I’m new to all this – if you couldn’t tell – and I’m struggling. I’m still playing as though I’m in a videogame. Why would someone put the unlock switch to their vault right next to their vault, in plain view? Before even thinking I’d blurted out the command. It was a knee jerk reaction. I’m Pavlov’s action hero, trained through habit to push every button I see. In Dragon Age those habits helped me save Ferelden. In this world they make me a brazen idiot.
I'm actually the DM in this story, and no, I didn't really know what I was doing at the time either.
I’m reminded of this time-lapse recording of a couple of Warhammer sessions from the Disaster-Capitalism themed campaign I ran a year or two ago.
Comrade Sheret wanted something as a backdrop for a presentation he wanted to run, and he created these. Things to note is how fascinated I appear to be in my crotch early on due to the mysteries of the screen and how we shamelessly smear all the games bits and bobs with takeaway curry.
KG’s hypnotic time lapse of his Warhammer Fantasy game.
