I don’t do reviews.
I’ve considered it, don’t get me wrong. It’s not as if I’m opposed to reviews as a format, or anything like that. After playing an RPG for some time, I tend to come away with strong opinions, very much encompassing what the game does, what the game fails to do, and if I think anyone should spend money on it. That’s all the necessary ingredients right there.
Every time I try to put those ingredients together, however, it ends up very anecdotal. I only have my experiences to speak on, after all, and how my personal impressions were or were not satisfied. Which parts I personally happened to struggle with, and which happened to bring me joy. By talking with the rest of the group, I can multiply that, but it still only yields perspectives on one instance of play. Any foibles or difficulties this set of individuals may have had are magnified. Are made the only thing, in a sense.
I got to play in a oneshot of His Majesty The Worm somewhat recently. It’s an OSR game of some solid popularity, talked up a fair bit in several of the circles I’m in, and with a handful of interesting mechanics to it.
To be honest, I didn’t really enjoy it much at all.
I found it interesting, certainly. And in many ways, I’d prefer interesting to enjoyable, in the context of trying out a game. But, the parts I had hoped to be more central (card-counting in combat and out to manipulate odds) proved to not be terribly impactful, the combat’s rules served their purpose and didn’t do much more than that for all their theoretical levers, and the general gameplay experience was a slog through a dungeon with primarily one player calling the shots while everyone else murmured assent to go to the next room.
…All this is, of course, intended. It’s more or less how it’s supposed to be. In OSR spaces, the dynamic of having one more boisterous player as the shot-caller is actively codified and supported, as a natural and efficient way to bypass the question of getting a whole group of players to agree on a single direction with relative frequency. The combat system, for all its complexities in theory, is in practice intended to still provide an open vessel for “I’d like to try something tricky to get an edge here” style angles, and otherwise straightforward hitting gameplay is just a matter of considering what card to use for defense. Spellcasting is costly, tricky, and rare, so the fact that I never ended up needing to use a single spell is just a mark of efficient gameplay.
“It does what it wants to, I just don’t like it” isn’t a particularly enthralling or substantive opinion. I’m not sure it qualifies as criticism at all. The closest it is to something is praise – which is more or less where my assessment of Worm has shaken out. Dismissing my not-terribly-useful personal feelings, a game doing what it wants successfully is a triumph of mechanism design, if nothing else. If asked my thoughts on Worm, unless someone actively means my personal emotions, my diplomatic answer is that. If you think you would like the pitch of the gameplay, the OSR play dynamic set up in this way, then you will probably like this game.
“If you think you would like it, you will probably like it” is somehow even more useless.
Complaints, now, those I can do a bit better. Hellpiercers has become one of my go-tos for discussing games that fail in ways that are easy to pinpoint and criticize. (This is perhaps an unfair pick, but, so it has gone.) My playgroup came away with many frustrations, but the biggest were the most straightforward and objective they could be: certain powers that produced instakill terrain outclassed almost anything else you could spend your time doing, and one weapon in particular dealt 5-6 times the damage of any other. Missions to kill bosses were trivialized, as were most major enemies in any other mission. After an errata, the instakill terrain no longer functions, and the weapon has been nerfed to around 3 times the damage of every other weapon. Still shockingly unbalanced, but, at least, steamrolling an encounter will now maybe take around twice as long.
This is also speaking to a subjective experience, mind. The social group I’m in with my fellow players make jokes every so often about the progressive heightened emotions throughout that short campaign about the particular imbalanced weapon I was using. However, it’s also something it’s a lot easier to report and corroborate. There’s numbers here. Something solid and objective to work with. “Here are the knock-on effects of dealing way more damage than expected” may be a bit muddled, but “this deals way more damage than expected” is provable. You don’t need to take my word for it, you can look at the weapon yourself (if you happen to own the game). That’s a criticism I can be confident in.
It’s rare, though. Most games don’t have really big numbers problems like that – and small numbers problems are a lot more subjective in how much they’ll end up mattering. If I tried to limit myself to that, then I’d end up back where I started. Most games, I’d have very little to say about.
So, that’s an interesting little dilemma.
Running the show
All art is subjective. But RPGs are, often, in a league of their own.
For the sizable majority of TTRPGs, you have a GM managing everything. Almost invariably, that position comes with interpretive and creative labor of its own. The GM figures out how the rules work, how they fit together, and what (eg battlemaps, NPC concepts, etcetera) needs making to make it all cohere in one piece. That GM, of course, is only a player, with the same books as everyone else. (Potentially the other players are deprived of a few confidential ones, but the point is the same – all they have is the text, and their prior expectations and experiences with the medium.) What decisions they make, and where, will vary considerably. And, fundamentally, it will shape much of the experience of everyone involved.
One of my larger but less objective critiques of Hellpiercers is of its objective rules. Rather, its lack thereof. It presents the notion that a given fight has the goal of eliminating one given enemy, or destroying a structure, or what have thee. Our GM had to make assassination targets specially immune to instakill terrain, as a parameter of the mission, to hold back my nonense. She also had to decide what enemy to make the target of the assassination in the first place, and what the map would look like to get there. When the time came to destroy a structure, she guessed an HP value entirely arbitrarily, for lack of any guidance. A few hundred, she settled on, considering how much damage I was putting out. A value it would be impossible for any set of builds to hit within the round timer (another thing she had to arbitrarily create), except for the one weapon I had that dealt way too much damage.
Had the GM been different, had the same GM made different choices, the game experience would have been notably distinct. The mechanics themselves would not change – “Ambiguous Intentions deals far too much damage and overshadows the other weapon options” would be just as true – but the experience of gameplay, and what other complaints may or may not have come up, would vary a lot. Depending on the game, the balance of abilities themselves could shift. In Lancer, a significantly better game in the tactical-grid-combat milieu, how much terrain and cover a GM puts on their maps changes whether cover is likely to be a common defense people have access to. I see many calculations of expected damage done by people who presume cover never or rarely factors into the equation, leading them to rely on inaccurate weaponry more than is true to my experience of the game. But, that’s only true to [my experience of the game]. For those that play with minimal terrain, it’s my expectations that would be off.
Which leads to another thing. My way is, in this case, better. Or… both more interesting and more expected by the design and developers of the game. Lancer is made with the expectation that cover is common and navigating an area requires more thought than moving in a straight line through a roughly-blank map. The gameplay is improved by the added complexities of such a thing. But, how does that factor into a critique, then? I can say “well, you’re just doing it wrong” to someone with an empty map, perhaps, but that isn’t all that useful. I can try to persuade GMs to use more terrain, as a matter of improving their skill at running the game, but that’s ultimately something they have to build their own set of tastes and best-practices for, and that is subjective based on their personal interests. (Which is the muddle with GMing as a whole, here.) I can criticize the game based on how well it does or does not communicate how the GM should run the game, perhaps, but that’s a presentation critique rather than a design one – worth consideration, certainly, but not at all where my interests lie.
The final possible angle, my natural state, is to criticize a game for every section wherein the GM’s subjectivity meaningfully alters the game. The more universally-consistent the game can be between tables, the better.
But, that’s an ideology. Worse, it’s a preference. In essence, it reduces to “I want games that are how I like games to be, and will simply dismiss games that fail to be that.” For my own personal use, that’s fine, if a bit snooty. But for critique? For something to be presented to anyone other than myself? I don’t think that’s good at all. We’ve circled back around to the earlier problem.
As with earlier, though, I kind of have to say it.
I have been running Exalted recently. 3e. It’s a game with a very unique setting that appeals to me, in a way that it’s rare any game does. It’s a good thing, too – the system brings me very little but grief. The game demands detailed mechanization for any given relevant NPC, with the only rules for that being to use the PC creation rules up through the relevant power scale they reach or to make it all up yourself, idiosyncratic abilities included. The numbers scaling mean the PCs face very little resistance from most of the world, save for when the GM decides that figuring out a given random fact is probably difficult enough to be nigh-impossible for a normal person, for whatever reason. Even worse, most of the uses and subsystems end up abstracted and relatively ignorable, and how to situate combat and its stakes is entirely dependent on one’s interpretation of the setting. The only saving grace thus far has been the interesting-and-decent social manipulation system, something the vast majority of games utterly ignore – and that has also been the majority of the mechanical interaction people can meaningfully justify or model for themselves. Several skills have their own long-term project rules that amount to rolling a bunch and letting the GM figure it out. Overlapping with that set, several skills are on a gradient from contextual to almost entirely useless. It would be trivial to build a useless character aggressively invested in options that don’t meaningfully contribute to anything – and, one of the stated expectations of the game that the GM will then work to make those skills relevant enough to justify the build.
In a sense, idealized Exalted GMing willfully distorts the world to make relevant the particular skills the players invest in. This, for my skills and interests as a GM, is a massive headache. The primary coping mechanism I have had is complaining alongside my players, who are also unimpressed by most of the system, and focusing on the part we find compelling – the setting.
And for all the fatigue that went into the prior paragraphs, it is, at best, a subjective critique. There are GMs who would not struggle where I have, and ones who would struggle in places I find easy to manage. Not mentioned are the notes of character premises and the overlapping schemes they are acting out in each space the players enter. This is because it is not difficult at all for me to do, and is conceptual labor engaging with the part of the game I like. The only tiresome part is having to eyeball stats, because the NPC rules give me little to work with. For a GM who is bad at conceptualizing a large set of characters with intertwined melodramas and magical plots between them, this requirement of running Exalted could plausibly be a stronger barrier to success than any of my mechanical complaints! Is that not a worth critique to bring up, just because I personally don’t have that problem?
But, then, do I need to imagine every possible GM skill that would go into running the game, to form that critique? What about my blind spots, the things I just take for granted? And even besides that, we’re once again criticizing any part of a game that requires the subjective GM to make work.
“It works on my machine”
…is a concept in bug reporting for computer programs, mostly as a [what not to do].
The series of events is simple. Someone, running a program, encounters a bug or error. They report it to the developer. The developer, following the same behaviors as the reporter, does not encounter the same bug. In other words, “well, it works on my end.”
The reason this is a [what not to do] is that it’s obviously not the end of the story. Was the person who encountered the bug using different hardware, or a different operating system, or running something else at the same time? These factors matter, and ideally that information is included in the report. Replicability is important for understanding problems, but if it’s not replicable, that doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist, only that you don’t understand it. “It works on my machine” is a sign there’s something deeper you need to figure out, but it’s not an answer. Not on its own.
Of course, in RPGs, it’s a sentiment I’ve seen often. “Oh, well, that goes fine when I run it.” Primarily in response to the sort of subjective-result critique from above, but secondarily also to questions of game flow, of player understanding, and other such “how did this feel/how difficult was this to enact” type questions. I find it to be a rather uncompelling response, in the same way as it is in bug reporting – but there’s an interesting difference here. In terms of GM subjectivity, the implicit commentary is, rather… the GM should be able to make this go fine. A computer running a program wrong is not a subject of serious judgement, obviously that won’t fix the bug. A human, however, can absolutely be blamed for their choices and the results thereof.
“A GM should be able to do this and make it run, so, this is an invalid complaint” isn’t quite the same as “a computer should be able to do this and make it run, so, this is an invalid complaint.” In that computers have no ‘should’, and no capacity to learn or change. For an RPG to lean on its subjectivity, to some degree, “the GM must be able to do X set of things competently (for a given definition of competently, specific to this game) to make this work” is not only a coherent statement, but a necessary one.
But, on the same token, I didn’t write all those complaints about the experience of running Exalted to conclude with “mea culpa, I should just get good about it.” And I wouldn’t consider it fair to expect the same out of anyone else.
I think “it works when I run it” is both necessary data and a useless response to criticism. Similarly, I think “this doesn’t work when I run it” is kind of a useless bit of data to someone who does know how to run it correctly, but an understandable form of criticism – and, potentially, room for a teaching moment. For conveying “this is how I run it to make it work,” or, perhaps, “this is how it’s supposed to work, try to do what you need to to make that happen.”
“This is how it’s supposed to work” is another muddle in critique, one that I’ve been on the impolite end of myself. In fact, it’s exactly what I ran afoul of in Worm. The experience wasn’t great, for me. It was also, exactly as it was supposed to be. I am of the mind that this kind of dampens my critique down to nothing – but, is that not valuable data, for someone who also would not enjoy that experience? When an acquaintance grumbles about how long turns take in a complex tactical game, and I respond by salivating over all the choices and complexities that reflects, does it become unfair for them to call the experience a slog? I don’t think it does, really. It just means, after composing those critiques, the conclusion has to be different.
In other words, I suppose, the only meaningful form of review I can envision doing would have to end up mealy-mouthed. Discussing experiences, joys and struggles, and then sorting them all into what conclusions can be reached about them, with very few actually ending up as critiques of the game itself. This sort of enjoyment is an expectations mismatch – you have to expect OSR gameplay if you’re coming to Worm, and you have to want it. This part of the GMing struggle is an expected skill – you have to be able to do this well, or it won’t work on your machine. Only the objective pieces, the straightforwardly-imbalanced damage of Hellpiercers, can actually touch on the question “does this game work or not?”
As a complainer, I don’t think the result would be very good. If I tried to write something like that, I imagine it would come off restrained to the point of corporate. I couldn’t even talk about the games I like well. In my eyes, this approach is essentially a dead end.
So, I don’t do reviews. This blog, and my chats about RPGs elsewhere, have willfully kept a handle on the subjectivity of things. I value my perspective, and I think it’s important for understanding anything I share or have to say. Judgement is just an extension of perspective – I can’t filter that out. I can tell you that Worm is probably a solid game, but I can’t give details on what I think is good. For my interests, none of it really did the trick.
For the purposes of recommendation, that’s usually good enough.
Fixing it in post
GMing subjectivity is actually a worse problem than I let on.
Everything I wrote above was taking one precept as given. The GM is running the game as-is, without meaningful alterations beyond where the game puts empty space to connect things together.
That’s very often not the case.
People homebrew things. A lot. A shocking amount, to my expectations, really. People will change or add to games long before they see whether they actually need to, often for the worse. That’s kind of just how it is. Games will expect that, to a greater or lesser degree. Exalted actively demands it, for designing NPCs, and all the more for designing new PC abilities as they design their own or build some magic items or the like. Lancer changes when the GM is light on cover in their maps – think about how it changes when a new batch of weapons are added to the mix? When NPCs that hit harder than the base ones appear? When you can just take a mech that erases all cover from the map? These will shift the balance of things radically – even those objective details I was so precious towards earlier. Hellpiercers could be so much more balanced, if you just introduce rules that hard-counter this one overpowered weapon down to the little leagues. (It would still have other faultlines of balance, the game has several problems, but it would be much less extreme.)
What do you say, then, when the reason someone encounters a bug is because of something they homebrewed up? Or, heck. What do you say when the game doesn’t work on your machine, and the answer you get is “oh, that works fine for me, I just modified the game like so”?
(If you’re me, you get peeved. But let’s imagine you’re someone with a bit more social graces to your name.)
I’m of the mind that, for a review, you have to avoid doing that. You’re here to take the game as it is, and respond as such. [As it is] is inherently subjective, because the machine it has to run on is a set of humans with interpretations and weaknesses, but, the more you change, the less you can speak to the game that anyone else is experiencing. And that’s what talking about a game has to be trying to do, I think. If what you’re saying can only ever be true for yourself, then, what’s the use in that?
(There might still be a use, actually. Artistic purposes, the expression of self and one’s experiences, providing anecdotes for people actively in the market for anecdotes. I don’t think it shouldn’t be done, per se. But as a review, it’d be a flimsy one.)
All this has been on my mind because I’ve been pondering fixing things in post, myself.
Not for my Exalted game. The group is invested in seeing the game as it is, and sharing complaints about it, so we’ve let things sit. Dismissing stunting is the only actual rules change I’ve made, and I ran that by the players first after they also started getting fed up with it. (And even that change, inarguably, means the experience we’re getting is different from base Exalted!) But I have been pondering, as I spend time with it and Glitch, what I do and don’t like about games in that vein of play, and how I would design one of my own that attempts to resolve some of the wider plains of GM subjectivity therein.
The result is that I’ve been working on a game of my own, something like a World-of-Darkness-like with a definite structure for “this NPC is doing this set of magic nonsense to change the world for the worse, go stop them.” Immediately, of course, structuring that is making a statement. For a GM who can conceptualize that on their own – of which I am one! – this is solving a problem that is already solved. It’s building a bypass for a segment that already works on their machine. But, it’s where I’ve been pondering.
I think that’s one of the big virtues of game mechanics. They ensure a consistency between GMs, and beyond the context of GM skill. Even if the subjectivity isn’t fully squeezed out, it takes homebrew to do a mechanic wrong.
You have troubles, still, even with an excellent mechanic, of fitting it in a wider world. Exalted is an extreme end of “augmented freeform” gameplay – the mechanics are all there to accent a baseline of just doing freeform play back and forth, picking up rules only as they’re invoked. Within that freeform, I’ve been struggling to have combats sensibly appear at all. So, for my thoughts on a fixed-in-post game in that vein, the freeform has to go. The structure is all you’re working in.
It’s trivial to conceptualize a mindset where that isn’t “fixing” the game, but “breaking” it. The freeform navigation is an appeal, and, for contexts with the subjective skill to manage it well, a pillar in its own right. Which defines a bound for the appeal of the game – it’s for players who don’t want that freeform exploration, or who struggle to make it work. Wherever one considers a [legitimate review] to fall, whether “this does not work for or appeal to me” is a legitimate criticism or not, it’s good to know that in terms of who to recommend a game to.
What I’m working on is, primarily, a game I would recommend to myself. Reliant on my strengths (the ability to think of several conflicting dubious schemes at speed, and the mental back-and-forth of arguing whether a given esoteric ability can address a given obstacle) and using structure to bypass my weaknesses. I’m trying to be cognizant of it as I develop, but I think it’s inevitable that the result is a game that will work on my machine, and therefore that I’ll struggle to connect with mindsets that don’t work like mine. To be honest, I have no idea how different the game would look when run by someone who isn’t me.
For any game that has any significant amount of interpretation, or wiggleroom within its structure, it’s kind of the same way. I suspect that’s inevitable.
It also makes RPGs really hard to talk about.
Ru's Roleplay Rants 