I recently attended Breakout con in Toronto. While I was there I ran into a friend whom I haven’t spoken to since COVID. He asked if I would be interested in contributing to a project happening out of KW Ontario. Here is what I submitted. And if you read that article and you found your way here, welcome!
D&D is like the summer blockbuster movie of RPGs, but who isn’t tempted by other movies? It’s at a lot of things, but sometimes I want the game-equivalent of a serious sci-fi drama, or an 80’s horror movie, or a road trip movie. Indie RPGs are allowed to be extremely weird and hyper-specific, in a way that a product from Hasbro just isn’t allowed to be.
To put it another way: what I love about Indie RPGs is that they let you explore roleplaying in different genres, with different mechanics supporting that play. Each game (D&D included!) encourages you to roleplay in different ways, and influences how you place your attention during the game.
When we play a wider variety of games, I believe we’re forced to stretch in new ways. By engaging with different genres and mechanics, then I think we become a better roleplayer overall. Then, you get to bring your new skills back to your favourite game.
Questions:
- What are some of the best unique game mechanics?
Monsterhearts (by Avery Alder 🇨🇦) is a game in the spirit of Buffy, True Blood, or Twilight, and has a set of unique game mechanics which focus on what the characters feel sometimes (perhaps especially) when those feelings are unwelcome. What’s so great about this game’s mechanics is that your character has tastes and preferences which are separate from the player, but the player must choose how to roleplay to either repress or embrace those feelings. This means the game always takes you in exciting and surprising directions, and the player often ends up in unexpected emotional territory.
Primetime Adventures (Matt Wilson) is another fantastic game because it tosses traditional ideas for a character’s stats out the window, instead focusing on the question: “What if we think of roleplaying as a drama TV show?”
In PTA, when we make a check, it’s to steal narrative control from the GM, and establish how the rest of the scene goes. This game teaches you to think about scenes, conflicts, and pacing while still engaging with the game as a player rather than a GM. Wilson’s thoughts about roleplaying are, to me, worth reading in their own right.
- What do you like to focus on, or include, that D&D is not optimal for?
Failure. I don’t mean missing a skill check; I mean the characters failing to achieve a goal, with some kind of personal cost to themselves or someone they actually care about. This is an idea that has occasionally made me unpopular at game tables, but I think it’s genuinely important that the characters fail to achieve their goals sometimes, even regularly. Characters in stories need to have failures and setbacks in order to build toward an emotional climax.
In a TV show or movie this pacing seems very natural, and many indie games also fall into similar narrative structures. But if you take this plot beat, and drop it into a D&D game, it just doesn’t work so smoothly. Imagine running a group of players through a three-hour dungeon crawl, only to tell them that the McGuffin they were after was stolen right out from under their noses? I’m not saying it’s impossible to do in D&D, but I think other games have an easier time handling that kind of failure.
- How do you convince players to try a new system?
Try running games when someone is absent from your D&D table for a week, especially around the holidays or in the summer when gaming schedules are often a little unstable anyways. Many indie games are absolutely playable in a single 3-4h session.
Failing that, bring your friends to a convention and try something there!
