Black & White RPGs vs Color RPGs

 

   The battle lines are drawn, and they are crisp black lines and dazzling swaths of color.

   It is not a question of AI or no AI. Both sides have been known to use AI art.

   It’s just color versus black and white, straight up.

   This battle is nothing new. It’s been going for some time now, and it sure ain’t confined to the narrow realm of tabletop role-playing games, either; it is being fought across the board, in multiple forms of entertainment. But our main focus on here is RPGs, so let’s talk about that.

   The 5e sun is not shining as brightly as it used to, and many gamers choose to return to or discover old-school D&D, which is great. It certainly can’t hurt to know the classics.

   But then Wizards of the Coast goes on record as saying that old-school D&D isn’t D&D anymore.

   The 5e influencers boldly staked their claim to D&D at the Wizards of the Coast Creator Summit, and now they’re not going anywhere. It’s their place. It’s not unlike a crowd taking over a bar. Every week there’s more and more of them; they keep coming and keep asking for BTS and mocktails; so the bar plays a lot of BTS and serves twenty different sorts of mocktails. It’s what any business would do. Know who your customers are.

   Your customers like bright colors and furry fairytales — give them that.

   Which means that the gritty black and white Russ Nicholson art “isn’t D&D anymore.”

   I get it. Colors can definitely be awesome.

   Look at this gorgeously decadent movie poster. It was supposed to be for Alejandro Jodorowski’s Dune. We were robbed of something truly epic. Look at the ships! Look at Orson Welles as the Baron! Look at Dalí as the Emperor!

   Fast-forward forty years and now we have Denis Villeneuve’s Dune — dreary, glum and colorless.

   Colorless has become synonymous with “serious.”

   Colors are for the furry fairytale crowd, and black and white is reserved for deep, serious stories. This is what we have come to.

   Black and white aesthetics are busy remaking classic games under their new paradigm, even when the originals were already in black and white. Shadowdark is AD&D, of course. Blades in the Dark somehow feels like Warhammer — both Fantasy and 40K. And Mothership feels like Traveller. You get the gist.

   Don’t get me wrong — I also love black and white. I love Jim Jarmusch’s early films, I love the work of Kwapisz and Chan in Savage Sword of Conan, I love the art in the 1977 Monster Manual, especially Trampier, and I love the 1981 Fiend Folio, especially Nicholson. In my opinion, the art in 5e is repetitive, and we no longer see player characters die or even take any serious beatings. It’s a real shame.

   The 5e art is also quite lazy sometimes. If Keith Parkinson had painted that Eve of Ruin cover, he wouldn’t have wasted so much space with violet rocks and boulders.

   Vecna could have been the lich in the ’77 Monster Manual, and it would have been so much better. A classic rendition for a classic lich!

   Also, Parkinson — or Caldwell, or Easley — would have filled that decor, that cave, with hundreds of tiny details: broken statuettes, forgotten phylacteries, pieces of armor, weird components, eldritch treasure, you name it. Instead, we only get this monotonous sea of mauve.

   But that’s not all. There is a weird new trend of conservative Christians getting into black and white tabletop role-playing games, and insisting that one can actually “win at RPGs.”

   I call them the Game Jesuits. They are among those who despise “tourists” the most. They demand a lifelong commitment to the hobby — like marriage. It’s very Christian indeed. If your commitment only lasts a few years, you are a tourist. Full stop.

   “For six or seven years in the early nineties I was really into grunge music!” Tourist.

   “I rode my mountain bike so much when I was in my twenties, man!” Tourist.

   If you love something, you must love it and keep engaging with it till death do you part. If not, you are a tourist.

   Yeah, those people completely freaked out in 1985 — Satanic Panic, B.A.D.D. and all — and then, forty years later and after realizing that they couldn’t have been more wrong about D&D and tabletop role-playing in general, they move in and claim these games as their own, but not the rainbow games, mind you, just the honest, straight, black and white ones. In retrospect, it appears that the demon idol on the cover of the Players Handbook and the giant horned efreeti on the cover of the Dungeon Masters Guide were not that much of a threat. But LGBTQ+ folks playing the game, that’s a big no-no.

   Satan is all right.

   Trans people are the root of all evil.

   Hypocrites.

   Plus, they seem to be saying: fuck Gygax’s “fourth category” of games, let’s make this a thing you can WIN, like any other game.

   Conservatives, am I right?

   And they sure are very suspicious about colors.

   Now that every single color means something extremely precise, they refuse to put on a shirt that isn’t plain black or plain white because they certainly don’t want someone on the street to approach them and say, “Aegosexual?” — as if something like that would ever happen.

   So black and white it is. They eagerly barricade themselves into OD&D with their three little black and white booklets, and refuse to allow anything else in that sanctum. It’s almost Waco-esque.

   I’m not asserting that the anti-color people are all conservative Christians, of course not. A diverse (pun intended) variety of folks hate colors these days.

   One Xwitter user caused quite a stir when they posted a beautiful Dragonlance piece by Larry Elmore and wrote: “Imagine thinking this is D&D.”

   That was really something.

   They want you to know that D&D is just three little brown books, Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes and fuck all else. It’s terribly reductive, but those are the battle lines now. It’s even getting into 40K. I recently saw a guy post some old black and white illustrations and say that “40K art peaked at Rogue Trader.”

   I won’t pick a side today, sorry to disappoint. Dune in shades of grey is bad, and Vecna in riotous lavender indigo and heather mauve is equally bad. Artistic directors need to learn when to make use of colors, and when to stick with black and white.

   Both sides have their flaws, but why do they hate each other so much? That’s a societal issue that thoroughly transcends tabletop role-playing games, and I’m not insane enough to try and answer it here. Smart people are doing friggin’ PhDs on that subject…

   Color me impressed.

Cozy Low-Fantasy Cinematic Sandroad Storygame

   Last July on Xwitter someone asked the question, what is a storygame?

   Among all the replies, I found two people who gave diametrically opposed definitions, and it was a real eye-opener. I took screenshots of those two answers of course. Here they are.

   One says that in a storygame, the players have narrative control — they create the world during play. The other says that in a storygame, the players can make minor changes to the plot, but what happens, happens.

   That’s when it hit me like a ton of bricks: we invent so many new names and tags and genres and categories in this hobby that we no longer know which is which. Nobody knows what a storygame really is, and perhaps nobody knows what the other categories really are, either.

   Someone talks about a sandbox game as being an “open world” kind of setting, but then somebody else says, “You are using the wrong terms, and don’t understand what a sandbox is. By definition, if you are making the world up in relation to player decisions it is NOT a sandbox. A sandbox is a pre-built, walled location to play in. Hence it’s called a sandbox.”

   This person focuses on the word “box” when they really should focus on the word “sand.” The sandbox in their definition is not an open world but rather a demiplane or a Flat Earth: one cannot venture past the edge.

   Sooner or later you’re gonna have to face Strahd. It’s the only way out.

   There is no consensus on what a sandbox is, and there is no consensus on what a storygame is. Semantics reign supreme.

   If you are making the world up in relation to player decisions, like the guy said, what is it called? Not a storygame? Not a sandbox?

   Do we need to make up yet another confusing name here?

   On the back cover of Blades in the Dark it says “all the maps, factions, NPCs, and opportunities you need to run an exciting sandbox game.” But then on page 6 the book clearly states: “No one is in charge of the story. The story is what happens as a result of the situation presented by the GM, the actions the characters take, the outcomes of the mechanics, and the consequences that result. […] You play to find out what the story will be.” (The parts in boldface are in the book as-is.)

   So Blades in the Dark is a storygame and a sandbox? Isn’t that like, heresy?

   Plus, the city of Doskvol and all the other cities in the game are linked together by mighty armored trains — a literal railroad. So it’s a storygame and a series of sandboxes on a massive railroad? What the hell?

   I’m trying to make it sound very confusing. As a joke.

   When role-playing games first started in 1971 the folks playing those games didn’t know what to call them. Fantasy wargaming? Medieval fantasy?

   The answer is that you don’t need to label it — just play whatever you want, and shift from one thing to the other whenever you feel the need to. It can be theater of the mind until the bandits attack the village, and then you bust out the miniatures. You can interrupt the session and play a real, live game of poker or chess, because one of the player characters is being challenged to a game of chess or a hand of poker by an important NPC that they absolutely need to impress.

   Hell, you can even incorporate a game of friggin’ Monopoly if you want. Clan Ventrue has moved into your city and start buying real estate en masse, so the other clans have no choice but to start buying property as well. Lucy shall play her clan Toreador, James plays clan Tremere, and Billy plays clan Malkavian. Just replace the names of the streets on the board with the names of important avenues in your campaign city, and go!

   Speaking of vampires…

   “Bleed” is another term that we can add to the already tall pile. As I understand it, bleed is the flip side of cozy: it’s when you feel something. But if I asked that question on Xwitter, of course someone would say the exact opposite.

   Bleed is cozy.

   Bleed is when you feel nothing.

   Bleed is railroady.

   Bleed ain’t at all railroady.

   Storygames don’t have bleed.

   Storygames are bleed.

   Wait — what is bleed?

   And the Great TTRPG Word Salad continues.

   This level of unfair scrutiny borders on hypocrisy. I sincerely don’t think anyone can watch Mike Krahulik, Jerry Holkins, Jasmine Bhullar and Luis Carazo play Vampire: The Masquerade and think that the game is about slavery and sexual assault.

   Vampirism has been a standing metaphor for sex literally since Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. What was dubbed “Now YOU Are The Monster” is a craze that began in ’91 with tens of millions of aficionados, a very, very low percentage of whom were pro-slavery and / or sexual predators. Don’t be absurd.

   You want to play as a monster, but you don’t want them to be a monster?

   Have you read the definition of the word?

   You want cozy monsters, right.

   Are we going to see people play Call of Cthulhu and be a party of friendly Shoggoths and smooth-talking Moon-Beasts and funky Fungi from Yuggoth?

   Bending over backwards to play “cozy Ghibli D&D” seems almost ludicrous. At this point, why not just play TOON? I mean, that awesome game is sitting right there, super easy to learn.

   This is like insisting on playing high-speed roaming hide-and-seek instead of plain old tag. Again, semantics, pure and simple.

   High-Fantasy vs Low-Fantasy is another worthless debate. Someone says that High-Fantasy means wizards and magic items everywhere, and someone else comes to the contrary conclusion.

   What’s the use of having this branding debate? If every character owns two longswords +3, that’s a game, and if there are only two magic swords in the entire world, that’s another game. Choose your table. Some play poker with thousand-dollar chips and some play poker with Monopoly money or Lego bricks.

   Take a pill. It’s a hobby, not a religion.

   Modern tabletop role-playing games are too preachy and try too hard to explain themselves. MCDM’s intro reads like an essay. What does Tactical even mean? What does Cinematic even mean? Tactical is just another word for crunch — and Cinematic is just another word for fluff. Get over yourself; you’re crafting a toybox, not establishing a sacrosanct doctrine.

   “Tactical Heroic Cinematic Fantasy RPG” reeks of desperation. There is such a thing as too many adjectives. It’s like Chartered Professional Accountants: these people need two adjectives in order to feel secure and recognized. Master electricians only need one. Lawyers are so cocky that they don’t need any.

   You are selling a game, not a table culture. Some folks play Call of Cthulhu like it is a first-person shooter game, rolling dice and dropping monsters non-stop. Some folks only play Cthulhu for the stories; their investigators run like hell when the Shoggoths appear. Sell your game, and people will play it in many different ways — tactical or foolish, heroic or murder hobo, cinematic or just old-fashioned verbose. Whatever. It ain’t your call.

   Don’t pontificate.

   Yes, Gygax did pontificate a little. But don’t do it.

   Spenser Starkes, the creator of Candela Obscura, also fell headfirst into the preachy trap. He said, “We wanted to ensure that we’ve made a place that, although it was scary, although it had many elements of horror, had powers that were scary… we also never wanted to create a space where people felt unwelcome for who they were in playing the game and the GM never had to make that decision either to whitewash the world or to play the world as it was and put themselves in a place that would make them and the table not feel welcome and happy.”

   Why not produce a game and leave the social engineering and exegesis to sociologists and historians? The designers of Settlers of Catan and Mortal Kombat and Yu-Gi-Oh! didn’t write complete doctoral theses to frame their work.

   Here’s an idea. Since nobody really knows what those labels mean, why not just stop using storygame, sandbox, railroad, point-crawl, bleed, low-fantasy, sweetweird, nobledark, grimbright, narrative and other such terms? You might as well run a grungeblend proseflux halflegacy — it’s gibberish.

   You and your group play a game.

   My group and I play a game.

   Joe Manganiello and his group play a game.

   Those games are all different.

   No need for seventy-eight meaningless name tags.

   Byzantium a.k.a. Constantinople argued for over a hundred years about whether the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost were one and the same, or three separate beings linked together.

   Don’t be like that.

TTRPG publishing: Everybody Does It

 

   Lots of people have been very busy bees since what we might call The Great Open Gaming License Debacle of 2023.

   Paizo have been working on their ORC License and are trying to remove the OGL from Pathfinder entirely — no Drows and all. They call it the Remaster Project. It’s gotta be a tedious endeavor.

   Darrington Press aka Critical Role have already released a game, Candela Obscura, and they’re working on their own fantasy role-playing game system, Daggerheart, completely independent from D&D and without any flavor of OGL.

   Cephalofair Games aka Gloomhaven is also launching their own fantasy role-playing game system AND releasing a revamped superlegacy Gloomhaven 2e.

   Kobold Press have released a fantasy role-playing game system, Tales of the Valiant, again, with no OGL.

   MCDM is also preparing to launch their own role-playing game.

   And then you have Goodman Games, Arcane Library, Troll Lord Games and countless others.

   The sheer quantity of writing that took place since last January is astounding.

   And unless you work at Paizo or Darrington Press or Kobold Press, your work has a very slim chance of being seen or read at all. There’s so much material being made — it’s like a galaxy, and your book is just one Oumuamua floating around in it.

   For most creators, TTRPG work is not profitable; even when working 70-hour weeks you are not guaranteed to be able to pay your rent.

   It’s the indie paradigm and it’s here to stay, alas. You can make stuff, but it shall remain fan art, fan fiction and fan design.

   Remember, DriveThruRPG is the biggest storefront out there, and yet 72% of all tabletop role-playing game products on DriveThruRPG sell less than 50 copies. This whole thing is not a market but basically a lottery.

   Out of every one hundred indie publishers of tabletop role-playing games, seventy-two basically do that staggering amount of work for nothing: the long hours trying to wrestle columns into place, the endless tinkering with margins, fonts and elusive image anchor points, the eight and a half different versions of the cover, the six thorough editing passes, the entire weekend spent on a single black and white drawing, all in vain.

   That is something to ponder.

   The homeless man begging for change in front of your neighborhood subway station is a better entrepreneur because he makes $1 an hour at the very least…

   In my previous post I mentioned Acererak’s Guide to Lichdom, which has now disappeared from DriveThruRPG’s listings. It went Platinum — then it vanished.

   Is that the trick then? Write Drizzt’s Guide to the Underdark or Jim Darkmagic’s Book of Big Bads, sell a lot of copies, pull it as soon as you get a cease and desist, and keep the money?

   People become indie TTRPG publishers because the technology is available to make such games and because there are webstores that can sell such games. In 1985, the technology wasn’t there — layout, PDF files, etc — and even if it had been available, where would you have sold your finished product? On the street? In front of game stores? And in what format? Zine? Floppy disk?

   Ten years from now people will be making their own video games, because the technology will be there, accessible to almost anyone. A creative person alone in their apartment will be able to make an Assassin’s Creed type of game in about six months, all by themselves, without having to commission any art; and there shall be indie video game webstores to sell those products. Steam and itch are already on it.

   Most of the talent that you see in indie TTRPS these days will migrate to indie video games by 2030. It’s inevitable.

   So, what is the solution here?

   That’s the sad part. There isn’t one.

   It’s unsolvable, even if you roll a critical 01% in Occult.

   You can shelve your TTRPG project and start working on that big video game right away, to be ahead of the curve. Or you can keep making TTRPGs, keep hustling, and perhaps you’ll get lucky, who knows? Or you can give up marketing and hustling entirely and just make the stuff you want to make—

   The tidal wave of publications on DTRPG and itch is enough to make you think that there are way more worldbuilders than there are people who buy and actually play third-party adventures and games. It reminds me of something my dad said back in 1984. My best friend and I spent literally every Saturday working together on maps, cities, taverns, sewers, traps, puzzles, religions, lists of NPCs, magic items, rumors, legends, trade routes, types of vessels, types of armor, either at my place or at my friend’s. My dad understood what a role-playing game was because he had seen us play a few times, and he understood that those innumerable Saturdays were just prepping.

   One day that he was looking at our huge world map on the kitchen table, dad said to us: “When you boys finally decide to play, it’ll be absolutely amazing.”

   And he was right. It was amazing.

   In the early eighties, everybody I knew was worldbuilding, creating their own continents, empires, fauna, flora, deadly traps, and I even knew a guy who created a langage for his world, like Tolkien or Prof. Barker.

   We’re all still exactly like that. Nothing has changed.

   You put it up for sale and earn $5 or $10? Good for you!

   But we are still doing the exact same thing we were doing in 1984.

   It may not be the booming business you wanted it to be, but it still is a damn good time, trust me.

   I say, enjoy this effervescent scene while it lasts. You’re going to have such nice memories of this period when it’s gone.