Links from about the interwebs, slightly late as I spent my day out in the fog. For more, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.
All Dead Generations shares GYGAX'S FORTRESS
Occultronics writes OSR Social Resolution Procedures
Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet gives us Animism and dungeons
Weird & Wonderful Worlds gives us Dynamic Reality Gaming
Throne of Salt shares Positively Unhinged Elden Ring Theoryposting: Part 2
Idraluna Archives shares Public Domain Illustrations on Project Gutenberg
cryptickeyway shares Make Ancestries Distinct By Giving Them Mastery of Their Domain
Personable Thoughts gives us Kickstarter FOMO and the Content Firehose
11 November 2024
09 November 2024
Review: Macaronicon
tl;dr: adds cool species for the players, great adventures for the DMs, a solid expansion for Brancalonia.
So, here we have the Macaronicon. It is basically a collection of all the stretch goals from the initial Brancalonia crowdfunding campaign - which is where I got it originally. This was bonus content for me and I have gotten a ton of use out of it. Brancalonia is a "spaghetti fantasy" campaign setting for D&D 5e "based on Italian tradition, folklore, history, landscapes, literature and pop culture" that lets you be a band of roistering Knaves and ne'er do wells out for their latest job. I have reviewed the Brancalonia Core book and Jinx's Almanac before - both great books and the Macaronicon is a close third.
It begs comparison to Jinx's Almanac which are both books of mixed lore, adventures and mechanics. Macaronicon is the more expansive and free-roaming of the pair, coming earlier and being that collection of stretch goals. There is some good stuff in here and plenty of inspiration for DMs thought it has not yet gotten that extra polish to the adventures which comes in Jinx's Almanac, the later book. Not to say that this is not very worthwhile.
As with all the books in the range, the art is great and the book has an aesthetic of old paper ill-used. Pretty like the rest of the range, with great, consistent, evocative art and good clear lay-out.
So, here we have the Macaronicon. It is basically a collection of all the stretch goals from the initial Brancalonia crowdfunding campaign - which is where I got it originally. This was bonus content for me and I have gotten a ton of use out of it. Brancalonia is a "spaghetti fantasy" campaign setting for D&D 5e "based on Italian tradition, folklore, history, landscapes, literature and pop culture" that lets you be a band of roistering Knaves and ne'er do wells out for their latest job. I have reviewed the Brancalonia Core book and Jinx's Almanac before - both great books and the Macaronicon is a close third.
It begs comparison to Jinx's Almanac which are both books of mixed lore, adventures and mechanics. Macaronicon is the more expansive and free-roaming of the pair, coming earlier and being that collection of stretch goals. There is some good stuff in here and plenty of inspiration for DMs thought it has not yet gotten that extra polish to the adventures which comes in Jinx's Almanac, the later book. Not to say that this is not very worthwhile.
As with all the books in the range, the art is great and the book has an aesthetic of old paper ill-used. Pretty like the rest of the range, with great, consistent, evocative art and good clear lay-out.
06 November 2024
The Great Tabletop Roleplaying Survey - Initial Data Comb
All praise to The Scholomance who just released a delightful anonymised dataset of a big survey they ran at the turn of the year. Their initial write up is here.
They got a solid 1902 results and you can see a few direct results on the initial write up which I will not rehash here:
How many tabletop groups are you involved in that regularly play game sessions?
How do you usually play your sessions?
How often do you play tabletop roleplaying games?
How long do your sessions typically last?
What was your first tabletop roleplaying system?
Select your current main system.
How would you rate the importance of a system?
How would you rate the complexity of your current main system?
The huge value in this type of big survey is in the cross-referencing, not the raw numbers. You can test out hypotheses like 'people who meet less often will probably game for longer' - and you've got the frequency of meeting up and duration of gaming to check that.
On a first look, it appears that for folk with monthly or more frequent games, that broadly holds true - more 3-5 hour games among the monthly gamers and more 1-3 hour games for the multiple-times-a-week folk. Folk playing less than once a month flip back to more shorter sessions - makes me suspect that if you do not have a regular monthly game carved out, you are taking whatever opportunitites you have, however long they might be.
There is another neat pair of 'what did you start as' and 'what are you now' for player/DM roles - as might be expected the player-to-DM channel is a one-way ratchet. A fair block of players become DMs, maybe half the DM's get to play sometimes but... ain't no going back to 'just player' for those who started as DMs...
Another one I checked was favourite genre against what people are currently playing - and it looks like a decent chunk are getting to play their favourite games - especially Sci-fi and Pulp games - and Fantasy but that is hardly surprising. Green in each bar below is the fraction of people currently playing in their favourite genre for each of those genres. For 'multiple genres across multiple games' the 'mixed genre' people are getting a partial nod.
Anyway - some quick cuts since the data got released - there is a ton of stuff in here that will merit more careful read through - perhaps using 'first game edition' to try and unpick the elder gamers into finer boxes, pull together a list of what games played and there are tons and tons of comments that will merit reading through in their own right. Lots to chew on, I will return to this.
They got a solid 1902 results and you can see a few direct results on the initial write up which I will not rehash here:
How many tabletop groups are you involved in that regularly play game sessions?
How do you usually play your sessions?
How often do you play tabletop roleplaying games?
How long do your sessions typically last?
What was your first tabletop roleplaying system?
Select your current main system.
How would you rate the importance of a system?
How would you rate the complexity of your current main system?
The huge value in this type of big survey is in the cross-referencing, not the raw numbers. You can test out hypotheses like 'people who meet less often will probably game for longer' - and you've got the frequency of meeting up and duration of gaming to check that.
There is another neat pair of 'what did you start as' and 'what are you now' for player/DM roles - as might be expected the player-to-DM channel is a one-way ratchet. A fair block of players become DMs, maybe half the DM's get to play sometimes but... ain't no going back to 'just player' for those who started as DMs...
Another one I checked was favourite genre against what people are currently playing - and it looks like a decent chunk are getting to play their favourite games - especially Sci-fi and Pulp games - and Fantasy but that is hardly surprising. Green in each bar below is the fraction of people currently playing in their favourite genre for each of those genres. For 'multiple genres across multiple games' the 'mixed genre' people are getting a partial nod.
Anyway - some quick cuts since the data got released - there is a ton of stuff in here that will merit more careful read through - perhaps using 'first game edition' to try and unpick the elder gamers into finer boxes, pull together a list of what games played and there are tons and tons of comments that will merit reading through in their own right. Lots to chew on, I will return to this.
04 November 2024
Shiny TTRPG links #197
Links from about the interwebs, fresh and time-seasoned. For more, see the previous list found here or you can check the RPG Blog Carnival or on Third Kingdom Games news roundup. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links.
Forsaken Garden launches the Haves & Have Nots RPG Blog Carnival
RPGFeed swears by this Super Simple Solo Oracle
Creative Wronging wrote Useful NPC, The Urbanite, Week 2: The Socialite
Of Gods and Gamemasters shared The Third Space
DIY & dragons gave us 5e - Alternatives to Darkvision
Forsaken Garden launches the Haves & Have Nots RPG Blog Carnival
RPGFeed swears by this Super Simple Solo Oracle
Creative Wronging wrote Useful NPC, The Urbanite, Week 2: The Socialite
Of Gods and Gamemasters shared The Third Space
DIY & dragons gave us 5e - Alternatives to Darkvision
02 November 2024
Notes on D&D Meetup Group Experiment
Meetup jacked up its subscription costs (174%!) so I cancelled my own sub, our game group as a whole sees no value in paying for one and the thing apparently drifted from my hands this past midnight. This seems like a good point to do a post-mortem - for all that it may stagger on another month as it auto-pings all the members looking for someone else willing to stump up to take the group over.
The group was conceived in a moment of seeking to get the word out and test whether we could pull of a significant expansion, sufficient to justify the running costs of the formal club structure here in Austria - bank accounts, chairfolk, book-keeping, all that jazz. We figured we needed to bump our regular attendees from ~25 to ~120 to bear the kinds of costs associated with having our own venue and all that. At that point we had not done anything, just had our forum and welcomed anyone who found us. This was an experiment in getting the word out to see what might happen.
We were blessed with two tailwinds, one foreseen, one not - the D&D movie and Baldurs Gate 3. We figured there would be a bunch of folk looking to try D&D following those so we initially set up the 'Night of the Rolling Dice' for after the movie - a ten table session for beginners - and created the meetup group. As you can see below, numbers went up like a rocket. We got 60 sign-ups, 45 of whom showed up, a good time was had. Then we did it twice more - once to capitalise on Baldurs Gate 3 and a last the following February to see if we had the process down to a low-friction playbook.
Each time we launched and event, typically ~ 60 days beforehand, we got a kick of new members into the Meetup group.
The folk who came to the Nights of the Rolling Dice occassionally showed up at our regular nights - 2-3 out of each batch of 45. Our open nights were what we were really trying to grow, getting those weekly Friday night open table games up. After the second one we started to slam the capacity of our venue and fished around a bit for another site. With two sites we could continue to grow and from there ramped up to... almost double our size. Almost.
I took over stewardship of the meetup group after the second event and started to block in our regular Friday night sessions into the Meetup group so people could see there would be a game a few weeks out rather than just ~4 days beforehand. We know people came in through these Meetups because we had regular deconfliction problems between both folk who signed up on the Meetup and no-showed and folk who rocked up to the events without mentioning on the sign-up thread that they were coming. Again, a fair few people said they found us through Meetup but only a handful on any given week.
Even once we restricted attendance, the 'out weeks' were not filling up with lots of folk - no indication that telegraphing that these were regular games that happened every Friday was making any difference to folk beyond an isolated case or two.
Overall the Meetup group probably funneled folk towards us but when I queried the webmaster of our forum, the actual core organising venue for our group, they said that it was mere tens of click-throughs from Meetup versus high hundreds coming off Google.
So all told, the group seemed to attract numbers and where we had big events we could fill them - neither of these converted into people turning up regularly for whatever reasons. Engagement was practically nil from folk who signed up to any mail shots or via the on-site tools beyond a few isolated requests for what was needed for a first timer.
You can probably barely see at the tail end of the top graph, the curve flattens out. This matches to when I stopped booking in events on the calendar, about a month ago when I decided to cancel the sub - having events on the calendar does bring people into the group, but having them in the group does not seem to do much for you.
All told, I am sure we got a few people into our group through Meetup because I have heard people say it - all of the metrics otherwise say it was a waste of time and certainly not worth ponying up extra cash. When I pulled the plug on it, the immediate response from Meetup was 'we have made it easier to charge your members dues!' which is just mean passing the corporate screw-over down the line. The main thing that changed that I can see between this year and last is they slapped on a bunch of AI tools for auto-generating events which is a completely unhelpful - you don't need randomly generated events, you need to just get the details right and up there. That and getting taken over by 'Bending Spoons' who also took over Evernote and also jacked up the prices there by a giant amount.
So, for us, nothing useful was added to a service that was not core to our operations, I had taken a punt laying down a subscription in the first place to see if it unlocked some large untapped pool of potential players - so all the above and near double the price was not worth it. We already have our venue charge, small and reasonable. The idea of layering on charges to pay off some corporations random price hikes? Not happening, not rewarding corporate bad behaviour like that.
All told, we tested the potential for fast growth and managed to get to double on a good day - I think proving up there was some growth potential for us but not massive x6 amounts. I am intrigued as to whether we will continue to get new folk wandering in once the Meetup evaporates; I reckon yes but let us see.
The group was conceived in a moment of seeking to get the word out and test whether we could pull of a significant expansion, sufficient to justify the running costs of the formal club structure here in Austria - bank accounts, chairfolk, book-keeping, all that jazz. We figured we needed to bump our regular attendees from ~25 to ~120 to bear the kinds of costs associated with having our own venue and all that. At that point we had not done anything, just had our forum and welcomed anyone who found us. This was an experiment in getting the word out to see what might happen.
We were blessed with two tailwinds, one foreseen, one not - the D&D movie and Baldurs Gate 3. We figured there would be a bunch of folk looking to try D&D following those so we initially set up the 'Night of the Rolling Dice' for after the movie - a ten table session for beginners - and created the meetup group. As you can see below, numbers went up like a rocket. We got 60 sign-ups, 45 of whom showed up, a good time was had. Then we did it twice more - once to capitalise on Baldurs Gate 3 and a last the following February to see if we had the process down to a low-friction playbook.
Each time we launched and event, typically ~ 60 days beforehand, we got a kick of new members into the Meetup group.
The folk who came to the Nights of the Rolling Dice occassionally showed up at our regular nights - 2-3 out of each batch of 45. Our open nights were what we were really trying to grow, getting those weekly Friday night open table games up. After the second one we started to slam the capacity of our venue and fished around a bit for another site. With two sites we could continue to grow and from there ramped up to... almost double our size. Almost.
I took over stewardship of the meetup group after the second event and started to block in our regular Friday night sessions into the Meetup group so people could see there would be a game a few weeks out rather than just ~4 days beforehand. We know people came in through these Meetups because we had regular deconfliction problems between both folk who signed up on the Meetup and no-showed and folk who rocked up to the events without mentioning on the sign-up thread that they were coming. Again, a fair few people said they found us through Meetup but only a handful on any given week.
Even once we restricted attendance, the 'out weeks' were not filling up with lots of folk - no indication that telegraphing that these were regular games that happened every Friday was making any difference to folk beyond an isolated case or two.
Overall the Meetup group probably funneled folk towards us but when I queried the webmaster of our forum, the actual core organising venue for our group, they said that it was mere tens of click-throughs from Meetup versus high hundreds coming off Google.
So all told, the group seemed to attract numbers and where we had big events we could fill them - neither of these converted into people turning up regularly for whatever reasons. Engagement was practically nil from folk who signed up to any mail shots or via the on-site tools beyond a few isolated requests for what was needed for a first timer.
You can probably barely see at the tail end of the top graph, the curve flattens out. This matches to when I stopped booking in events on the calendar, about a month ago when I decided to cancel the sub - having events on the calendar does bring people into the group, but having them in the group does not seem to do much for you.
All told, I am sure we got a few people into our group through Meetup because I have heard people say it - all of the metrics otherwise say it was a waste of time and certainly not worth ponying up extra cash. When I pulled the plug on it, the immediate response from Meetup was 'we have made it easier to charge your members dues!' which is just mean passing the corporate screw-over down the line. The main thing that changed that I can see between this year and last is they slapped on a bunch of AI tools for auto-generating events which is a completely unhelpful - you don't need randomly generated events, you need to just get the details right and up there. That and getting taken over by 'Bending Spoons' who also took over Evernote and also jacked up the prices there by a giant amount.
So, for us, nothing useful was added to a service that was not core to our operations, I had taken a punt laying down a subscription in the first place to see if it unlocked some large untapped pool of potential players - so all the above and near double the price was not worth it. We already have our venue charge, small and reasonable. The idea of layering on charges to pay off some corporations random price hikes? Not happening, not rewarding corporate bad behaviour like that.
All told, we tested the potential for fast growth and managed to get to double on a good day - I think proving up there was some growth potential for us but not massive x6 amounts. I am intrigued as to whether we will continue to get new folk wandering in once the Meetup evaporates; I reckon yes but let us see.
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