Author and journalist Kieron Gillen joins the panel to cover the golden age of games journalism, Squaresoft’s 1996 SNES licensed X-Men JRPG, and the mysterious Hat Man. Hosted by Alex Jaffe, with Frank Cifaldi, Ash Parrish, Brandon Sheffield, and Kieron Gillen. Edited by Esper Quinn, original music by Kurt Feldman.
I’ve always thought that being less skilled at video games is a potential boon for someone who writes about them. Someone who’s highly skilled and has frictionless experiences probably has a lot less of interest to say about a game’s challenges when they’re all minor bumps in the road. Someone of low skill probably acts as a better barometer for most people. It’s a lot more important to know if a game is potentially too difficult for a large swath of people to engage with, than if it’s not hard enough for a set of masochists.
I loved that Prince halftime show. I was at a party with what was basically a group of aliens. When halftime came around everyone there snarked about how the acts the NFL picks for the Superbowl get worse every year and made homophobic comments about Prince. Never have understood the many people I’ve heard say that junk about Prince through the years, did they not once ever pay attention to the lyrics of basically every one of his songs? They all went in the kitchen and talked about lizard-people stuff and ate finger food, while I sat in the living room alone in my Peyton Manning jersey enjoying the best half-time show I’ve ever seen.
I’ve thought a lot about this in relation to my own tabletop play. This is a conceptually messy table for how I’m thinking.
Specific Theme
General Theme
Few possibilities
Apocalypse World
Dungeons and Dragons
Many possibilities
Call of Cthulhu
Fate Core
Basically, games can be more specific or more general in theme but still maintain an identity as long as they remain focused on its set of possibilities. With most Powered by the Apocalypse games, the theme is very specific, and one has character cards that are customizable but present a few possibilities in an accessible way. In contrast, Dungeons and Dragons and related systems (Pathfinder) are customizable to a number of themes or settings - from low-magic medieval games to high-magic sprawling space fantasy epics. The classes provide a decent amount of customization, but all of it is bound within rules that remain pretty rigid around the conventions of combat and adventuring: x actions per round, skill checks, and lots of in-game mechanical and narrative limitations (gods and domains, spell types, rules for resting).
Call of Cthulhu (and similar games like Runequest) is one way to try to get more player flexibility. They add a lot of different skills and progression systems based on each individual skill rather than externalized XP and class levels. The simulation has a lot of detail around its core areas (investigation and action); pragmatically, I have found more flexibility as a GM for handling those encounters. But there is still some limits in what is feasible within the system. It takes a lot of work to convert the detailed, specific skills from one setting to another or (sometimes) even one decade and another. Still, it has a strong identity.
Fate Core does not have a strong identity on its own. It’s a flexible, modular system: you can add skills, stunts, and other features as you like to tailor the game to an individual theme or setting. The rules put a lot of emphasis on narrative development and player conributions while teaching GMs how to improvise. I’ve run everything from Star Wars to time travel to medieval fantasy in the game. As a consequence, the identity of the game itself is weaker. The identity it has centers on a few metagaming concepts, like creating aspects and invoking the death spiral. (Basically, combat is all about players and NPCs setting more aspects on the scene that can be used to get better results against an enemy.) The people I GM or play Fate Core with tend to love it, but “Fate Core” is not really the draw of the game; instead, it’s whatever theme we’re running with.
Personally, I don’t think most players or GMs are ready for the “do anything” / “unique identity” game proposed in the question, at least not at the start. When I’m running or playing, we often need a session zero where we discuss what kind of game we’re wanting to play. Even before we’ve chosen a system or setting or module, we have usually moved from “do anything” to “play spies in Star Wars” or “do a pulp adventure game” or “let’s do a big fantasy dungeon romp.” Our very first discussions already invite welcome limitations, and the subsequent discussion on choosing a ruleset is about what allows us the kind of play we want in the game. Fate Core is good if we want the play to remain pretty open in terms of possibilities; otherwise we’re probably going with a game with more defined options and identity.
The table top question reminded me of the first time I ever played one. This was back in like 2007 and I had no idea how they worked or even really what one was. There were no DnD podcasts anyone was listening to yet and youtube was mostly standard definition.
My friend had me and another buddy set up to play I think Vampire Masquerades. We created characters which I think were just like real life us as vampires? And then he sort of just said we’re in a town what do you do.
And we looked at each other and we were like… go to… a concert? I dunno!
So we like wandered around for an hour looking for a concert I guess? To listen to music and feed on people? Eventually we found one and nothing of note continued to happen.
He gave us far too much choice and it was BAD!
Had we some experience in games already maybe we would have known how to queue up something more interesting but I think our DM was feeling out if this infinite freedom thing would work and discovered it would not. I don’t think I played another one until like 9 years later lol.
this is embarrassing to say now because some of these people are my peers, but I grew up reading games magazines (I knew the name Crispin Boyer before I knew the name of probably any US senator) so I was primed for the Mad Men Era of Games Journalism. people at 1up and Kotaku and Vice (and maybe a site called insert credit and maybe a site called Action Button) were rock stars to me, so it was validating hearing Ash be as impressed as I was back then.
Oh man, I guess I have to say - we all just believed frank when he said a Hanson brother died. It was even the best joke at the end of the show!
But all Hanson brothers appear to be alive. There’s a hockey player who was a “Hanson brother” who died at some point but he was unrelated, and that doesn’t sound like the sort of thing frank would have been paying attention to so something has gone awry! Will get to the bottom of this and report back.
Probably the closest a video game came to ruining my life was Overwatch 1 when that game was new, because that was the closest I ever came to seriously getting into a game with a lootbox economy. I’m thankful that I stepped away from that precipice lol
i hadn’t thought about the hansons for so long that I had to look them up and according to wikipedia one of the brother’s pinterest account (lol) got leaked and it revealed a whole lot of right wing hate nonsense so he might as well be dead to the public consciousness
brandon actually mentions in conversation just after I cut the segment that it’s a song played on a dan bau quite a bit. i should’ve left that bit in there!!
