tl;dr
It seems somewhat counterintuitive to drop this at the beginning since it goes about trying to prove my point via blunt force trauma, but perhaps that's the best place to start: I don't think people read critically anymore. Whether due to lack of time, willingness to commit, or just atrophied critical thinking skills, by and large I think that the average TTRPG enjoyer does not take the time to read TTRPGs anymore and therefore will turn to community commentary on a game - which is inherently neither a good or a bad thing, but one that I do believe often leads to misconceptions about games as they must necessarily be filtered through other people's biases before they come to you.
The good news is, I think these are all things that can be counteracted. If you're willing to come take a journey with me, then I think I can lead you onto the path towards understanding games better. As luck would have it, there are two games about journeys that I often see conflated that we can thereupon practice our critical reading skills: Ryuutama by Atsuhiro Okada; and Wanderhome by Jay Dragon. This may be setting off alarm bells for some of you - specifically, because Wanderhome is so often recommended in the same context as Ryuutama, incorrectly. To be honest, I don't think anyone but Jay has ever pitched me one of Jay's games properly - that's a blog post for another time, but I think we have to do this one first.
Some Context
While my current job doesn't quite afford me the privilege of unfettered access to the deluge of podcasts that I once had, I've spent the better part of the last three years mainlining TTRPG review podcasts, and the better part of the last decade consuming (and occasionally being a part of) TTRPG actual plays. Before that, the most common ways I heard about other games were from the experiences of my friends playing games. Since entering the world of games professionally, I've run a lot of games for people at cons who were not in my immediate friend group, often by having to rapidly onboard myself to a system I'd never read. I've also taken to working through my TTRPG backlog by way of forcing coercing cajoling curating and gently encouraging a very specific group of my friends to read through games with me as an act of play in and of itself, and perhaps most relevantly to this blog I also contributed to a Ryuutama zine this year! All of this is to say that I feel like I am a pretty reliable resource to make the kinds of claims I'm going to make in this post, but since part of the point of this post is learning to examine biases both of yourself and others, I feel like this is an important thing to include here! Ultimately, I am just some sicko on the Internet, just as you are. Suffice it to say that the advice I'm about to present is ALSO useful for evaluating this very article as you read it, so feel free to chug a Monster Zero and get that brain meat jiggling.
Pattern Recognition & Data Synthesis
I do not think it is a particularly hot take to say that we humans love us some good old fashioned pattern recognition. We love to associate things with things we already know - it makes the world more digestible, and being able to assign context to new situations allows us to function. A lot of the time, this kind of data serves us well enough to get by - so much of the time, in fact, that it becomes very easy to just rely on this with no further consideration to the conclusions we jump to. Not to belabor a very obvious point here, but like, just going off of this data is kind of exactly the situation we run into with both AI and hurtful stereotypes of all kinds - if you don't consider the data you have received and just take it at its face value, you've done at the very least yourself a disservice and depending on what position of authority you hold to other people, that disservice may become damage to many other folks.
As much as I would love to make my English degree worth more than the paper it was printed on by way of explaining all the ins and outs of how to synthesize data and evaluate sources, that would make this blog as long, dry, and interesting to read as a CVS receipt so I'm going to skip around a bit: You have, almost certainly, heard of primary and secondary sources. In the context of what we're looking at here, a primary source would be an RPG text itself, whereas a secondary source would be a review of a game. Blog posts by the creator of the game about the game itself are kind of a nebulous area outside of these two classifications - they are technically primary sources, but can sometimes be secondary sources depending on the content - especially as it starts bleeding out into author interviews, etc. It's not really important right now that we categorize this thoroughly, but I need you to have at least this as a starting point for where we're going so that you're thinking about how tightly tied to the core concept of a game a source may be. It may be more helpful to you to consider things as a spectrum of direct and indirect sources - a direct source being the RPG text itself, an indirect source being someone with no relationship to the game voicing their opinions about it, and everything else somewhere in-between.
So. You, dear reader, likely have sources you like to go to for content about games. You might just talk to people on Discord about it, or you're reading horror stories on Reddit, or you're watching nerdy-ass voice actors play the game on Twitch, or you've assembled a group of friends to talk about games in person, or maybe you like to listen to a pair of disembodied hands flipping through a game and talking about the ways a game may or may not be compatible with the owner of those hands' own game system. Whatever floats your goat - but the point is, these are all functionally secondary sources to the actual text itself. These are extremely valuable resources, each in their own ways, but each with their own pitfalls as well. For a brief and noncomprehensive list, here's some hits:
Watching/Listening To People Play On A VOD/Podcast
- Pros: Getting to see the actual gameplay mechanics at work; being able to see a demonstration of how the game actually works; getting a good idea of pacing and timing for when to do certain things in the game; learning what parts do and don't chafe that group to potentially plan for those things in your own group
- Cons: Gameplay made As Content (TM) is often heavily edited not presenting an accurate depiction of how a game plays at the table; differing levels of skill as performers vs your home group; unclear what things are houserules that group has implemented vs what is in the text; otherwise unrealistic expectations of how easy or difficult the game is to pick up as a player/GM
Forum Posts
- Pros: extremely accessible; easily see multiple viewpoints on a topic; people motivated to speak on a subject in a forum are almost certainly passionate about that topic
- Cons: inevitable and extreme bias; unable to tell if people are voicing original thoughts or parroting things they've heard elsewhere without interacting with the game at all
Online Reviews
- Pros: someone has taken the time to thoughtfully lay out their reaction to a game; biases are often disclosed and repeated entries may allow savvy consumers to predict how a reviewer may interpret something; often presented in an easily digestible form to deliver information quickly
- Cons: potential for unethical journalism; obvious bias may prevent accurate coverage of a game; people who do not like a game often do not give it the same kind of care and coverage of a game that they do enjoy whether they take pains to mitigate their bias or not
Reading and Playing a Game With Your Friends
- Pros: You are directly digesting the text as intended; you and your group will form your own decisions based on your own experiences
- Cons: Cognitive load for learning a new system; conscious and unconscious biases may prevent you from enjoying the game before giving it a fair shake; nerds are afraid of change and attempting to get them to learn a new game rather than just play the thing they already like may provoke nerd rage
In a perfect world, you would do all of these things to fully understand a game. But the thing is, of course, that a lot of the time you're not going to be approaching games from an academic standpoint - sometimes your decade long D&D group has exploded and now you're on the hunt for a new game for that group of friends and have to try and sell them on something new, so you've gotta figure out what to play next with not a lot of time. How do you figure out what a game is actually like, and what do you do when you start playing something and realize it's not what you wanted? And what does all of this have to do with Ryuutama and Wanderhome, or that other thing at the beginning of this article about people not reading?
Natural Fantasy Roleplaying
To completely jump away for a moment, let's talk about Fabula Ultima. Fabula Ultima is an homage to classic JRPG videogames, and as of March of this year has released three total setting guides to help you dial in the flavor of your story - beyond the content in the main guide, you have the Atlas: High Fantasy for games geared towards epic magical quests to attack and dethrone god, Atlas: Techno Fantasy which is more about the struggles between capitalism corrupting the environment and co-opting natural resources and the people who have to fight back against it (the whole Final Fantasy 7 situation, you know the deal), and most recently Atlas: Natural Fantasy which to quote directly from the DriveThruRPG page "...bring[s] you into worlds deeply permeated by the cycles of time and nature, where young heroes face the consequences of past mistakes and demonstrate that history does not have to repeat itself, creating a brave future of coexistence[.]" Ryuutama is likely the game that got the term "natural fantasy roleplaying" in the ears of gamers in the West, and given Fabula Ultima's definition thereof you could probably argue that Wanderhome fits into this category as well. There are, in fact, a staggering number of similarities between Wanderhome and Ryuutama, some of which are brought up more often than others. Superficially, they are both games with very cute art where you create a group of travelers that are not traditional RPG combatant types, they're both games intended to foster collaboration between the players and GM with a robust set of options for building out towns and festivals and which care heavily about the seasons and how those affect the characters, and most importantly the characters are learning about themselves as they help people along their journey. Less superficially, they're both written by people with backgrounds in teaching and specifically teaching games to newer players meaning that they feature language intended to be easily consumed and with broadly simple character mechanics, plus they're both doggedly committed to making sure that everyone at the tables knows that the journey is the point of playing.
The issue is, that's where the comparisons basically stop. While both games take great pains to emphasize that they are about telling the story of a journey of people who are just regular folks, Ryuutama still includes combat, meaning that it expects players to interact with the world through violence despite trying to indicate otherwise. Wanderhome all but explicitly forbids violence - the one character able to commit an act of violence must be removed from play immediately after doing so - and predominantly expects players to affect the narrative directly. What this means, then, is that while both games are interested in telling a story of a journey, how each game defines what a journey is is wildly different.
The journey you take in Ryuutama is one where your Great Journey is one where you must Accomplish Something and you do so by way of your Skills And Might despite being just a regular person in the world. The story you tell in Ryuutama is quite literally in-game being recorded by a DMPC who will then feed that story to a great dragon, and so wants the characters to Do Great Deeds and push them beyond their normal humdrum life to make sure it's a good story. It's focused on DOING. And once the characters have finished DOING, then they are done, and the journey is over.
The journey in Wanderhome is just that - a journey. Characters may come and go during the journey. They do still have goals to achieve and can affect the world in material ways, but since violence is not an answer, all the actions your characters can take focus around being present in the moment and practicing compassion. When a character accomplishes a goal, or when it feels appropriate, that character may leave and another may take their place, and the journey continues. Wanderhome is a story of BEING. Wanderhome asks you to BE with the characters for a while - for you to BE the town, to BE the landscape, to BE the NPCs. Wanderhome wants the players simply to BE the journey until they are satisfied and move on, just like the characters they play.
But What Does It All Mean, Basil?
If you were pressed for time and listened to someone tell you about the basic premise of Wanderhome and Ryuutama and you drew the assumption that they were similar games because they're both nature-focused, travel-focused games with easy-to-learn mechanics, you would be correct - they are both that. However, you would also be completely wrong, because without an understanding of how each of those games want players to interact with the narrative, you cannot understand what each of those games will be. This, I think, is the major issue people have with trying to interact with any new RPG, and why I brought up how frustrating the lack of critical media consumption is - it seems as though people lack anything but the most baseline curiosity, and so when they find out about something new they try and immediately sort that game into a box with things they already know rather than making any kind of attempt to meet the game where it is and see what it actually wants you to do. In some ways, this lack of curiosity also leads to people trying to shoehorn their favorite games into being things that they are not because the intent of the existing mechanics encourages a specific kind of play which usually does not jive with whatever the new intent is which leads to either bad play experiences for everyone or the birth of new game designers, but I feel like that's a drum I beat in every article here and I don't really need to go into that right now. The point is, people will do literally everything in their power to make assumptions about a game rather than try to figure out what the game actually is, and then are often upset or confused when they find the game is not what they assumed it would be.
Frankly, I think that sucks. So.
Let's imagine that spectrum of sources I mentioned earlier for a moment. Let's say someone told you about a game that for whatever reason piqued your interest. You're not sold on it enough to just go out and buy the book and read it, so what do you do? Here's my quick and easy tips:
- If "the book itself" is one side of the spectrum and "random person sharing thoughts about a game" is the other side of the spectrum, start near the middle: try to find an interview with the designer of the game and see what they say the intent of the game is.
- If you're still interested, go one step to either side of center - moving closer to the text itself would be something like looking up development blogs or other posts by the creator about the game, whereas moving farther away would be something like watching or listening to a one-shot of the game being played.
- If you've gotten this far and you're still hooked, you can now move to the farthest sides of the spectrum - listen to some people review the game itself, and then go read it.
AND BEFORE YOU START WITH ME, because I can hear you begin to type furiously across the gulf of space and time, what I did not just say was "you should go spend money on something you don't know if you and your friend group will like." There are so, so many legal ways to get games for free if you cannot or don't feel comfortable purchasing a game. You should check with your local library - if it's a more mainstream release, one that has received at least a paperback or hardback printing, most library systems will have at least a copy or two floating around that you can grab via Interlibrary Loans. If it's an indie game and it has an Itch.io page, I would all but guarantee you that the page for the game either 1. has community copies available or 2. the creator of the game would be willing to send you a PDF for you to read - many creators are just happy people are interested in their work. Speaking of Itch, if you are someone who often purchases the charity bundles that pop up, there's a strong chance you might already have the game you're curious about! And perhaps the most critical thing - you should ask your friends if they have a copy of the game they could let you borrow - or, gasp, since they already own it, ask them what they think! Have them run a game for you, or get them to let you run a game for them!
This blog post got a little more negative than I would have preferred, but at the end of the day I really just want people to feel comfortable critically evaluating things because it is not materially harder to do than what people are already doing - the only difference is actually thinking about the information you take in and how you feel about it to have your own thoughts. Simply absorbing information is not enough - you do sometimes have to use that piece of soggy bacon between your ears.
Also, you should go play both Ryuutama and Wanderhome. Ryuutama is a great game to bridge the gap between people used to playing turn-based JRPGs into the world of tabletop RPGs. Wanderhome is a great game to bridge the gap from passive players to active storytellers. Both are great tools for your toolkit - you just have to know when to use them.
Stay weird out there.
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