The Golden Age?

 Well, it has happened again. All the wits and pundits of the blogosphere have spoken and I feel like I must weight in as well.

Ben Riggs, who purports to be a historian, has made a bold claim that 2023 marked the end of the Golden Age of TTRPGs. https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/18xtxdq/the_golden_age_of_ttrpgs_is_dead/ And the reason I say "purports" is because he's missing an obvious historical parallel to the scenario that he lays out in his post: D&D 4e.

The Open Gaming License was first introduced to enable the average hobbyist gamer to support Third Edition D&D back in the yesteryear of Y2K and maybe make a buck or two while doing do. And some people began making more than a buck or two and were able to do very well for themselves. Over the course of the 3,x publishing era, a number of companies sprang up that were able to sustain themselves entirely on publishing 3.x content under the OGL.

I mention those companies because that seems to be the thread that Ben isn't following, but it's really key.

When D&D 4e was announced, it was made clear that it would not be an OGL game. While players would have to buy all of their books from Wizards of the Coast from then on (which WotC didn't mind at all), this is also cut off the meal ticket for this whole ecosystem of publishers who supported 3.x over the years.

So the hunt was on for a d20 successor system, so those publishers could continue to do something very close to what they had been doing previously. Paizo and its Pathfinder system ultimately won, but let's not forget that once D&D left the OGL market, there were a number of people trying to fill that gap. True20, FantasyCraft and a host of others that I've forgotten in the interim.

And now, thanks to the OGL 1.1 fiasco of a year ago, we're in a similar situation. Even though WotC has recanted and relented and begged for forgiveness, they burned a lot of trust. Enough that the OGL publishers supporting 5e decided that they needed to design for a system that either was truly, assuredly open as WotC had previously promised D&D would be, or was under their direct ownership and control.

That's what these products that are "fracturing the market" are. Publishers seeking assurance that the rug won't be pulled out from under them again. And there's every possibility that those game lines won't last long. For every Pathfinder, there are a large number of True20's. And this disruption is arguably smaller than the one that created Pathfinder, so it could happen than none of these manage to sustain much more than a niche interest.

New Year, Same Old Me

It's been a while since I posted here, but I've been doing pretty good.

I don't know if I mentioned, but my main New Year's resolution for 2023 was to run a campaign. And since it had been so long since I've been a stable GM, I made myself a generous definition: Run 2 (or more) sessions that share continuity. This could be a traditional campaign, or it could be an OSR open table, where I run multiple sessions in the same dungeon and keeping the progress and changes to the dungeon from one run into the next session even if the players and characters are different. It could even be a Fiasco "campaign," which would be fairly close to a film franchise with sequels and side stories, kinda like the MCU or whatever the American Pie franchise is.

But even with that generous definition, it took me a long time to manage it. I'd been meeting with my Wednesday group off and on for a while, but it was all one shots. Some Fiasco from me, Blades in the Dark if one of them wanted to run. Finally, I got to run my traditional Halloween one-shot for them, which was InSpectres.

The end of the year was drawing near and my resolution still going unfulfilled. So I suggested that we try InSpectres again. They enjoyed the first session, and so a week or so before Christmas, we were able to make it happen. They still had their character sheets and I still had my records from the session, so we had the continuity. It was a good session and I got to say that I actually kept my New Year's resolution.

I also got to run my All Outta Candy Canes Christmas one-shot. I've wanted to use the All Outta Bubblegum system for about 5 or 6 years, but the notion of "The Expendables save Christmas" was only 2 or 3 years old. So this was a long time in coming, but I finally got some interest at the monthly RPG Meetup in December.

For this year, I'm going slightly more ambitious for my New Year's resolutions. I'm planning on keeping my resolution regarding running a campaign. I'm not even going to revise my definition of "campaign." While I did pull it off last year, it was a near enough thing that I am not going to get cocky this year.

But what I am doing is #dungeon24. I found out about #dungeon23 on social media last year, but wasn't sure if I had my act together enough to do it. The idea is to create a megadungeon by creating 1 room per day. At the end of each month, you will have completed 1 level. At the end of the year, you will have a 12-level megadungeon.

My plan is to leverage the power of random generation. I've already got my first level mapped using the random dungeon generator from OSRIC, as well as some of the second. While I will be using that procedure to determine whether monsters and treasure are present, I'll be using random encounter tables from Adventures Dark & Deep. The Bestiary is enormous, so I'm expecting some good variety of encounter to keep things exciting. I'll also be using their rules for reaction rolls, since OSRIC doesn't really include those.

Just because everything will have a procedure for it doesn't mean that I'm not going to be creative about this. It turns out that my creativity is the kind that's really good at filling in the gaps between existing things, not really so much about making things from whole cloth. Those reaction rolls are going to help me fill in the story of the dungeon, along with every other detail that gets rolled up.