RPGaDay 2024 #4 RPG With Great Art

Maybe I've just been in a funk for a long time, but I don't think I've seen many recent RPGs that blew me away in terms of art. I could always wax rhapsodic about Castle Falkenstein, but I think I've done that enough over the years. So I'm calling a mulligan. Rather than go with one of the alternative prompts, I'm going to write about something that I've been meaning to put together for a while.

I'll be going over one of my Laws of Gaming. This is a list of things that I've learned as a GM to help guide my process. I'm currently at 4.

The first one I'll cover is very simple: Define the core activity of the game.

As defined by Robin D. Laws, who inspired this one, the core activity of a game is what the game is about. It should fit in the sentence "You are all X who do Y."

Some games will have this core activity baked into the setting and/or mechanics. For example, D&D's core activity is "You are all fantasy adventurers who kill monsters and take their stuff." The character classes and races determine what the character are, while the default XP rewards are for fighting monsters and stuff is often its own reward. (Don't @ me about milestones).

Even without having mechanical rewards for leaning into the core activity, you can still have one. Licensed RPGs will typically have the same core activity as the original media. For example, a Star Trek RPG will typically assume that the characters are Starfleet officers who explore strange new worlds.

But if you don't go into a campaign with a core activity, whether that's determined by the rulebook you bought or something you came up with on your own, your campaign is going to struggle. I can definitely point to campaigns I've run where I did have a core activity and those I didn't, which also generally lines up with the campaigns I remember fondly and those I remember with chagrin.