RPGaDay 27&28


 27. Hunger

The first thing to come to mind with this prompt is naturally the systems that have evolved in Vampire the Masquerade. The first version that continued from the first incarnations of the game through to the 20th Anniversary Edition (which I still think was the climax of the line) had a point pool system. You'd drink blood to fill up the pool, while waking up, healing and using certain powers would deplete the pool. It was a nice balancing mechanism that really fit well with the genre being emulated, but still had an easily understood way that it functioned in play. The newer incarnations of the system have a diue that is rolled instead of a pool that is gradually refilled and depleted. It makes things a bit more dramatic because you don't know if your character is going to become more ravenous when you use a power, or if they're going to remain stable at this stage. The downside here is that it strips a little more agency away from the player, they don't have the information to make informed decisions about the story going forward. It adds to the level of helplessness and not fully understanding the nature of the curse afflicting the characters. So I can understand how some people prefer this system, to reflect the curse of the beast within, but there afre reasons why I'd prefer to stick to the old one.

28. Devotion

There's a few ways I could take this prompt, but I'll go with the devotion that so many players show to "Dungeons and Dragons". I mentioned it in a post a few years ago where one of the players in my high school gaming club would only refer to TTRPG products without a WotC logo on their cover as "homebrews". 

There are so many great games out there, but many players are drawn in these days by the big live-streams, the appearances on shows like Stranger Things, and the wider cultural shorthand that just refers to TTRPGs as "D&D", everything else is seen as either a derivative of that, or a deviation from it. Granted, a lot of games do fit that description, but the built in devotion and prejudice to D&D isn't healthy for a wider hobby. I've thought long and hard about how to overcome this, but still haven't seen how an independent designer can make enough waves to rock the boat.

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