RPG a Day 2017 Question 16

What is RPGaDay2017?

I’ll link here to the actual group. Basically, it’s a series of questions that you can answer. There are 31 questions that you can answer to help shine a light on the different reasons people play role-play games. This is my answer to the 16th question. For my full list of answers check here.

Question alternate#16: What do you look for in an RPG review?

I’m using one of the alternate questions from the list today because I think my answer from yesterday also answers today’s question which was, “What RPG do you enjoy using as is?” Since that happened, I decide to go with one of the other questions today.

I think I’ve kind of answered this already but feel I can expand on it. I look for mechanics, I want to know how easy the system is to learn, I hate having to sit at the table and spend lots of time looking something up to make sure we’re doing it right or simply avoiding it all together, I’m looking at you D&D 3.5 grappling rules. At the same time I don’t want a system that’s so devoid of rules that it feels like nothing is going on. I admit there are exceptions to both of these, I love Shadowrun and Fiasco.

Knowing something about the world and the setting are always a nice thing. A good setting can make the difference between me wanting to try a game or not. If the world is interesting, something I’ve never considered, or a twist on an old favorite. The YouTuber Dodger has a RPG world she’s developed for Dungeon World that revolves around gourmet dungeon crawls and fashion based wilderness hunts that’s pretty fun sounding. The twist on the old setting was what attracted me to X-Crawl.

Finally, if I can see some gameplay I feel I can get a much better view of the game itself. I love decent play sessions that give a little focus on the mechanics. I don’t want them to stop every ten minutes to explain why they’re rolling the dice, but I do like being given enough information to figure out what’s going on. I saw a video of Star Trek Adventures recently where the DM, was texting the players the things they discovered and descriptions of their locations, so I wasn’t hearing them. They used roll 20 but weren’t showing the dice rolls only announcing success or failure. I found that frustrating. Without seeing those things it felt hard to follow and was a poor representation of the game. While I know that gameplay isn’t exactly a review, I think it’s a factor in how people view the game.

Anyway, that’s what I look for.