• 28 Dec, 2025 *

For much of the early 2000s and 2010s, whenever a TV show wanted to signify that a character was supposed to be a geeky type, they would have them express a strong opinion on the question, “Did Han shoot first?” (a reference to an Alec Guinness film that had a strong cult following at the time). In this time of apotheosis, the question had become so familiar that to speak it aloud was a comical act unrelated to its original context.

In a similar vein, some questions are perpetually debated by RPG fans, to the point where simply posing them can be a joke. In the final days of 2025, I thought I’d spend some time giving my own more or less serious answers to each of them.

1. Are RPGs art?

Yes. I feel like this I see this question less in recent years, corresponding with a rise in complaints that RPGs are too artistic. Can’t please everyone!

2. Why is everything a Kickstarter?

Crowdfunding is the only safe way to make games for small publishers, and the most profitable way to make games for large publishers. Printing a physical product is all about economy of scale – the cost per copy changes wildly between 100 books, 500 books, and 1000 books. A publisher can easily lose money just by guessing wrong about how many books they need to print. A crowdfunding campaign creates a guaranteed minimum print size and data that can be used to guess at an appropriate size for a total print run (rule of thumb is 2-3 times the total ordered via crowdfunding). Most of the time, there’s no other way to get an estimate this good.

There are also a number of consumers who only buy books from crowdfunding sites, so running a crowdfunding campaign is the only way to sell to them. And crowdfunding provides access to the financial capital required for a print run at minimal risk to the publisher, which is, in economic terms, a deal too good to pass up. Not all crowdfunding uses Kickstarter - Backerkit and Gamefound are increasingly popular - but Kickstarter was the first major platform.

3. What is the OSR?

“OSR”, or “Old School Renaissance”, is the second most successful marketing term for both RPGs and RPG communities, right after “D&D 5e”.

The term OSR started around 2005 with gamers unhappy with the 3rd edition of D&D. They wanted to return to the playstyles common in D&D through the years of 1977-1988. The OSR has now lasted for around twice as long as the old-school era it seeks to revive. It is used to sell everything from retroclones to avant-garde adventures, fascism to anarchism, and everything in between.

Personally, while I think the Renaissance was a good thing, things really got cooking with the Enlightenment. I’m hoping that stage of RPG history comes soon.

4. Does system matter?

If all you play is GMed games about dungeon-delving and generally being fantasy mercenaries, then no, it really doesn’t.

Otherwise, yes, it does. This can be demonstrated easily by trying to run the campaign Masks of Nyarlathotep in the system, i’m sorry, did you say street magic?

Even in very similar systems designed for playing within the same genre, there can be big differences in the cognitive load on the GM, the amount of time resolving a conflict takes, and other things that create a different feel at the table. Potatoes might always be tasty, but there’s still a difference between baking them, frying them, and mashing them.

5. How do I get my RPG group to play something other than Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition?

You tell your friends, “Hey, there’s this thing that I really like. Could we try it once, just to see how it is?” That’s a pretty normal thing friends do for each other, and if they won’t, the problem doesn’t have anything to do with RPGs.

6. Why is 5e the best/worst system?

D&D 5e was created at a low point in the popularity of D&D. 4th edition had been a very well designed game for a specific type of very tactical player, but by being so well tuned for one style of play, it was poorly suited for most others. 5e was designed to be a “big tent” game that would have something for everyone and bring people back to D&D. Specifically, it was designed to support both OSR playstyles and maximalist, heroic fantasy 3.5 playstyles.

To create 5e, WotC assembled a team of talented and experienced game designers. They consulted with other skilled designers from across the industry. Together, they created a system that could indeed support both OSR-style resource-constrained dungeon delving and 3.5-style epic adventures and build optimization. Most importantly, they built a system with a lot of tolerance for error. You can forget rules, the GM can be drunk, the players can be exhausted, but it breaks one piece at a time, instead of collapsing around a single point of failure.

As a game, 5e is fine. I’d even say it’s pretty good, and it met all the design goals of the team that made it.

This was over a decade ago. In the time sense, WotC has done very few interesting things with D&D. Most campaigns have been outsourced to 3rd party teams, and additional rules have mostly been a slow drift towards 3.5 style maximalism.

Designers and a lot of people who play a lot of RPGs are incredibly tired of D&D 5e. It eats up a huge amount of the conversational space around RPGs. As the only RPG recognized by people outside the hobby, anything titled D&D receives free publicity in popular media beyond what any game company could ever hope to buy. WotC already has a marketing budget and legacy communities far in excess of any other RPG publisher. Some RPG professionals across the industry – designers, actual players, professional GMs - find themselves in the place of wanting to work with other games, but only being able to afford a living working with 5e. Amateurs who don’t care about the money still find the design space constrained by 5e being used as a solitary base of expectations for what an RPG is and how one works. There is an argument to be made that other RPGs only have popularity as a consequence of the success of D&D, but I think the thriving non-D&D-based scenes in countries like Japan and Sweden would show that there could have been another way.

Then, of course, WotC has engaged in some specifically unethical business practices: attempting to change the terms of licenses granted as irrevocable in livelihood-destroying ways, sending private detectives to intimidate fans, attempting to build walled gardens, and playing will-they-won’t-they with AI.

7. How do I get a group to meet regularly?

Meet at the same time every week, no matter what else is going on. Have at least 5 people, and always play as long as three people show up.

8. How do I find a GM to run a game for my friends?

Congratulations! You have received the cosmic mandate! You are now the GM. Good luck!

9. What’s better, hexcrawls or pointcrawls? What about depthcrawls? And how wide should a hex be?

I don’t actually know. Ask someone from the OSR.

10. How do I make players follow my plot hooks?

Start the game where the action begins, not in the lead-up. Ideally, start as close as you can to when the players start making meaningful decisions. If they’re doing a dungeon, start at the gates of the dungeon. If they’re solving a mystery or doing a secret mission, start after they’ve agreed to do the job.

It also doesn’t hurt to discuss the basic premise of a game out of character before starting it. If you tell your players, “I’m very excited to run an adventure tonight about smuggling rum past the blockade,” then hopefully they won’t turn down a job as rum smugglers. If you do a Session Zero this can be part of it.

11. How do I run a mystery without the players getting lost?

There are a few ways. I explain them in another blog post, here.

12. Are railroads or sandboxes better?

I have two postulates:

In any sandbox, there are a set of encounters that are the most interesting and engaging ones for any particular group of players. They may be different based on the players, but for any particular group there will be a most interesting sequence. 1.

If a campaign involves simply visiting everything in a sandbox, it’s not really a sandbox; it’s only a sandbox if some things are not discovered.

Given these two postulates, would it not be better for the GM to make sure their campaign visits the best possible encounters? I think this may be the most controversial part of this blog post, or any blog post I’ve made.

I do think that adventures across maps, where players can make at least partially informed decisions about their paths of travels and destinations, are wonderful fun. This does require the players to have more information than a purely blank set of hexes and a dozen rumors. The line between players having enough information to make informed choices and players having so much information that they will choose a single optimal path is a fine one.

13. How do I deal with hacking/stealth?

Anything that requires one player to go off and play a minigame while the rest of the table does nothing can be boring for the rest of the table. The most common examples are hacking or stealth, which are often handled as separate minigames. Shoutout to Cyberpunk 2020, which makes hacking effectively an entirely separate RPG that happens to exist in the same book. Shadowrun can come close to this depending on the edition. (Despite this, there’s a lot I really like about Cyberpunk 2020, and its hacking system is at least wonderfully cynical in the way it makes characters pay 99 cents a grid tile to maneuver in its cybernetic dungeons.)

Obviously, it’s best to keep these segments short, no more than 5-15 minutes. You can handle them similarly to any other time the party is split up, moving the spotlight back and forth between player characters.

The most important thing I’ve found is to make sure that the minigame can provide levels of tangible advantage to the whole group without being necessary or sufficient to solve their problems. If hacking or stealth is all or nothing, either giving complete success or tipping off enemies and making other forms of attack more difficult, then there will be no interesting outcome for anyone other than the solo players. Instead, make it so the solo player will probably return with a small tangible advantage, and has a chance of returning with a large tangible advantage. These advantages could be actionable information, resources, reductions in guards, etc.

If you want to avoid the minigame altogether, hacking can be something done by a distant NPC. It’s a common trope to have a hacker on a radio who can help the heroes in convenient ways but never completely solves their problems. If you’re designing a game with hackers or sneaky characters, it’s okay for these to simply be abilities used in the thick of an action scene as single rolls, rather than as separate minigames. A sneaky character might have the ability to hide and dramatically reappear elsewhere, while a hacker might cause specific devices around them to malfunction advantageously in the same way a wizard casts spells.

14. How do I fix the ranger?

The ranger was an early D&D class that has equivalents in many fantasy adventure RPGs. It is the only classic RPG class based on a single fictional character: Aragorn, Son of Arathorn. Even the Paladin is at least based on the 12 Paladins of Charlemagne. In many D&D-inspired system, Rangers have two frustrating abilities: some sort of advantage against one specific type of creature, and some sort of advantage in one specific type of terrain.

Other situational abilities, like stealth, social skills, and spells, are often used as a result of player decisions, and it’s also common for adventures to be written with an eye towards making them all useful at some point. Terrain and creatures encountered are almost purely a result of GM decision, and adventures rarely try to cater to the specific abilities of a single class, especially a less popular one like the ranger. “The GM must arbitrarily decide if a specific character will be either more competent or less competent than anyone else each encounter,” is not fun for anyone at the table.

To “fix” the ranger, a designer needs to decide on a distinct identity for the ranger class within their game, something beyond a pastiche of Aragorn. A solution presents itself as soon as you settle on an identity. For example, if a ranger is the druidic equivalent of the paladin, then you can make them a partial spellcaster in the vein of the paladin. If they are the fighter’s ranged counterpart, then you can split up combat abilities between the two classes. If they are a terrain-based combat specialist, give them a way to create areas of their favored terrain in any environment. That’s how to go about fixing the Ranger in a game.

Some News

That’s all the perpetual RPG questions I could think of! One small news update: I wrote a short horror adventure where the players get to be the aristocrats who plot to kill Rasputin. It’s designed to be low-prep and around 2 hours. It’s free. You can find it here.