Smash the System!
Your favorite RPG System, I mean.
This week marks the 24th episode of my series of instructional videos about how to be a better gamemaster. In this week’s video, I discuss how to mash up your favorite RPG system with another system to make a unique hybrid game. Car Wars + Traveller yields Driver. Cyberpunk + Runequest yields Runepunk. It’s time to smash the system! (The episode was delayed by over a day due to audio issues but fortunately my brilliant brother ArcanistWill was able to save the day. Sorry for the tardy delivery!)
The Grey Brotherhood’s Adventures Continue
Today we also released Episode 10 of the Grey Brotherhood ACKS II Actual Play series. If you haven’t been watching the Grey Brotherhood series, you’ve been missing out on seeing the new ACKS II system in action. Unlike a lot of alleged “actual plays,” this is an unscripted show played authentically and without fudging or narrativism.
If you want to catch up on what has gone before, you can do so by watching the videos or by reading the Annals of the Grey Brotherhood, available here:
The Truth Is Out There But No One Knows It
Recently a pair of interesting and well-written articles came to my attention. They are from the blog Ponderings on Games. The first one is called “The OSR Contradiction” and the second one is called “When Is a Gold Piece Not a Gold Piece.” Both of these excellent articles are correct in their analysis — but both fall short in their conclusions for apparent lack of awareness of what ACKS has accomplished.
In “The OSR Contradiction,” Ponderings is absolutely right to point that “rulings over rules” and “player ingenuity over character ability” are ultimately, incoherent as explanations of how to play and run RPGs. As Ponderings puts it:
Not only is the “rulings over rules” principle applied inconsistently, its pursuit has lead the playstyle, how shall I put it delicately, up its own butthole.
The conclusion he draws from this is:
Though its manifestoes and principles may suggest otherwise, [the OSR] is simply an amalgamation of parts and approaches that happened to work well together, not a unified, self-consistent design arising from deeper philosophical ideas.
That may be true for some designers, but it is not true of my games, which are certainly part of the OSR. My games are unified self-consistent designs from deep philosophical ideas, so much so that I spend hours each week explaining them in detail. For instance, I’ve given all of the answers to the issues raised by Ponderings in previous articles and videos - namely that rulings are rules and that player skill shouldn’t trump character skill, but rather synergize with it. There is an entirely coherent playstyle available for all old-school players; it’s called simulationism and it relies on open world sandboxes that are built for player agency.
In “When Is a GP Not a GP,” Ponderings is correct that the economies of Dungeons & Dragons and its ilk are incompatible with each other. In my opinion, however, he is dead wrong when he writes:
Equipment lists vary greatly between game systems, and there’s never any thought put into actual economics of the fantasy worlds we inhabit – which is fine, that’s not what the games are about, and any attempt to extrapolate how those worlds actually function is futile yet hilarious (see the Dungeonomics articles). For my part, I’ve previously looked at what money are used for in games, and why they so often don’t “work”.
What can we conclude based on this little collection of data? Only that one game’s GP has nothing to do with another.
He’s wrong because I’ve put a lot of thought into the actual economics of fantasy worlds — to the point of modeling the entire GDP of the continent in a circular flow. The effort is not futile, as I’ve shown exhaustively in my writing on fantasy economics in Axioms and ACKS II. And ACKS is a Mithril bestseller, in the top 0.5% of all products on DriveThruRPG; it’s not an inconsequential game.
I don’t say this to bash Ponderings. He’s clearly a sharp and thoughtful theorist of game design. The actual takeaway - painful as it is — is the sinking realization of how far I have to go in building the audience for my ideas. The OSR is not a large niche, so when over a decade of work has entirely eluded an insightful critic researching the exact areas I focus on, it’s worrisome.1
If anyone has ideas about how I can better promote my games and theories, please hit me up in the Comments. Are there YouTubers I should be speaking to? Bloggers I don’t know about it? I’m open to ideas.
ACKS on Substack
If you haven’t checked out the flourishing ACKS Substack community, here’s some blogs to check out. We’ve added new ones to the list!
If you have a blog or third-party product that supports ACKS or Ascendant, please let me know and I’ll be happy to include you in my next round-up.
ACKS II Update
It seems likely that ACKS II will Kickstart in October. I regret the delay very much but “it is what it is.” Rome wasn’t built in a day.
This September, Adventurer-tier backers of my Patreon are getting an updated beta of the ACKS II Revised Rulebook, Conqueror-tier backers are getting an updated Judges Journal, and King-tier backers are getting an updated Monstrous Manual. If you’ve been wanting to check out how ACKS II is shaping up, you can head over to the Patreon now.
If you haven’t already, don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel, then head over to the links below for others ways to get involved in my recently-declared Simulationist culture movement. If you’re already a fan, be kind and spread the word!
Autarch Discord with the smartest, nicest gamers around [fixed!]
Autarch Reddit with a sub-set of the aforementioned smartest, nicest gamers
Ascendant Patreon with a new character and story hook every month
Autarch Facebook page with news and updates about our projects
Autarch Twitter channel with brief comments and witty quirks
Ascendant Comics Facebook page with sneak previews of the upcoming comics
Ascendant Comics Instagram page with tons of art and cosplay
Ascendant Comics Twitter channel with short messages and quirky wit
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I acknowledge it might be a deliberate snub because of my supervillainous reputation but I prefer to assume unawareness over malice until demonstrated otherwise. As far as internet supervillains go, I’m a really nice one.
I have a fondness for DCC which will always be the apex example of an OSR game in my mind. It is charming, weird, playful, and a bit incoherent; but its incoherence stems from a deep-anchored chaos that determines its style and feel.
ACKS does not occupy the same galaxy of concepts as DCC in my mind; your work on and emphasis of simulationism is only a single, if prominent, example explaining the totally different feel of ACKS from DCC.
It is most practical in the current context to consider "OSR" not as a historical moment but as a "living" philosophy which is a rough constellation of ideas evolved from "We're Not 4th Edition D&D." The main thrust against 4E D&D was that it wasn't D&D. The problem is that it was also a very tightly designed game, in many respects, and its more prolific detractors shunned that in favor of deep chaos. These points are irrevocably wound up in the meaning, presentation, and expectations of "OSR."
Today, Rule Zero and "rulings, not rules" and all the other undermine-your-own-game nonsense is unfortunately a core component (even if only implicit) in the OSR mindsphere. Your work on the role of referees, and thus your attitude towards these ideas and where they lead, aligns you strictly against the mindsphere on this and many other points.
Essentially, it may be worth considering positioning yourself as an ALTERNATIVE to the OSR mindsphere. There are many factors to weigh, but apparent misalignments of this nature can create serious friction.
While ACKS is definitely an OSR game, it doesn't really fit in with the main stream of the OSR, you know? Questing Beast is currently the gateway to the OSR (to my limited understanding) and I wouldn't be surprised to hear he'd never looked at ACKS. You went in a different direction than nearly everyone else, and you've wound up in vastly different places because of it. Add to that all the fundamentally new school people who saw OSR as a less mechanically rigorous way to publish adventures, and it's not hard to see why ACKS doesn't come up that much.
I don't think it's your supervillain status, because I've seen a few recent blog posts begrudgingly mentioning Zak S (trigger warnings firmly attached, don't you worry), who is probably more reviled than you, and I suspect that it's because his stuff better matches the "rulings, not rules" crowd's ideals.
Basically, you're the weirdo in the corner of the OSR fraternity, scribbling out your math assignment while everyone else is getting drunk. Congratulations.
P.S. no, I don't know how to fix that.