Over the course of the Terminal City Tabletop Con, I probably picked up, perused, and otherwise paged through a plethora of RPGs (presuming plethora means two-dozen-ish). Of these, I bought two: Nirvana on Fire, a Mothership module, and The 2d20 Modiphius Fallout TTRPG Starter Set.
Both these products should be reviewed. Nirvana on Fire is very cool; people should read it. The Fallout Starter Set is mildly infuriating; people should know not to buy it. That said, TTRPG reviewers who don’t bother to play the games they review are even worse than ill-conceived and incomplete starter sets, so those reviews will have to wait until we can play those games.
Instead, I wanted to take a second to reflect. Why did I choose to buy these two games? Why not any of the others I looked at?
Nirvana: Module Moksha
Why did I buy Nirvana on Fire? A short list:
- The cover illustration by Jerome Berthier is incredible. Seriously, look at this thing:
- I’ve been looking for a Mothership module.
- I’ve met Dave Kenny, the writer.
- When I picked up the book and started scanning it, even without really reading it, I found my eyes catching on interesting words and phrases. “A nun ignites a blowtorch”. “Unstable flesh held together by bandages”. “The Spear of Bishamonten”. Compelling!
- The premise (creepy Buddhist monks in space) was obvious, novel, and appealed to me.
So these are all very fine reasons to buy a product. Some are non-replicable: I cannot personally meet everyone who might pick up a module I wrote. Still, bold covers, targeting popular systems, keeping prose punchy, and having a simple/wild premise are all doable.
The Fallout Starter Set: A Nuclear Waste
I bought this as the con was ending. I stopped to look at a booth as it was closing, and the fellow there offered to knock $5 off as a last-minute deal. Altogether, it cost just shy of $40 CAD. It came with some special dice, premade characters, punch-out bottle cap tokens, the starter rules, and a starter adventure.
I am not sure this was a wise purchasing choice.
Why did I buy this?
- Love me some Fallout.
- Time pressure. Con was ending. Limited time only sale.
- Box set prevented me from leafing through the book, preventing me from realizing I didn’t care for it.
Which leads me to…
Why Didn’t I Buy the Other Stuff I Read?
A brief sampling of reasons I picked things up, looked at them, and then put them back down.
- Walls of Text. Gabriel was telling me during our weekly walk about a kid who came up to the booth, took a look at Doom Desert (which is pretty terse), and was like ‘whoa, too much reading’. Which drives me crazy, but also, I do that too. I picked up a bunch of books this week, looked at the length of the paragraphs and just thought, ‘I don’t want to read that right now’.
- Black and white illustrations. Just never grabs attention in the same way.
- Rambling introductions. I don’t care about why you wrote this game. Skip the preamble. Skip the proper nouns and setting info. I don’t need you to explain what a GM is. I’m not shopping for non-DnD TTRPGs because I’m new to the hobby.
- Unjustified crunch. The more complicated the system, the higher the time cost of learning it. I took a look at a ton of Superhero RPGs, but constantly found myself asking ‘why wouldn’t I just run this in Troika?’. Learning a new game always has to compete with hacking an old one.
Honestly, it’s this last point that stands out the most to me. Especially relative to the Fallout game, I feel like if I’d been able to read it through or taken a look at the premade adventure, I probably would have realized how much easier it would be to throw together a Troika hack to play a Fallout one shot.
So maybe I’ll do that next week.
Swing back around then!
This is the third of three! Check out what we had to say before we went to Terminal City Tabletop Con and what we learned from the experience.