How to Pick Your Next Game w/ Zakariah

Have you just finished your DnD campaign and are looking for something new to play? Or do you love to hop around and try different systems but have a hard time figuring out what game to try? 
Well this is what we are talking about in today's episode of The RPG Goblin! How to Pick Your Next Game! I bring on Zakariah and we talk about what elements of TTRPGs are important to us when considering what game to play next like play style, tone and genre of the game, mechanics, and even if you should just stick with a game you already play! 
So if this is something you have been struggling with please join us in this episode and think about what is important for your next game! 

You can find Zakariah on DMsGuild by searching his name "Zakariah"! 
Or click this link here!: https://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?keywords=Zakariah&x=0&y=0&author=&artist=&pfrom=&pto=

Transcript

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Have you recently finished your D D campaign and you're looking for a new game that you can try out and play? Or do you like to hop around in different systems and games to try them out and see what they're capable of, but you don't really always know where to start from? Well, in today's episode of The RPG Goblin, we talk exactly about this and the steps of choosing the next game that you're gonna play. Obviously, this isn't an end all be all. Here's all the rules and the way to do it, but here's some things to basically keep in mind as I bring on Zachariah to talk all about this with me. We talk about considering genre, what your playstyle is, what mechanics are important, and all of those types of details on trying to choose what your next game should be and whether or not you should stick with a system you're already comfortable with as well. So if that all sounds like a great time, then I think you will love this episode, and hopefully this will help you pick your next game for your next campaign or one shot. And if it does, let me know. I'd love to know, but I think that's enough of me talking, so let's get into it. Welcome, everyone, to the RPG Goblin. I am your host and the resident Goblin Willow, and I am the one who asks all the questions. And in today's episode, we are going to be talking about choosing your next game, which I'm really excited about, and we'll get more into what this means. But first, let's introduce our guest, Zachariah. Would you like to give yourself a little introduction and tell everyone what you do? Yeah. Hi, I'm Zachariah. I make content for D. D on DMs guild. I release it through the Copper Dice Discord, but it's also all available on DMs Guild. Just go ahead and search. My name Zachariah, and it'll all come up. I release everything there for free. It's mostly a way for me to take all of the side content that I generate in between games that I play, that I don't have an opportunity or maybe doesn't fit directly into my game right now, as well as some of my ideas that I'm more proud of. And I put all that up on DMs guild. Yes. Amazing. Which I haven't looked at all of the stuff that you have up, but what I have looked at is absolutely fantastic, and I hope to also add it into some of my own personal games. I mean, we've already talked about some alternate rules and stuff that you've added into that you've done for DND that I've already added into my games, and it's been amazing. So ten out of ten would recommend checking out Zechariah's content. It's fantastic. Gold star to you, but yeah, I am very excited to have you on again. I absolutely loved when we talked about Morkborg or I guess morkborg. But I'm very excited to have you on again, especially because we're going to be talking about choosing your next game. Now, what exactly we talked about this a little bit before recording, but what does that mean in this context, choosing your next game? Like, what story I'm going to tell, what are we going to be talking about today? I think what we are going to be focusing more on, although we'll see as the conversation drifts because that's just kind of what happens whenever we talk about anything. Moreover, like choosing what system to play your next game in or if you're wanting to play in another system, what kind of a game would you want to play in that system? Because I think that if you're looking at like, oh, I really want to play Call of Cthulhu, if you really want to play Call of Cthulhu, what does that mean in the sense of, like, you want to play with the mechanics of Call of Cthulhu? You want to roll percentiles, or do you mean that you want to play in a 1920s Lovecraftian investigation type of game? Yes, I guess the important aspects of why you're choosing these games. Yeah, because in the case of something like and I guess just to jump straight into it, if we talked about Call of Cthulhu as an example, and maybe we'll have some other examples along the way, but it's on my shelf, so it's the one that I'm talking about. So I as somebody who runs the game, I think a lot about the technical aspects of the game, and I do love myself a D 20 system, and I do love the way that the math shakes out with bounded accuracy. But there is something very I want to say, like, charming isn't really the right word that I'm looking for, but there's something like, compelling about, oh, this system is from the ground up, just totally different and shiny and new to me because it doesn't use that die that I'm used to using for everything. It's all based on this other die that I look at all the time but never roll justice to the D. Ten or well, I guess percentiles in general, they don't get used very often, but yeah, no, I think that's amazing. And the want to play with a new system just for the mechanical reasons, just to see what it has in store for you is so valid. And I feel that very. I and looking at it right, it's like, okay, so Call of Cthulhu uses this percentile based system, but it's not alone in that. If you look at Warhammer Fantasy also uses percentiles. And I think you can see right there that you have a broad breadth of genre just between those two, right? Like, you have a more dark classical fantasy, but more like a dark fantasy game that uses percentiles with warhammer fantasy RPG. But then you also have this called Cthulhu Game, which has a breadth of different settings. Because I know that there's like a Wild West Cthulhu setting. I know that there's also I was pretty sure I may be misremembering this, but that there is like a Dark ages Cthulhu setting out there somewhere. If that's not official if it's not official, it's out there on the Internet. Yeah, for sure. Someone's made it. Yeah. There's a ton of different genres for Call of Cthulhu. But I think one of the things that you have to decide when you're like, if you want to play Call of Cthulhu or not, is look at the starter box and look at the kind of adventure that they include in the starter box. Yes. I think that's a good place to start because that is going to tell you the game designers thoughts as far as the type of game that this is going to be good for. They might be wrong, right? Like game designers are people too. But at least for me I think that's a good jumping off point of like if this is a game that is meant for epic fantasy they'll probably tell you in the introduction that this is an epic fantasy if they want it to be like an investigation which is a lot more of what call of Cthulhu is geared towards. It's not really a combat based game. You don't have a lot of hit. Points, punch things, you're probably going to die. Yeah. The intention isn't really for you to be getting into a bunch of extended combat. It's not that kind of game. Call of Cthulhu is also like a skills based RPG, which is also very different than something that's like a class based RPG like Dungeons and Dragons. Because more of what your person can do. Right. Well, also as you use abilities, they continue to get better if you succeed and they get worse if you fail. Is it through success on that one? Because I know there's one that goes through succeeding on failure and one that goes through succeeding on success. I might be getting my that might be success. I think it is. Again, my wires might be crossed on this. I'm not an expert on Call of Cthulhu in particular, but I do know that I'm pretty sure that it does, actually you gain because your stats are all between one and 100. I guess that they wouldn't really be one, but you know what I mean? They're more on the scale of 100, like 100 base scale rather than on a scale of like one to 20. So you're allowed more incremental increases and decreases in your skill on things. Because if you have 65 in a skill or you have 66 in a skill, that is such a small difference, but it allows you to like, oh, if I succeed on this, then I get another plus one to this percentile, which makes me incrementally better. And it's a lot more like tweaking as you're going along rather than having a set of stats that are bi level rather fixed. Because if I'm correct, from what I remember of Kala Cthulhu, you do have stats but they do affect what numbers you have in your actual skills. But they aren't like the end all, be all. They're not the only thing that determines that number because like you were saying, that success. When you succeed on things, you get better at it over time and slowly. And so there are outside forces other than the stats that do connect to making those skills better, which I think is really cool. Yeah. And there's a lot more mental focused stats in Call of Cthulhu because again, it's not really a combat game and you can see that with other games that aren't really combat focused. Like Vampire the Masquerade is another good example. It's a game that isn't really focused on combat in particular social skills. Yeah. That game. It tells you in the stats that it has sort of and I guess that is also like a good way of, I guess, sussing out what kind of game you want to play is, like, look at the stats. Just look at a character sheet in that game and it'll tell you so much about the kind of game that it is. Indeed, I absolutely agree on that. Especially if because I think a big thing that's good to keep in mind when you are trying to pick out a game is where is the focus? Is it combat heavy? Is it maybe more storytelling focused and figuring out where you even land on that scale too? Like, do you want something that's in the middle? Do you want something that's going to be just combat? Do you want something that's going to be a lot more narrative storytelling? And then, like you said, looking at those character sheets and being able to kind of compare with the idea of the story you have in your mind and what that game actually supports is a really good idea. Yeah. And along those lines, you can tell that not only from the stats, but also just the complexity of the character sheet, how complex the rules of this system are. Is this a rules light system or is it a rules heavy system? Is it really a crunchy system? You can kind of tell that just by looking at the character sheet and get a vague idea of like, how many rules am I about to learn in order to play this game and do I want to invest the time in order to do that? And also the time of all of my friends who have been summoned here to play this game, how much time do they have to invest in this? How much do I need to carry the game as the person running it? There's a lot of thought that needs to go in that and actually there's a point there that I'd like to make that I feel like when it comes to choosing a game, I think it's very important to play games that whoever's going to be running the game wants to play. Because having a GM basically learn a new game just for like a one shot is tricky and there's a lot of work that has to go into that as a game runner. And I think it's important to keep in mind if your GM doesn't want to run a game that the entire group wants to play, other people in the group can actually step up to also run that as well. It doesn't always have to be on a forever GM or whoever's kind of the normal GM of the group, too. Other people are able to take on that responsibility if that's a game that you really, really want to play and that speaks to you too, like, Man, I really love this game. Learn it and run it for your friends, because I think that's fantastic. I always love it when my friends run other games that I don't want to run. Yeah, that's actually a really good point, and I think that not to divert too much, but I would say that that's true even if it's just the game that you're playing, even if it's not like the actual rule set that you're playing, but if you're running a game and you're like, I'm just not feeling this anymore. I really don't enjoy running this game. That is something to just bring up with your players that I am not enjoying running this game and explain why and maybe there's something that you guys can all agree to adjust or change about the game that would make it more enjoyable, or maybe you just kill that game. And that's a really hard thing to do when people are invested in things, especially depending on how deeply they're invested. But I had a campaign that was running for well over a month. I think it was like a month and a half or two months that I ended up just going to my players and saying, hey, you know, I'm getting so stressed out trying to think of ways to make this game move forward, and I am enjoying none of it. Can we just start over? Yeah, but that being said, everybody in that game, the people who wanted to rebuild their characters or bring back a character who had died or just do a hard reset were able to because we just kind of started from scratch with similar characters, a similar story. But it was more in line with what I had in mind and hadn't gone so far off of the rails like the first one had. And it ended up being one of my favorite games with honestly, one of my favorite character deaths at my table was a player of mine. He was playing like a rat folk named Rat Damon and Rat Damon faced down a oh gosh, the name in a lithid a mind flare and said at me and the mind flare disintegrated him. And it has gone down as a legend at our table of just like oh yeah, at me. Anytime that player says at me, everybody gets nervous because there was that one time that's so good and that wouldn't have happened if we didn't kill the entire previous version of that game. The previous version of that game had just gone so off the rails that that would have never happened. And that game ended up ending on a really cool and positive note but we had to kill it. So to I guess just emphasize what you were saying about if the GM is not interested in running their game, it's not going to go well. It's never going to be that great because there's a lack of investment from the person who I think in theory has the most investment. Not that your players aren't invested in your game, but just for the amount of time that it takes to set up and host a game. Your GM really has learning how to play it too, like yourself, at least in my experience. So I've recently started not recently, it's been a few months, but I've started a game of Monster the Week and my role as the keeper of that game I read through the entire book. I actually have the supplement for it and I made sure to read through everything and was trying to be as well versed in the rules as possible. While my players only really read the reference sheets of that game and their own character sheets. And that's not to say that they care less about that game, but there is just a larger investment that a GM has to make when it comes to running games, whether it be having to read an entire rulebook and being more well versed in the rules and all of those small things, or even teaching the players how to play. Yeah, no, definitely. It's actually the reason why I have not run a game of Vampire the Masquerade is I've been asked to like hey, can you run a game of ETM? And I'm like, no, because I don't know enough about the masquerade I don't know enough about the world of darkness to feel comfortable being the storyteller for that game because I just lack so much knowledge in it and I frankly feel like my investment in it would be disingenuous in the element of like oh, I could just watch a ton of videos of explainers of Vampire the Masquerade and read the books because they are on my bookshelf and just read all of the stuff about Vampire the Masquerade. But I haven't had a moment where I felt particularly grabbed by it. That being said, there is someone who has reached out and said that they want to run a game and they want me to be a player. And now as a player, I am interested in Vampire. I think it would be well, because that is a level of investment that I'm comfortable with. And also I don't feel like I'd be ruining anything or ruining the not ruining, but spoiling the experience for anybody else at the table by being ignorant of the lore of Vampire the Masquerade. Because if I'm playing so important yeah, because I wouldn't want to get anything factually wrong about the world of darkness or about the way that things work based upon my in the moment decision making, right. Where it's like somebody's asking me a question about something lore related. And I wouldn't want to pause the entire game, go on a Wikipedia rabbit hole and find the answer. I would probably just write down what my response is as like, okay, this is canon now. And I would worry that in a game with so much investment in its lore that that sort of on the floor decision making would spoil the experience rather than enhance it. Yeah, absolutely. I would completely agree with that, and I think that's a good point in knowing what's important in these games. So Vampire the Masquerade is a great example of the lore, is really important. The lore of the world that has been built up over all of these years is very important to the game. And while you still could play with using different lore, it wouldn't work as well. I shouldn't say it wouldn't work as well. That's not the intended experience that a lot of people expect. Yeah, I think that that would be for anybody who is I think for anybody who is invested in the lore of the world, it would not be what they were expecting and you would be breaching the social contract. A bit of following people's expectations for a game, because you can't invite somebody to a game of like, oh, we're going to play a game of D D, and it's like, but guess what, guys? It's set in the Wild West and actually there are no fantasy races. We're all playing as human gunslingers. And that is the premise of this game. It is the 5D rule set, but nothing that you would be expecting when you're invited to a game of Dungeons and Dragons unless somebody told you, hey, we're going to do something wildly different with the genre. We're going to do something very different with the lore. Exactly. And that's expectations is so important. Yeah, no, absolutely. And that's, I think, one of the things that does vary based upon the game system that you're playing. Right. Like, if I'm playing the game, I have the Conan RPG, which is a system which I really would love to play because it's about two D twenty systems. They seem interesting. Two d twenty system. I like rolling two D twenty s. It's a lot of fun and the way that the system if I'm remembering right, because it's been a minute since I've read it, but it's almost like inverted. Like rolling low is your objective and rolling high is not good. Yeah, it's like upside down in my brain. And I'm like, what a fun and creative way to use the same polyhedrals that we use all over the place. But I really want to play it. But that game, it's a Conan game, right? Like, if you're playing the Conan RPG, people are going to expect it to be in that universe, right? Like it's baked in it's on the tin. It's part of why we're here is you invited me to play Conan. Why are we not in the Hyporion age playing Barbarians? What are we doing here if we're playing in some other made up universe? I guess, I mean, they're all made up universes, but you know what I mean? Like you're playing some other universe. Why are we playing the Conan RPG. So there is definitely something to say about expectations. When you invite someone to call of Cthulhu, you may be able to get away with like I mean, there are definitely so many versions of call of Cthulhu, but when you invite people to the expectation that they are going to be dealing with this sort of existential lovecraftian creepiness is, I think, the piece of it that is more requisite than any particular set of lore. Right. Because lovecraftian is such a breadth of genre that you could set your Call of Cthulhu game in the 1920s, in the 1950s, in the 1870s, you have more leeway for genre because Lovecraftian mythos has such a wide breadth of available expectations. Yeah, for sure. I absolutely agree. And that's where, again, looking at what's important in the game is really important because looking at Conan RPG, like, the setting is very important. Looking at Vampire, the Masquerade, the lore is very important. Then there's other games like Call of Cthulhu, and I would even say things like Monster the Week, where it's mostly an idea. Like, this is the type of story we want to play when it comes to the setting. And what you actually encounter is what varies. That isn't as important. There's no lore that you have to follow because when I sign up to play Monster of the Week, I expect to hunt a monster. That's really my only social cons, my only expectation going in. I expect to hunt a monster. And if I don't, then I'm not playing that game. Yeah, exactly. Any particular lore? Exactly. Like, if you're playing Monster of the Week and there's no monster, then that would call into question why you chose Monster of the Week to play out your, I don't know, social etiquette scenario, right? Where it's like, oh, well, this man has been flirting with the Duchess and you have the letter, and you might be able to spoil the if you're having a Regency era conflict from a Jane Austen novel. Like, maybe Monster of the Week isn't the right game for you to play, unless suddenly a monster jumps out, in which case, by all means, set it in the Regency era. It's going to be so fun to do that. I kind of want to do that now. Exactly. There are so many different ideas that you can fit into a monster hunting story. That's what I love about Doctor Who. I've been watching a lot of recently that's a Monster of the Week show through and through and they do so much random stuff because it can go anywhere in time, anywhere in space, so it doesn't matter. All that matters is there's always a monster. And there's a Doctor. Yeah. It'S on the label. If the Doctor wasn't there, then something is very off about your episode and we'll probably need to address that at some point. I'm sure that in the history of Doctor Who, there has been an episode where the Doctor didn't make an appearance. I'm sure that there's somebody who would listen to this and be like, I know exactly the episode where the Doctor was at the present the entire time. And I'm like, yes, but that is like a direct it's running counter to our expectations. Deliberately. Exactly. But the expectation is that you're going to get a Doctor and you're going to have some new wacky adventure that you're stumbling into through your time and space machine. Yeah, it's amazing, but that's what I think is really important, that's what I try and talk about a lot, is like, there are games that are meant for specific types of stories and it doesn't necessarily narrow what types of stories you can tell. It's just, yeah, Monster of the Week is meant for monster hunting stories. Blades in the Dark is meant for freaking oh, God, why can't I remember what they're called in the book? The player characters scum, but I know that's Merckborg. Is it the same thing. Whatever the characters are in Blades in the Dark, you're supposed to be basically like the bottom of the barrel criminals in a horrible, terrible city, working your way up and you're supposed to be committing crimes and heists and stuff like that. That's like the basis of the story. You can have different settings for that. You can make the city whatever you want, you can make the people whatever you want, but the base of the game is to commit crimes and heists and those types of stories, that's what built for. And it's amazing. And it's not that you can't play those types of stories in other games, there's just games that do those stories really well because those are what they're built for. Yeah, I think that there's two other things in this along this vein that I do kind of want to address as far as picking a new system. Because you brought up Blades of the Dark. Zeba Shoe had a video about running heists in DND five E. And I think he even mentioned in the video about people asking, why don't you just learn how to play Blades of the Dark? Why don't you just play a different system? If you really wanted to do this, why are you using all of these different rules in order to play what? You could play more, I guess more in genre, in Blades of the Dark since that's what you're doing. Why jerry Rig. Blades of the dark into five e. And I think the response and I've borrowed this to myself whenever I'm recreating the wheel, right? It's like there's some other game that would be better suited for this. And I'm adding those features into five E. Like, I've added sanity mechanics into five E. And it's like, well, you could play Call of Cthulhu. And it's like, well, there's a few reasons why I don't. And maybe this applies to somebody who's eyeballing other games and wondering whether they should try playing those, or if they should just steal features and import them into their own game. Yes. Which is wrong doing. Do your players want to learn a new system right now? Are they invested with the world that they're currently playing in? And are you going to be engaging with those rules for a long enough period of time to make it worth learning an entirely new system to do it? Are you running a heist? In which case, if you're running a Heist, it's probably not worth it to learn Blades in the Dark and play a game of that and then never run another Heist again. Right. Like, you have to consider, is that the thing that you and your players are interested in doing time and time again, or is it going to be like a one shot, in which case maybe just borrowing some ideas is enough and just running the game in the system that you already know, maybe that's enough? Yeah, I completely agree. I think there's nothing wrong with modifying a game you're already playing. I think it's great to play games that are built for specific stories, but if you're comfortable playing Fifth Edition or whatever system you want to play and you're comfortable playing that you're comfortable running it, then just go with that game and modify it if you need to. I am completely fine with that. I find it even fascinating to see what the modifications that people make to those games. It's amazing. But I think that's a great point is how long do you want to use this game and is that investment worth it? Yeah. And I do think that while I do believe that more people should be comfortable trying out new systems and be comfortable trying out new games at their table, I do also completely understand, like, this is my Saturday. I want to just go and play the game, and I don't want to have. To learn a new system every single week or I don't want to learn a new system every month or even every six months. I only spend like, as a player, it's like I would only spend the two to 4 hours a week to play the game, and that's about my only interaction with it. I don't want to learn a new game. Right. Like, I get it if you're busy. This isn't like your number one, I'm obsessed with it hobby like it is for, like, us, that is also fine and perfectly valid to just be like, hey, I'd rather just play the game that I already know, and there's nothing. Wrong with being in your comfort zone. Yeah. So that's fair as well. On a slightly different note, but it did come to mind and I made a note of it. Hi. Time for the middle segment of the episode to give a little bit of a break. If you need to get some water, go get some water. If you need a snack, make sure to go get a snack. This is the time to do it, I guess. But I hope that you are enjoying this episode of the RPG Goblin so far. And if you are, please make sure to leave a review wherever you listen to the RPG Goblin, whether it be Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, anything, please make sure to leave a review because it lets me know that people are enjoying it, keeps this podcast going because I absolutely love doing this and I want to continue. And if you're really enjoying Zachariah and the ideas that he please, please make sure to go check him out on DMs Guild, which again, all you have to do is type in his name, Zachariah, which will be in the description of this episode and in the title, so it'll make it easy for you. And you can find all of the awesome DND Five E content that he has made and is really, really great to add into your own personal games because they're really fun mechanics. Now, before we roll the promo, which is going to be for Game Master Monday podcast, which is a fantastic show that is almost kind of like a bit of a sister podcast in the way that they actually run a different game every single episode, or at least a one shot spread out through a couple episodes. And basically they play a bunch of different games so that you can get a taste of them and see how awesome they are. Just really awesome show. So make sure to stick around for the promo. But first, the next episode of The RPG Goblin is going to be coming out on September 15 and it is going to be an episode about The Guide to Death, which is a project anthology game that is going to be coming out on Kickstarter soon. And I bring on the project manager, Mark Shepherd to talk all about this game with you. And I am so, so very excited because this entire anthology is all about exploring death through short TTRPG games and essays and it's such a cool project. So make sure to keep your eyes and ears open for when that episode comes out again, september 15. And yeah, I think that is enough for this part of the episode. Let's get into the promo. At last, I have reached the tallest peak in all the world, where the wisest person lives. Finally, I'll get the answers I seek. Welcome. I am the wisest person in the world. Ask me your question. What is my purpose in life? What should I be doing to achieve pure happiness? You must stream game master Monday. Come again? Game Master Monday, the bi weekly podcast that plays a new one shot in a new system in a new setting, with the new casts every episode. Listening to their funny jokes and wild stories is the only path to happiness. My child sick. I'm going to go home and binge the whole thing right now. What a nice kid. Oh, dear, he fell off the mountain. Now they'll never know how good game Master Monday is. On a slightly different note, but it did come to mind, and I made a note of it, is when you are going to play a new game and you're like, okay, I have in front of me the Warhammer 40K Wrath and Glory box set. I'm all gung ho to play it. This is based on a true story of I have all of this and I'm gung ho to play it. How do you actually go about playing that for the first time at the table? What level of investment do you, as a DM, take in learning those rules and in getting your players up to speed with those rules in order to play a one shot or something in a system that you've never played before? I have my system for doing it. I'd actually love to hear it. So I think a good example of this is we did this. It wasn't in a tabletop RPG, but it is the most recent new game that I played, and it was Munchkin. Have you ever played Munchkin? Fun. Yeah, munchkin's great. Okay. I'd never played Munchkin before, and I have a group of friends. Like, two people at the table have played it before, but it was years ago and they don't really remember. And then there's two people, myself and another friend who have never played we've never played it. And we have the what is it? It's the critical role, like Munchkin box set. And so we're like, okay, we're going to be playing with these cards. One, it's like a variation of a game that two of us have never played, and so the other two had never played this version of it. So it's all brand new now. It's like even your valid knowledge and remembrances from years ago are no longer valid because these have different cards with different rules. And the way that we would go about learning it is we all agreed at the start of it, I was like, we're going to just start playing. I've read through the rules. But reading through the rules doesn't mean anything when you sit down at the table, right? Because immediately half of the stuff you read falls out of your head. Yes. And it's like, okay, we're going to start playing. And if we run across a situation that we don't know what the rules are, we're going to make a call on the spot, decide what the rule is and keep playing. And then if we stumble upon that rule at some point in the future and we find out how wrong we were, then we'll change it and we'll do that going forward. But we're not going to stop the game for everybody to look up the exact rule because that's going to happen so often that you're never going to get to actually playing. And I would say I do the same thing for RPGs. Like, if I'm sitting down to play a Merck Borg is a bad example. It's so rules light. You can make up the rules on the spot, that's fine. But let's say I'm playing pathfinder, right? Like, and it's going to be my first time playing Pathfinder. I fundamentally disagree with the idea of we're playing a game. We all gathered here on our day off to spend 4 hours to play this game and I'm going to spend an hour of it looking up rules. I really do not like the idea of that as a player or as a DM. As much as I like looking up rules and learning rules in my spare time when I'm sitting there at the table, I don't want to spend my time researching. That isn't my idea of this. Yeah. So I'm like, once we get to the table, you turn to your DM and you say, make a call, how do we rule this scenario? And the DM will use their best understanding of the rules to make a fair decision. And that's what you're going to do until later when we end up looking this rule up later and we find out that we were totally wrong. Yeah. Even if you're going to play a game for a one shot, that's the best way to do it, just make a call because you probably won't play this game more if you're just going to be playing it this one time. There's no reason to do all this research into the rules just to be like, okay, that was fun, and never touch it again. Yeah. Especially on a system that is a lot more heavy if you don't have of course, this is advice more for geared towards like you're playing a game that you came across and you don't know anybody who knows the rules, right? It's like, how do you learn the rules to a game that you've never played before? It's like well, literally, you make a call in the moment whenever you stumble across something that you don't know how to handle, and then you just carry on. That is precedent, and you use that rule for the rest of the evening. And if it seems like that is yeah, and as long as it's the same rules for everybody and that rule isn't like changing willy nilly or without cause because you may discover that your call was wrong. Right. It's like, hey, I made the call that it would be fair to do this in the given scenario. And it turns out that if we allow that, that the game becomes broken and completely unplayable super fast. Right. And then it's like, okay, maybe I made the wrong call on that. Maybe we'll try it a different way. And then you'll probably look in the rules and find out that that is not the way that that calling is supposed to be made. Hopefully. Yeah, but I mean, as long as you're in a good group, those mistakes on calling a rule and stuff like that shouldn't be that big of a deal because we're all just trying to play and have fun. And as long as that was achieved as we were playing, then no harm, no foul. Yeah, exactly. There are some, like in the case of Warhammer 40K Wrath and Glory, right? This is a tabletop RPG that is set in Warhammer 40 K's Universe. And that is the reason I want to play it. That is the entire reason. It's just I like the universe of Warhammer. I like the genre that it has created and I want to play in that universe. And I'm not particularly interested in investing in the actual War game. So this seems right down my alley. The system is like it is like a dice pool system with like, D Sixes. It's a D Six system and it seems very cool, and I have the box set for it, but I do know that the box set does not have all the rules in it, obviously, right? Like, it's the condensed version of it. So there will be scenarios that we come across that are going to be outside of the scope of the beginner box rulebook. And when that happens, I'm going to have to just make a call for somebody to roll a die. And if they roll the number high, they get to do the thing. Right. That fundamentally, I think, as far as tabletop games that have a DM game, master storyteller, whatever, whoever the person is that is your master of ceremonies and your referee. That person making the call of, hey, flip a coin if heads you get the thing is fundamentally, historically important for the purposes of running this sort of game at a table. It's the entire function, right. Like the entire function of the DM historically is as a referee for War games to decide when two players can't decide who wins a given bout. It's like, well, there's somebody sitting on the sideline, an impartial party who makes the call. Yeah. And that's actually an interesting way to look at it as well, which I do want to talk a bit about since you mentioned that you really want to play Warhammer for the setting itself. That's a big draw of why you want to play that game. That is also an important element when looking at TTRPGs, is the setting and the themes that you are going to be playing in that game with. Like looking at Vampire, the Masquerade, people who are in love with that setting would want to play that game because they love that lore and they love everything that comes with it. Same thing with Warhammer. There's some other games that Alien RPG even, could be the same thing with, you know, and love those movies and you want to explore that world. Yeah. Conan and also there's a Dune RPG, there's a whole bunch of them, where it's like, yeah, you're going for not just for the mechanics of a game, you're absolutely going for the genre. And hopefully the creators of this game have matched the mechanics to the genre of the game. And that's at least always the hope. I'm sure that there are games out there where that is not the case right. Where the creators of the game might have made a miscalculation of the kind of game that they were running. And maybe the mechanics don't match the genre particularly well. But I haven't encountered that yet. So, so far my experience has been that there are some games that I like the mechanics of, others that I don't. But I haven't found one yet that felt particularly mismatched. Because I haven't either, really. When I've looked through and read, I mean, I've played quite a few games, a lot of them shorter one shots. But I haven't encountered any issues where it's like, oh, man, that's a weird rule to put in this magical girl game. Yeah. And the mechanics of wrath and glory. What I think is really interesting about the Warhammer game particularly sorry, the Warhammer 40K Wrath and Glory. The reason why I keep specifying this, because there is a separate, very different warhammer fantasy RPG. Warhammer fantasy RPG has been around since the least, and Warhammer 40K Wrath and Glory has been around since, I think, 2014 or 2016. It's relatively new. And Warhammer versus Warhammer is also just kind of confusing to explain to anybody who hasn't physically seen the difference because it's like, oh, there's like this whole fantasy genre that is Warhammer, and there's this whole science fiction genre that is Warhammer. And the worlds aren't really connected. I think you can put together a canon where they somehow connect, but I don't care to because I think keeping them separate is better because they're both accomplishing very different kinds of settings, worlds stuff. But if you look at the actual mechanics of Wrath and Glory, the game is not weirdly enough, not a super tactical game, which I thought was interesting because the war game itself is a war game and is all about tactics and fighting and combat. But the actual RPG that they built is mechanically a lot more similar to Vampire the Masquerade. It's a D Six system instead of a D Ten system, but it is largely based upon a pool of dice and a bunch of successes or failures adding up to whether you succeed or fail. While the subject matter is, oh, do you succeed or fail at punching through the hull of a ship or breaking a space ORC's jaw or whatever? The actual mechanics of it are a lot more narrative focused, and you can see that in systems like Vampire the Masquerade, how the mechanics of it serve narrative. And I thought that that was very interesting that the warhammer game, to make itself super contrast from the war game that it originated from, has mechanics that are a lot more focused on emphasizing narrative rather than combat mechanics like tactile positioning mechanics. Fascinating. Yeah, it's really one of the reasons why I'm so interested in it is because it's a lot more of a narratively focused set of mechanics when you look at it. That's amazing. Which, again, that's another good thing to keep in mind is like, do I want to focus on combat or do I want to focus on more storytelling that's social and stuff like that. And looking at those mechanics too, and even knowing what you want to play around with, let's say you've only played really heavy tactical TTRPGs that are very combat focused, you might want to try something light and more narrative just to see how that feels. Too. Yeah, and I think in the case of, like, the more crunchy systems, I think tend to be the ones that are less storytelling focused, they're a lot more technical. And I think that that is suitable for an audience that is more technically inclined, I guess, as far as the games that they play, that isn't personally, for me, I do like games that are narrative. Of course, I love combat in DND and I like the role that it serves in playing the game as far as creating drama and tension and creating a deeper investment because there are stakes. But I think of it as more of as a conveyor belt for stakes than as it was so satisfying when you moved from this position on the map to that position of the map in order to put yourself in a position to succeed here. When my players talk about combat, at least the group that I have together, right, we never talk particularly about the tactical elements of combat after the combat is done, right. Like nobody reminisces about their positioning or about their choice to use. People will talk about spells, like spells making an impact or they'll talk about. Things that they did. Yeah, they'll talk about critically hitting this thing, whatever. But they won't talk about the technical elements of the decision making for the combat long after it's done. They will talk about the narrative impact of who died, who lived, who saved whom, if anybody did something where they made a choice to save one person rather than leave, they'll talk about the narrative impact of what the combat's fallout is a lot more which I know is very like for me. I like chess, I like playing chess, right? And chess is entirely a tactical game and the joy does come from like oh yes, I moved here, I did this and this is why I won. Right. But I feel like in tabletop games, the group that I'm playing with on a regular basis has never been particularly interested in that kind of tactical satisfaction. So for me, I will be drawn more towards games that have mechanics to push the narrative forward or will where combat is fast yet impactful, where I do want them to have obviously choices and decisions that they make that are based off of those combat scenarios. But I don't want them to be pushed out of their narrative choices because they had to make a smart tactical decision, if that makes sense. It almost bridges a gap into and we'll probably talk about this at some point in more in depth but it almost is like the gap between people who power game to play the game for the sake of being good at the game versus people who just want to play the game in order to tell a particular type of story or. Bring that middle ground character. Yeah. So I think that there's definitely like leanings into that territory that I'm getting with this is like if the game doesn't have a combat system, I don't mind as long as if there is combat, that combat has a meaningful outcome. Right. And I think that's partially on whoever's running it as well as whoever's running the game also makes a lot of the tone differences too, because there are people who like to run D and D in the way of having the combats be few and far between but very heavy in narrative. And there's people who like to play in a way that they present combats often for people to just demolish enemies. And so even if the game is set towards a specific view and how to play the game, that doesn't mean it will always match up because it will always semi depend on well, not semi, it will depend on who's running the game too. Yeah. Well, I also think that there is another thing to be said for the amount of combat that you want in your game is you can kind of suss out based on if you're looking at how much combat is there and how long will it take, you can look at the number of hit points that things have. And interestingly for me, even a game like Merckborg, right, where it's like, oh, you have such a low hit point pool, you have two hit points and you might die at any time. I feel like for me, the game drifts often more into narrative than combat because combat is such a risky thing that your players will avoid it whenever possible unless it is something that they feel like they absolutely have to partake in. They have to deal with it. They can't just like, you know, normally they would just be like, oh, I run away and then you roll a check and see if they got away. Or they would be like, no, I'm not going to travel to the Doom Cave of Death and do that unless there's a strong enough reason. Yeah, exactly. Right. But it's like unless they feel like they have a reason to go there. And so I felt like for me, proportionally, the amount of time spent in combat in a game like Merck Borg is so much lower than in a game than in a rules is written standard game of DND five E. Right. Or than in a game of well, literally any game with low hit points, you can kind of say the same thing. Like lower hit points, I think naturally means that your combats will well, not even naturally. Your combats will be shorter, the hit points are smaller, there will be fewer turns. Monster of the week too, because exactly. Hunters have like seven hit points. Well, the hunters have seven and then the monsters can have up to like maybe twelve. But that's like really high level when people have weapons that could do like four or five hit points in a hit. Yeah, no, absolutely. And so I think that there is absolutely something to say about the correlation between like, oh, are the hit points lower? You'll end up with ironically, less combat and more narrative in a combat focused game that has lower hit points. Right. Also even looking at the abilities that the characters get as well and how focused they are on combat versus how focused they are on maybe social skills or mental skills and stuff like. I mean, and that brings us full circle back to like Call of Cthulhu. It is an investigation based game. It is a game that has a lot of stats that are related to investigations. There are a lot more mental stats than in something like 5D, but that's because that is the focus of the game is about making checks in order to investigate things and get a better understanding of the mystery that is to be solved. Because there's always a mystery to be. Solved and it will usually probably end deadly. Yeah, that is sort of the horror is almost like self imposed in some of Craftian stories, where it's like it gets worse because you're looking into it, where if you just were blissfully unaware, then you wouldn't be able to comprehend what it is that you're seeing. And so you just wouldn't. This is a bit of a bridge of genre, but it is lovecraftian, though. But did you ever hear about or play the game Bloodborne? Yes, I've heard about it and I've been wanting to play it so bad. Hopefully someday maybe they'll bring in HD remaster out, but I'm not going to hold my breath because people have been saying that for years. But there is an element in that game where you collect insight and as your insight rises, like this score, basically of insight rises, you're able to actually see more enemies. You can see different things and it's like, well, if you raise your insight, you oddly become more like the world around you becomes more bizarre and more strange and more alien because you have more insight into the world around you. So you have context by which to see more lovecraftian horrors and move further away from the grounded world. And I think that there's an element of that in Lovecraftian horror that is super dope. Yeah, no, for sure. That you definitely could work into. I mean, naturally, that is sort of the like there's like madness mechanics in Call of Cthulhu that are similar to Know, but there's also ways to convert that into your current game if you're not ready to take the plunge and play a brand new game. But you want those elements. There are conversions. I know that Sandy Peterson made a Cthulhu book, or maybe it's a PDF that converts like Call of Cthulhu Things. Because if I'm not mistaken, sandy Peterson helped create or did create Call of Cthulhu. I believe so, because I recently saw that as well. Yeah. And I know that he made a pathfinder conversion for Call of Cthulhu Things and Pathfinder. I think he did one for five E as well. But I think it's a lot harder to find but you can find those sorts of things, too if you're not ready to start the plunge into a brand new RPG. Absolutely. I completely agree. And you can even do those things in a more narrative way, too, if you don't want the mechanics. You could absolutely add lovecraftian horror into any game that you do. Just your approach, whether you want to do it through narrative and storytelling or mechanics is up to you. Yeah. And how important it is that your mechanics reflect the narrative or not, depending upon what level of abstraction you're content with. I, for one, like things to sort of run parallel, but not in depth. Right. I don't want to have people make a I actually was talking to a friend about this. I was like, we should make a game that is way too detailed to the point that combat well, because my thought was, like, you could have every articulation of your arm and joints be a separate action. So to do one round of combat, you could do like 28 actions. You have to use an arm action in order to bend your elbow action, in order to point your sword action. And then you could use, like, 20 some turns just in order to do, like, a basic single thing from DND, but it would be so in depth, and the entire game would be just one round of combat. That would be the entire four hour session is just one round of combat. A slight shift in position and we end. And I really want to make this a thing, but at the same time, it's purely just there as almost like a satire of the idea of being too in depth in your combat. Yeah. We're denying you any abstraction of combat and therefore your decisions are all meaningful, but nothing ever happens. Oh, my God. That would be absolutely insane. If I had the inclination, I would want to create like 100 page PDF for this, but it's just such a dumb idea. I'll never actually make it. But somewhere out there, if someone has the dedication, I would love to see it. Yes, please, someone do it. It'd be very insane and awesome to see. Yeah. And the entire game would just be one round of combat. The game. One round of combat. The game. Oh, my Lord. To the entire point of today's topic, I think that if you like the genre, if you like the vibe of the game, I would look at, like, literally, do you like the box art in the title? Look at the rules, get, like, a general idea of the basic game loop. That very fundamental of, like, if I'm looking at Call of Cthulhu, it's roll percentiles roll. I believe it's a roll under your score, right? So if you have like a 65 score, you want to roll below that in order to succeed. And that is like the basic gameplay loop. If it's DND five E, it's roll a D 20 roll high, right? That is the fundamental gameplay loop that everything is based around. Sorry. So you find that first fundamental gameplay loop, and that is the gist of the game. Gloss over the basic version of the rules, and then just see if your players are down to give it a one shot. See if they want to play it and sit down and be like, we're going to play this game. We don't know the rules, but we're going to learn them together. And if we come across anything, we don't know what the rule is. We're just going to make it up and keep moving and we'll just write it down and look it up later. And if we all have fun, maybe play this some more. And if we absolutely. If. Everybody hates it by the time that we're done, we'll never play it again. Exactly. As long as you're clear. No, but I think that's a great thing, playing a one shot in a system first, or even a mini arc that might be like two to five sessions. Well, I mean, how many one shots are really one shots, Willow? Like, how many of your one shots actually ran for one session and then stopped? I'm sure that there's some, but there's got to be a plethora that turned into twos. There are a lot of DND five E one shots that I've been a part of that end up turning into a million shots. I've actually found when I switched to playing other TTRPGs that are more specifically geared towards one shots, suddenly they started to actually fit in one session miraculously. I mean, to be fair, I did once play Merck Borg while on vacation in a hotel room with some friends, and it was just one session. But you're absolutely right. Longer form games seem to just force themselves to be longer. Yeah, once it starts getting into more crunchy and more rules and stuff like that, I feel like that's kind of how it happens. But what I was going to say is, when it comes to those games, a one shot or even like a mini arc, you can play just one of those. Just as simple as it comes. We're going to go through a story and then when you finish playing, you can always decide what you want to do. And I actually love this quote. I can't remember where I saw it, but a one shot can be a successful pilot episode to a campaign, basically. So if you really love the game and you love the stories and you love the characters, when you play a one shot, just continue on. If you had that much fun with it, you can always turn it into a much larger campaign. And that's just fantastic. I think. Yeah, I agree. I think that that is a good summation of it, to give things a try and to see how they go. Because if you find a game that you really, really like and that you very much enjoy, then maybe that can be the game that you guys are playing as a group for years and years to come. Because there's a lot of them. There's so many. There are. And I don't think that I will ever play through all of the games I would love to play through in my life because there are just so many and they also take time to play themselves, too. It can take several weeks to even years if you're going through long form campaigns. But it is absolutely fascinating. And it's always going to be when you finish your game, it's like, what are we going to play next? And I do hope that you consider a new game just even to see what is out there. And like Zachariah said, if it's going to be the new game that you play for years and years and years, because if you at least give it a shot, you give it that opportunity to become that. So much for talking to me again and taking time out of your day. I do appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you for coming on again and talking about me with this, because this has been amazing. And talking about games is always extremely fun and I always enjoy talking with you. So, yeah, thank you so much for coming on and thank you, everyone who listened and, yeah, I think that is the end of the episode. Please make sure to go check out Zachariah's content on Dmskilled again. All you have to do is look up his name, Zachariah, and I think that is the end. So thank you, everyone so much and thank you, Zachariah, for joining me. Thank you.