2018
Dungeons and Dragons
This is D&D’s world, we just game in it.
As someone who mostly spends their time playing indie games even I can’t deny that the bulk of roleplaying is now about Dungeons and Dragons. In a way we’ve come back full circle to the 70s and 80s.
Lots of people play Fifth Edition and they play it in lots of ways. The idea that basic killing and looting is really just the platform that the game is built on is definitely back. Some groups put a post-modern ironic spin on top, others a whimsical feel in the vein of Final Fantasy and others bring a queer twist to the story of a group of friends camping in the wilderness (but still killing monsters and taking their treasure).
From an indie perspective one of the interesting things to see over the year was a change in the tone of what used to simply be the OSR movement. 5th Edition is so much the D&D game and what used to be the OSR “feel” is now a style within a broad range of play experiences of the same rules. We are in many ways back to the heyday of D&D where the style and conventions of the groups matter a lot more than the actual rules.
I felt that some of the most exciting indie games came from this dialogue between 5th Edition and the OSR design group. Games like Black Hack 2nd Edition, Ironsworn and Knave all seemed to me to express a desire to find some unique space of play that they could occupy outside of the D&D hegemony.
Online turmoil
2018 was the year that G+ was served its notice. The network was perfect for roleplaying as it was integrated with Google Docs and Hangouts and was also unpopular enough that it didn’t really have much in the way of spam or marketing.
In indie terms it is interesting that a lot of people are not going for another social network but instead going back to blogs and self-publishing which is cool.
However even before G+ closed down there were a lot of things switching to Reddit, such as the 200-word RPG competition. I don’t feel very comfortable with the site and its main audience so I ended up barely participating in the discussion around the competition this year.
Rolegate
I stumbled onto Rolegate via G+ and it is quite a cool idea. It’s essentially a strucured webchat application that focuses on enabling asynchronous online roleplaying sessions.
Currently the site focuses on the typical D&D experience of a GM-led party-based game with lots of rolls and combat.
It’s given me the opportunity to try some of the more conventionally structured indie games that aren’t that popular with storygaming groups.
