Year in review: 2020

One of the interesting things about 2020 is that so many of us had a very similar experience this year. When catching up with gaming friends from around the world this year it is surprising how much can go let unsaid. “This year hunh?”.

Apart from an aberration in the first three months of this year my gaming year has been initially suspended and then slowly old staples and classics, comforting in their familiarity but made strange again by being played online at a distance by voice and video call.

Online gaming

At first I didn’t really feel like playing very much but since then I’ve launched myself into the world of Discord although for a lot of established groups it is hard to understand how they work and how to actually get into a game. All of these places still don’t really welcome people outside of the group except by invitation.

Once I’d got into it though there is a lot to be said about games over online chat. You get people turning up from all over the world instead of being divided according to the whims of the transport system. I particularly enjoyed being able to “teleport” from the game straight to bed rather than having to factor in a trip home.

Figuring out what games work in the medium has been a bit of a struggle though. One of my favourite games prior to lockdown involves dominoes and that has been hard to translate online.

I also attended my first online convention which was an interesting experience.

2020 was a year of great art direction and book production. Let’s start with Mork Borg which torn up all conventional design and went with the idea of having a different art direction for each page. It’s cut up collage style reminded me of The Face or punk fanzines but it was an absolute tour de force.

Our Queen Crumbles came in a beautiful black and gold design that really was only let down a little by a lack of contrast making the small light text on a black background illegible. Like fashion though sometimes you have to suffer for art’s sake.

Tools

Itch was important last year but this year by latching onto the game jams functionality Itch took it to a whole new level. For many creators the money from the online store also made a difference and it was interesting to see how much cooperation, joint bundles and collaboration there was.

After G-Plus closed in 2018 there hasn’t been a single online place for people to gather and talk. This year I feel Gaming Twitter was a thing. Many of the interesting people are there, at the moment the trolling and nastiness isn’t.

Gaming theory

In the absence of other ways of spending your time the opportunity to catch up on reading was a joy. There were so many books that I was able to properly read and engage with this year and I felt a lot of them really enriched my experience of gaming in general.

Dungeons and Dragons is already so ridiculously hegemonic within roleplaying it can be easy to lose sight of how much space is occupies within popular culture generally. The amount of fan art and secondary works things like Critical Role generates is ridiculous and that creates a long tail of influence in pop culture generally.

One of my favourite pieces of roleplaying adjacent pop culture was Raiders by Crom. This is unashamedly influenced by fantasy roleplaying tropes (dungeons of respawning monsters and treasures) but overlays it with a serious and tragic plot. The artwork is also amazing with all the energy and excitement a good roleplaying combat should have.

PbtA avalanche

Last year I was looking forward to Cartel, Root and Voidheart Symphony. While electronic versions and playtests of all those games came out it looks like 2021 is going to be a case of deja vu. Out of the three I think Root is the one I’m most looking forward to now.

Black Armada’s Lost Fleet has also had a lot of positive buzz around it’s electronic versions, so there’s a lot to look forward to.

Played and looking forward to

The game I played most this year was Black Hack as I took part in a regular campaign that used Patrick Stewart’s Deep Carbon Observatory. It’s fun to play something that a lot of other people have played through, you have that shared experience but your own unique twists on it.

The game that I’ve enjoyed playing most was Swords Without Master which is a favourite of mine and its variety of freeform fantasy roleplay is still one that I find liberating and exciting.

I was disappointed I didn’t get a chance to play Tunnel Goons or one of it’s derivatives. I’ve also heard people saying good things about Mausritter so I’ve ordered a copy. Probably the main thing I’m excited about though is some of Vincent Baker’s work in progress. The Burned Over revision of Apocalypse World was incredibly exciting but I wasn’t sure how to run it remotely and his return to the mechanics of Dogs in the Vineyard chimes with a lot of what I’ve wanted to hack with that system but in a format that I suspect will be infinitely more accessible to a general audience.