What’s hot in Storygames 2018

This article is meant to be a companion piece to the Storygames panel at Dragonmeet 2018 and a place to expand slightly on my thoughts for the year.

The game I’ve found most interesting

It wasn’t a new game but a game that felt revitalised and more relevant. Paul Czege’s Clay that woke is about many things but is definitely about masculinity and the concept of what means to be a good or moral man.

This question already felt relevant when the game was first released but now feels burningly pertinent.

In addition its portrayal of a physically powerful but numerically inferior species living inside an alienated human population provides a perfect playground for exploring issues of race, power and the relationship between minority and majority groups.

It also the best game I’ve found for trying to make sense of Kanye West as virtually everything he does makes a perfect Clay plotline.

Minotaur World

I played an online playtest of a PbtA version of the original rules called Minotaur World and it brought me back to the strange and wonderful world of the city and the Deringoglade.

Doing PbtA; better

Last year I was moaning about games that used the PbtA but were so slavish to the formula that they were essentially useless and overly complicated. “Disempowered by the Apocalypse” if you like.

This year there seemed to be a new wave of lightweight PbtA games. The stats have become approaches, rather like Fate Accelerated.

They don’t have attribute related moves or basic moves. Playbooks have given way to bundles of abilities that focus more on enabling the metagame empowerment of the players.

Dice modifiers have boiled down to a plus or minus one and the adoption of the idea of advantage and disadvantage. Rolling 3d6 instead of 2d6 and keeping either the highest two or lowest two.

I thought Vagabonds of Dyfed was a great example of a lightweight adoption of PbtA rules combined with genre and scenario moves and mini-systems.

Minotaur World also fits into this category of lightweight Apocalypse games.

Second editions

I’ve also been reading Jason Morningstar’s posts on Drip about his plans for a Second Edition of Fiasco. The strange part of the experience is that he has no intention of addressing any of the problems I feel the game has.

I felt exactly the same way about the second edition of Summerland that was also released this year. It kept exactly the same mix of good and bad elements as the original and just changed the rules.

The bigger point though is that Fiasco will be ten years old next year. A lot of games that are sometimes thought of as unconventional or experimental are now getting long in tooth and worthy of reinvention for a new audience and with the advantage of all that we’ve learnt about game design in the meantime.

Old games

I spent 2018 playing with different groups of people and gaming in different contexts. The result was that I spent a lot more time than normal revisiting old games and classics.

It was interesting to replay some of those games with new eyes. One old favourite that remained fresh and interesting was Final Girl which retained all the power of its interesting winnowing mechanic and which allows people to sketch out interesting characters really quickly.

I also finally played the dice tower version of Dread which was quite interesting. It feels like its perfect for genres where danger lurks around every corner like zombie shows or espionage stories.