Why Do You Love The RPGs You Do? It's Worth Thinking About

If you've spent any time at all in RPG spaces, whether online or in-person, you've heard gamers talk about their favorite games. Whether it's one of the early games from the dawn of the hobby, something that exploded on the scene during the boom of the 90s, or one of the various settings that came out of the OSR revolution a few years back, gamers are not shy at all about bigging up the games we love.

However, a lot of these conversations devolve into arguments over time... particularly when we have a round robin regarding game recommendations. With that said, I feel like a lot of these arguments could be avoided if we took a moment to not only ask which games we like, but to actually take a moment to evaluate why we like them.

Really? That edition? Okay, make your case.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.

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One Man's Meat is Another Man's Poison

All of us have favorite games, but even if two different people adore the same RPG, they may love it for wildly different reasons. For example, Pathfinder Classic is still my go-to game for high fantasy RPGs, as it was for a lot of people. But while I loved it primarily because of the robust mechanics that carried on from DND 3.5, for other folks it was their first RPG, and they have a lot of nostalgia for it. Other people really like certain classes like the magus, or they love the Golarion setting, and enjoy exploring its various nooks and crannies.

While all of these players might share the same table, chances are good they're all getting something different out of this one game system. And while you can have that much variation among people who like the same game, you can also have one person who doesn't care for a game for the exact same reason another person absolutely loves it!

As an example...

While a lot of the interest in the FATE Core System has fallen off over the past few years, I remember when this game was everywhere. If you were looking to adapt a property, or if you needed a fast turnaround, this was the system everyone recommended. Horror, fantasy, sci-fi, FATE could do it all! It was easy to learn, easy to play, and it was a story-forward, mechanics-minimum experience that removed a lot of the reading and number crunching from your game, allowing new and experienced players alike to get to grips with the action quickly.

All the stuff I just described is what a lot of people loved about this game. It's also a description of why I was never more than lukewarm on it at best.

Now, does my opinion that this game is primarily just an exercise in cooperative storytelling but which barely has enough components to it for it to claim to be a game mean it's bad? Absolutely not. I'm one RPG fan in a colossal sea of people, and it was plenty successful without me buying a copy and making it my game of choice. And just because I don't subjectively enjoy an experience, that does not mean it isn't the perfect experience for someone looking for that exact type of game.

It was just bad for me.

And this is what I wanted to get to as part of this week's update. Because a lot of the time we know whether we like a game or not... but we don't always stop and ask why we do or don't like something. Especially when the thing we do or don't like might not actually have been the game's fault; a bad GM, awful table mates, too many homebrewed mechanics that just didn't work... a lot of things can make or break a game that have nothing to do with what's between the covers. That's worth thinking about, not just because it can help give you a better sense of what appeals to you as a player (thus making things easier to recommend to you in the future because you can more precisely describe your enjoyments), but because it can help you figure out what experience someone else might be looking for before you tell them the game they definitely need to play next!

We can like our games for whatever reasons we want. We can dislike games for whatever reason we want. But if you can't articulate what about this experience sparks joy, and what does not, then you're going to get into a heated debate with someone while the two of you talk past one another because the fact that this game is a chopped down, rules-light affair where your characters have the survivability of a wet paper bag may very well be the reason one of you hates it, and the other loves it.

Lastly, even though I didn't find a place to work this link in earlier, take a moment to go and read my article 5 Things You Can Do To Be a Better Ambassador For Your Hobby. I figured that gelled nicely with this week's topic.

A Reminder, For Folks Who Haven't Subscribed Yet!

Regular readers have likely seen me talk about this before, but we're only 106 subscribers away from getting the Azukail Games YouTube channel over 1,000 people! Not only that, but we're slightly less than 1,000 hours of watch time away from getting the channel monetized!

Whether you just want to listen to me talk instead of always reading my blog, you're a fan of audio dramas, or you're looking to break into the TTRPG industry and you want the inside scoop from a professional, that channel has a little bit of everything. And once we get it monetized, we'll be able to expand, and do even more stuff! And if you want to support some of my other work, subscribe to my Rumble channel The Literary Mercenary.

I am not allowed to have my own YouTube channel for complicated reasons, which is why I had to go to one of the site's only viable competitors. For the full run down, please read Trying Out Rumble as a Platform For My Audio Dramas (Join Me, Won't You?).

Like, Follow, and Stay in Touch!

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday. To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!

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