Games « Isegoria

Hasbro is being sued by its own shareholders for printing too many Magic cards

Tuesday, January 27th, 2026

Hasbro is being sued by its own shareholders for printing too many Magic cards:

In a 76-page lawsuit filed in the US District Court of Rhode Island last week (via GoLocalProv), a group of investors allege that Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks, former Wizards of the Coast president Cynthia Williams, and company executives engaged in “breaches of their fiduciary duties as directors and/or officers of Hasbro” by devaluing the Magic brand, even as shareholders raised concerns about the ramifications of overprinting cards and sets.

In 2022, the lawsuit says, Bank of America issued a report concluding that Hasbro was “overproducing Magic cards, which have propped up Hasbro’s recent results but are destroying the long-term value of the brand.” Despite questioning from shareholders and analysts, however, the lawsuit alleges that the defendants “repeatedly denied such speculation,” issuing “materially false and misleading” statements during shareholder calls where those concerns were raised.

As a result, the plaintiffs claim Hasbro executives “caused the Company substantial harm by causing it to repurchase its own shares at artificially inflated prices,” as Hasbro spent $125 million to repurchase approximately 1.4 million shares of its own stock from April 2022 to July 2022, when share values had been “artificially inflated” by the outpouring of new Magic sets.

“In total, this caused the Company to overpay for repurchases of its own stock by approximately $55.9 million,” the lawsuit says, which became clear when the company announced declining financial results in following quarters.

Throughout that time, Hasbro maintained that “new Magic sets were to be printed to meet demand from new consumer segments,” which the lawsuit says was “false and misleading.”

“Hasbro’s strategy with regard to printing Magic cards was not as carefully thought out as portrayed,” the lawsuit says. “The Company was in fact printing a volume of Magic sets which exceeded consumer demand; the Company’s inventory allocation management was problematic, particularly as it pertained to the Company’s printing strategy for Magic sets; the Company was overloading the market with Magic sets to generate revenue and to offset shortfalls within the Company; as a result of the Company’s overprinting of Magic sets, existing Magic cards were devalued; and the Company failed to maintain internal controls.”

Posted in Business, Games | No Comments »

The RPG industry is like a water pipe

Friday, January 23rd, 2026

Ken “Whit” Whitman explains how he learned TSR was dying:

A lot of people ask me: “If you were just the Gen Con coordinator, how do you know so much about TSR’s internal strategy?”

Fair question.

Here’s a little story that might give me some legitimacy.

In 1994, TSR’s VP of Marketing, Rick Behling, convinced Lorraine Williams to spend $150,000 on market research.

That was a MASSIVE amount of money for TSR at the time.

They paid Nielsen—yes, the TV ratings people—to add questions about Dungeons & Dragons to one of their regular surveys.

The results came back.

And I was in the meeting when Rick presented them.

Here’s what we learned:

-9 million people had played D&D at some point in their lives.

-2 million people were actively playing.

-TSR controlled 80% of the role-playing game market.

-The other 20% was “leakage” to competitors.

-On paper, we were crushing it.

But then Rick explained the real problem.

He used a metaphor I’ll never forget:

“The RPG industry is like a water pipe. TSR controls the pipe. But there are little springs—little holes—where water leaks out to other companies.

The problem is, the pipe is only about 7 years long.

Most people get into D&D, play for roughly 7 years, and then get out. Forever.

They don’t come back.”

That’s when I realized TSR was in trouble.

Because if your entire business model depends on:

Capturing new players

Flooding them with so much product they can’t afford competitors

Losing them after 7 years

Then finding NEW players to replace them

…you’re not building a sustainable business.

You’re building a treadmill.

And eventually, you run out of new players.

Rick’s strategy—the one TSR actually used—was this:

“Make so much product, there’s no money left over to buy other people’s product.”

Flood the market.

Capture the entire wallet.

Starve the competition.

It worked for a while.

Until it didn’t.

Three years later—1997—TSR collapsed.

Wizards of the Coast bought us.

Spanked us. Hard. Because Wizards figured out what TSR never did: You don’t win by flooding the market for 7 years.

You win by keeping players for LIFE.

So why was I in that meeting?

I was the Gen Con coordinator.

Gen Con was TSR’s biggest marketing event—30,000+ attendees, vendors, distributors, press.

Rick wanted someone who understood the ground-level reality of the market.

I wasn’t an executive.

But I had access.

I saw things.

I heard things.

I was in rooms where strategy was discussed.

And 30 years later, I remember that meeting like it was yesterday.

Because Rick’s “water pipe” metaphor explained everything:

Why TSR made so many products

Why quality dropped

Why retailers couldn’t keep up

Why players got exhausted

Why we collapsed

We optimized for the wrong thing.

7-year wallet capture instead of lifetime engagement.

I’m telling these stories because:

1. I was there. I witnessed things that aren’t in the history books.

2. For my children. So they understand what Dad did and why it mattered.

3. For the ADHD community. Because my brain is Swiss cheese—I forget names but remember strategic presentations from 30 years ago.

4. For gaming history. Because if I don’t tell these stories, they disappear.

Posted in Business, Games | 5 Comments »

What can be seen can be destroyed, so don’t be seen

Tuesday, September 16th, 2025

As NATO prepares for a potential Russian invasion of the Baltic region, planners wonder how drones, hypersonic missiles, and modern kill chains might play out there. A new tabletop game, Littoral Commander: The Baltic, offers answers:

The game depicts a Russian invasion of the Baltic region around 2030. In addition to the Baltic states, the 11 scenarios in the game include a Russian landing to seize the Swedish island of Gotland, an offensive launched from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and missile-equipped U.S. Marines attempting to stop Russian warships from breaking out of the Baltic to hunt convoys in the Atlantic. There is even a humanitarian scenario where the U.S. has to evacuate civilians while Russia tries to disrupt the operation.

[…]

Platoons — represented by cardboard pieces on the map — are rated for firepower, range and speed. The American forces include a plethora of types: Marine infantry, amphibious combat vehicles, Army HIMARS rockets, M1 Abrams tanks, Stryker armored reconnaissance vehicles, Typhon long-range missiles, air defense and logistics units, as well as U.S. Navy destroyers and amphibious assault ships. Russian forces include naval infantry, T-90 tanks, self-propelled howitzers, mortars and multiple rocket launchers, paratroopers and airborne artillery, air defense and logistics, plus cruisers, destroyers, frigates and amphibious ships.

However, the heart of the game are the 277 “Joint Capability” cards, an abstract representation of the myriad force multipliers available to modern armies. By spending a limited pool of “Command Points” to buy cards from either a U.S. or Russian card deck, each side assembles a customized array of support forces. Players can choose from a wide variety of capabilities, including B-52 and Tu-22 bomber strikes, naval gunfire, special forces raids, drone strikes, laser air defenses, cyber warfare, psyops and electronic warfare (there’s even a “Public Affairs Officer” card).

“The cards feature a wide range of future, near-future and present-day capabilities to allow players to experiment and explore what capabilities can contribute to different scenarios,” Sebastian Bae, designer of “Littoral Commander,” told Defense News.

[…]

The key to winning “Littoral Commander” can be summed as: “What can be seen can be destroyed, so don’t be seen.” The fog of war always hovers over the game, with combat units on the map flipped upside down, so the enemy doesn’t know whether they are an infantry unit, an artillery battery, a frigate — or just a decoy.

“Littoral Commander” resembles a game of hide-and-seek. Both sides use ground troops and reconnaissance assets to detect and identify enemy forces, while trying to screen friendly forces from enemy detection. Once an enemy unit is located, it can be targeted by long-range fires such as artillery, missiles, aircraft and drones. Meanwhile, the target attempts to break contact and become concealed again.

[…]

Compounding the problem is that the U.S. and Russian forces have limited stockpiles of guided munitions, such as artillery shells, cruise missiles and — perhaps most importantly — air and missile defense interceptors. This puts a premium on judicious target selection.
And if battlefield problems aren’t enough, “Littoral Commander” players must also deal with public opinion. The game includes an “Influence Meter” that awards players additional resources for destroying enemy units and capturing key terrain — or rewards the enemy if you bombard urban areas (this is where the PAO card comes in handy).

“Littoral Commander: The Baltic” is actually the second game in the series, following “Littoral Commander: Indo Pacific,” which covered a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan and the Philippines. The games have been used by U.S. military staff colleges, U.S. Marine tactical units, the British and Australian armies, the Bundeswehr, the Philippines Marine Corps and others.

Posted in Games, War | 7 Comments »

The modern battlefield requires split-second decision-making, seamless coordination among distributed teams, and processing vast amounts of information, all under extreme pressure

Thursday, September 4th, 2025

The modern battlefield requires split-second decision-making, seamless coordination among distributed teams, and processing vast amounts of information, all under extreme pressure:

As I have learned over the last year, as an advisor to August Interactive, a gaming studio, these are exactly the skills that well-designed military gaming programs can develop and refine.

Unlike traditional military wargaming — which typically involves structured, turn-based exercises on maps or models to explore campaign plans and strategic concepts — the gaming discussed here draws heavily on digital interactive platforms, including modified commercial titles and purpose-built military simulations. These environments — ranging from real-time strategy games to tactical shooters, flight simulators, and cyber-themed games — emphasize rapid continuous decision-making, high-pressure coordination, and immersive skill development. While both approaches aim to sharpen judgment and prepare leaders for complex scenarios, this form of military gaming leverages the speed, interactivity, and scale of modern gaming technology to cultivate competencies that are difficult to replicate in traditional wargaming formats. And they are also more engaging and fun, which is a good thing.

The U.S. military should formally embrace and invest in advanced digital gaming as a core training tool, leveraging its ability to build critical cognitive, coordination, and technical skills for modern warfare.

[…]

I visited the gaming center at West Point last spring. I was impressed with the setup and technological capabilities, but I was even more impressed by the insights shared with me by combat-experienced officers and non-commissioned officers overseeing the program. The positive impact on cadet leadership development was remarkable: improved communication skills, quicker decision-making, and faster adaptability to change. Notably, many intercollegiate athletes there are involved in military gaming.

Posted in Games, Technology, War | 7 Comments »

Dungeons & Dragons enters its stadium era

Monday, August 11th, 2025

Dungeons & Dragons started with small groups of friends playing at home, but now it is entering its stadium era:

But in the past decade or so, D&D has emerged as a popular form of spectator entertainment, with comedians, actors and podcasters playing the game for other people to watch. “Actual play,” as it’s known, has attracted millions of viewers online and has even spilled out into the real world, with D&D shows playing in movie theaters, touring globally and selling out stadiums.

One of the most iconic examples of this phenomenon came earlier this year when the show Dimension 20 sold out Madison Square Garden in New York. Roughly 20,000 fans showed up to watch seven comedians perform D&D, with a few rock show flourishes — like gouts of butane fire around the stage to simulate the wrath of the dragon Kalvaxis, the big villain of the night.

[…]

In 2018, Mulligan and six other comedians launched Dimension 20 on the streaming platform Dropout. The stories they tell are mashups: Game of Thrones meets Candyland, Lord of the Rings meets The Breakfast Club, Jane Austen meets A Court of Thorns and Roses.

[…]

That first episode, which is nearly two hours long, has 7.7 million views on YouTube. A representative for Dropout says its subscribers number “in the mid-6 figures,” and that Dimension 20 is one of its most watched shows.

[…]

Fans of D&D started recording their games in the early 2000s, but actual play didn’t pick up as a genre until around a decade later.

The Adventure Zone, which launched in 2014, featured the hosts of the popular advice podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me playing with their dad. In 2015, a group of voice actors started posting their home D&D games online as the show Critical Role. The first episode of Critical Role on YouTube has nearly 25 million views today.

[…]

They’re also touring globally — Critical Role has performances scheduled at London’s The O2 and Edinburgh Castle in Scotland next year. Fans who can’t make it can watch the live games in around 800 movie theaters in North America. After Madison Square Garden, Dimension 20‘s tour continued on to Los Angeles and Seattle. A show is planned for Las Vegas later this year

Posted in Games | 1 Comment »

The VR game was designed to give the eye muscles a workout

Monday, June 2nd, 2025

Researchers at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan developed a VR game that aims to improve players’ eyesight:

It’s a relatively simple target shooting game developed in Unity for Meta Quest 2. The game features three lanes, each with a circular target on a stick. Pressing down the trigger button on the controller activates a virtual laser beam. Pointing this laser towards a lane highlights the lane and target and puts the player into “aim” mode. But to successfully hit the target, players have to move the controller’s stick in the direction indicated by the small Landolt C (a black ring shape with a gap used in Japanese eye tests) in the middle of the target.

The VR game was designed to give the eye muscles a workout, as players alternate between switching their gaze between targets at different distances and focusing on the Landolt C to see where the gap is. At the end of the game, players were treated to an arcade-style results screen, showing how many hits, misses and combos they got, as well as whether they broke a new record (apparently, some participants got very competitive about high scores).

The results showed that the game was effective in improving the vision of all the participants over the six week study period. For the severely myopic participants in particular, it was found that the more often they played the game, the more their sight improved.

The Landolt C was developed by the Swiss-born ophthalmologist Edmund Landolt:

The Landolt C consists of a ring that has a gap, thus looking similar to the letter C. The gap can be at various positions (usually left, right, bottom, top and the 45° positions in between) and the task of the tested person is to decide on which side the gap is. The size of the C and its gap are reduced until the subject makes a specified rate of errors. The minimum perceivable angle of the gap is taken as measure of the visual acuity. It is generally practised in the laboratory.

The stroke width is 1?5 of the diameter, and the gap width is the same. This is identical to the letter C from a Snellen chart. The Landolt C is the standard optotype for acuity measurement in most European countries. It was standardized, together with measurement procedures, by the German DIN, as DIN 58220 (now EN ISO 8596).

Posted in Games, Science, Technology | 1 Comment »

Both “Elton” and “van” were added much later

Saturday, January 11th, 2025

I recently went back and read “Black Destroyer,” a science fiction short story by Canadian-American writer A. E. van Vogt, first published in Astounding SF in July 1939 and later combined with several other short stories to form the novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle, because the protagonist of the story, Coeurl — pronounced “curl”? — is a large, intelligent, black, cat-like alien that inspired D&D’s displacer beast.

The monster was introduced in the game’s first supplement, Greyhawk (1975), as “a puma-like creature with six legs and a pair of tentacles which grow from its shoulders,” a physical description that matches the story’s, but there the similarity ends.

The story’s anti-hero is intelligent, if hungry and impulsive, and easily controls “vibrations,” a term that seems to include radio waves, the electricity in the ship’s electronics, the vibrations emitted by the human explorers’ weapons, and even the structure of space-age metal walls. It craves id, its term for phosphorus, which it drains from its victims. (The later novel changes this to potassium.)

One exotic power Coeurl does not have is the one the Dungeons & Dragons monster is named for, its ability to appear to be several feet away from its actual position. I don’t know where that came from.

Anyway, “Black Destroyer” arguably kicks off the Golden Age of Science Fiction:

The same July 1939 issue of Astounding also contained Isaac Asimov’s first story to appear in the magazine, “Trends”, while the next issue included the first story by Robert A. Heinlein, “Life-Line”, and the next, Theodore Sturgeon’s, “Ether Breather”. As a result, this issue is described as the start of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

I recognized A. E. van Vogt‘s names as one of the old masters of sci-fi, but I was never sure how to pronounce his seemingly Dutch name properly:

Alfred Elton van Vogt (/væn vo?t/ VAN VOHT; April 26, 1912 – January 26, 2000) was a Canadian-born American science fiction writer. […] The Science Fiction Writers of America named him their 14th Grand Master in 1995 (presented 1996).

[…]

Alfred Vogt (both “Elton” and “van” were added much later) was born on April 26, 1912, on his grandparents’ farm in Edenburg, Manitoba, a tiny (and now defunct) Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba, Canada, in the Mennonite West Reserve. He was the third of six children born to Heinrich “Henry” Vogt and Aganetha “Agnes” Vogt (née Buhr), both of whom were born in Manitoba and grew up in heavily immigrant communities. Until he was four, van Vogt spoke only Plautdietsch at home.

[…]

He added the middle name “Elton” at some point in the mid-1930s, and at least one confessional story (1937′s “To Be His Keeper”) was sold to the Toronto Star, who misspelled his name “Alfred Alton Bogt” in the byline. Shortly thereafter, he added the “van” to his surname, and from that point forward he used the name “A. E. van Vogt” both personally and professionally.

Plautdietsch?

Plautdietsch (pronounced [?pla?t.dit?]) or Mennonite Low German is a Low Prussian dialect of East Low German with Dutch influence that developed in the 16th and 17th centuries in the Vistula delta area of Royal Prussia.

[…]

Plautdietsch was a Low German dialect like others until it was taken by Mennonite settlers to the southwest of the Russian Empire starting in 1789. From there it evolved and subsequent waves of migration brought it to North America, starting in 1873.

Another van Vogt story that went into The Voyage of the Space Beagle, “Discord in Scarlet,” describes an alien boarding a human ship to implant parasitic eggs in their stomachs. Van Vogt brought a case against 20th Century Fox for Alien copying his work. They settled out of court.

Posted in Games, Media | 9 Comments »

Taiwan’s presidential office runs first ‘tabletop’ simulation of Chinese military escalation

Sunday, December 29th, 2024

Taiwan’s presidential office Recently ran a war game, or tabletop simulation, of Chinese military escalation:

Unlike traditional war games by the military, the tabletop exercise was aimed at testing how different government agencies could “ensure the normal functioning of society” in times of crisis, according to Taiwan’s presidential office.

It simulated two scenarios: one where China imposes “high-intensity” grey-zone warfare tactics, and a second where Taiwan is “on the brink of conflict,” the office said. Grey-zone tactics refer to actions that fall just below what might be considered acts of war.

Government agencies were not allowed to prepare notes in advance and had to react immediately to different contingencies, the presidential office said, without elaborating on the exact circumstances featured in the simulation.

While Taiwan’s military regularly holds tabletop war games to test its defense readiness, Thursday’s exercise was the first time that the presidential office has held a simulation that focuses specifically on civil responses to the threat of a Chinese invasion.

[…]

Liu said that while Taiwan’s defense ministry was well positioned to respond to different situations, many government agencies struggled to clarify falsehoods during electricity or internet outages, highlighting the need for Taiwan to have a backup mechanism to ensure the flow of information.

She added that authorities have plans to recruit and train 50,000 volunteers across Taiwan to assist in disaster relief by the end of next year, which will include workers from the public sector.

Posted in Games, Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Play life like a game

Monday, August 26th, 2024

In 2021, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), Musk became obsessed with a new multiplayer strategy game on his iPhone, Polytopia:

In it, players choose to be one of sixteen characters, known as tribes, and compete to develop technologies, corner resources, and wage battles in order to build an empire. He became so good he was able to beat the game’s Swedish developer, Felix Ekenstam. What did his passion for the game say about him? “I am just wired for war, basically,” he answers.

[…]

“He said it would teach me how to be a CEO like he was,” Kimbal says. “We called them Polytopia Life Lessons.”

Musk’s Polytopia Life Lessons:

Empathy is not an asset. “He knows that I have an empathy gene, unlike him, and it has hurt me in business,” Kimbal says. “Polytopia taught me how he thinks when you remove empathy. When you’re playing a video game, there is no empathy, right?”

Play life like a game. “I have this feeling,” Zilis once told Musk, “that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn’t notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.”

Do not fear losing. “You will lose,” Musk says. “It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.” You will be more fearless, take more risks.

Be proactive. “I’m a little bit Canadian pacifist and reactive,” Zilis says. “My gameplay was a hundred percent reactive to what everyone else was doing, as opposed to thinking through my best strategy.” She realized that, like many women, this mirrored the way she behaved at work. Both Musk and Mark Juncosa told her that she could never win unless she took charge of setting the strategy.

Optimize every turn. In Polytopia, you get only thirty turns, so you need to optimize each one. “Like in Polytopia, you only get a set number of turns in life,” Musk says. “If we let a few of them slide, we will never get to Mars.”

Double down. “Elon plays the game by always pushing the edge of what’s possible,” Zilis says. “And he’s always doubling down and putting everything back in the game to grow and grow. And it’s just like he’s just done his whole life.”

Pick your battles. In Polytopia, you might find yourself surrounded by six or more tribes, all taking swipes at you. If you swipe back at all of them, you’re going to lose. Musk never fully mastered that lesson, and Zilis found herself coaching him on it. “Dude, like, everyone’s swiping at you right now, but if you swipe back at too many, you’ll run out of resources,” she told him. She called that approach “front minimization.” It was a lesson she also tried and failed to teach him about his behavior on Twitter.

Unplug at times. “I had to stop playing because it was destroying my marriage,” Kimbal says. Shivon Zilis also deleted Polytopia from her phone. So did Grimes. And, for a while, Musk did so as well. “I had to take Polytopia off my phone because it was taking up too many brain cycles,” he says. “I started dreaming about Polytopia.” But the lesson about unplugging was another one that Musk never mastered. After a few months, he put the game back onto his phone and was playing again.

Posted in Business, Games | 3 Comments »

Monopoly Go! made $3 billion in just over a year

Saturday, July 27th, 2024

I can’t say I even knew that there was a Monopoly Go! game:

On Hasbro’s second-quarter earnings call Thursday, the toymaker revealed that the mobile video game has grossed more than $3 billion in revenue since its launch on April 11, 2023. That makes Hasbro the top licenser of video games in the past year, the company says.

Hasbro works with mobile games company Scopely on Monopoly Go!—along with other licensed titles, such as Scrabble Go and Yahtzee with Buddies.

[…]

For the full year, Monopoly Go! is expected to generate roughly $105 million in licensing revenue for Hasbro—and company officials admit they could be underestimating that, as they’re still getting a sense of how players interact with the game.

“We don’t quite get the seasonality yet,” said Chris Cox, Hasbro’s CEO on the call. “However, where I do think we have some bullishness is on the mid- and long-term [prospects] for the game. When you look at games that reach this ‘hyperscale’ like Monopoly Go! has . . . 10 of the 20 best-performing games have been out for five or more years. So, this is a game that’s going to be a really strong and positive annuity for us for a long time to come.”

Posted in Business, Games | 4 Comments »

Maybe fire forces growth, and stabbing them only stuns them

Monday, February 5th, 2024

Back in August, 1979, issue #29 of Dragon magazine included a game called The Awful Green Things From Outer Space. I never played it, so I didn’t realize it included this interesting game mechanic:

Scattered around the ship are various weapons. However, alien physiology is weird. Maybe fire forces growth, and stabbing them only stuns them.

At the start of each game, the Weapons Display is empty, but the first time a weapon is used, a token is drawn to determine its effect on the aliens for the remainder of the game.

This is a silly sci-fi game, but a similar concept was used by the Naval War College in the years before World War 2, so officers could learn how to learn to fight the expected war against the Japanese:

Naval War College students certainly wanted to win their big “capstone” wargame at the end of their school year. As students have always done, they asked those who graduated before them for advice, or in the vernacular of the US military, “gouge.” Graduates were happy to provide advice: “Try to engage the Japanese at night, they are blind; watch out for their torpedoes though, they are killers; fortunately, though, their ships sink like rocks after the lightest of battering.” However, when they talked to someone who graduated in a different year, they learned “Avoid night engagements, the Japs are incredible; and their ships are so rugged they can really close in and slug it out; at least you don’t have to worry about their tinker toy torpedoes.” Slowly it dawned on the students — the faculty was giving the Japanese different strengths and weaknesses in each wargame!

Posted in Education, Games, War | No Comments »

A powder keg’s more thrilling when it hasn’t blown up yet

Friday, November 10th, 2023

When Dungeons & Dragons was young, it had a western counterpart called Boot Hill that I only knew through the crossover rules in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Adam Rutskarn went back and gave this “cowboy miniatures game from the 1970s” a try:

The basic rules are pamphlet-sized. Players randomly generates gunmen to shoot at each other with unexpectedly realistic firearms. Though a “powerful” character might tend to go first or hit more often, where they hit and how much damage they do has nothing to do with character (or player) skill. All hits debilitate, and a fifth of the time they’ll kill outright with no recourse for the victim.

There are no skills, attributes, guides, or systems in the early editions unrelated to stacking up bodies. Mechanically, all it simulates is violence.

Boot Hill is the best political intrigue system I’ve ever used.

With no rules for political intrigue, the rules couldn’t get in the way. He created a town:

I baked violence, fear, greed, and vanity into every level of the region. I filled the badlands with an organized crime network, the Roundup Boys, and carefully noted their relatives and connections within the town—especially relations the characters were likely to meet. I made two opposing railroads and gave each its payroll of enforcers, toughs, and hitmen. I decided that the Lewis, Chicory, and DeMorgan railroad was represented in town by one of its cutthroat owners, but Western United only by its founder’s naive son. Finally—of course—I went straight for the high-octane templates and created a list of the top ten most dangerous wanted criminals in the Arizona territory. Most were not local to my town, but a few were, and many more were connected to its smugglers, importers, and crooks. Naturally, both Western United and Lewis, Chicory, and DeMorgan had quietly hired a top killer for their staffs.

Everywhere in town, I stretched tensions as thin as they’d go. Here, a deeply crooked and vicious campaign for sheriff. There, “respectable” business owners versus “rowdy” roughnecks. In the boonies, robbers versus marshals, marshals versus deputies, robber gangs versus robber gangs, a gangs robbers versus its robbers. A powder keg of a county, always ready to blow.

Then I dropped the players into it.

He designed his setting to offer the constant threat of violence: the tension of knowing that a sudden and fatal battle might result from any misstep:

After all, a powder keg’s more thrilling when it hasn’t blown up yet.

Not many games discourage players from pissing off NPCs. The worst thing an aggrieved character can do is fight you, and that’s just where most RPG characters are built to succeed.

[…]

Played ruthlessly, Boot Hill‘s mechanics and milieu produce very different expectations. That any character can die easily in a fair fight is almost a moot point; if you provoke a cattle baron or a slimy industrialist or a crooked sheriff, he’s not going to get his henchmen and fight you fairly. He’s going to pay someone to shoot you in the back with a shotgun, and if you’re not ready for it, that’s not much better than a death sentence. The only reason the streets aren’t awash with blood at all times is that the NPCs are also hapless mortals that have to watch where they step.

[…]

Faithfully roleplaying the game’s emergent “villains,” or the characters willing to risk death and murder to get their ends, comes with a set of broadly-applicable rules. Don’t fight unless the rewards or risks are too great to avoid it. If you’ve got power or money, abuse it to keep yourself safe and your interests protected. Confront enemies directly only when you’ve got the force to bully them into backing down or surrendering; otherwise, strike from ambush. Use the extent of your cunning or guile. Be wary of crossing other powerful interests, like the law or organized crime; strike surgically whenever possible. Wait for the right moment.

Very naturally, the players found themselves observing the same rules.

[…]

That the game has simple randomly-generated combat stats helped me design a thorough, reactive campaign setting. If the game had classes, levels, races, or tactical options, I would be obliged to either create combatants by hand or study each in detail, limiting my precise grasp on each faction and their strengths. If the game were even simpler, like Apocalypse World, the players would know too well what to expect from their opponents. Instead I found myself perfectly between the two extremes.

The vicious, tense, and bloody combat made players very afraid of the consequences of mis-stepping. There was a fear, a tension, a thrill every time they even picked up the dice; if they were attacking they knew they were taking a great risk, and if they were being attacked, they knew they may have made their last mistake. Between these isolated combats there were no rules or clattering of dice to distract them from playing their characters and angles; the immersion was total.

There was another benefit to not having any social mechanics at all in the game, counter-intuitive thought it might seem for a game about managing adversarial relationships without combat. While combat in Boot Hill is decided immediately and obviously, and is thus very well suited to open dice rolls, the game’s social conflicts created tension by being uncertain. One never knew whether to trust an NPC, whether an NPC trusted them, whether a bluff had succeeded, or whether a threat had landed. They had no reason to expect success because a number was high or failure because a number was low. Instead, I simply presumed that each PC was reasonably charismatic and putting their ideas as well as possible. From this position I used my well-developed understanding of the game’s NPCs to determine whether they would be fearful, greedy, honest, smitten, lonely, tempted, or reasonable enough to be persuaded. I would never argue against social mechanics in general, or even in most campaigns, but stripping them from play here made for a tenser and more engaging experience.

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Storytelling needs to be practiced, just like flying or marksmanship

Monday, September 11th, 2023

Ian Strebel and Matt McKenzie are intelligence officers in the United States Army and Navy, respectively, who have found that creating a compelling narrative takes practice, which traditional military training does not provide:

This can be a big problem for military intelligence professionals — they are trained to deliver intelligence, not to tell stories, so the stories that commanders tell themselves win out. Despite studies showing people are far more likely to remember stories than statistics, the military trains new intelligence professionals to brief intelligence through rote memorization and presentation of information. Neither of us ever received formal training in how to present information and intelligence as a story. This breeds uncreative military intelligence professionals concerned more with being “right” or having all the facts than whether their information is absorbed. Often, when information is presented in this manner, without context, commanders don’t remember what is important or, more importantly, why something is important.

[…]

Militaries have used wargames to train ever since Lieutenant Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz introduced the concept to an initially skeptical Prussian General Staff in the early nineteenth century. Very simply, a traditional wargame is a board game that simulates some aspects of military combat. The popular game of Risk is a very simple wargame, while chess can be considered as one of the oldest. Wargames can be successful mediums for training, in part, because the narrative holds players responsible for their actions and emotionally attaches them to the game’s results. Tabletop role-playing games are just the modern evolution of the classic wargame.

[…]

Tabletop role-playing games are unique from traditional wargames because the collaborative nature of the game means that almost anything can happen. The rules of these games only help structure the narrative and determine the consequences of actions. Players are free, even encouraged, to try anything they can imagine within the limits of that narrative. Most tabletop role-playing games have several rulebooks, but, as with military doctrine, the rules do not and cannot account for every eventuality. Instead, games such as Dungeons & Dragons rely on players’ creativity and flexibility to develop and adapt rules as they go. One of the most essential aspects of such games is the application of chance, usually employed by rolling various-sided polyhedral dice, which encourages out-of-the-box thinking for players and Dungeon Masters, especially in the face of catastrophic failure or, just as critical, catastrophic success.

These rules, when applied to wargames, can make them better — we have firsthand experience with this. Ian acted as an observer during a 2023 joint wargame using the Marine Corps’ Operational Wargame System. During the wargame, an experienced aviator wrestled with the decision of whether to use an exquisite munition to attack a threat reconnaissance drone or let the drone continue unimpeded. Recalling recent footage showing a Russian fighter jet dumping fuel on a U.S. surveillance drone, which downed the MQ-9 into the Black Sea, the aviator said he’d do the same. The wargame moderator said it was a “nice try” but that the move was outside the rules. If, instead, they’d abided by tabletop role-playing game rules, the aviator and moderator would play out the situation. Most likely, the moderator or Dungeon Master would determine, on the fly, the probability of the move’s success based on the game-defined attributes of the two aircraft and ask the aviator to roll a die. The Dungeon Master would use the die results to determine success or failure.

An experienced Dungeon Master might further adjudicate the results by applying a range of outcomes based on the die roll. For example, on a twenty-sided die, a roll of a “1” (critical failure) might result in the loss of the friendly aircraft with no damage to the drone, while a roll of “20” (critical success) might down the drone with minimal fuel loss and allow recovery of the drone sensor equipment. Rolls in between could result in varying degrees and combinations of damage and fuel loss to both the friendly aircraft and drone, as deemed reasonable by the Dungeon Master. Simultaneously, the Dungeon Master would determine the enemy’s reaction to this unanticipated event, both tactically and strategically, as well as the opposing force’s long-term adaptation to this move.

This is not so different from a military intelligence professional’s job: think like the enemy, understand their capabilities, develop possible scenarios, and then play the adversary as operators run through their plans. As previously discussed, while service intelligence schools generally teach presenting just a few courses of action, in a real conflict, there are infinite threat scenarios. Modern intelligence professionals must be flexible, responsive, and creative, in both planning and ad hoc operations. The problem is, short of an actual conflict, there are practically no opportunities for these personnel to practice working in a wide-open world — this is where tabletop role-playing games could prove valuable. As Dungeon Masters, military intelligence professionals can build worlds and scenarios and act as the enemy, or red, force. Most importantly, they will learn to respond spontaneously to unexpected player actions — regardless of whether those actions are incredibly clever or incredibly stupid.

In the Netflix series The Diplomat, Keri Russell succinctly described the problem of intelligence storytelling in three short sentences: “Intelligence is a story. A story based on incomplete facts. Life or death decisions turn on whether people buy the story.”

[…]

Dr. James Fielder explained that when games are designed correctly, a synthetic environment is created that becomes real to the players. In such an environment, the learning becomes real even if the risk is not — at least not yet. This is the challenge for both Dungeon Masters and military intelligence professionals. Telling a compelling story that enables others to envision combat environments and the threats within them accurately can be the difference between success and failure.

[…]

Storytelling needs to be practiced, just like flying or marksmanship. Pilots can safely make mistakes in simulators or with instructors in the cockpit. Shooters can miss targets on a range until they understand the weapon firing process. Similarly, Dungeons & Dragons provides intelligence personnel the opportunity to practice storytelling with the ability to make and learn from mistakes. After all, if a dragon kills a party of adventurers because the Dungeon Master wasn’t clear, they can simply try again. There are no second chances when giving an operational intelligence briefing before a strike mission.

Wargaming has seen a resurgence in professional military education, something we wholeheartedly support; games make learning fun, effective, and memorable. But integrating games into this education isn’t enough. The armed services only send a military intelligence professional to formal training a few times over a long military career. Comparatively, tabletop role-playing games can provide regular practice for the skills needed in exercises, wargaming, and the real world. After all, as James Sterrett, chief of the Simulation Education Division at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, said, “Experience is a great teacher and well-designed games can deliver experiences that are tailored to drive home learning.”

They make a better argument for a “free” Kriegsspiel or a Braunstein Game than for D&D, but the basic argument is sound.

Posted in Education, Games, War | 5 Comments »

Anything can become a full-time job if enough people are paying attention

Sunday, September 3rd, 2023

Matthew Mercer is the most famous Dungeons & Dragons player in the world:

Critical Role is a miraculous success, with 2 million YouTube subscribers and an additional 1.3 million followers on Twitch. Critical Role’s first season, called “Vox Machina,” ran for 115 episodes over the course of two-and-a-half years, demolishing the meager expectations of the eight-player cast. Those episodes, often four hours in length, were produced by the digital media brand Geek & Sundry, but in 2018 — when Mercer reconvened the Critical Role crew for a second season — they did so as a fully independent LLC, called Critical Role Productions. With that, his leisurely nights around the table officially transformed into a for-profit endeavor.

The pivot paid off in spades. A 2021 data leak out of Twitch confirmed that Critical Role is one of the richest channels on the platform, generating a mammoth $9.6 million in revenue between 2019 and 2021. The show has quickly become a fixture of the geek-media ecosystem and is blessed by a litany of third-party investments. There are now Critical Role novelizations, comic books, and most notably, an animated Amazon Prime television adaptation.

[…]

Mercer has his own theories about why Critical Role struck oil. He believes the troupe came together at the right time, during the dawn of the livestreaming revolution, when the world was still adjusting to what was possible with this brand-new hyperspeed broadcasting medium. It also helped that they all, including Mercer, were voice actors of some renown before signing up for the campaign. (Ashley Johnson, who has appeared in all three seasons of the show, is best known for playing Ellie in the acclaimed The Last of Us video games, and Travis Willingham, who serves as CEO of Critical Role Productions, has stepped into the booth to portray everyone from Sandman to Thor for Marvel.) The stars each had a robust presence on social media, which they dutifully funneled toward their newly formed Dungeons & Dragons series. One of the great revelations of the 2020s is that anything — even a weekly tabletop group — can become a full-time job if enough people are paying attention.

Posted in Games, Media | 3 Comments »

The classic dungeon crawl promotes a play style that is very cautious, methodical, and calculated

Friday, November 11th, 2022

Yora of the Spriggan’s Den feels that classic dungeon-crawling is a fascinating and fun form of gameplay, but the archetypical dungeon crawl is not a good basis for a Sword & Sorcery campaign:

The classic dungeon crawl, with its complex underground labyrinths, countless traps, secret doors, and numerous small hidden stashes of treasures all over the place naturally promotes a play style that is very cautious, methodical, and calculated. It encourages players to progress slowly and with care, to examine all the small and possibly insignificant details, and to take any precautions before following through with well thought through plans. In a well deaigned dungeon, this can be hugely exciting and thrilling. But it’s a kind of exitement and tension that is very different from the style of Sword & Sorcery. This is a style that is all about fearless and even reckless initiative, where fortune favors the bold. Heroes are certainly relying heavily on cunning and trickery to take down foes much stronger than themselves, but often these are things improvsed in the heat of the action and more of a gamble than much of a plan. In a Sword & Sorcery themes campaign, players spending a lot of time over maps and rummaging through large boxes of tools to disable a dangerous mechanism with a minimum of risk is something that you want to avoid, not to have as the default approach to playing the game.

This contrast between methodical attacks and dashing ones goes well beyond fantasy roleplaying games. It’s arguably the key distinction between stereotypical Great War tactics and the newer stormtroop tactics that commanders like Rommel used to overwhelm larger forces in strong positions.

(In 1989, then-Commandant of the Marine Corps Alfred M. Gray reenergized the post-Vietnam Marine Corps with the publication of Warfighting, which advocated that more dashing style.)

If an adventuring party takes its time, then the dungeon full of monsters should have time to organize and attack the adventuring party en masse, instead of getting defeated in detail.

(Hat tip to Castalia House.)