On Cognitive Overhead

Preface

This will be my last blog post on Substack, and I will begin the process of migrating over to another provider in the next week. Why you may ask? The short answer is that Substack has a serious problem with nazis and alt-right grifters, who they directly fund and promote. This culminated in a rather dog whistley article on “free speech” that they published recently (which you can read here).

I’m not the kind of person who wants to cancel everyone who doesn’t agree with me, nor do I necessarily believe that everyone with conservative right wing politics is a nazi. However, when you have editorial power and are algorithmically promoting certain work, I believe you have a responsibility to make sure you are promoting fair and factual content, not hate speech.

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As such I’ll more than likely be navigating over to Ghost who behaves in a way you would actually expect a “free speech” provider to do; as a content agnostic open source software and hosting provider. If you’re currently subscribed you will be migrated over to Ghost when I make the change. More to come!

The Article Itself

Throughout the tabletop RPG space, the fantasy genre has been the dominant one since the release of D&D in 1974. Part of this is maybe first mover bias, as D&D has largely remained the number 1 selling RPG in at least the US, except for brief periods where it was supplanted by either Vampire: The Masquerade (Urban Fantasy) or Pathfinder (literally just D&D but slightly different).

Yet when we look to the broader world of media, most of the highest grossing and most popular media franchises are either sci-fi or sci-fi adjacent genres like superheroes. Those high grossing franchises that aren’t are typically Disney favorites like Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh. The highest grossing general fantasy Franchise is Harry Potter, but we have to go a ways to find something more “traditional fantasy” down all the way at Warcraft, at a seemingly respectable $12 billion. I say seemingly because that is less than franchises like Pixar’s Cars ($21.5b) and Korean Free to Play side scrolling MMO Dungeon Fighter Online ($22b).

Why then is this the case? There have certainly been plenty of great licensed Sci-Fi TTRPGs, including numerous Star Wars and Star Trek games. The MCU is a media juggernaut, yet all of the numerous Marvel RPGs have not been particularly popular, to say nothing of some of the more niche tabletop original superhero RPGs like Champions and Mutants & Masterminds.

I’m sure there’s more than a few reasons for this, but today I want to focus on one in particular; cognitive load, or the energy and effort needed for your players to be able to understand and immerse themselves in a setting that may be unfamiliar to them.

The Loads are quite Cognitive

One of the advantages that D&D and dervied games present to most tabletop RPGs is that they are incredibly familiar feeling, even to first time TTRPG players. For better and for worse, D&D has been a hugely influential game not just in the realm of game design but in the larger media ecosystem, particularly in fantasy literature and video games. Your players know all the tropes through osmosis; if they’ve ever played Skyrim or watched the Lord of the Rings movies, they already grasp the basic conceits of a setting where Elves, Dwarves, and Magic are all real and where heroic adventurers use that power to fight evil.

While there are meaningful differences between various fantasy settings, most of them end up being relatively minor from a player’s perspective. Indeed I’d wager that most D&D players familiar with the various official settings could not articulate the specific differences between settings like Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Eberron, and Dragonlance.

However in the realm of science fiction, the differences between popular franchises are incredibly vast. Star Wars, Star Trek, Mass Effect, even the MCU forays into space such as the Guardians of the Galaxy, all present very different ideas of what spacefaring civilization might look like. Does Faster Than Light (FTL) travel and communication exist? How far has civilization spread, what do alien lifeforms look like, how does humanity exist in space? Everything from the general level of technology to whether magic also exists in the setting, almost everything is up in the air to be notably different.

And this presents a problem to your players, who are trying to immerse themselves in a different world, but are instead having to ask clarifying questions out of character every 5 minutes like “Wait what color skin does this Alien species have again?” and “Does my equipment let me survive in the vacuum of space and if so how?”

A TTRPG Example

Let’s use a modern and relatively popular Sci-Fi RPG as an example; Lancer is a mud and lasers mecha sci-fi RPG from creators Miguel Lopez and Tom Morgan. In it, players take on the role of mech pilots fighting conflicts in the far future as part of a sort of post-scarcity communist human society. It features board gamey tactical combat and fast and loose narrative rules; it’s great and you should definitely play it if you never have.

However, one of the biggest flaws of Lancer is undoubtedly its wild and zaney setting that is a mess of proper nouns and unique terms. Having run a full Lancer campaign, I can guarantee your players will repeatedly ask you to explain terms like paracausal, NHPs, shackling, and the differences between Seccom and Third Committee. At least a third of my playtime every session was spent just answering questions like that or explaining minute differences in the official lore.

In situations like this it is important to balance whatever cool unique ideas you have for worldbuilding alongside the desire to keep things digestable for your players. The easier it is for them to really immerse themselves in the fiction of the game, the better they will be at roleplaying and problem solving within it.

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