Picking a Game is More Than Just Rules, it's a Community Too
Alright time to get this off my chest; I participate in a lot of hobbies that are populated by people I personally find incredibly distasteful. Such is the curse of having nerdy hobbies where there are incels, sexists, racists, transphobes, and other varieties of bigots that would be too numerous to name, populating the darkest corners. Whether it's my love of anime, fighting games, video games in general, or (and more relevant to this blog) tabletop RPGs, I often feel like I have to constantly wade through a minefield of shitheads just to enjoy the things I enjoy.
As the years have gone on and every minor issue gets amplified and turned into a culture war battleground, these problems have only gotten worse. And perhaps in the TTRPG space I only have myself to blame, given that I choose to associate with OSR games. It turns out that a non-zero amount of people who think that rules from the 70s and 80s are the best way to play D&D also have shitty reactionary opinions! If you value your sanity, don't ask an OSR community how they feel about Orcs.
But this got me thinking about rules systems of choice and the communities that spring up around them. Even as I gear up to run The Halls of Arden Vul using Old School Essentials, I thought to myself "You know I bet the Shadowdark community isn't like this! After all, every insufferable asshole I've ever interacted with in the OSE Discord seems to irrationally hate Shadowdark for reasons they won't articulate. And certainly the 5E or Pathfinder communities don't seem to tolerate people just being weirdly racist.
Why am I going on an unhinged rant about all the bigots who like to ruin good things? Well first off, have we met? Because going on unhinged, highly opinionated rants is a bit of a specialty of mine. Secondly, because despite everything I've just said above, finding and building community is incredibly important in the tabletop space. Despite the growing number of solo RPGs out there, it usually takes a group of 4+ people to tango and get a game off the ground. That means finding people who want to play the same game you want to, in the same way you want to play it! It also means finding people to bounce ideas off of between games; how should I rule this situation, or what house rules do you recommend, or how can I make a character that focuses on X, Y, or Z?
Community is the backbone of this, and along with the rules and published modules for a given system, helps shape the play culture within. For example in the Pathfinder 2E community, we find crunchy rules, modules designed to challenge tightly composed groups of 4 players, and a lot of posts about optimizing and buildcraft. The PF2E types are the folks you go to when you want to understand whether this build needs an Aldori Dueling Sword or a Gnome Flickmace, or how to get 5% extra damage out of a particular feat line. Crucially though, they are not the people you go to when you want to figure out how to plan a compelling character arc from start to finish, or how to manage resources in a dangerous dungeon crawl. When I built my Inventor character for our last campaign, it involved a very lengthy Google Doc put together by the community going through Ancestry and Background choices as well as Feat choices by level. It was a lot of information to parse through, that's for sure.
In OSR circles, it's a bit of a grab bag. You will find some excellent blogging and general advice for how to run the game, you'll find free adventures or rules to run that will seem better put together than anything a major publisher has ever put out, and often you'll find people who are happy to welcome players in and recommend great resources to help get started. On the flip side though, you will find a lot of "one-true-wayism" about how the game should or should not be played, you will find a lot of irrational hatred for any rules invented after 1989, and you'll hear a lot of stuff that, while not outwardly sexist or racist, is certainly not too far off. For instance just this week in the OSE discord someone told me that the idea of seeing Orcs as people with autonomy and rights, rather than evil monsters solely to be slain, was and I quote; "tired". Hopefully nobody reading this has to be told why that isn't the case in reality.
My point with all of this, is take care as to what game you're choosing to pick up next. Because unless you are so enlightened that you live under a rock and never go on the broader internet, buying into a game is buying into a community and a set of conceits and values. And you're not always going to like what you see.
