Feeling & Thought: Fruitless Void
It's been a while since I've done one of these.
There's this thing that keeps happening to me. I buy the pdf of a game because it is advertised or generally agreed upon by the rpg community as doing something well, only to end up disappointed with its supposed offerings. I'm calling that a fruitless void as a cheeky reference to the commonly used design concept in RPGs called Fruitful Void. Let us discuss.
This is a Feeling & Thought. A series where I write about my experiences in the TTRPG hobby. Just like feelings, these thoughts aren't science, they aren't truth, and they definitely aren't reliable. Explore them with a playful attitude and don't take them too seriously. I certainly don't.
Fruitful Voids in RPG design are essentially places where the author did not mechanize or write out some part of a game because that is the space they want the players to play in. Like the Alien RPG not including stealth rules because it wants players to feel the horror of sneaking around and avoiding the aliens. Being able to just roll to avoid the alien would hurt the tension. Good design.
What I want to complain about here is kind of the opposite: a game promising some kind of gameplay and just not delivering anything except the bare minimum. It's a void, yes, and it did not bear fruit. The biggest offenders to me are crafting systems and homebase management systems. Crafting systems that end up as "here's some ingredients and things to make from them, figure out the rest dear GM" and homebases that are just roll tables of random npcs and some random event rolls. These are more illustrative than specific examples but I hope you get the point.
I know, I know. A lot of value in RPGs comes from the author spelling out something for you so you don't have to invent it. I'm really not super angry about this topic, it's a minor annoyance at best. But I do still want to bring attention to it because I think it is an interesting issue: is a game providing value to you if the systems and content it provides are no better than content you could have made yourself? I for one buy a game hoping the time the author spent making it would contribute some novel system or idea that I would not have been able to come up with myself.
So what's the takeaway here? Man, I don't know. I can't fault a game for having simple mechanics or writing and I can't demand all games be mindblowingly novel. Mine certainly aren't. But maybe this frustration resonates with someone out there, that when I decide to purchase someone else's DIY in this DIY hobby it would at least want it to feel different to my own. Or maybe this is me realizing the RPG industry is just people making things to inspire other people to make things, and the art of the craft really isn't particularly complicated.
Hate to end on a bummer, so HEY GO MAKE COOL THINGS! Maybe invent a new use for this stupid joke of a design term I came up with. Maybe I am leaving you a fruitful void to work with... or is this post a fruitless one?
