TTRPG hole

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

The contents of The One Ring TTRPG boxed set with cards, maps, and dice Unboxing my new Starter Set of The One Ring.

(Now some very personal blogging that will only interest a few of you)

Last week I wrote about the fantasy hole I have been in. Contributing to this is the fact that we are also in a Table Top Role Playing Game hole as well.

I have been playing TTRPGs with the same group since 2013. We started together after a big Board Game Night where we organized two simultaneous sessions of The Red Box to introduce people to tabletop gaming. My oldest friend helped found the group (I first learned to play DnD2E with him back in ‘92). We would go on to play other games like Shadowrun, classic Star Wars, MechWarrior, In Nomine, and probably a bunch other games I have totally forgotten.

Our Kelowna group has kept stable over the years. When I went to Iki it was the beginning of the COVID pandemic so we all just played online together. We kept going, and even today I beam in via FaceTime to a laptop on a round wooden table where they gather together in person every few weeks. A couple times a year I will drive up to Kelowna to play in person. These are usually 3 day events where we will play DnD, board games, drink, and cook together. Basically it is camping for nerds.

In 2013 with Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition and soon made the transition to 5th Edition. We have also down some Shadowrun and Star Wars, but mostly we have been a DnD5E group. A few years ago there were some controversies with how Hasbro was managing Wizards of the Coast, the stewards of the Dungeons & Dragons franchise. As a group we made the decision to transition to another game system… and then proceeded to take like another 3 years to finish our massive Curse of Strahd campaign (which took a total of 5 years of our lives to play) 😅😅😅

Anywho, earlier this year we wrapped up the final DnD campaign and now are finally looking for something new. That’s right! We are basically divorced DnD Dads, looking to play the TTRPG field a bit. (So cool! 😎)

TTRPG Speed Dating

DnD is great and all, but is basically the overwhelming default roleplaying game due to its mindshare of appearing in pop culture (Stranger Things) all the way back to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. (If you are interested in a history, check out my review of Of Dice and Men). Defaults are okay, and can actually act as an easy on ramp tot he hobby, but it is pretty sad how many people just stay on that boring old freeway — there are so many more choices than just dungeons or dragons.

As an experienced group of DMs we decided to do a little speed dating. Of course we could just fire up Pathfinder or Daggerheart, but why not get a little more… adventurous 😉

Together we listed up a number of games that interested us, not only by genre but also by game system. We wanted to explore things like the FATE or Apocalypse system. We put all kinds of interesting systems in the pot, things we had heard about from others, or systems featured on the excellent Quinn’s Quest. Once we generated a good list, each person went off and bought the system(s) they were interested in running and started reading. Here are a bunch we are looking at:

The idea is that if we do 3-5 sessions of each system we will have quite a runway of games over the next year. By then we will have fully recovered from 5 years exclusively in the land of Lord Strahd and be ready for a more long term campaign and can commit to one of the systems we tested.

So far we have already had a few sessions of Blades in the Dark which I really like. We usually end each session with 45 minutes of reflection, talking through what we have learned about the mechanics of the game, analyzing it for features that we enjoy and figuring out what trade offs there are in the design and how the game is trying to be fun (and if this is how we want to have fun). We really want to give each of these systems a good chewing over, and since we know one another really well and have lots of trust at the table, I think we are doing a great job getting to the bottom of the system.

This exploration of game systems and settings is another reason I feel like I am down a sort of Fantasy Hole. This is not taking any more time out of my already sparse recreation time, but it is strangely focused. I am usually exploring such a wide variety of things in my non-work life (and my work life tbh) that it feels strange to me just to have a couple of things on my plate and not feel bored.

While we are changing things up…

We started playing DnD before the Snowden revelations. We relied on all sorts of mainstream technical infrastructure to keep in touch, build community, plan and document sessions. We were very aware of our lock-in and often discussed migrating away from things like Slack (or being force-migrated off Google Plus just to give you a sense). So, since we were getting off the mainstream TTRPG, we thought it was a good opportunity to get off mainstream digital platforms too. The cool thing about RPGs is that while you can buy and run adventures off the shelf, you are free to modify them to fit your group or even come up with your own… and nobody can take away those fun memories. It should be the same with technology infrastructure.

Here are a couple of things we have done:

  1. Swapped out Slack for Zulip which we can self-host and never loses our lengthy chat history. In Zulip we have dedicated channels for each game system. While doing research we can post insights to this research channel to inform everyone else of cool tidbits from the system. We also have a dedicated channel for memes… which is self-explanatory.
  2. Documentation for each system and each campaign has moved out of a handful of giant Google docs to a self-hosted Outline.

We currently don’t have any virtual table top management solutions since we play hybrid, but in the past we used the excellent local-first serverless VTT called Owlbear Rodeo. The new version is SaaS which sucks but the legacy version is still available.

Long form