Quinns Quest “Blog” #1: My big goal & my big problem (Patreon)

GREETINGS TRAVELLERS

Welcome through the gauzy veil betwixst your world and mine. Welcome to a realm where thoughts have teeth, and stories have lives of their own.

Welcome... behind the scenes.

I have a lot of goals for Quinns Quest, and I have fair few stresses. The biggest dual-class goal and stress is “hitting 1,000 patrons”, which would let me cover tabletop RPGs for a living. But I know I have some terrific fans out there (yourself included!!) and these days TTRPGs are so high-quality that I hope they’ll do a good job of selling the channel for me.

Today, I wanna reveal my other biggest goal, and my other biggest stress.

That big goal: To get more people to leave Dungeons & Dragons to try different games.

And that big stress? Curating an indispensable group of friends to review all of these RPGs with. 

So let's talk D&D. When we began Shut Up & Sit Down in 2011, we had the goal of getting people to stop buying Monopoly when countless other, brilliant games were languishing on shelves, unplayed, unknown, their components untouched. Right now, I think TTRPGs are in a similar spot.

For what it's worth, I don't hate dungeons or dragons! Given infinite time, I’d be perfectly happy to shepherd a table of players through a campaign of glossy battlemaps and cascading spell activations. It's just that this ancient brand that's kept aloft by nostalgia and wince-inducing marketing budgets steals desperately-needed oxygen from the rest of the TTRPG scene. Players go straight to D&D and stay there, meaning countless luminary designers who should be lifting the genre of TTRPGs to ever-greater heights can't even make a living selling games.

Obviously, without D&D's recent revival (and great shows like Critical Role) there wouldn't even be a TTRPG revival right now. But I'm relieved that today, interest in TTRPGs seems to be as high as it's ever been, but interest in D&D itself is waning. The signs are all over the place. The Open Gaming License debacle and Critical Role developing Daggerheart show a playerbase that's starting to feel stuck, and now the lid of the jam jar has been loosened I want to help pop it off.

Me choosing to review Wildsea specifically for the first ep of Quinns Quest is a black powder broadside aimed directly at those folks - whether they know it or not - who are getting ready to move on from D&D. I think Wildsea's world and art capture not the vibe of D&D, necessarily, but how D&D is presented in actual play. It doesn't capture Baldur's Gate 3 so much as Baldur's Gate 3 memes. It’s colourful, funny and pacy, but more than that, it’s a book that actively helps any table of players to be colourful, funny and pacy.

And then the second review on Quinns Quest (imagine my frigate twisting to deliver a second volley from the cannons on the opposite side) is actually going to be chunky sci-fi mech game Lancer. My hope there is to capture the attention of folk who find D&D's long, tactical combats a comfortable way to structure an evening. But you’ll hear me talk more on that with review #2.

Finally, coming up later in Quinns Quest season 1 are a couple of terrific games that offer funky interpretations of dungeon-delving... But I won’t spoil those just yet.

I say all this partially as a heads-up: There won’t be room for many reviews in Quinns Quest season 1 of games that fall under the (only half-meaningful) catch-all term of “indie” releases- smaller books designed for quicker play, often with more ambitious structures, often by designers who aren’t white men. Imagine!

But that's for later, when the channel is established. First, I want to whack the monolith that is Dungeons & Dragons with a bunch of glossy, hardback books and see how many fans fall out. I wanna get people to imagine trying games. Then once that's less of an intimidating proposition, I can wheel out stuff that's a little zestier. Like this:

(I appreciate that Apocalypse Keys is also a glossy hardback, but you know what I mean! Mechanically, emotionally, philosophically and spiritually it's gonna be asking a lot from your average D&D player.)

Now, let's round off this post by talking about a big problem facing Quinns Quest:

Holy crap is it tricky to curate a community to review RPGs with!

A bar I wanted to clear with Quinns Quest is that I wouldn’t just read books before reviewing them, I’d actually play them. I think it's the least that designers deserve, and while it isn’t common among today’s RPG reviewers, you can see why. When I reviewed videogames, you can get what you need in a couple of days. When I reviewed board games, it might take a few evenings. But reviewing a big RPG takes months.

But actually, just talking about the time you need to invest, I think I can crack that nut with forward planning. Right now I have a couple of groups running concurrent campaigns, working out at 1 or 2 big RPG nights a week, and if I sprinkle my calendar with the occasional shorter game I think I’ll get by (though I'm not saying I WON'T be writing a blog post in nine months time with the title "Oh God how wrong I was").

So what’s got me twisted isn’t this timekeeping, but the fact that reviewing games is mostly a methodical, grinding process, whereas roleplaying with folks is a delicate, emotional process built primarily on trust.

I’m realising now that this is a huge subject best left for a future Fan Club blog post. But for now, here are some of the sticky issues I’m ruminating on on a weekly basis:

Starting new campaigns is exciting and juicy, but finishing those campaigns so my players get satisfying closure is a lot of extra work. A couple of times it’s been unavoidable that we shutter a campaign before we reach that ending, and everybody hates that. It leaves those characters in your head like a splinter.

Not every players is cut out for every game. Not everyone is an ideal candidate to test a game that involves - say - protracted investigations, or complex combat, or just the DARKEST horror, or heartfelt relationships between PCs, or improvisational roleplay, and not everybody wants to read the entirety of the "real" first edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula before a campaign starts. Figuring out which players to call up to start a campaign can feel like casting a play.

With the above point in mind, having a wider pool of players to call up is helpful, but welcoming new players with limited RPG experience to my table is a slow process! Roleplaying requires a lot of confidence! And giving players that confidence and watching them find their feet is maybe the single thing about RPGs that I love the most, but it just can't be rushed. So that's another piece of forward-planning I have to do. It's no exaggeration to say that I am planning whole campaigns to get new players up to speed, so they'll be comfy in the game I really want to test.

Related to that: Sometimes I'm blessed and have more players excited to join a game than I think it needs. But what is the right number of players to test each game with? Powered by the Apocalypse games often benefit for having more players, because that creates more player relationships. But what's the ideal number of players for a Delta Green game? Or a Mausritter game? I have to make that call before I've even scheduled Session 0.

Should I always be GMing? That seems the best way to review a game. But am I succeeding at growing in RPG expertise if I hardly ever experience games from the players’ side?

This stuff is so nuanced and rich that on any given week I can be found in the pub with 1 or 2 or my players, trying to puzzle it out over a few pints of beer. I expect we'll still be philosophising about the answers for years to come. But I'm so excited to be going on this journey, and so grateful that you, my reader, are letting me try and figure it out.

It's no exaggeration to say that you're changing my life. Now, let's see if we can get some more folks playing TTRPGs and change their lives, too.

- Quinns