What RPGs can learn from board games

And a new RPG review!

New video review is out, this time for The Vast in the Dark, an infinite demiplane inspired by the Blame! manga.

I’ve shut down the Questing Beast merch store, since Teespring appears to have stopped sending payouts to merchants. I’ll let everyone know when I’ve set up a new one.

And now, here is this week’s bonus post for paid subscribers and Patreon supporters. Join me in the comment section below to discuss it!

What RPGs can learn from board games

Previously, I mentioned how RPG players seem to be willing to put up with gameplay that would be anathema in a board game. Let’s expand on that.

One of the most striking things about playing Original or B/X D&D as written isn’t the higher lethality or the simplified classes, it’s how boardgame-like the experience is. This often comes as a surprise to players who are used to the much more free-form and DM-directed style of modern DnD. The boardgaminess is especially clear in dungeon crawling, which has a very defined structure.

All the rules in old-school dungeon crawling are tied into the concept of the 10-minute turn, during which the party can take a limited number of actions. Torch expiration, wandering monster checks, and resting happen after a set number of turns. Most of your standard actions like listening at doors, opening stuck doors and searching areas all have rules. Most tellingly, dungeons are laid out with squares like the gameboard in Clue, and the party can move a set number of squares every turn.

And it doesn’t stop with dungeons. Overland travel has rules that give the party meaningful choices, and combat is much more regimented than in later D&D editions, with things like movement, missile attacks, magic, and melee attacks happening in different phases. There are even rules for what happens when you drop food or gold while a monster is pursuing you (a favorite of mine).

To new players this can feel at first like a straightjacket, because it seems to run counter to the open-ended nature of RPGs, but you have to keep in mind that the early designers of D&D weren’t trying to create what we think of as an RPG. They were creating a tabletop adventure game that focused on achieving concrete goals through strategic planning. Using techniques from boardgames to do this is a great idea, because I think that your average board game produces fun more reliably than your average role-playing game.

Here’s what I mean by that.