On the second of February the respected RPG blog What Do I Know? shocked me.
RPG reviewer and podcaster Jared Rascher introduced one of their regular blog posts with the title On Changing Times. I thought at first it would be one of Jared’s typically insightful posts and perhaps about changes in the TTRPG landscape.
It was not. In the post, Jared announced a stop to writing roleplaying game reviews for the foreseeable future. I reached out and, kindly, Jared agreed to do an interview.
You’re stopping writing reviews for the foreseeable future. As I understand it, that’s because life right now does not allow it, not without harming your mental health. Is that right?
Its been difficult for me to focus on doing very specific, timed content. If I know that people may be waiting for me to post something, even if I haven’t given a specific timetable, there is a certain tension that builds between pushing me to get something done, and paralyzing me every time I try to do work. I would rather be up front with everyone and let them know I’m not going to be posting things regularly than worry that they are out there waiting.
Are you okay? It sounds like you’ve had several tough years, and 2025 is shaping up nastily.
No need to worry about me, not because I’m okay, but because I’m in several demographics that will be affected the least in the coming years. Spend your time making sure your POC and LGBTQIA+ friends are doing okay. If you have the resources, see a mental health professional. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it may be the thing that helps you keep going.
Do you have a favourite RPG, a favourite review you’ve written, and is there a connection between the two?
I think saying D&D is my favorite RPG is like saying pizza is your favorite food. It’s such a staple at this point that I don’t know if it really counts. Whenever I think about RPGs that hit me hard and made an impact, it’s hard not to mention Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. I love fantasy, but superheroes are part of my soul. I think its something about being called to make the world a better place. People mention superheroes as a power fantasy, and I think that’s true, but not in the way it’s sometimes meant. I would love to have the power to save people, to fix problems, to know the right thing to do for the largest number of people. That’s the dream.
Marvel Heroic Roleplaying hit me around the time that I stopped finding joy in Pathfinder, not so much because it was a bad game, but it’s a game that’s very demanding of the GM, and it was carrying on a tradition started by D&D 3e. I needed a break, and I wasn’t playing or running anything for the first time since 2003. When I first read Marvel Heroic, it just didn’t click. It was because I was used to game rules defining things with more absolutes. Marvel Heroic was a game about emulating the storytelling of a comic book, not modeling a superhero world. All of that didn’t crystalize for me until I listened to a review and actual play of Marvel Heroic, and about halfway through listening to the actual play, I started thinking to myself, “That’s not the best way to resolve that with the tools the game gives you,” and I started appreciating the game rules more and more. It was my gateway to understanding and embracing more narrative RPGs. This is how I happened upon my runner-up for this question, Monster of the Week, which I dearly love as well.
I have really enjoyed the reviews of games that I feel were saying something meaningful and communicating those things to anyone who engages with the game. I’ll also admit there have been debates about whether a game needs to be playable to be art, and my bias is if I don’t want to play a game, even if it’s novel or profound, I’m going to have a hard time being as excited as I am when I read a game that I want to play. Some of the games that hit me with their messaging or their clarity of storytelling over the years would be:
- Good Society just floored me by being a game that emulated its source extremely well and with a structure that wasn’t just an improv prompt but was interesting and thought-provoking to follow.
- Harlem Unbound 2nd edition was not only a great product, but it led me to talk more with Chris Spivey, who is an amazing human being doing amazing work.
- Pandora – Total Destruction just floored me by presenting a game about dangerous superheroes in training and then hitting you with the gut punch of making a statement on residential schools and similar human rights tragedies.
- Girl by Moonlight ran circles around my expectations because I was trying to wrap my head around “Magical Girls using Forged in the Dark rules,” and then I realized the game was really about presenting the person society wants you to be while trying to live who you were meant to be.
These aren’t the only games that I reviewed that rode that line between being a solid game and having a solid message, but I think these are the ones where I was still making revelations about the game as I was writing the review and seeing how the pieces fit together once I had a chance to think about them.
I’ve had angry creators get upset when I’ve not been able to review their game, not liked it, or said I can’t review their game on the schedule they want. Have you developed ways or techniques to cope with that?
Retiring from doing formal reviews. :D
I’ve always had a hard time not pressuring myself when someone gives me a review copy. Some people have been straightforward and said, “Can you write something about this before my crowdfunding campaign ends/starts,” and I want to help them, but the more larval a ruleset is, the less I want to comment on it because it may not have a solid trajectory yet. I don’t want to give impressions about a game that’s still developing, so that’s always tricky.
I was always very careful to say, “I would like to look at this, but I can’t promise that I’ll do a review or do a review by a specific time.” A lot of people were great and understood this, and sometimes I got to their product, and sometimes I didn’t. Some people, despite the disclaimer, would email me frequently asking when I thought I would get to something or if I had a timetable. Given how I specifically react to things, the more emphatic someone was, the more anxious I would get, and the harder it would be to work on what I was currently working on, let alone work through my queue to get to their product.
If you’re someone who makes games, and you’re thinking of giving someone a review copy, I beg of you, remember that most of the people that you’re probably considering can’t do this full-time. Some of them, like me, only ever lost money on the gig. If someone hasn’t gotten to your product yet, pushing them, even if they don’t shut down like I had a tendency to do, is probably going to get you the most perfunctory, unenthusiastic post about your post that you could imagine. “The pages of this game didn’t give me papercuts, and there were no noxious gases when I opened the box it came in.”
I have seen creators say either that they don’t think people should review their games or that they shouldn’t review games that they haven’t played, sometimes with the addendum that they should have to play it multiple times before they review it. I would love to have been able to play with every single game for which I wrote a review. I did my best to make sure to note where I wasn’t sure if something would play well at the table because it resolved things in a different way than other games I’ve played may have resolved them. I think if someone is saying something meaningful that shows they interacted with and attempted to engage your product, and they aren’t insulting (this is important given today’s review environment), that’s what a reviewer should be doing.
Do you think gamers read reviews of RPGs they hadn’t heard about?
Yes, but I think gamers are likelier to read reviews that are still adjacent to their regular tastes. If somebody likes PBTA games, they might read about Forged in the Dark games they haven’t heard about. If someone has only played fantasy RPGs but they like Marvel movies, they might check out a review of a superhero RPG. I also think there are some gamers who just like to stay abreast of what’s going on beyond what they immediately see on social media or at the local game store. One of the reasons I’ve always wanted to make sure my presentation and formatting are clear and easy to follow is that I want it to be easy for someone to engage with a game they may not be interested in, or at least as easy as it could be to read one of my fairly lengthy reviews.
What do you think makes a good review for a reader?
I think this may sound counterintuitive, but I think it’s important to understand what the reviewer cares about because that’s going to tell you where you agree and where you depart from the review. It’s been my position that a good review isn’t really about the review saying thumbs up or thumbs down. That’s kind of expected, but that’s not what is important about the review. I think there were two big influences on my RPG reviews, and that was spending way too much of my youth watching Siskel and Ebert and reading the reviews in Dragon Magazine back in the ancient past.
At the Movies, it was a revelation to me because these were two people who were meant to be experts, talking about if movies were good or not, and they didn’t always agree. That meant the question of “is this objectively a good movie” isn’t what they were really engaging, they were saying “here is my criteria of what makes a good movie of this type, and this is how it measures against those expectations.” The point was to hear what each of them thought was important and to see why something that appealed to one of them didn’t appeal to the other. I know a lot of people say things like “ignore the reviewers, like what you like,” but what are you ignoring, the star rating or what they are actually saying about the movie? You might learn more about what is in the movie and how it was presented from reading a negative review that has meaningful engagement than you would reading a review that just says, “This was awesome!”
The reviews in Dragon Magazine were almost always opinionated. I was shocked when I read about the reviewer thinking another system did some things better than D&D, and it made me think about how D&D did those things. I read reviews that brought up lots of cogent points that were more than the reviewer was willing to recommend, but that let me know that the product engaged with some topics that never came up in the ads or on the back copy of the book. It actually taught me that some RPG books, even when they’re made for one system, can be useful across the board.
There are two trends I’m not thrilled with in the review space online, and I’m sure that’s even beyond the fact that either of these tactics would get the reviewers exponentially more reach than anything I ever wrote. The first kind of review that bothers me is the cheerleader review. You know if you watch the reviewer for any amount of time they’re always positive about a book, which is fine. I don’t like to write reviews for things I would never recommend, and I’ve only done it a few times when I think it was worth making a larger point. However, the kind of reviews I’m talking about are the ones where the reviewer gives you a resume of the company’s greatest hits, tap dances around what would make the book a disappointment, and then, surprise, the book doesn’t do that thing. But other than knowing it doesn’t do the disappointing thing, what do I know about the product?
The other trend is the kind of over-the-top bloodbath reviews where someone finds the worst aspects of a thing, usually divorces them from context, and turns the hyperbole dial to 11. At best, the person can pull off an amusing rant that’s fun to read. At worst, a handful of the reviewer’s pet peeves are presented as the only thing of substance in the book. Beyond that, these kinds of reviews are the most likely to veer into my least favorite thing about any review, when people judge the designer’s talent and ability rather than the product they are engaging with. When creators are anonymous, and you’ve already ramped up the hyperbole about how terrible this thing is, it’s really easy to cross that line and start to ridicule the people who worked on the product.
Both of those types of reviews encapsulate the biggest issues we have in the modern internet. Things are either amazing and beyond reproach, or they are the worst thing that has ever been produced. If someone doesn’t like your amazing, above-reproach item, they are probably bad people who need to feel bad for existing. If someone likes something that you have determined is the greatest threat to you ever having joy in your life again, you need to badger them into submission until they understand how bad this thing is. That’s not a healthy way to approach anything. Everything that I love has its issues, but that doesn’t outweigh what I love about it.
Do you think reviews sell games?
Yes, but it’s not an absolute. I know I’ve had people reach out to me and tell me that they picked up something after reading a review. That said, it’s hard to know how much you’re moving the needle, and the bigger the company, the less any single review will make or break that product. From a sales standpoint, there was no point in me writing reviews on WotC D&D products because I’m not going to even be a drop in the bucket when it comes to their sales. But I’ll admit, people will read them, and more than that, it gave me a chance to talk about trends developing in the game and broader game design ideas. In that case, I don’t know if I convinced anyone to buy or not buy anything, but I may have shown someone that WotC had done the same thing in X, Y, and Z products, and that indicated that some change in game design was underway.
If I can get a little more abstract, I do think that if a game regularly appears in sources that a gamer is engaging with, even if they don’t buy that product, from that review, it does serve to make that game part of the zeitgeist. Eventually, that person may not buy that product, but seeing that review was one of the contributing factors to them finally giving a new game a try.
Can/should review sites make money from RPG reviews?
My personal feeling is that even if you manage to separate your opinion from your cash flow, it’s ultimately going to hurt you if you make money directly from reviews. But I want to stress the “directly.” If a company that sent you a review copy of a book buys ad space on your site, that’s different than saying, “Would you take X amount of dollars to do a review of this product,” and its especially different if multiple people are paying your ad revenue because then it’s just known that people pay for ads on your site. I had briefly toyed with putting up a Patreon for my personal blog, but I didn’t want to gatekeep any of my articles, and even the most well-meaning of people have a tendency not to pay for content they’re already getting for free.
I’m glad that because of D&D’s boom since 2015 or so, a lot of major outlets started to cover RPGs, and will offer a review once in a while. Unfortunately, a lot of that has been eaten up in recent years with the internet trend of a big company to buy a website with an established name and turning it into an AI content mill. There are a few spaces in the RPG world that are still providing news, and in some ways, I think that if we had more robust gaming news sites, reviews would be a natural fit for those sites, the same way reviews have been part of newspapers or morning news shows for ages. However, there are only a handful of dedicated RPG sites, and I worry that, even without recent political events, the RPG market will start contracting. Whether you are or aren’t a fan of D&D, that’s the bellwether of the RPG industry, and I think we’re entering an era of Hasbro being too aware that they own the property for the property to grow.
I think the fact that instead of reaching out to online creators and popular actual play shows for cross-promotion, Hasbro wants to own everything they use to promote D&D, and that doesn’t build a community the way events like the Stream of Annihilation or the Stream of Many Eyes did. To bring this around to the original topic, I think between companies gutting existing online outlets and the growth of D&D slowing, you’re going to see a lot fewer large venues dedicating space to RPGs and RPG reviews because they won’t be directly bringing in traffic and driving clicks. I think the best option would be for people to get really comfortable with a patron model of production so people can actually run the kind of sites they want to run to cover RPGs the way they desire.
By the way, I love how Geek Native has promoted reviews on personal blogs. I miss the days when blogs could actually catch someone’s eye and develop a steady readership, and I love seeing other bloggers still out there doing their thing.
Is there a shortage of reviews for RPGs?
As long as there aren’t enough people to cover even just the major publisher’s regular releases, let alone smaller publishers and the indie scene, we don’t have enough reviews. In fact, until everything has at least two reviewers meaningfully engaging with it, there are too few since having a contrast between what reviewers value and expect is so important for people to develop their own priorities. The RPG industry has always had marginalized communities, but there are more marginalized people who are present and staying in the space longer because they aren’t being actively pushed out the way they were in the past. We need perspectives from these communities more than we need someone like me to comment on things. I think Graeme Barber’s blog posts covering Tomb of Annihilation and how WotC adapted Chult to the modern gaming scene helped to start a really important conversation about who gets to work on what projects and who gets to have a voice, and it’s amazing how different things look now compared to 2017, when you still had people who were not from those communities starting up settings based on cultures they haven’t even really engaged without outside of pop culture. We still have a long way to go, but it’s amazing the things that have become standard in the creation of RPG products, and I hope that corporate cowardice in the face of regressive, racist, LGBTQIA+ hating politicians doesn’t actively erase a lot of the gains that have been made in a short period of time.
The plan is for you to still write Gnome Stew and keep up the podcasts. Is that right? Where’s the best place for people to follow your insights into the hobby?
Ang and I are still going to be recording THAC0 with Advantage, where we tackle various aspects of D&D and fantasy gaming topics, and Ang, Chris, and I are still doing more of the Heroes of Hovel’s Way, our two-person actual play series. Chris and I have been making 5e SRD material for the Patreon, and eventually, Ang will have some adventure content up there as well. Ang and I are still working on an idea for a series of articles that I’ll be tackling that aren’t quite as narrow in focus as reviews but still have consistent content and topics. I’m also still going to post about the RPG industry and even products on my blog, although I’m probably not going to talk about those products as formal reviews the way I have in the past. I already did an article looking at the Forgotten Realms subclass Unearthed Arcana, but it was a lot more laid back and less structured than my first impression articles, where I would sit up half the night comparing the new subclasses back and forth with existing ones from multiple releases to catch everything I could about what had developed over time. It really was a first impression, not a first impression + lots of additional work and context. I hope people still enjoy what I’m working on. I’ve met some of my best friends through interactions via forums, social media, and online venues, and I hope I get to meet more of them.
