A manifesto

For a blossoming of delight in roleplaying games

For playing!

Buy no more books that will lie on shelves and coffee tables gathering dust.

Spend no more time building characters for games you are not about to play.

Beautiful art and book design have their pleasures, but to play is the highest pleasure.

You need no more dice to play.

You don’t need a complete collection of rulebooks and supplements to play. You can play now. Just with the core book or even the free basic rules.

You need no more minis to play. You can use anything to represent your characters or just your imagination.

Spend no more time studying combos of character options that would break the game. Instead play.

Play often.

For supporting RPG products that play well!

Play often to discover what products play well.

World building is admirable. But some worlds play better than others. Play to find out.

Maps may be pretty but some play better than others.

Rules may be light or heavy, comprehensive or not, innovative or derivative. But do they play well?

For critical reviews based in experience!

If a product plays well, tell others. If it doesn’t play well, tell others. Whether by a big company or small. Whether the art is beautiful or not. Whether the setting is enjoyable to read or not. Be a part of the feedback loop that rewards products that play well.

Does the new game breaking Kickstarter records play well? What about the game by the famous person? Find out by playing. Let others know.

Play a lot to develop the faculty to predict whether a game or module plays well, even without playing it. You might be wrong but you will enjoy more.

Adventures may have evocative titles, wonderful art, and back cover blurbs. But reviews should go beyond describing those. Can players really pull off a heist in the heist adventure? Can players choose their path in the open-world adventure? Can the players explore the hexcrawl within the time constraints of the plot?

Is the game really rules-lite and fast-to-play? Are the rules easy to find when you need them? Is the game really about existential ennui and insatiable hunger or is that just the stories at the beginning of the rulebook chapters? Can players engage in political machinations? Is the game really gritty and deadly?

None of these can be taken for granted.

So play. In groups. Duets. With and without a game master. In person. Online. Play by post. One shots. Mini-campaigns and long campaigns. Modules or homebrew or both. With friends or strangers.

Then the game you’ve always dreamt of will reveal itself.