SUNDAY MUSINGS - The Bespoke Vs The Licence

A question that often bubbles up into my brain during the afterglow of a good RPG session, one that has returned time and time again over the years. Why can I not get into a pre-existing licence when it comes to RPG games? There’s many a good system out there ranging from Blade Runner to Discworld, but yet I struggle to engage. Is the cynic in me so against the the two blades of nostalgia that I cannot fathom getting an unforgettable adventure out of a book with a familial logo slapped onto the front? Is it that there’s only a certain amount of space and finance that can used up by this arm of the hobby, especially now when a fully sized hardback core book can cost the same as heating the house for a week. I don’t think so, at least not fully. An RPG session for me is all about the storytelling and the possibility, which I’ve seen over the years can become much reduced by the familiarity of the setting provided

Don’t get me wrong, there’s joy to be be found in re-engaging with a Colonial Marines Bughunt, or being able to wander Middle Earth without having to get permission from Christopher Tolkien. There is in no doubt an undeniable thrill in stepping inside worlds we’ve adored for years, but once that initial excitement fades, I find that players go around the setting rather than get inside it. The what-ifs and improvisation of a free-wheeling campaign either became slave to Canon becoming an invisable player or heads swiftly to the land of drinking whacky juice from clown shoes. The Canon problem often rears a head here, as not all players will have the same amount of knowledge of a setting, and if my actions contradict a 1997 novel, it feels less a game and more a museum.

The elephant in the room of course is that my most-played RPG games are Call of Cthullu, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Delta Green, themselves all licensed in roundabout ways.However, all three of these games appear to invite the player in, to find the parts of the world not explored in the existing narratives. The unreliability of the narrators are writ large in the framework of the those games.

Outside of those games (And I am taking great care not to just list the games I do adore), a bespoke setting will always fire the imagination further. All the players arrive with the exact same level of information, we can all throw theories on how and what happened to the ancient empire, why the dragon keeps stealing the tiles off tower roofs (a thing I have experienced). Every answer is yet to be discovered and all questions matter because the world belongs to the players around the table. That’s a magical and intoxicating thing. It’s likely why my soft spot for the obscure has only grown as the Tabletop RPG market grows. Sensible people would be happy to drop into an existing world whilst I would rather dive with infectious enthusiasm into some half-forgotten pre-internet box. I understand the former but the latter is the place place of blank maps, where the imagination can take root and stretch the branches.

Bepoke settings in many ways level the player difficulty. I neither know nor care how Klingon politics works (or why I can’t be a Jedi Jawa). I however love it when a gang of the ignorant, of the gloriously confused have to pay attention. Bespoke feels less passive to me, where we become more active in the building blocks of the setting, in the story as it unfolds. There are times when even the GM does not know. That uncertainty is brilliant. As I get older, I get the feeling a lot of this comes from trying to recapture that sense of discovery from my youth. That joy in unlocking another chain of things to learn about, where as a man in my mid-40s now it’s hard to regain that joy. Modern fandoms are amazing at documentation, where every mystery finds an exhaustive answer to be given, not to be found. I want to find those moments of exact sequences of catastrophes that caused a ratcatcher to be crowned (because everyone else was dead) or the heroic sacrifice that was immediatly overshadowed because someone forgot to pack rope (not me). Those moments become both the mythology of a world as well as the ribbing and conversation afterwards. These are moments that belong exculisively to the players in that moment, the fools rolling dice on a Tuesday evening.

It is entirely possible that what I am chasing every time I sit down with an unfamiliar settingis uncertainty. The feeling that somewhere beyond the next hill is something nobody at the table has ever imagined before. That sensation is surprisingly difficult to manufacture inside a universe where millions of people already know exactly what is over the hill, what colour it is and which expansion book first mentioned it.

There is an irony hidden somewhere inside all this. The hobby spends an extraordinary amount of time celebrating worlds that somebody else imagined while quietly overlooking the ones we could imagine ourselves. We lovingly memorise fictional histories instead of making new ones. We chase canon when we could be creating legends. Licensed games let us visit famous worlds, and there is genuine joy in that, but bespoke settings hand us the keys instead. They ask us to wander into the darkness armed with nothing but curiosity, questionable judgement and a character sheet that probably won't survive the night.

Maybe that's why, if someone places two roleplaying books in front of me and asks me to choose, I will almost always reach for the one filled with unfamiliar names and maps that make absolutely no geographical sense. Somewhere inside those pages is a mystery that belongs to nobody yet. There are monsters nobody has catalogued, kingdoms nobody has argued about online and ancient evils that haven't already been ranked in a top ten video on YouTube. In an age where almost everything has been explained, analysed and filed into neat little boxes, there is something wonderfully rebellious about opening a book and not knowing what on earth is waiting on the next page. That, for me, is where roleplaying still performs its greatest magic.

Of course, that’s just me, and I know I’m not a normal boy. I’d like to hear your thoughts on the topic.