Dungeons & Dragons has become widely known and accepted by the general public since (1) the release of 5th Edition, (2) the portrayal of D&D on the progam Stranger Things, and (3) since multiple groups have started posting the audio and video of their gameplay to the internet, from Adventure Zone and Acquisitions Incorporated to Critical Role and Dimension 20.
Other tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) have also risen in popularity both alongside and in response to the rise of D&D. Some have revived ‘old-school’ (pre- 5th Edition) flavors of play. Some have always been fundamentally different and less-known systems and settings, such as Savage Worlds, Call of Cthulhu, and the many variants of the Powered by the Apocalypse system.
With all these TTRPG options, why create yet another?
My Persistent Interest in Game Design
When Sebastian Bell introduced me to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1979, I was intrigued but I thought the rule-system was too difficult to learn. For several years in middle school I ran a much-simplified homebrew, relying on improvisation to make the gameplay appealing to my friends.
I was greatly encouraged by Wizards of the Coast’s publication of the Open Gaming License in 2000. By that time I had not played D&D for years, but I was learning Linux and deeply committed to the Free Open-Source movement. I tinkered around a bit with alternate rules, but I did not know anyone who gamed at that time.
Men my son started discussing a new edition of D&D that had been released in 2008 (4th Edition), I was again intrigued, but disappointed. I agreed that the rules needed simplification from 3rd Edition, but not in the direction of reducing D&D to a board game as 4th Edition seemed to do. By chance I found that my friend Chris Specker was running the game store Its Your Move, and I joined a Pathfinder group there to get reacquainted with TTRPG game-play as an adult, and using more modern rules. Pathfinder improved the consistency of design from D&D version 3.5, but did so by building out an extremely elaborate rule-set. Again, I hoped for simplification.
I was therefore encouraged by the release of 5th Edition, which simplified in another direction: a less-crunchy rule-set, but also not constraining like a board game. I felt they had gone about halfway in the simplification I hoped for, but at least in the right direction. The rise of popularity of 5th Edition suggests that this simpler, open-ended rule-set appeals to many people. Six of us kept our sanity through the COVID-19 lockdown by playing a 3-year campaign in the Eberron setting.
Like so many players, I was dismayed by Hasbro’s attempt to revoke the Open Gaming License at the end of 2022. Our gaming group decided to start trying other systems. Blades in the Dark is well-designed, but the whole tone of gameplay and the setting was too grim-dark for us. Thirsty Sword Lesbians is even better-designed, but tonally inappropriate for a very different reason: the explicit purpose of the game is romance and flirtation. Wonderful for some groups, but not what we are looking for. I have considered Gamma World (d20 rules), Dead Lands (Savage Worlds rules), Call of Cthulhu, and Kids on Bikes. These are all wonderful settings, but their rule-systems are complex and different enough from D&D to present an additional obstacle: a need to unlearn our assumptions from D&D.
In most respects the Notches system is a radical simplification of the d20 system. However, what I learned from other systems was to change the assumptions about combat. On the one hand, it is simplified to a series of Skill checks using the same mechanisms as other Skill checks. On the other hand, combat is subsumed into a broader set of rules about conflict—much of which might be witty (and vicious) repartee.
So, part of my motivation for designing Notches is irreducible to anything other than very persistent interest. I enjoy design.
My Persistent Interest in Geography
Geography is another, very different reason why I have designed Notches. In the 1990s I thought that my persistent world-building in the 1980s led to my undergraduate degree in geography. Later I came to understand that it was the other way around: I have always been fascinated by spatial relationships, mapping, landscapes, and urban settings. I learned about plate tectonics, orogenesis, erosion, biogeography, and cultural geography both for their own sakes, and to make my fantasy-geographies credible.
As you can imagine, this interest is also problematic. Like others, I drifted off into the rabbit-hole of making fantasy worlds as my actual gameplay tapered off in the 1980s. Once I resumed being a Game Host in 2020, this fascination with geography remained a distraction. I have had to tame my fascination to the point where geography is only one non-player character (NPC) among many that support gameplay, where the Players and their Characters always are central.
At this point I can generate an indefinite amount of fantasy physical geography. In 2021 I reviewed the documentation on the city of Sharn in the Eberron setting, and was able to produce a vastly more detailed geography of the city. I published a detailed urban atlas of Sharn on the DungeonMaster’s Guild under the gnomish pseudonym of Enta Spinwhistle of Zilargo. It is a fantasy, 40-level homage to the twisting streets of Venezia. It made me feel a bit like Italo Calvino’s portrayal of Marco Polo: city after fantastical city, Marco was always describing yet another aspect of Venezia to his patron, the Great Khan.
A Mirror on Reality
Like science fiction, fantasy is a genre that always reflects back on our present real world. Both genres have been around long enough for the world itself to change, and therefore reveal potentially ‘dated’ qualities of each fictional genre. D&D began in the shared cultural experience of white suburban American boys. In the 21st century, it has been embraced and largely appropriated by queer, trans, and other diverse people. The popularity of Tieflings as ‘inescapably different’ and ‘disparaged for reasons of birth’ are types of ostracism which many new players strongly identify with. By 2010, we came to regard Paladins as imperialist and intolerant crusaders; the archetype of lawful evil, not lawful good. By 2020, we rejected the ‘monster’ stereotype of orcs and goblins, since these stereotypes had originating in Tolkein’s racist attitudes towards East Asians.
Through our Characters, Players can explore different identities. Through setting design, Game Hosts can explore different cultures and politics. For the past two years I have been focused on a distant-future setting. As I explained in a recent blog post, I am now going to shift to a focus on the Gilded Age, and specifically the year 1892, as a harsh rebuke against the right-wing aspiration to try and ‘wind the clock back’ to some supposedly ‘great’ time in the past. 1892 was not great. From the 2020s, 1892 looks like a dystopia and a cautionary tale. Excellent for a conflict-rich roleplaying game; not a time towards which one should aspire to return.