The Gaming Den

We're always talking about broad industry stuff... but how was your experience with tabletop gaming through the 2010's. Any games surprise you in a good way?

Get any of your heartbreakers finished, or a lot started?

I joined TGD in 2011 and since then I've become a university game design teacher, a lot of what I've learned here I apply to class.

Mid to late 2010s was when I got the most consistent gaming group I have ever had and have become good friends with so much better than 2000s where I list my previous longest running group.

Shout out to Acid, Rad, Hicks, Tenngu, Foxwarrior, Sigil, Bunny, and Darth Rabbit.

Honorable mention to Kale, Lokathor, and DSM.

I basically quit freelancing for roleplaying games with the CGL debacle (2010).

I did the Farcast yearblog for Eclipse phase, mostly because I could (2013).

I finished Space Madness!, after much dithering (2019).

Ran some games online, mostly on the den.

Did a shitload of OSSRs, many of them with Frank Trollman.

So that was fun.

I ran not one but 3 or 4 major campaigns, one of them my own homebrew and the others various published megaventures/adventure paths.

Got into Pathfinder for a good long while before I burned out on the system.

Started a minor self-publishing company and put out 11 sourcebooks which sold decently.

Experienced a political awakening which got me into leftist politics and made me more cognizant of how this intersected with gaming culture. Various friends and social circles helped make me a better person and how I approached my own writing and behavior in group games.

Ran a fantasy and gaming blog for around 5 years before slowing down around 2017.

Joined the OSR for a more rules-lite D&D alternative, more or less cut all ties due to widespread toxicity in comparison to other fandoms.

Joined Min-Max Boards, RPGnet, the Gaming Den, EN World, and just about every major tabletop gaming site with the username Libertad.

Reviewed a shitload of Let's Read/OSSRs on a bunch of sites. I think I broke two dozen easily.

Backed a lot of projects on KickStarter. All but three of them have delivered finish product eventually, and one of those hasn't hit its estimated completion date yet. All in all, a lucky run for me.

Last but not least, the majority of my lasting friendships were made during this decade.

I started tabletop gaming back in high school at the start of the decade, played a bit in college, and got a "consistent" gaming group within the past 3 years.

I moved from D&D 4e to 3.5, took a break, then started back up with PTU. It was my idea to start up a group with my friends, and they introduced me to a lot more RPGs, since some of them are actually into reading new books.

Been running the same campaign for nearly 3 years, while my friends would GM 1-4 sessions of various other games, ranging from Apocalypse World to Eclipse Phase to Basic Fantasy RPG. Now I'm in a Blades in the Dark game, since my friend really seems to have a boner for shitty AW games.

Getting into tabletop RPGs has really opened up my world to other hobbies, like painting minis, assembling terrain, and creative writing. It's probably one of the better hobbies I've gotten into.

I think this decade is when I went back and re-did some of my more haphazardly built dumb things and made them actually workable and better to play. And wrote up the Monster Prestige Classes and published them as pdfs so now I'm pretty sure the Aranea and maybe even the Cloaker and Mimic have more "You must be this race" options than the fucking Half-Orc (allegedly a core playable race in the PHB that is totally supported). Not including anything that says you have to be an Orc, or you have to be a Human, or you have to be Orc-Blooded, or whatever. I'm quite pleased with those docs and in the next decade I'd like to see, run, play or hear about a game where they played a big role (whether every PC being one of them or the majority of major enemies using this or whatever).

It's also the decade that I created (and then recreated with a new system) Bakuhatsu High. On a related note I realised my hatred of dice pool systems was misplaced and it's just that my experience had all been with bad dice pool systems also known as "literally anything by White Wolf (and the people who bought their various properties and continued their sagas as (somewhat fittingly) walking corpses of games)".

I played some really solid, enjoyable games with people like Maxus, Miekle and Chamomile, along with other people not on the Den. There were some full D&D campaigns - no they didn't go up to level 20 so the rule of "nobody gives a fuck about level 20" still holds true, but they reached their actual end rather than just people wandering off and forgetting, or whatever. And a key character I've sort of been re-using in different forms across different games since before I came to the Den has actually been retired, having finally had a game that saw a bunch of growth and a conclusion.

I've had some paid work in the design and GMing fields, which is pretty cool too, but that was mostly this year so it's likely to be a bigger deal going forward.

Edit: also the entirety of Disgaeagame was this decade and a huge success

The decade through my eyes:

Given how the decade kickstarted with Pathfinder, well...

Met pathfinder and got hands-on experience of how fanboys can ruin things for everyone.

Then got into RPGnet and burned bridges with everyone 3-degrees related with CCP because I'm a heathen, clearly.

Got acquainted with Mutants&Masterminds and it became hands-down my favorite game of all time.

Got acquainted with Fate, and loved it until Evil Hat turned into a bunch of gangsters.

Got acquainted with Gumshoe, and I'm a fan of Robin D. Laws to this day.

First became a fan of Monte Cook because he seemed to make d20 fun, then saw him fall from grace after he grew the neckbeard and did Numenera, Perhaps Shana ruined him for gaming, or perhaps he really never intended to write rules and Shana made him become true to his own self.

Saw White Wolf burn all of its bridges and then set itself on fire, and then saw the remains of WW rot RPGnet to its very core with their totalitarianism, but then observing their products in detail, this shouldn't have surprised me in the least.

Saw the hobby emulate the fall of Rome and then plunge deep into the dark ages, and then saw the cycle close and repeat itself, now back into the days of Gygax (and then saw the world imitate the hobby and throw itself back 80 years, but that's beyond the point), and then saw the lumbering corpse of the hobby become a cargo cult of itself much like Zack Snyder imitating Zack Snyder in the first four minutes of Justice League.

Now lacking both dnd and its most suitable alternative, I decided becoming the change I want to see and wrote a fantasy heartbreaker I have yet to finish but already tested (because if shitty games are what people like now, then I can write a shitty game too). Also wrote a shounen anime emulating game that is less than 20 pages long, and may test in the following weeks, and carrying on with my joke of organizing a kickstarter specifically to pay for a payola campaign for game a wrote, I asked for prices to my favorite artist for a cover, but he has yet to get back to me.

In the end, I reached the same conclusion as Ep. 8 of Star Wars: It's not about fighting what I hate, it's about protecting what I love.

In the last decade (dang...) I got back into gaming regularly when a games cafe opened in my neighborhood. I also met my now white and introduced her to RPGs. I got into the OSR scene and ran a 2 year ACKS campaign before realizing that the OSR was a dead-end and had a super toxic community. (Who would have thought a scene dominated by white men over 40 would have reactionary politics?) My wife and I got into 5e and she ended up DMing for the first time (Storm King’s Thunder.)

In the last year we had a baby, so haven’t been gaming much lately, though we plan to rejoin our gaming group in the new year by alternating playing a character who’s been possessed by a spirit. To scratch the gaming itch I’ve been working on a heartbreaker on my lunch breaks. It’s cargo cult bullshit right now, but it’s just something to tinker with. I’ve also started adapting it with a friend to make a Tekumel/Lord of Light inspired psychedelic dying earth fantasy game.

Going forward, I’d like to get back into a regular gaming group (that’s being planned,) and do more D&D inspired art. But, I’m also back in grad school for my Special Education masters so “more” might be very relative.

I only started proper tabletop in the past decade. My previous experience was playing in games my cousin tried to run while I was a very dumb child. Now I'm a very dumb adult and the Internet exists, so my weird obsession with D&D in spite of never being able to play it is now something I get to act on.

I went from 4e to PF to 5e to PF. I've managed to get a group of video game players to become a shockingly stable tabletop (but played over Maptool) group that will probably be my most consistent group if we go for just another month or two. Maybe this is more of an indictment of my previous groups.

I've also played in a bunch of 5e campaigns in real life that all shattered like the empty ceramic pot that system is.

That's all for me.

Let's see, a decade ago I was still in college. Back then I had a group of a dozen or so friends who I and one other experienced D&D player introduced to gaming, and we had two games every semester, one I ran, one run by a different DM each time, mostly 3.5 but with some d20 offshoots like SWSE and M&M. It was the most consistent and fast-paced gaming I'd ever done (trying to game in high school was such a pain) and playing so many different games in quick succession started me on my first serious homebrew, including the Obligatory 3.5 Heartbreaker.

After college, I moved across the country and found a crew of more gaming newbies (with one lapsed AD&D player and one reformed 4e player) and ran my first long-term campaign for them, two years almost to the day. I kept working on my heartbreaker during that time, and for the next campaign (which ended up lasting four years) we basically playtested my heartbreaker with the classes/monsters/etc. rebuilt for the setting we used. They loved it and want to revisit it at some point, and having my heartbreaker so well received had me start working on a bunch of other large homebrew projects I'd been thinking of for a while but had figured no one would care about.

During that time, I was visiting my hometown three or four times a year and had reconnected with some of my high school gaming friends, so I started running one- and two-session adventures with them every time I was back in town, sometimes two different ones in the same visit. By this point I'd read through a lot of systems and read about a lot more here on the Den but had never played or run anything not D&D or d20-System-derived, so for those games I branched out a bunch: I ran Fate (Dresden Files plus three different Fate Core hacks I wrote, one Last Airbender, one Mass Effect, one Star Wars), Mistborn, Shadowrun 4e, GURPS, Riddle of Steel, Game of Thrones, a bunch of different OSR games, and one abortive attempt at Burning Wheel. Writing Fate hacks, attempting to learn new RPGs in a really short time, and the like taught me a lot that I've since incorporated into my homebrew and DMing style.

Near the end of the long campaign, I started running 5e for a coworker and his friends (I'd wanted to do 3e, but one of them had played 5e before and insisted). It's set in the Forgotten Realms, per the request of the 5e fan who'd read most of the novels and was a huge fan, so I leveraged that to start sneakily playing 3e in 5e, porting so much stuff from 3e while remarking "Gee, it's a shame they don't have this in 5e already, lemme whip something up..." that at this point the party has almost no vanilla 5e races, classes, or items and they've decided they want to play actual 3e next campaign. Mission accomplished.

At this point between all my homebrew stuff and some well-organized campaign wikis, I have several friends who've played in my games insisting that I clean some of the stuff up and publish it somewhere, which...I mean, I'm not going to make any noticeable money off of adventures or random third-party systems and I'm not about to rewrite everything for the dumpster fire du jour that is 5e, but the votes of confidence are much appreciated.

This decade was when I first got into TTRPG's and I've been enjoying myself immensely with them. Mostly stuck with the same group of friends.

Made Pokemon Mystery Dungeon D20. Made a bunch of reimagined monsters and some homebrew classes and even a few campaign settings. Even if the industry as a whole is disappointing, I'm rather satisfied with what I've accomplished.

Personally, it was great, globally, not so much.

GW has kindly cured me of almost all of my annoying obsessive fan tendencies towards it, though not sure when they stated doing that.

The new models tend to be nice, and there's some that aren't only "technically nice", though.

At the end of it, I've gotten a lot more chill about what I play. I've stopped collecting new hardcopy books almost exclusively, simply playing my existing collection. If I want something new, I get it in PDF. I've given away or sold a substantial amount of my RPG book collection.

The early 2010's I played/ran Exalted for a couple years. It was great. I shifted to an Ars Magica Game around 2013? 2014? For another couple of years. Then I did Pathfinder Giant Slayer for a year.

Now I mostly just game with my son as a way of bonding. I haven't played a regular game in a good two years with other adults.

I came to the realization that gamers are mostly shitty people.

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I came to the realization that gamers are mostly shitty people.

Yeah, but people are mostly shitty people. It's probably a slightly higher incidence rate, but I'm not sure what you expected.

The 2010's had me suffer from 10 years of ageing. Fortunately, did not die from it.

I've been in two RPG groups throughout the entire decade, one always a GM, the other one sometimes as a player, other times as a GM. Almost always playing Pathfinder, with some tries at other RPG's sprinkled in for the second group.

Good times, as far as my RPG experience goes. I hope I can keep it up for the next decade at least.

Well, the 10s are the decade in which I was shown TTRPGs.
Which was pretty fun when I was a player and we occasionally met at the GMs house to play her fantasy homebrew.
And still fun when I started running Shadowrun.
And less fun when our GM moved away and thus only my group survived.
And a lot less fun due to our group at best meeting once per year to play.

So, yeah. Could definitely be better.

Fwib wrote:The 2010's had me suffer from 10 years of ageing. Fortunately, did not die from it.

Widely under-rated, is aging. Same happened to me, and am hoping for the same again in the 2020's.

Avoided a few 4e games, acted as a sounding post for people's complaints about the 4e games they played in. Read a whole lot of Pathfinder stuff, but hardly ever used it. Played a few PC games that are "RPGs", but eventually gave up on tabletop. I think I know people who play 5th edition D&D still, I just don't care enough to ask.

Mostly played a whole shit lot of bloodbowl. Still not all that good at it, and partly it's that I want to protect and level up my players way more than I want to win games. Because, you know, RPG background, where that's the whole thing.


Every now and then, very nostalgic for tabletop RPGs. Think about joining something, read the 5th edition book a bit, and then it goes away again.

Oh, was quite sad about Pathfinder 2 for a bit, because I had hopes they would make the game better, and then they didn't seem to do that. I can see how as designers they thought they were onto something, but no, no, it was not good.

Burned the fuck out on caring about RPGs, got into 40k instead.

I regret nothing.

I'm going to spend the next ten years laughing at you.

Honestly the big thing is that the 40k club meets regularly and the RPG groups fall apart.

I'm surprised you haven't brought up the new Space Marine supplements where GW took...a fairly balanced meta and kicked it in the nuts.

Eh, GW, for all it's many, many failings still seems better in various ways than a lot of big RPG companies. The Nazi stuff tends to be satirical and the grimdark stuff doesn't tend to be all weird rape stuff and the rules sorta kinda work most of the time.

My standards might be a bit low, admittedly.

This decade:

I found this forum - my homebrew improved heavily as a direct result.
I got into good testing practices - my homebrew became significantly more rigorously tested as a result.
I got into Agile development habits - my homebrew releases became significantly less painful.

I bought a house, changed jobs twice (for the better each time), made a couple of new friends, and continued gaming with my oldest friends and my partner. Good times. We got a cat - that's good, and he's just started sleeping through the night, rather than getting bitey @0330, which is awesome . I dropped out of, then fell back into, both GW games (40k/Necromunda, working on houseruling both into playability!) and WoW, so the addictive personality is still going strong. I shaved my head. I lost some relatives. I got into politics, and tried to slow the western world going to shit. I started giving to charity much more often.

All told - still a positive decade. Hoping that the next one is better.