When a comment on a YouTube video reaches a certain length, it behooves you to turn that into a blog post because otherwise you are wasting a fine opportunity. I hate to waste an opportunity. Plus my commentary needed supporting documentary links, damnit, and you can’t do that in a YouTube comment.
A couple of days ago my comrade Grim / @grimjim posted a review of a role-playing game named Eternal Contenders. Which wouldn't be much of a thing to note, except that I have a complicated history with EC.
Actually, no – it's not that complicated. I really like it. But I'll let my commentary speak for itself.
I think we have a situation where your biases are getting in the way of actually presenting the game.
Up front, let me say that Eternal Contenders is a game I often refer to as "my favorite game that I never get to play." I love GM-less RPG design. You could even say that I specialize in it and have been focused in GM-less play for much of the last decade. I love the fact that every player at the table has to step up. That there is constant pressure to actually be interesting, engage everyone else at the table, be responsible for world building, be responsible for narrative – these are great things in my world. I've run GM-less co-op wargames. My biases are out there for everyone to see.
So when it comes to Eternal Contenders, I was going to be on board.
But I would never, ever present the game to anyone without providing a description of what the game really does and what the game is intended to do:
"Do you like Mortal Kombat? How about DarkStalkers? Do you like anime about fighting tournaments? Have you ever really been into 80s movies which depicted a group of people getting sucked into some sort of fighting tournament/Most Dangerous Game and then having to work out their interpersonal issues while continually getting into fights which provide opportunities to expose their inner landscape? Do you like shonen?
Yes? Let's go."
If you don't start the discussion about EC with that, you're not only doing a disservice to the game you're doing a disservice to the people you're talking to. I would know more bring it up in conversation or review without that preface than I would talking about Vampire: the Masquerade without saying "do you really like moody Goth culture of the early 90s?" It's that elemental.
EC is a relatively highly narrative, surprisingly tactical set of mechanics which is entirely intended to emulate a very specific set of experiences and narrative tropes – and has absolutely no interest in doing anything beyond that. It's an extremely focused game, though less focused than its predecessor, Contenders. It wants to allow the players to create this story in which hyper-violent characters in a hyper-violent world work out their issues with their fists (or their melee weapons). To that end, it creates a very crunchy set of tactical mechanics with big clear buttons and big colorful levers for people to build their subjective narrative experiences around. Also, there is a lot of fighting.
If you don't want to tell that kind of story, if you don't want to share that kind of story, then you definitely don't want to play EC. It does a very particular thing in a very particular way, and it does so surprisingly well. One of the best things about it is that it doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not in the text itself, which is amazingly refreshing once you've read enough RPGs.
Yes, like any narrative game you really need a group who is going to want to step up to the plate every time somebody opens their mouth. Not everybody wants that experience. Not everybody should want that experience. I want that experience. I love that sort of thing.
The only game that I am aware of that is in the same sort of conceptual space (narratively if not GM-lessly) as EC is Beast Hunters, which if anything is staggeringly less well known. If anything, these kinds of games work better in person than they do online unless you have the full camera rig, because being able to read the face, body language, and vocal inflection of the other players makes it much easier to engage with them. You can get away with a lot of asynchronous attention in something that's kind of a boring tactical exercise like D&D but if you're going to play something with a strong narrative focus then you probably ought to at least be real-time if not flashing the webcam.
The biggest problem with asynchronous play mechanically is the randomizer. If you want something to play via forum or play by email (to show my age), you want something that doesn't hinge on a randomizer that requires nonlocal trust. There are games which explicitly are about resource management and point management which exist within the narrative RPG sphere, but it's not something that a lot of people have done much with lately. ("Diceless play" got a bad rap in the past because a lot of its major proponents made Powered by the Apocalypse fan boys look like bloodless, dispassionate charming companions you'd want to take to dinner on a regular basis. Which is its own kind of shame.)
But all that aside, if you're going to talk about a game it probably works out better to open by talking about its central conceit and building outward rather than getting hung up on talking about how you're already predisposed not to like one of its central founding axioms.
Seriously, I can't believe that you never got around to talking about the fact that it is effectively all about playing out fighting games. It's right there in the name.