Experiential Yearning And Some Sort of Space Hack?

It’s been a while! Sorry, not really been able to post lately, but back now, and better late than never. -Jim

What do you want out of TTRPGs? No, that doesn’t matter. What do I want out of TTRPGS? Yes, that’s the important thing. Let’s find out!

A few years ago I was pitching a videogame to a room of swarthy videogame veterans. Beards, fortunes, you know the type. You have probably heard of these people. They had a lot of experience, and even more opinions on the experience of others. Anyway, the conversation came around to an already established game, how it was successful, and why. The general drift of things was that it didn’t matter how good or bad any individual element of the game was, because overall it fulfilled the sort of experience that gamers wanted, and had always wanted, and would always want. That, they said, was a good pitch: addressing a popular gamer fantasy. I had to agree. 

Since that time I’ve found myself comparing all games to that argument. Is this what gamers fantasized about doing? Is this providing something they wanted from their games? Do people even know what they want? If they didn’t know, but liked the game anyway, was there some unfulfilled potentiality that was always there waiting to be filled? That’s philosophy, that is, and best avoided.

Yes, the conversation with the bearded men around the table was obviously using this idea to consider how to shape videogame pitches to get money for development, but I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that the proposition suggests that there are gamers out there with unmet experiential needs. They really want to play a game where they are a reverse centaur, and no one is making it!

Frustrating.

So sometimes this argument feels like an accurate one about what you need to make a game that gamers want. It seems true and valid. But when you consider what actually does the business, it can seem less so. Did we really have an inner yearning for zooming around a rainbow racetrack with a cartoon plumber and his friends? Maybe, now that I think about it. Maybe. But it seems more likely that the internal pitch was more abstract, diffuse, or subjective: I just want a silly game where I can beat my dad at something he will actually play.

Okay, but did, say, Starfield address the (surely pre-existing and commonly-considered) fantasy of “exploring the galaxy, a bit like Skyrim, but riding on a spaceship?” Literally yes, but more abstractly and subjectively, perhaps less so.

Hmm! It’s all in the details, isn’t it? It’s almost always in how that experience ends up landing that decides whether it matters, and whether I really got what I wanted out of it, rather than the broad pitch of the experience itself. Not that this mattered to the bearded men: they just needed to get people buy copies of their games. Videogames are an expensive thing to make.

I started considering what I want from games. Did anyone actually ever make what I wanted? I have certainly forgiven games for their errors and foibles over the years, precisely because I wanted to — I don’t know — wander round in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone while being attacked by mutant dogs, but I am not sure I knew I wanted that until that particular game came along.  I do think there was a genuine and vital kernel of truth here, though, because I really do find myself thinking about games — and here we can begin to include TTRPGs — in how they are a sort of search pattern for particular kinds of experiences. Sometimes you know this explicitly. You watch a movie, and think “it would be great to fly an X-Wing” or “I want to be a corrupt mediaeval king!” Or you have an opportunity to goof off with some pals and everyone would be on board for a wacky heist. And sometimes you look, and sometimes games provide do material for that yearning.

Other times you won’t know what you wanted, and you end up playing a boardgame about animals building a city in a forest, and it’s the best fucking thing ever.

The trickier bit, then, is a question of whether you know what you want, or whether you should just go fishing and hope what you want turns up? High chance of shopping trolleys and old boots with that latter approach.

So can I work out what I want right now, aged 47 and a quarter? What TTRPG experiences do I want to see? What can I make happen in 2026?

Okay, so there’s a list of games I’d like to run or play just because they are hot, new, intriguing or cool. But is there a specific experience? A gamer fantasy?

At my least introspective and nerdy, and as a GM, I really do want to run a game where my players are the crew of a spaceship. I’ve wanted this for a while, and taken some stabs at it in the past decade. Sounds like a pretty simple order! But when it comes down to it the reverse of that initial assertion again seems to be true: a game might sell itself to you based on addressing the fantasy of being a knight in a dense melee or whatever, but it’s only if all the bits and pieces that make up the swinging of the sword are great, that the game will have staying power. It’s only because of the specifics that it will address whatever experiential need you are trying to meet.

It doesn’t just have to address the fantasy that gamers are yearning for, it has to do it in a particular way. And with the space-crew thing I have yet to find a game that fits all the other aspects of the bill: the setting, the art, the specifics of how players interact, the liteness-to-crunchiness ratio of the rules, the vibe created by the combination of all these things. There are a lot of variables!

Yeah, we did play Scum & Villainy, and we do love Forged In The Dark Games, and I probably should have adapted it to some other setting. But I didn’t, and we gave up after a few weeks. Yeah, I’ve read my copy of Traveller and it appeals in all sorts of ways, but I know it’ll prove too trad for my players. Yeah, I got the new Coriolis game this summer, but it’s actually about delving in space dungeons with an alien bird, so… Yeah, we played a load of Mothership, but it’s a horror game about stress, and I am looking for something in the casual heroic mode, like your Han Solo or your Firefly crew. You know the sort of thing. Right? Right?

And I am sure there’s something out there, but I haven’t zero’d in on it. In fact, I begin to realise, I probably need to hack it together myself.

This seems to me to be where my TTRPG GM self has a significant advantage over my Developer Of Videogames self. I am not going to need millions of dollars and an office full of slightly odd people to make the game I am looking for: I can tool it together myself out of the bits and pieces that I have to hand. I can quickly adapt rules that I like. I can pick up generic sourcebooks full of sci-fi prompts and use them. I can hunt down modules and worldbooks that picture the sort of game I want to play and then find a way to cannabilize them.

Like when we ran a player-authored version of Dark Heresy that used the Genesys system, or more recently when we ran Vast In The Dark With Mork Borg rules. If there’s notion, then there really is a way to hack it into reality.

Yes, that’s what I need to do! That’s where 2026’s TTRPG energies are going. I am not going to rely on the work of some creative character in a far away room, spilling their cross-hybridisation of Star Wars and Event Horizon into my lap. No! I will be the person who addresses the gamer fantasy. My own. I can build something, and then I can run it. 

Let’s see how I get on.