My 101 Favourite TTRPGS: 98-100

We finally return to my list of every single TTRPG I’ve ever played (up to my 50th birthday) as ascertained by my rigorous and definitely not entirely improvised methodology.

I bring you 100, 99 and 98. Yes, at this rate, maybe you can expect this list to be completed by the time I’m 100.

100) The Flower Court

The Flower Court is Jay Dragon’s game of pop-star-nobles in a decadent-punk world, gathering for a party, scheming, fucking, murdering, and getting the help to mop up afterwards. Selecting from 12 weirdoes – each who get to select aesthetics from picklists like “Floral Gross, Neo-Victorian, Smogwave, Bourgeois-Punk, Palmgaze, Pastel Demolition” – they then choose their secret mission, and try to complete it. Messily.

You have to admit, this sounds like my kind of thing.

I love Jay’s work. I back her Patreon. Yet here it is, right near the bottom of my favourite TTRPGs.

I must have really hated it. What’s up?

Here’s the e-mail I sent the morning after the game.

“Thanks for facilitating last night – it was just delightful.”

Well, nothing, it seems. That Kieron guy seems really into the game. What a two-faced monster he is, to say it was delightful and then claim he only slightly prefers Rolemaster to it.

Let’s talk a bit about my methodology in compiling this list.

I made a big list of every game I could remember, making it easier on myself by remembering each group, and then trying to remember each game. I went through the records of e-mails in the period, checking if there was anything I missed.

This was especially key in the online communities I play in, such as Open Hearth, which makes it easier by having a whole online booking system. So I can just check and see what games I signed up for. So when nosing, I discovered The Flower Court was on the list.

I presumed it was a game where I didn’t get past the wait list, because I had absolutely no memory of it.

Then I searched my mail, and found the above message.

Oh. I had played the game, and liked the game enough to send a specific message to the facilitator about it. That didn’t happen often.

I just had no actual memory at all of playing it. Not a single moment. Nothing.

This was 2020, December. It’s the year of the big covid lockdowns. I don’t have many memories from that period. This is nothing to do with the Flower Court’s merit.

But it can’t be a favourite game if you have no memories of it.

Consider that principle as we continue: games which I may think are better, but didn’t imprint on me enough, will be lower than things which are shoddier but grafittied my soul.

This is my favourite list, whatever that means. Finding out what that means is basically the point.

99) A For The Queen Hack Which I Won’t Name As That Would Be Mean

I jumped on a random For The Queen hack playtest, as the concept sounded fun and it was the early days of Descended From the Queen. I more than a little interest in doing something with it myself, though never did. I’ll be talking about Alex Roberts’ For the Queen eventually, but its just an elegant, beautiful game born of post-The Beast design, building a castle in the air from questions. It’s a huge influence on what I do.

Except it turned out this hack was by someone who’d never played a game of For the Queen. What followed was a car crash, born of someone assembling a car having never having seen a car in motion. Hell, it didn’t even crash. We just sat in the parts for a bit, starring at them, confusedly, while I bit my tongue to try and stop me pointing out this anchor you’ve put through the engine kind of stops it going anywhere.

I found the experience so entirely mortifying, I actually volunteered to run a game of For the Queen afterwards, just to show how it was meant to work. So they could see how the ghost of a structure coalesced, in hope it would influence a new draft.

I saw someone on a TTRPG Discord recently say on this topic something like “I’m a chef of decades experience – I don’t need to cook a recipe to tweak it.” If I’m in a more generous mood, I’d say that it’s perhaps partially true if it’s close to recipes you already know (and even then you’re risking a lot). If you get me in a less generous mood, I’d say that’s delusional, arrogant, insulting bullshit, like a French chef looking at a recipe for any other region’s cuisine and figuring they know all they need to already. It’s nearly as bad as reviewing an TTRPG from just reading the manual. Who could think that was a good idea?

Equally, someone having real trouble enjoying a game when you’re sitting there, believing it’s being run in a way which is substandard and it’d be better off if you just did it? That’s insulting, unkind, control-freak nonsense, and it is 100% something I do.

I could have accepted the game for what it is. Instead, I had to grit my teeth for the full playtime. I couldn’t, wouldn’t let go. It was a badly designed hack, certainly, but I could have had more fun with it than I did. I was unable to get past myself. I confess it here, so you know my damage, and know why I mostly have ended up as a Forever GM.

I am an imperfect lens. My favourite list is going to be shaped by what I simply can’t bear, and that is 100% born of My Bullshit Mugging Me.

98) In Nomine

It’s 1998, months after the infamous Rolemaster Game. My fellow survivor and me have put together a group. We play regularly, and move through all manner of games. It’s my first tasting-menu style group. The players are all older than me, by some years, impossibly ancient Grognards. Some are in their late 20s. One may have even been 30.

In Nomine is the first game I ran for them, me trying to impress the bigger boys.

In Nomine is Steve Jackson Games’ reworking of a french TTRPG. It’s in the mode of White Wolf’s games of the period: you play Demons or Angels, fighting in a shadow war on earth. It is, thematically, absolutely my jam. I’ve been raised Catholic, so this is right in my DNA. As a Pratchett kid, I loved Good Omens more-playful take on the material. I just escaped being a teenage metalhead, so I’m still on side with edgy nonsense like having the archdemon of fire’s unholy sites include Belsen.

I give it a shot. I ran it poorly, however. The game just runs poorly. It’s straight from period of design where games lean towards a lot of cool worldbuilding without really much idea of how one could even run a game in that. What do you do? What does that look like? It just wasn’t working at all.

I can’t run this. I suck. It sucks. Burn it down.

I decide the next session will the the final one, and try for a climax. I have a demon start try to kickstart the end of the world by acting out events from the book of Revelations. This demon went to Bristol Zoo, and performed a rampage in the aquatic mammal area, vivisecting the poor beasts, spilling guts everywhere.

Yes, they had broke open seven seals.

At which point, I pass the players new character sheets. I tell them as reality is warping, we’re now playing by Feng Shui rules. We’re doing a remake of the Omen as shot by John Woo. For a second I think I may have made it even worse, as the players are so lost.

Then it clicks and, finally, laughing, our game about angels flies.

Next : 97, probably? Maybe 96? Maybe more? Perhaps, I’ll start doing them out of order? We’ll find out.