“There’s just this sense that the designers want to remove every element that they feel detracts from the experience,” he says. “There’s no more tracking food, water, or encumbrance, no diseases, no sort of ‘sanity’ system. They think those things get in the way, but I actually think they contribute so much to the feel of the game, the sense that what you are doing has consequences.” While he’s far from an old-school apologist, he gestures to earlier editions of the game for rules that are more grounded in reality, and are therefore more to his taste. For example, while “long resting” for 8 hours under the default rules in 5th edition restores all of a character’s “hit points,” a similar rest in an earlier edition of the game would restore only a tenth or less, depending on the quality of the lodgings.
By contrast, in Darker Dungeons, a character has to rest for an entire week in order to gain back all of their resources, a radical change that its creator describes as “vital.” Characters are far more likely to go insane or suffer career-ending injuries when faced with stout foes, and spells can backfire on an unlucky caster. While Giffyglyph presents the rules in a free PDF that has a superior layout and presentation to a number of professional RPG products, he says that he never plans to make a significant amount of money on it, even as he adds more products to his line-up, such as an “encounter builder” for fellow Game Masters. (He has a Patreon that some contribute to, but all his work remains free). “I don’t even know how to go about asking money for this sort of thing,” he says, laughing. “I want this stuff to be as good as possible, but overall, I mostly do it for fun.”
Adapting Scythe
Though creators like Giffyglyph are unlikely to receive significant compensation from their work, they enjoy one significant advantage: creative freedom. When it comes to the alchemy that enables the finicky rules of tabletop games to be enshrined in a digital adaptation, if the experience of Piotr Sobolewski is anything to go by, a certain mantra seems to hold: stick to the script. Sobolewski is the CEO of the Knights of Unity, a Polish developer that’s working on a computer version of Scythe, one of the most acclaimed “euro-style” board games of all time.
Initially, according to Sobolewski, the team had fairly ambitious plans for their take on the game, hoping to build it in 3D rather than the traditional two-dimensional approach of most board games on PC. However, they quickly realized that it would cut against the expectations of the game’s most dedicated fans, so they dialed it back. That meant throwing away six months of work. “Scythe is as complicated a game as you can find, so we talked to the original designer Jamey Stegmaier, and we decided that it wouldn’t add that much to the experience,” he says. “At the time, Scythe was the fifth most popular game on BoardGameGeek, so that’s a lot of fans who want a standard adaptation. Even though the digital platform gave us a lot more room for creativity, we figured out pretty quickly that any major changes would damage this really major IP, which clearly works really well. There’s always a party that owns the IP when it comes to games like this, and they have a very strong voice when it comes to even making the game 2D or 3D, for example.”
Sobolewski said that the two most difficult elements of the game to implement were both issues posed by the digital space. For one, getting the game’s “undo” feature to work proved extremely troublesome, forcing them to rewrite core aspects of the game in order to facilitate its proper function. For another, the game’s complex tutorial took far more work than they expected, owing in part to the massive rulebook that players are expected to internalize before they even pick up a token. “When you’re playing it on a tabletop, you have the massive rulebook under your elbow,” he says. “In a video game, you have to make it just as easy for them to find the right rule in the tutorial or in a guide. You have to think about it in a very different way.”
On the king’s path
Overall, acclaimed video game writer Chris Avellone (who contributed to Pathfinder: Kingmaker, the video game adaptation of the Pathfinder tabletop RPG adventure path) describes the difference between physical games and their digital cousins as largely one of specificity. While tabletop RPGs like D&D or Pathfinder focus on the fundamental task resolution systems that can apply to an incredibly broad set of possibly inputs — which allows for a great deal of improvisation on the part of both players and gamemasters — digital games require the developer to define all those systems down to the most minute details, which can bolster immersion while necessarily limiting the playspace. He uses the example of Wish, the most powerful spell in most editions of D&D and which bends reality to their will in dramatic and sometimes catastrophic fashion. Whereas the “gamemaster” might choose to adjudicate such a powerful spell in a wide variety of ways, using the vague spell description as a guide, Kingmaker has to set the rules hard and fast, removing the human factor that makes tabletop play so vibrant.
The surge of digital-to-tabletop adaptations isn’t going to subside anytime soon. But while not every blockbuster video game will translate into a material masterpiece, it’s clear that the two mediums will continue to influence each other, whether the creators like it or not. There’s an argument to be made that 5th edition’s accessible, video game-esque vocabulary of short and long rests that Giffyglyph so dislikes has added to D&D’s explosion of popularity over the past few years, along with other factors, such as the rise of streaming platforms like Twitch. There’s a lot that they can learn from each other, but let’s just be happy that the days of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons “THAC0” and literally typing out commands to roll dice on your PC are well-in-the-rearview at this point. Not even the crusty grognards liked that.
“While a tabletop gamemaster can simply say, ‘you arrive in the city,’ a digital gamemaster has to build every facet of the city, know the layout of all the gates, entrances, walls, streets and every corner of every alleyway, the schedule of every citizen the player sees, every guard’s weapon and armor and what provokes them to attack … it’s a lot of work,” Avellone says. “But that’s the strength of tabletop play.”