Thoughts on RPG Reviews

I posted a review of Frontier Scum on Bones of Contention just over a week ago! Well, sort of a review. I'm not really that interested in the game itself which, as I say in the introduction, is "totally serviceable". The wording and placement of that whole mini-discussion was intentional on my part, to signal that there is not much remarkable about the game as such (the rules and all that) if not for its presentation. Overall, I'm a very easy-to-please player anyway and don't care much about rules if they're not going to annoy me. It's not a bad rulebook; it's a fine rulebook. I don't know if good rulebooks even really exist.

But I think my attitude touches on a certain discourse about reviews, and whether reviewers should play games or adventures prior to reviewing them. The main reason why this has become an issue is because big-name reviewers tend to be commercial, not wanting to say anything too critical about works, often being paid by publishers, and put under social pressure to release reviews regularly. The solution? Don't play books, just read them! Do they look pretty? Should you buy it? I also find that irritating and totally get people being frustrated by that.

That being said, here's my hot take: if you are a hobbyist reviewer with no reason to be overly nice, with no obligations to publishers, and with no pressure to publish regularly, there are contexts in which it's totally sensible to review (or, more broadly, discuss) game materials without using them in play. Taking my review of Frontier Scum as an example, I am specifically interested in how the text postures itself politically and claims to be analogous to the American West—and not because I'm an enjoyer of the Western genre, obviously, but because I think criticism of historical writing is interesting and important.

Meanwhile, I don't think there's much interesting to say about rolling 1d4–1d4 for your attributes, or about rolling d20 to see if you shoot someone, or even about role-playing a character in the West. It's all just fine in the way that most rulesets are if they are not headaches. Part of it is that I am not the target audience or that, like I said, I'm perfectly content to do whatever as a player. It being 'pretty' and well-organized is, in a way, the best I can hope for. But it's nothing to write home about. I don't care about whether people should buy Frontier Scum as much as I care about it as a text, and whether it succeeds at doing what it tries to do.

If my critique of the setting is one cent, I hope this post adds up to two cents so you have the full context of my opinion of the book and why I chose to focus on the setting. My verdict is that if you really want to play a Western as envisioned by the setting, the book won't stop you and it'll be generally helpful. But, you know, do you have to know about the other ¾ of the book for what the first ¼ says it's going to be like? Finally, none of this is to bash on the book but just to indicate that I don't think there's much to say except for that. So I'll keep reviewing fictional texts as fictional texts if I think they're interesting to talk about, and I'll review game materials as game materials if they're interesting as such.

Edit: Not gonna entertain weird, aggressive sockpuppet comments. I did accidentally misspell Brian as Bryan, sorry about that, but misgender? I referred to their pronouns literally twice throughout the whole thing, using what he has listed. I have no ill will against Yaksha, and just wanted to evaluate his work as an analogy for the West. Sometimes people say negative things about someone else's work, but that is not a moral judgement on the other person. Be serious and sincere about accusations you make against others' character.