November Musings: Tangible Things

Kyle Kinane is one of my favorite standup comedians, and on Trampoline in a Ditch, his most recent comedy album, he did a bit about how retired guys get into model trains because it’s a little world where they’re the boss. During the pandemic I adopted some new hobbies and got deeper into others, and being able to have something more or less under my own control has helped me get through living in a world on fire. I’ve had my share of failures and frustrations while building mechanical keyboards, but even the failures are my failures, and they’ve been instructive. Compared to a lot of other mechanical keyboard hobbyists I’m nothing special, but I can confidently order a kit and build a working keyboard, and even do competent handwiring. I’ve radically changed my setup, from a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard to a Microdox (a 36-key split ergonomic keyboard) with gChoc switches and a 3D-printed tenting case, plus a Spacepad macropad and a Setta21 number pad, all of which is in addition to what I can only call a keyboard collection. A significant part of what drives the hobby is an obsession with feel, hence the massive number of options for different kinds of switches with subtle variations of actuation force curves and other minutiae. I have opinions on key switches (specifically I like the feather-light springs of gChocs and the silky-smooth action of Speed Silvers), which is yet another weird little thing about the whole affair.

Taking up mechanical keyboards as a hobby led me to 3D printing. On the more DIY end of keyboards there are a lot of places where 3D printing is the best or only way to get some parts. My roommate is even more into 3D printing, and part of why I started doing it myself is the gap between how much stuff I want printed and how much I’m willing to bug him to print for me. With the manufacturing services available now, it’s relatively easy to design a PCB with open-source software, upload it, and have the boards shipped to you (albeit with the conundrum of weighing a good price against having to wait for things to ship from China). The tooling process for injection-molding of plastic is much more involved and costly, so a lot of hobbyist keyboards either use a sandwich case made of PCB material or something that lends itself to small-scale manufacturing, such as 3D printing or laser-cut acrylic. With hand wiring, you can even omit the PCB step entirely (at the cost of a more intensive soldering job). I went a little overboard with printing and building various kinds of keyboards, and I now have a box with a bunch of macropads of various shapes and sizes.

Part of the appeal of 3D printing is that it produces something tangible and in 3 dimensions. It sounds trivial to say that, but there really is something fascinating about sending a file to my 3D printer and getting something I can hold in my hand. I’ve printed entirely practical things, and I’ve printed visual puns and dumb memes. I printed brackets to stack Ikea LACK side tables to make a stand for my 3D printer, and I printed Kirby with human legs for reasons I cannot explain. At times I catch myself just holding some 3D printed thing in my hand and turning it over and over.

3D printing is a process, and it has limitations that you have to learn and work with. Filament printing has a relatively low resolutions, and although you can work around it, it has some trouble with parts that overhang much. Resin printing has much better resolution, but typically can’t handle as much of an overall size of print, plus the finishing process is more involved.  3D printing can also be time-consuming, and it doesn’t take all that much volume to have a print go overnight. Thankfully, more often than not you can set up a print and leave it going, though coming home to a failed print isn’t fun. While it’s relatively easy and affordable to get into as a hobbyist (a basic printer is around $200 or so, and 1kg of filament or resin is around $20-25), the technology isn’t reliable enough to go mainstream just yet. There are frustrations that a hobbyist will likely work through that would be a deal-breaker for average people, which helps about explain why there are so many 3D printing services and Etsy sellers.

3D printing also isn’t necessarily the entire process either. Just as pencil drawing can be a final result or a prelude to inking, projects can involve taking 3D printed parts and variously sanding, painting, adding coatings, integrating hardware, housing electronics, and so on. Screws, nuts, bearings, LEDs, and magnets can go a long way towards making 3D printed things that much more useful. My roommate of course paints the minis he prints, and it’s just as much work as painting the ones he buys from Games Workshop. Printers than can extrude two different filaments at once or even add multicolored pigmentation exist but cost substantially more, so unpainted prints tend to simply be whatever color the raw material is. 3D printing materials do come in a massive variety of colors and finishes, particularly when it comes to PLA filament, and you can do a lot just by separately printing parts of different colors or even switching filaments partway through a print.

This year I decided to give mostly 3D-printed Christmas gifts. I started working on them in early October, and since I’d set myself about two dozen or so printing projects, I’m glad I got into it so early even if waiting to give this nifty stuff to people is going to be painful. So far I’ve bought about 5 more spools of filament (in addition to the dozen or so I already had on hand), a combination to getting styles I didn’t have before (notably faux-wood PLA) and restocking some (like the basic black PLA) that I ended up using a lot of. Since there are a few gamers on my list I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time sifting through STL files of board game stuff on Thingiverse. (Also fidget toys, Hololive, Illuminati, arcade games, and Discworld.) I also came upon a few different designs for small lamps, and ended up ordering a bunch of LED lights from China (plus some HALVKLART lights from Ikea). I’ll have to see how these actually work out, but I’m looking forward to having a bunch of weird lights sitting around. My printer’s relatively small build area (a 150mm cubic area) limits how much I can print at one time, but it’s not unusual for a project to require 24 hours of print time. This is how people end up with shelves running multiple 3D printers.

3D printing has a lot of potential for tabletop gaming, and there are a lot of people taking advantage of it already. Wargames are probably the category of tabletop that gets the most out of 3D printing right now. My roommate uses it to supplement and customize his Warhammer 40k armies and make scenery, though he had to get a resin printer to get to the level of detail of typical 1” base miniatures. For board games, some gamers have put together STL files for better storage solutions for games, as well as enhanced, replacement, or alternate parts. For Settlers of Catan for example you can 3D print card holders, replacement tokens, fancier tiles, and a UFO to replace the robber. There are also whole board games you can print, whether old classics like chess and Connect Four or original titles like Pocket Tactics.

How much you can do with RPGs right now depends a lot on the particular RPGs involved. Dice towers are an obvious thing to 3D print, and there are tons of nifty designs for them. It’s possible to print dice, though 3D printing doesn’t necessarily lend itself to good balancing. To be fair I have it on good authority (i.e., I watched that one Lou Zocchi video) that the tumbling process most dice manufacturers use isn’t very good for balancing either. Beyond that, most of the 3D printable things for TTRPGs tend to be miniatures and terrain for D&D. There are 3D modelers whose Patreons feature new miniature designs each month, and there’s a wide array of minis and terrain for various adventurers, monsters, and dungeons available for free or to buy.

When I had a regular D&D group, we were in the habit of using very basic stuff to represent things on maps. While the DM did pull out map tiles at times, we formed a lot of dungeons by putting rulers and Scrabble tiles on a grid mat. We did have a bunch of random miniatures, which the DM would pull out and use as monsters on a somewhat ad hoc basis. The most obvious upgrades to that experience would be more and more representational miniatures and terrain, though what helped the game play better for us was getting a bunch of little rubber bands in different colors so we could keep track of fighter marks, warlock curses, the ranger’s hunter’s quarry, and I’m sure there are some more but it’s been a while. Although there was room to streamline how the game played, doing all that stuff with maps and minis was just fun. 3D printing could also be a good way for an enterprising GM to add props. They describe how the PCs come across a pedestal with a golden goblet on it, then reach into their bag and pull out a goblet they printed from gold silk PLA. 3D printing has also been useful to cosplayers, as it’s an ideal way to build many props. Weapons, treasures, ornaments, significant-looking cubes, etc. are all possible.

There’s a concept that Ryan Macklin talked about on his podcast ages ago called “tangibility,” which is the notion that things in a TTRPG can feel more impactful if you as the player sitting at the table do something physical. While the use of miniatures in D&D is an obvious example, it can also be something as simple as rolling dice or making a checkmark on a character sheet. Maid RPG has pervasive tangibility because instances where you can interact with the rules without rolling dice are few and far between. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s a requirement for a good RPG—in fact I could see a game deliberately using a lack of tangibility to feel more ephemeral—but I do think that an awareness of how it plays into the experience is helpful for a designer. It’s a concept I’ve come back to several times over the years, though it feels less relevant in the age of COVID-19, even if virtual options are the best they've ever been.

In the world of board games, components are expected, and there are games like Splendor that have earned praise for their beautiful components. The variety of components available is impressive, covering figures, tokens, sand timers, play money, tiles, dice, pawns, chips, trackers, cubes, discs, meeples, bags, boxes, and I could go on but you yet the idea. Many are available off the shelf (or would be easy to 3D print), while some need to be customized for the particular game. While you may find a selection of components at a local game store, as a small press designer you’d likely end up needing to either do mail order or ask people to e.g., grab the pawns out of a Parcheesi/Ludo set or pick up a cribbage board.

Components can vary wildly in terms of how abstract or representational they are. Krosmaster Arena gives you a vividly colorful figure for each playable character. They have over-the-top anime-inspired designs, but it’s an over-the-top anime-inspired setting. At the other extreme there are eurogames where you keep track of resources with different colors of little wooden cubes, or truly abstract games like Blokus. Being representational isn’t inherently better—especially if cost is a consideration—but it’s certainly something players appreciate.

Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play 3rd Edition (2009) was Fantasy Flight’s controversial attempt to revise WFRP, and while I’m all in favor of experimenting with using more components in TTRPGs, they kind of went component-mad. It requires roughly as much setup as one of their Arkham games, and most of your character takes the form of a collection of little cards and other bits of cardstock that you store in a small box between sessions. It was an interesting design, but they took the use of components so far that there were a lot of places where writing on a character sheet would’ve been easier. It was also just a radical change to WFRP that its existing had fanbase didn’t want. That goes a long way to explain why their more recent RPG offerings like Star Wars and Genesys have used custom dice ($14.95 for a set) but not much else in the way of components.

I think a big part of it comes down to trying to do too much too fast. You can get an audience for a game that has one or two gimmicks, but at a certain point you get into Oops! All Gimmicks territory and it turns people off. Dread leverages a Jenga tower to foster particularly tense horror role-playing, but a game with a Jenga tower and a chess set, a spinner, and a bunch of wooden cubes would start to feel like a Mouse Trap RPG that people laugh about and mess with but never really play.

It’s not healthy to care too much about the market, especially in a medium where that could easily lead you to do nothing but D&D stuff, but doing using non-established components (i.e., anything beyond dice, pencils, paper, and maybe miniatures) will run into practical concerns regardless. Unless you’re just making something to play with your friends (valid!), it’s hard to mess with the physical medium in a way that’ll be affordable and won’t relegate your game to a curiosity. There are quite a few RPGs up for sale on The Game Crafter that use things like custom cards and tokens, and chances are you’ve never heard of them. Doing this kind of stuff via Print on Demand is also inherently more costly per unit, and it’s very easy to stack up enough components to make a game cost $40 or more with little to no profit margin. Proper board game manufacturers won’t give you the time of day for an order of less than 1,000 units, which is a lot for a small press RPG.

Although I’ve played with ideas about using more components in RPGs, I don’t have a lot of games to show for it, mostly just a box of board game parts that I take out once in a while. (Specifically, a box shaped like a big six-sided die that was originally a collection of traditional board games I bought from Toys-R-Us on sale.) Raspberry Heaven ended up taking the form of a set of 6”x6” cards, and it’s a niche game that I mostly have as a longtail POD thing. Right now, I’m leaning towards having I Hate You use a small VP board similar to the one in Dixit. I don’t know if it’ll end up actually working, though right now it seems promising. (Also, I’ve been 3D printing little animal meeples for it.) Of course, I find myself thinking that I should have a version of the character sheet that lets you play the game without the board, instead making marks to track where you are.

3D printing is popular enough of a hobby that people can make a living producing content for its adherents, but making 3D printing a requirement for entry still seriously limits your audience. A lot of the 3D models that go up for sale are either sexualized (if not outright pornographic) or elaborate enough to become difficult to print without skillful use of a resin printer, and most lean on popular IPs. Some tabletop publishers have made 3D printing a supplement to their business, allowing people to buy STL files as well as plastic minis. On the other hand, plenty of people with 3D printers sell stuff they print. The other day I ran across a YouTube video by a guy who started off doing Nerf mods and ended up with a small warehouse full of 3D printers producing custom parts. (The video is actually about how 3D printing needs to get better about sustainability, and how he’s worked with a local filament supplier, the excellent Polymaker.) If I were to make a game with some 3D printed components, I could put them up for sale on Etsy, and the people who really want them could get them, and I could offer the STLs for the 3D printing people in the audience.

I haven’t gone as far as learning 3D modeling, but a lot of people have, especially since there are open-source modeling programs like Blender out there. I was able to commission an Indonesian guy to create a 3D model of my OC for $100, and while professional modelers can charge a lot more, a static, untextured 3D model for printing is significantly less involved than a fully textured one rigged for animation.

There was a period around a decade ago when I read Blue Ocean Strategy and was looking for novelty for the sake of novelty. A lot of what broke me out of it was just the fact that Apocalypse World’s influence let me actually start finishing and publishing games, and AW just uses 2d6 and reference sheets. Vincent and Meguey Baker credit a session of old-school D&D that P.H. Lee ran at a convention for the spark that led to Apocalypse World and in turn the plethora of Powered by the Apocalypse games. While the more surface-level aspects like the simple set of stats and moves are important as well, the very core of it is more in principles like “Play to find out what happens.” A portion of the innovation that the Forge crowd brought to bear was a formalization of techniques that some GMs had used for ages, but given how much stuff Gygax and other early RPG people didn’t think to write down, that formalization was more important than it might seem at first blush.

Innovative game design is important to moving the medium forward, but the first form of something is usually hard to make and less refined than what comes after it. The further you get from the core of what TTRPGs have been, the more difficult the designer’s job becomes. If I sit down and create a basic PBTA RPG, it’ll most likely have a 100+ page rulebook by the time I’m done. If I were to put together a d20-based RPG for some reason (it’s an example, not something I’d actually do), it’d take some extra work to have it not be over 100 pages. In contrast, when I’m working on something with an unconventional design, a lot of the elbow grease is in the less obvious work of figuring out how the rules and the structures of play fit together.

Changing up the materials involved is exactly the kind of thing that all but forces you into that mode of design. While there are any number of alternatives to the convention of rolling polyhedral dice to see how well a character performs, the game needs to fully embrace whatever it’s using to avoid just having less efficient dice. There are all sorts of things you can do with a deck of playing cards, but if you’re just drawing single cards and checking their values, you’ve effectively made a game with paper dice that you have to shuffle (and that some players will inevitably count). That it takes a lot of care and effort shouldn’t dissuade designers from trying things out, but as usual it’s important to be realistic about what it entails and what effect it will have on the end product. Sometimes it can be a good hook to pitch the game—“a horror game where you use a Jenga tower”—but you may end up with a weird curiosity. We need those weird curiosities, but they’re necessarily more spice than staple.