Rediscovering the Magic: Fandom, Creation, and Games
About a year ago, I fell down the Skyrim rabbit hole again. How does this relate to X-Wing and other tabletop games, you ask? Give me a second, I’m getting there. But first I have to talk about how my Skyrim character kept freezing to death.
Special Modifications
Fun fact: This is also the weather forecast for Minnesota next week…
It happened like this: I hadn’t thought about the game with no end in years, and suddenly the Youtube algorithm or some other news source threw me to a video on how the game had gotten official downloadable content (DLC) based on earlier fan-made modifications (mods) that supported survival mechanics. Instant traveling is disabled, your character needs to eat and sleep - the sorts of things you’d expect in any post-Minecraft survival game. I was curious, so I reinstalled Skyrim, played for a few hours, and was hooked. I’d “finished” the game twice before (which is to say: sunk in around a hundred hours before getting bored and stopping - whether Alduin the World Eater was actually stopped or not in his quest to eat the world, I can’t recall).
But upon starting this new playthrough, I was immediately struck by how differently I was playing the game was this time around. The need to keep my character supplied, rested, fed, and warm while traveling everywhere on foot created a set of challenges that drew me into the world of Tamriel in a way I had never really experienced before. I was paying attention to things I had never bothered to acknowledge before: the food scattered meticulously throughout the world. The weather, and sheltered locations between cities to wait out a cold night. The location of beds; there are so many beds in that game, but really I’d never cared before. Needing to use these resources made me care that the developers had taken the time to put those details into the world, and my overall experience with the game was made much richer for it. This in turn led me deeper, into fan-designed mods that enhanced the survival experience and elevated other existing content in Skyrim better interact in this new playstyle.
X-Wing has also had a vibrant rules modding community for much of its lifespan (it also has a flourishing hobby scene that is worthy of discussion, but is also slightly tangential to my point today). It ranged from people running custom scenarios at cons to the designers of complex AI systems like Heroes of the Aturi Cluster and Fly Casual to folks creating rules and minis of even the most obscure of EU vessels, a lot of creative energy comes out of the X-Wing community. I’ve run some of those custom scenarios at cons myself, and I even got to dip my own toes into the more “official DLC” side of things when designing the rules and scenarios of Epic Battles, the expansion for multiplayer game modes in X-Wing 2nd Edition. So I’ve spent quite a bit of time observing which game modes and fan rules seem to have a big impact on the community, and which ones drop off the radar.
Everything Old Made New Again
The Cloisters - Playing Cards ca. 1475–80, because the more things change, the more they become the same again…
Obviously, quality of execution counts for a lot. Yes, “homebrew” can get a bit of a bad rap for its notoriously inconsistent quality in tabletop spaces (especially if you’re playing D&D 3.5 in 2005 and your GM has a folder full of rules that only exist when it’s inconvenient for you, personally). But for X-Wing, I can confidently say that there’s a lot of content out there that is very high-quality, and some things still stick more than others. A well-executed custom ship or unique narrative scenario will be played and enjoyed, but I can’t think of any that have caught on widely. There tends to be a certain consumability to that sort of content - most people play it once or twice, but don’t make a habit of using it. As a result, they don’t proliferate it by sharing it with lots of other players over numerous games - which means fewer people are exposed to it, reducing its impact.
In an interesting parallel, we even observed this phenomenon for the official narrative scenarios included in many 1st Edition X-Wing products; while many people liked the idea of them in theory, we found that few people played them more than once, and only a small number of people played them at all. And as a result, their impact on the community was minimal even though they were official, well-made, and widely distributed. And this was because they offered a very narrow experience - a specific encounter, set up and played with specific pieces. That meant that people didn’t want to replay them, generally, and didn’t encourage their friends to try them. When I set about designing the scenarios for Epic Battles, I aimed to make them less like these highly specific narrative scenarios and more like “encounter archetypes” that players could approach with lots of different builds and strategies, with the goal of replayability and longevity in mind, and from what I have seen, this has paid off at least to some degree.
So I don’t think execution is the whole picture for enduring appeal of a tabletop game mod, official or fan-made. Generally, the tabletop game offshoot projects that seem to enjoy the longest attention are the ones that break players’ out of their preconceptions about how to play the game, and as a result, help them find new fun in parts of the game that were already there. Like the survival mechanics that made me look down at the details of Tamriel I had ignored in previous playthroughs, the X-Wing mods that have been the most impactful are the ones that serve to make a large portion of the game’s content fresh again.
Heroes of the Aturi Cluster, for example, pits the player against an AI opponent, alone or with human allies, across a campaign’s worth of games. Further, losses are persistent across multiple encounters. While in a standard competitive game of X-Wing, sacrificing a pilot might be expected, losing your pilot, who has advanced across numerous games and has a name and perhaps even a backstory, is a much more concerning prospect. By bringing a player’s loss aversion into the equation, defensive strategies and upgrades suddenly become more appealing than they would be in the standard game. Dials that can break away from combat more easily might also look more useful than before. And most importantly, the player’s thinking begins to align with the fictional pilot they’re controlling, who presumably wants to stay alive to fight another day. Even for someone who has played countless games of standard X-Wing, the emotional engagement here is weightier. The core of the game from the player’s perspective is much the same (plan maneuver, see if your plan pays off when your enemy moves, attack and defend), as is the content of the game (the various pilots and their abilities, along with upgrades), but the meaning of that experience has changed. You’re not the chess player sacrificing the pawn any more; now you’re the pawn, trying to survive, and many choices look very different when analyzed through that lens.
Perspective Shifts
They’re a lot more intimidating from this angle.
This weight of this shift in perspective ties back into my Skyrim experience. Playing a game a lot can cause you to hone in one one specific part of the experience, even to the point that you start to miss the forest for the trees. For me, when I played Skyrim the first time, it was combat and progression. I had fun solving the combat puzzle, seeing new enemies and locations, and optimizing my equipment, but eventually those things became the only parts of the game I saw When I revisited Skyrim in a way that incentivized (read: forced) me to interact with many of the details I started had started glossing over a few hours into my last playthroughs, I found a totally new source of fun in a pool of content that was, by volume, 99% the same as before.
Shifting your audience’s perspective to remind them of the parts of the game they had begun to overlook can serve to rekindle their interest in the entire experience works for tabletop games, too. It was amazing watching X-Wing players light up about Aces High at Worlds 2019, and all the new builds they would never have considered previously but now wanted to try. And it should not come as a surprise to anyone that Aces High was inspired by a format run at conventions.
Maybe the most famous is Magic: The Gathering’s Commander format (Elder Dragon Highlander to us fogeys), which transforms Magic into a diplomatic strategy game. But perhaps more importantly to its success, I think, Commander puts cool creatures front-and-center and reworks the whole game to let them shine. And cool creatures are a huge part of what inspires people to play Magic, but they are also frequently rendered less than awesome by a plethora of removal, tempo effects, and other realities that keep them from being dominant in the competitive metagame most of the time. Focusing too much on how you play a game and losing sight of why you play it isn’t just a pitfall for designers; it also affects players. Sometimes the best way to rediscover what you love about a game is by changing the how completely and letting the why fall back into place.
So, where does someone go with this? I’m sure about one thing: I don’t think the widespread appeal of a fan project is a marker of how worthwhile it is. If you had fun making it, it was worthwhile. Fandom spaces are big enough to accommodate everything from tournament-friendly alt-art cards to full custom factions to Mario Kart-inspired racing game modes, and all of them make the game richer and more interesting. Honestly, I love seeing that fans are dedicated enough to make rules and minis for the Yorik-et Coralskipper! And for some people, realizing that they have that freedom to create is itself the shift in perspective they need to find joy in the other 95% of the game’s content again. The barrier for entry to homebrewing content for tabletop games is very low, and that’s a good thing, whether you use it to do something as approachable as adding your own Free Parking rule to Monopoly or something as comprehensive as a custom Magic game mode.