Tavern Watch Podcast: Do you like your TTRPGs crunchy or streamlined?

This week on the Tavern Watch Podcast, we wander very naturally into one of the most age-old discussions among tabletop players and GMs alike: do you have a preference for crunchy systems or streamlined ones? Do you get giddy at the idea of Shadowrun‘s forty pages of equipment and entirely separate game-within-a-game for Technomancers? Is D&D about as heavyweight a game as you like to get, or is even that too much and you’d rather have something like Kids on Bikes? Opinions on this always vary wildly, and it’s a fun discussion to have every so often — especially because sometimes playing games will either reinforce or flip an opinion.

On the news front, beloved Seattle-area cryptid Jimothy has stats in D&D now, Paizo reaches a new agreement with Archives of Nethys (great news given the incredible service the Archives offer the community), Daggerheart is testing a Summoner class as part of the new Blood domain (shared with Critical Role favorite the Blood Hunter), and Matt’s perennial favorite Godzilla is coming to the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game later this year. Will we see the storyline return where Reed Richards shrinks Godzilla and sends her back in time? Were you at all surprised to learn that that was a Reed Richards plan? Of course you weren’t. The crowdfunding roundup this time includes Dungeons and Daddies (not a BDSM sourcebook), cozy Hobbit murder-mystery solving game Merryshire Detective Club, and the beginning of developer logs on the Masks 2E Kickstarter ahead of its eventual launch, starting with: why a new edition of Masks?

You can listen to all that and more directly from this post, click on the download icon in the upper right corner of the player to listen on your own devices, or listen to the Tavern Watch Podcast wherever fine podcast products are found.

Music from this episode is “Midnight Tale” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.

For more Tavern Watch, check out all of our recent episodes! We do actual plays of a wide range of games — you can check all those out here — as well as a monthly episode on tabletop news, just like this one. Listen to our latest games in the playlist below, and subscribe if you want to keep up with our gaming exploits.

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