What even is blorb? A blorby situation in an RPG is when the room, the monsters, the stuff in the rooms, that’s all canonically decided. You’ve written it down even. Maybe there are some random encounter tables in there.
The players know some of the stuff or maybe they’ve figured it all out through “playing 20 questions with a door knob” as some like to call it. They’re stuck down here and now they need to find rope. Or they know that the floors are trapped but how do they get across? Or they’re just in a boring office building and trying to figure out how to get Maddy to tell her secret.
You’re not introducing new stuff out of your own whim. Instead, the “playing pieces”, the hard landscape, that’s all there, you prepped that before the player got in, before you saw their characters even. You knew that there was a village, who lived there, what was on sale there, what troubles they had, and what wilderness and dungeons nearby could be explored and what was in them.
Plenty of pages on here about how to blorb or how I first found out about blorb or just how to start out as new a DM (hint: get Lost Mines of Phandelver or B4 The Lost City!) but I also wanted this short li’l one that’s a super zoomed out view of what it is.
Really wish sometimes when I saw RPG reviews they would get right to the point because the number one question I have for a game setting or game system or even a module is: is it blorby? Or is it full of cheaty, scripted, railroady, forced “this-is-gonna-happen” beats? Or conversely, full of blank spaces where you’ve got to wing it?
I love story games also. They’re usually super un-blorby, they’re more like story-creation games that you and your friends play out together where you’re scriptwriters and play actors at the same time. I can get really into a good story game if I know what it is and if it’s well done as a story game. They’re the opposite of blorby games in many ways.
If I see a game that’s not clear about what kind of game it is, I assume it’s a “90s game” and steer clear of it (so game designers, please be more clear about what kinds of games you’re selling so we know how to approach it constructively!).
Now, this is what I hate. I grew up on ‘em and maybe that’s why I’m still so frustrated with them. They’re the games that have rules for creating and playing a character but on the DM side there’s just “lol make it tense and dramatic like a movie” or it tells you to put flowcharts of scenes or setpieces or skill challenges. I can’t even. Sometimes it’s super railroady, sometimes it’s all winged, either way it’s all bad.
Calling ‘em “90s games” is super arbitrary since they’ve been around since the 1970s and are still around today. I just associate ‘em with the 90s since in the 90s they were pretty much all we had. I have a pet theory about them. In the early days everyone had grown up on B2 Keep on the Borderlands and were playing blorbily. You could by a game that had a completely different setup, like you were rolling tons of D10s looking for successes, or you were rolling low on d100 or whatever and you were 1920s dilettantes or modern leather jacket vampires or whatever, but DMs were still prepping places, obstacles, rewards, and interesting people to talk to, just like any old Moldvay joint. How to prep and run games that way didn’t even need to be in the game because “everyone has played D&D, right?”. In parallel, DMs were also piece-by-piece compromising away the blorbiness with initially awesome results. “Wow, my players don’t need to TPK against this dumb random encounter if I put my finger on the scale! Wow, this boss fight can be a li’l more epic if I just cheat a little!” But the back end of the game was being hollowed out.
Meanwhile, the front end, the player side of the game was being completely overloaded with 500 skills and powers and feat trees and quadratic wizards and vehicle spreadsheets while the GM guide was turning into 200 pages of “lol make shit up make it ‘dramatic’”.
And, of course, after a while the foundation of “everyone has played D&D, right?” fell away since no actually, everyone hasn’t played Moldvay D&D with stocking and dungeon levels and treasure-by-type. Everyone doesn’t know how to prep blorbily.
So the kids of the second wave, xennials, who were getting into roleplaying after the fad era was long gone picking up books were being taught a completely different play culture. This lives on today as “adventure paths”.
Everyone loves Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, and Fate, right? These games combine the functional “procedure-oriented” backbone of a story game with the player-facing “feel” of an adventure game.
Lumpley explains how the “physics” of neotrad games PbtA is different than your traditional RPG and it’s a key read for people who wanna understand this kinda stuff.
But once you’ve got a situation really set up, established, players know what’s what, you can get plenty of that good old blorby feel out of these games.
Fate (and The Shadow of Yesterday) are more traditional with their own brand of quirky narrativium-driven physics but can work well with an atomic encounters style, where you set up scene-by-scene blorbily instead of an entire game world.
Blorby vs unblorby isn’t the only way to slice the world. Rules-light vs rules-heavy, high magic vs low magic vs sci-fi, wilderness vs urban, scoundrels vs heroes and so on. Me as a super monomaniacal fan of blorb, I feel like blorb is a good way to get rules light to work (if you have an interesting enough “hard landscape” full of weird and dangerous toys for the PCs to explore and play around with, you don’t need much in the way of rules) and is also great for crunchy, buildy rules-heavy games (if you’re just unblorbily “shadowboxing”, all their efforts into character building is meaningless, but with a blorby world to throw their decked-out characters into, those choices matter a lot more).
The shared touchstones between “rules-light” and “rules-heavy” games is that those games are all about the character as the interface for the player, and the player-facing rules being based around the capabilities of the character. That’s true for neotrad also; even if the “physics” of an Apocalypse World game is different, I’m still handed one character and I’m still given stats and HP for that character.