Archive for September, 2025

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Do you play to win?

September 28, 2025

There’s a few conversations I’ve seen online and on video about the issue of challenge in RPGs and it reminded me of the main reason I start The Same Page Tool with this:

Do you play to win?

a) Yes, you totally play to win! The win conditions are…
b) Good play isn’t a win/lose kind of thing

And very simply; it’s because most things non-roleplayers see as “games” are things you play to win, so if that is NOT the goal for the game, then you want that cleared up right away.

This is not to say you cannot have a game that you play to win that happens to create some interesting story, or that a game you don’t necessarily play to win might not have some competitive/planning elements to it, just that as a compass pointing to “what is the point of play?” it’s a great question to start with.

It also is one of the most common points where disjunction among the group leads to problems.

I remember years ago a friend was running Dog Eat Dog, a game where you are not playing to win and they decided their character was going to hole up in a cave, set up traps and try to hide from the Occupation. We had no context about the character, their motivations or why they’d take such a drastic measure, when really, the entirety of the game is about the interactions between the Natives & The Occupation. The player was playing to win, but all it did was derail the point of play.

I’ve also seen D&D games where the goal is “clear the dungeon” and people would make jokey, useless characters for adventure. Again; it disrupts the goal of the campaign.

I don’t think one or the other type of play is more valid; I enjoy both, they’re fun. I do think the play to win crowd (Gamist play!) have had more successful coherent play consistently for decades; if the goal is to play to win and everyone in the group knows it, there’s many games that make that easy.

I also think that sometimes people mix up the idea that if you’re not playing to win, you’re definitely playing to lose. Rather, you might choose to run your characters into a tragedy if it makes a good story. You also might choose to have them fight for their goals with all their might because good endings are awesome. You might choose what “feels realistic” which might be anything in between. The key point is the metric that guides what is “good play” is very different.

There’s also a thousand “micro dials” of things too: how hard of a challenge? How much does randomness play a role vs. intentional action? Puzzles, puzzle type? Combat, combat length, combat to be avoided, combat to be engaged, how many combats, how many options in combat etc.? Can people use dialogue, persuasion and trickery to overcome some challenges? How much does it depend on player skill vs. character skill/dice? If you spend all your gold subcontracting dungeon teams to clear the dungeon for you, is that good play?

There’s equivalent questions for not-playing to win, as well.

I think the problem is a lot of the discussion is chained down to talking points going back 20-40 years. “Ugh, power gamers” was a phrase I remember hearing in the late 80s early 90s. “Ugh, people don’t like challenges anymore” feels more recent but I remember it coming mostly out of toxic groups that mostly used it as the cover for their bigotries, much like a Dark Souls fan who happens to feel any game that has too many POC or women also strangely coincidentally is not a challenging game and therefore completely trash.

Challenge is fine. Non-challenge is fine. There’s lots of great discussions to be had about what people prefer, what nuances, or what common attractor spaces exist within any of those. That’s kind of where the great nitty gritty of craft in design gets done; finding the details and subsets. Unfortunately I also think that a lot of those discussions can’t develop without slower, longer lasting media; discord conversations slide away within a few days if not hours, tiktok videos move from discovery within days or weeks.

A player looking for challenge play might find a developed palate between Tunnels & Trolls, Red Box D&D, Robin Laws’ Rune, Agon, Torchbearer, His Majesty the Worm, Lancer, The Lone Wolf Gamebooks, the Heroquest boardgame, 1001 Nights, Wilderness of Mirrors, Trophy Gold, Gila RPGs Rune, D&D 4E, and Pathfinder – but maybe heard of 2 of these games at most. It takes time and spaces that make things like discussions/experiences of these available for people to find over that time, possible for people to expand that palate.

You can’t be good food reviewer or a good chef if you’ve only tasted 4 dishes in your life. You won’t have the words or the means to know what you’re seeking. You can’t say if you want more, or less, or a different type of seasoning, if you’ve never even considered what that could look like.

Anyway, to a future where people continue to play more games.

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The dungeon as story vs. the dungeon as game

September 23, 2025

There’s some discussions going on around dungeon crawling in RPGs, especially with stuff like Dungeon Meshi or Frieren being amazing stories that do use dungeons.

However.

I think the thing sometimes people miss is that the dungeons are interesting plot points and set dressing, but the key role they play in those stories is about how they put characters in pressure, splitting them up or trapping them together, including and especially more characters than just the “party”.

In that regard, what you need mechanically, is systems to help focus the spotlight of play on character interaction and development; not a map or logistics around a dungeon. Primetime Adventures, or Universalis, would do better at telling those stories than the dungeoncrawling games, because while the logistics of surviving, outsmarting and beating the dungeon are fun, they’re fun side points to the characters revealing their histories, ideals, fears, and connections to one another.

A long standing tradition that has been in RPGs is the fear of contrivance. Too many mechanics, or too much “how the sausage gets made” might “ruin the fun”. But in RPGs you are the creators as much as the audience; your act of play IS making the story or events in play. And while an exquisite corpse story is surprising, funny and entertaining, it’s also understood that people are to accept the nonsensical outcome, whereas anything more sensible requires some form of coordination and planning; the contrivances needed for it to happen. A good storyteller can hide much of those contivances to the audience, but again, if you’re the co-creators in play, you can’t hide it from yourself.

If you want to reliably see more story and character development, you’ll need to make choices about how play works that puts story and character development ahead of the other things; and, if you chose a system that puts story and character development behind (or not at all considered), you will not see those things consistently. It all revolves around what the point of play is for the game you want to have as a group.

If you see folks excited for a dungeon game, and they’re mentioning anime/manga/books as their inspiration, it might be worth asking a few more questions about what they’re looking for before recommending any given game at all.

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Forbiddances and Forbidden Wishes

September 11, 2025

Devin White had a post on Bluesky, about how things being not chosen in RPGs has it’s own interesting aspect. (In the example, it was a spell having extremely annoying side effects. It also makes me think a bit about Momatoes’ ARC game where recharging spell uses often involves harsh costs like giving up a memory.)

Anyway, I thought about a premise I’ve had rattling in my head, probably 2 decades now, for a game where kids get kidnapped into the fae lands and forced to be knights to fight the monstrosities there.

While there, the kids do not age, and are immortal, unkillable, and can eventually heal all wounds. As long as they have not broken all three of these rules:

  • You must never kill anything that can speak
  • You must never lie in the Fae lands
  • You must never fall in love

Once you’ve broken all three, you’re mortal and very MUCH in danger.

I remember telling this idea to someone years ago and they said, “Is there anything that forces you to fall in love?”. “No”. “Then I’ll just never fall in love” and they felt that was all there was to it, missing the fact that the choice to never fall in love is kind of a big choice as a player for what kind of character you’re making and what kind of story you’re telling. It also seems funny to me that the issue of not killing creatures that speak already seemed foregone to them.

I think it’s a great thing to play with, in game design; the idea of forbiddances as well as things which have a high, brutally high cost, as long as it’s not the thing I’ve seen sometimes where a game will sell a central premise THEN make the premise unfun. (“You’re all sexy vampires. But vampires cannot enjoy sex.” Ok why are we playing sexy vampires then?).

The point of the high cost is to give players a narrative Chekov’s Gun. A chance to say something interesting and important when you choose to cross a line that should not be crossed or pay a price to do something.

Who is your character? What do they value? When does the scale tip past the point? It’s good fuel for charged stories. I just think part of it is making sure you it’s fun costs, not “why bother?” which is a different issue altogether.

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How bad do you want it to hurt?

September 11, 2025

There’s intersections going on between games I’m playing in and conversations online in multiple places about RPGs and what level of rawness they bring to the table.

**

We’re playing Primetime Adventures. The characters are fighting memetic entities that are slowly eating people’s memories and existence, a bit of a cross up between Satoshi Kon’s Paprika and Paranoia Agent, and the expanding threat at the end of the Japanese horror movie Pulse. One of my players, her character has a girlfriend, she fails a key conflict but I get the narration. She’s sure her girlfriend is going to die, but that was never a stake I wanted on the table – separated for a while, yes, dead, no.

I hear the relief in the player’s voice; she had already started sliding into grief stacked on top of a life of real world stresses where even her imaginary happiness was getting ripped away. This is Primetime Adventures; we already had set general genre expectations as part of play, I wasn’t going to do the brutally tragic outcome, but she’s been through in real life so much she can’t see anything else. Not having the worst possible outcome helped shift a place for her, even in failed outcome.

We play in the ruins of everyone’s mental space in real world battles. The battles never end so if you always wait “for a better time” you just don’t roleplay at all.

**

We’re playing Errant. The characters have during the course of the campaign, wasted quite of bit of lucky goodwill their party has gained with the local authorities, and, along the way, started a faction war with a crime cartel. In one conflict, they manage to mostly trounce the thugs sent their way, but one of them happens to randomly be someone with a bit more sense who sees how powerful these adventurers are, and sues for peace; he’s going to tell his bosses that this is basically pissing off John Wick and not worth the cost. Behind the scenes, I make a couple of rolls; “oh, oh no”. Like many organizations, the competent layer isn’t at the top, and the guys at the top are running on pride and ego. “No one does this to us. They HAVE to pay.” I roll the random event chart. “An NPC dies.”

The party had tried to send their ally, a mercenary captain and her small band of warriors on a boat, to get away from this. Of course the criminal cartel goes for her.

A player, different from before, had this as her best friend. We played through the arc, but, definitely the tenor of play shifted. I think maybe we didn’t expect this level of pain to be in the game.

Big sets of mechanics have a lot going on, and often hide hard hitting outcomes or patterns you might not see right away. It’s the punches you don’t see coming that hit the hardest.

**

We’re playing my friend’s highly modded 5E campaign. It’s not a meat grinder, but many battles are hard fought, but most importantly it’s a game with a lot of powerful factions and our characters with networks of connections; vulnerable, hard to protect connections, getting cut out, one by one.

Another friend is playing his street tough hobgoblin, has found his gang scattered. Among them, a father and his two kids kidnapped and magically experimented on. By the time we get there to save them… well, the kids are altered, the father half digested by some gargantuan monstrosity that has been turned into an alchemical factory. In the moment of crisis, it’s just “get out with whomever you can save” but sessions later, the daughter, says to the hobgoblin, “My father’s dead because you didn’t protect him like you promised, and now you want me to make you feel better about it?!?”

I think he was always angling for a level of tragedy; we’re just not sure where on the dial that was going to be. This is harder than we expected; not game breaking, but again, a tonal shift, one we accept and roll with. (It is, after all, more than what D&D’s rules would give us on it’s own). There is an emotional Sword of Damocles hanging over many of the characters and we know some losses are going to stick.

You also know things matter to the group, there is engagement, if there’s a place where people feel something about it.

Emotional engagement

It’s not always moments of tragedy, but I think they’re the easiest ones to see the engagement of “this matters, but that’s also why it can hurt”. (Golden Sky Stories is a great counterexample of a game that somehow manages to just generate engagement on pure good will). And just as much as I was saying a key thing for Narrativist play is finding a dramatic engagement, the Conflicts that matter, a good system will guide the group both in understanding what to expect, what kinds of Conflicts, what kinds of tone and genre boundaries, and where things should be pushed.

Yes, of course you can do this on your own. No, you don’t need the book to do that for you. However, if your group is still developing a communication mode with each other, if people are going through a lot in real life that maybe isn’t communicated, if people are coming to the table with different expectations; the text having some of that laid out up front can make a lot of that easier. As I often say, half the “problem player” stories are just people who wanted different games and could have been avoided with clarity up front.

Two Dials

Let’s think of two dials.

The first dial is the experience during the game itself – Emotional Stakes to the player. Low/Medium/High. How fraught is the experience.

The second dial is where the game system will take you. Guaranteed happy ending, probable happy ending, possible happy ending, probable tragic ending, guaranteed tragic ending. (“What if the game doesn’t guarantee any outcome? Possible happy ending.”)

You know what the difference is between a Disney movie and a Don Bluth Studios movie? Disney is typically not going further than Low/Medium stakes for a Guaranteed Happy Ending. Don Bluth is going to take you through some shit with High stakes and leave you at the end with a Possible Happy Ending.

Real people making real feelings in unreal worlds

Anyway, your group is real people who have to navigate The Fantastic Respite and the Horizon of the Real, and if the game doesn’t help you figure out where you want to be on that space, you might be sliding into some emotional space you’re not ready for and turn the fun into not fun. It’s one thing if you’re ready to go into the space where you know as a group I Will Not Abandon You is on the table, but if not, you end up with “Why Are We Here?” and “This Isn’t Fun”.

Some of this, is how well a game communicates what it’s bringing to you before you play. It’s why I consider the highly fraught space of All Praise the Hawkmoth King to be perfect in telling you it’s about to be ugly, messy stories of teens making bad choices with supernatural powers, and sex, in an exploitative society (real world, mostly). It’s also why I think the nadir of the spiritual journey in Thirty to be a cheap gotcha and highly distasteful in terms of both the history it touches and dishonest to the players about what kind of emotional experience they’re going to be signing up for.

I’m glad we’ve moved past the point where RPG culture generally pointed to moments of emotional connection being solely “good roleplayers” where system could not touch (instead of, facilitate), but I also think that we’re probably still 10-20 years away from a developed general language about the vast array of possibilities of how that can happen. Not a design language, but as a play culture, in the same way movie or book reviews can give full nuance.

Until then, it’s a bit like feeling our way in the dark and using a lot of workarounds and communications to try not to stumble over each other too much.

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Apocalypse World & the missing Fiction to Clocks

September 10, 2025

(I swear I wrote a post about this before… but it’s not coming up on my searches so… here we are)

Over on a Discord, someone was talking about clock mechanics in games and how they’re generally unsatisfying. I agree; most games took the idea of “clocks” from Apocalypse World, or one of the PbtA descendants, but somewhere along the way, the load bearing bit about “fiction tied to clocks” got left behind.

The Example

It’s not just “succeed X number of steps” or “fail X number of steps”. That’s just “roll a bunch of times” without any meaningful push in the situation or events.

Here’s the example and explanation I wrote:

You write down the clock with a number of steps. There should be fictional points at each step. In AW, most of the clocks are generally negative situations, bc they’re GM tools to generate trouble. “Mako’s Gang Takes Over the Hold” might be one.

1 – People stop asking Leader Bassie to help, they go to Mako instead.
2 – Mako’s gang outnumbers every other gang 2 to 1 in the Hold
3 – The Foodhouse is protected only by Mako’s Guys
4- Bassie is absent during a crisis.

So, sometimes things will advance the clock (hard moves, failing to do anything long enough), but sometimes player actions or side effects of player actions causes things to advance as well.

Say one of the players drugs Bassie in order to rifle through her safe, and Bassie is left unconscious during an raid by the Owl Bikers. Oops you’ve pushed the clock all the way to 4 in one go. But this is also the logic you’d use for positive events as well if you chose to put a clock on it.

Additional Aspects

A couple of things also come of tying it to fiction – each step is an indication to the players something is happening.

Let’s take that example clock, and say the players cut it off 3 steps in (“We throw Mako into the radiation pit” “Geez” “Yeah make an example of them.”) you still have a lot of problems (people still want someone to do better than Bassie, Mako’s guys feel a way, some make a power move, oh crap they control the Foodhouse…). Likewise, if it was a positive clock and you fail the larger goal, you might have gotten some steps that earned meaningful gains you can still use.

And, along with that, the fiction of each step might change how you approach the clock as a whole. You can offset step 1 in the example by negotiation or leverage with folks. By step 3 you have to play very cagey if you want control of the Foodhouse back. Hell, you might be going without food for a while or cutting side deals with other folks you don’t like to stay supplied.

Now, these are basically back end – the players may know you’re using a clock mechanic but if they don’t know how many steps or what the fiction triggers are, they just know they should be doing generally what makes sense to solve problems or achieve goals. And, as the GM, your job is also to judge “close enough” or “I didn’t think of that but it should do X to the clock” when and where it makes sense.

Specific to Apocalypse World, is that the Threat Clocks tie into each other; one set of problems quite likely will accidentally trigger other clocks to advance. It’s a meta mechanic that builds into the “Moves Snowball” logic. But there’s no reason you couldn’t have clocks in a different game, impact both positive and negative in different ways. It’s a bit like “Help Organization A and Organization B, their allies, also likes you, but Organization C dislikes you”.

I wouldn’t try to go this complicated to start; just make them as you need them, and then if you realize one impacts the other, go with that.

Why do all this?

You can think of clocks as “bite sized prep”. In old, 90s style RPG plot prep, you’d prepare a branching path plotline of different things the players are likely to do, and it could add up to quite a bit of prep, after all, you’re almost designing a weekly “Choose your own adventure” set. Clocks are a slick way to put together small bits that might happen over several sessions, blast through in one session, or not at all, but you can probably jam one together in 5 minutes or less, which means it’s lower time cost and easier to modify, adapt, drop in, or throw away.

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