I’m a great believer in not reinventing the wheel. I have a teeny tiny platform but it’s not nothing so every now and then I like to share that with others who don’t have one. So this week Elodie Lloyd, an Aussie TTRPG designer (check out their games here) is interviewing another Aussie TTRPG designer, Logan Timms.

I’m Logan, he/him pronouns, living on Wurundjeri country, just in the outer suburbs of Naarm. And I am a big tabletop games nerd. Broadly speaking I am a tabletop designer, I play games at home, and every now and then I’m on streams but that’s kind of rare. I also am one of the mentors for the ARC tabletop roleplaying mentorship program and sometimes I do stretch goal writing. Oh, and I have a podcast about lyric games.

Tell me about your RPG projects as an expression of your art and how it ties into other art forms, in your specific instance.

Great question. I do consider tabletop roleplaying games as my primary art form, like it’s my primary way of expressing myself, and that wasn’t always the case. It’s become that way as I’ve come to really enjoy it and come to understand it and all the different ways that a tabletop game can be designed. But yeah, as an art practice I often use tabletop roleplaying games to unravel or explore things like topics that are interesting to me, relationships or relationship dynamics, or tensions or dynamics that I’m experiencing in my life. And they can be positive dynamics or crunchier, less fun dynamics as well. So a tagline that I often use for my games is ‘games of connection and self-reflection’.

That’s what it looks like for me but I guess connecting it to other arts practices, particularly thinking about lyric games, that intersects with poetry quite a bit, so I have been dabbling in poetry just a little bit and it is interesting to do that. In the venn diagram of tabletop games and poetry is lyric games, and I feel like in the overlap where lyric games are is where ‘connection and self-reflection’ are commonly themes. So it feels like a very comfy niche to find myself in, which is fun. So yeah poetry and prose writing fit quite well under and around tabletop roleplaying games. Other arts or creative practices that I do currently are woodworking and that’s about it really.

Tell me about lyric games. I guess your personal definition of them because I know they’re broad.

Exactly. There’s no one unified definition of lyric games, but to me lyric games are games that often intentionally blur the line between reality and the game in ways that often evoke a very personal and emotional experience, that can sometimes lead to insight or personal reflection that is actually usable or useful to your real-life self. And I think that’s really powerful. I think a lot of lyric games are solo and so they allow you to have that time to be as deep or as vulnerable as you feel that you can, in that space being alone which can feel safer for a lot of folks. It can be really interesting to have that space to sit with yourself and learn something about yourself in a way that doesn’t feel like a self-help book or a lecture or anything like that, and it’s actually also fun.

There are some duet lyric games and some group lyric games as well. Having the safety of rules structure- you know, we’ve got the rules in front of us so we both know what we’re getting into and we’ve got agreed terms for how this is going to happen- can make space, can create that safety and structure for a really deep and intimate and personal experience between two or more people.

For me personally growing up I didn’t really understand the importance or benefits of just, like, sitting by myself, and self reflection, and yeah like ‘who do I really want to be,’ ‘how do I want to be’ and a lot more about being; rather than just doing and kicking goals and doing tasks and things.

Do you have any very very entry-level advice for someone who wants to appreciate games in the same way that you do; experience lyric games to some extent?

Oh, the other great thing about lyric games is they’re often very short; five pages or less. And so yeah you can dip your toe in quite lightly and get across a lot of them quite quickly if you read them all back to back. As for games that I would recommend: one of my all time favourite lyric games. Well, I spoke to the designer on Lyrical Ludology and he was like ‘oh yeah okay, if you want to call it that that’s alright.’ And that is Pyrescence by Achillobators on Itch.

That’s a great game, there’s no fancy layout. It’s just black words on a white page. Very simple mechanics and yet it was super powerful. If you allow yourself to really lean into the experience, yeah. Pyriscence is about a forest burning, and what burns away and what is left behind and what is saved, but the fire and the forest and all of that are a metaphor for different elements of yourself.

And then everyone always talks about We Are But Worms by Riverhouse Games, which is, yeah, a one-word RPG, and it’s on the sillier side, which is where Lee likes to play. I’ve been talking about RELATIONSHIPS and INSIGHTS and all this. I enjoy the serious end of lyric games, but there’s, like, just bonkers silly ones too. So, Pyriscence and We Are But Worms kind of show off that spectrum a little bit.

What’s something you’re passionate about that you’d love to see more of in the RPG space?

I think I’ve lightly touched on it in my overall approach to tabletop game design as my arts practice, but really explicitly drawing from personal experience I think can be really powerful.

Even if someone makes an autobiographical game and never publishes it, I still think it’s super worthwhile. Of course just because someone’s played my autobio they can’t go around saying they know exactly what it’s like to be a trans man. My experience is just one of many, but I think it’s a good way to even start getting your head around what that might look like or feel like; consequences or outcomes, or joys and difficulties, of various life events that have happened to a person, in a way that is more interactive than just hearing a story. For example if they were playing my game, they choose who they want to come out to or if they want to come out, and have the agency to make that choice.

And I know that all art has some autobiographical flavour to it, pulling from our experience. And I think with the autobio game I was just curious to see if I took that all the way to its extreme, what would that look like?

Links:

Logan’s games
https://breathingstories.itch.io/

LOGAN: An Autobiographical Tabletop Game
https://breathingstories.itch.io/logan

Logan’s podcast, Lyrical Ludology
https://open.spotify.com/show/4W8rWngzwLNOP3SU9RG97W?si=7kAdUZuqSlWIhXlVgC09hQ

Beau Jágr Sheldon’s Script Change RPG Toolbox
https://thoughty.itch.io/script-change

Pyriscence, by Achillobators
https://achillobators.itch.io/pyriscence

We Are But Worms by Riverhouse Games
https://riverhousegames.itch.io/we-are-but-worms-a-one-word-rpg

This blog post is too long and too effusive but it’s trying to say that The Isle is a well written adventure for three key reasons:

1. It says only what is necessary, instead of a lot of over-writing
2. By just saying what IS, it doesn’t direct how anyone should react to it
3. By virtue of the sparseness of the text and lack of an introduction, it can be read like fiction with an element of discovery.

Let’s talk about those things as once again we continue to hit the Non Trivial Problem in Narrative Game Design, of how to allow complete freedom of movement but still produce tight linear exciting narratives. (A problem that TTRPGs have never wanted to solve and never will solve, as always.)

The first point is fine. We have a bad habit in all TTRPGs of overwriting things, and saying a lot of words that add up to very little. The third point I can kind of jive with in that I appreciate making things more readable in general. We decided the default presentation of the TTRPG is technical writing but it certainly doesn’t have to be and it doesn’t have to be so bland. But I object to needing to read the whole thing before I start running it, because who the fuck has time for that?

This is the core problem with the linked blog: it is all about how good it is to remove the walls of the house without stopping to ask if the walls had a purpose. The adventure summary exists for a reason, and that reason is so a) we know if we want to run it without having to read the whole fucking thing and b) we know the scope of it going in so we don’t HAVE to read the whole fucking thing.

The second one is exactly why I gave up trying to run D&D adventures entirely. It was just so impossible to turn a bunch of laundry lists into anything resembling narrative, drama or excitement. The blog wants to assert that in the magic of minimalism, we have true freedom but in my experience, no we don’t. We have a lot of shitboring fights, is what we have. But I think this does touch towards an interesting question on how we solve the Non Trivial Problem Nobody Wants To Solve (NTPNWTS).

There is something to be said for the model used in so much D&D and the Isle, the what I call The Waiting For A Bus model, because everyone is just remaining in situ until encountered, and the virtue is, indeed, that you have lots of lovely randomness. The downside is that the randomness isn’t very random, because if it doesn’t matter what order you go in, then it doesn’t matter what order you go in. Random noise is just noise. Again, this is why the problem is hard: how do you allow for maximum randomness but also produce something out of it? But I think that IS a good question and I think we definitely do often overwrite a lot trying and typically failing to find good answers. Throwing away all consideration or responsibility for narrative and going “they’re all waiting for a bus, go for it” is at least an aesthetic choice, as opposed to fucking up a railroad and then pretending the characters have agency.

Call me crazy, though, but I think there are lots of clever ways you can have your cake and eat it too, and there quite a few games playing in that space: very random, completely player driven, always unique, but also not just a floor plan. There is also a sense that the Isle does this too because you will eventually, one supposes, find closure in final rooms (unless you, you know, do what most gamers do faced with a floor plan, which is murder everything in room one, leave, go back to village, level up, come back with a large amount of portable lava, fill dungeon with lava, realise lava has melted the treasure, blame the GM for not reminding them and then get in a fistfight). I can’t tell if The Isle is any good however, because I’m not going to read the whole thing. It should have had a blurb.