I’ve long since abandoned any idea of knowing or caring how other people play ttrpgs. I am always Doing It Differently. But I still hope explaining myself adds clarity to other designers and players.

As discussed many times, Dungeons and Dragons started as a miniature wargame for crawling dungeons and was never supposed to be a simulation of anything in particular. But the wargames of the day and now had systems where you would retreat from battle and switch to a different set of rules for what happened next – how you solved supply lines, scouted terrain and improved your troops or technology. But because D&D was not so much designed as congealed, when it copied this approach it didn’t really come up with a separate system. It is the same Constitution throw to survive the quicksand whether you are using dungeon movement speeds or overland speeds, or even days march speeds. (As a humorous aside, this important change in movement was buried deep in the back of AD&D first ed, leading to a friend moving towards the keep on the borderlands at ten feet per minute.)

As a result of this, it was never entirely clear how much of the rules of the game describe reality, and which parts of reality. Does it make sense, goes the question, for everyone in the fictional world to have their capabilities measured in strength, dexterity, intelligence and so on? Probably yes. Are the average die rolls an indication of the average person? Again, we’re often told yes. Okay so then does everyone in the world have a class and a level?

Opinions differ.

I’ve had some GMs suggest I was ruining the tone by asking if characters cwere rogues or bards. Thousands of magazine articles have been written about whether a small town should have a third level cleric. Endless you tube sketches have been written about “does the npc shopkeeper know my class is thief”. Sadly, tons of RPGs don’t actually answer these questions! Like we talked about last week a lot of players rcand designers have an idea of what is and isn’t in-world knowledge, and get cranky if you suggest a different idea, or even if you ask the question in cthe first place. But I, being autistic, never assume.

(Not least because I’ve been punished for assuming wrong. The phrase autists have heard the most in their life is “why are tut asking? Isn’t it obvious?”)

The Warhammer Exception Law goes as follows: “Whenever anyone complains about a trope in fantasy/fantasy gaming being ludicrous or unjustified, Warhammer either doesn’t have that trope or has justified it.” Warhammer spoiled me for lots of other games in many other ways as well, and one of these is it appeared in the mid-80s-early-90s trend where the design of the game was not around the idea of special systems existing for characters, but rather that the point of the system overall was to describe THE ENTIRE WORLD. Call of Cthulhu and its parent, Runequest probably did the most work in establishing this tradition. When those games say that a standard soldier has 80% in Marksmanship you can be sure that’s how their armies operate and every soldier has this and the soldier training will be written so as to produce this level when the soldier is released from basic training.

Obviously there were still things outside the scope of the rules but it meant removing the question of “in world” logic altogether. And it tied the system together around a central goal of representation. The downside was some games took this too far like Rollmaster and Harn, with a roll for everything and everything for a roll. Thus by the 90s the pendulum swung the other way and much harder: the idea was born that the rules and rolling dice were bad. To this day, many many rpg players want the rules to be entirely invisible until they peek around the corner in their allotted time, which is usually combat.

I’ve always hated this approach for two reasons. First of all, I don’t want to play five different games at once. I want to play the same game all the time, not two hours of improv drama, one hour of miniature wargaming, one hour of optimisation and one of see-if-we-can-outsmart-the-GM and one of dolly dress up, each with their own rules and each entirely disconnected from the other. I’m way too lazy to do that and way too autistic to know when I’m supposed to switch from one to the other. It’s all very artificial to me, although of course I realise that artificial is a moving target on a sliding scale of personal taste.

The second reason I dislike this approach is that I find that when players are rolling lots of dice and getting interesting results that really drive play and produce interesting outcomes they lean right forward in their chairs and are super engaged. And the only time they get like that when the rules are absent is if the drama comes to this big head and the interplaying acting is hella dramatic. To some, I know, asking for a roll in a big dramatic moment is anathema but to me, rolls exist to create and drive big dramatic moments. To some, it’s totally fine to play a weird game of soldiers alongside deep improv and there’s no loss of fidelity in bolting the two armies together in loosely connected series. To me, I want to use every tool at my disposal to dazzle my players and just as an escape room threads puzzle and plot, so do I expect my RPGs to entwine mechanics and drama.

And because I want to switch constant back and forth, seamlessly, between mechanics and story and out of character and in character, between game and simulation and plot, I want a system that does everything the same way, all the time, at about the same level of detail and the same pace. One of my goals is to roll dice at the same rate for the whole session. Otherwise I’m creating weird disconnects where combat feels different from socialising. And we don’t put up with that in other media. Small structural changes occur to highlight drama and tone, not to highlight whether the character is shopping or dancing. The question the filmmaker asks is “Is this shopping important? Is it light or dark, happy or sad, grim or comedic?” not “Is this shopping?”

Honestly I would probably be annoyed if I had to change systems for dramatic reasons too, though. I’m an extremely busy guy and all my decisions are based on how hard do I have to work. If I have to learn one subsystem (and remember when it applies) I’ll allow it. Two and I’m out. And it may be habit but at least combat feels pretty natural for dialing in the detail. I very much dislike, for example, Gumshoe asking me to decide whether a scene is clue-gathering-exposition delivery or (everything else), not least because these scenes are shot the same way in fiction. Maybe if all exposition delivery was done in bullet time Id get it.

A response to last weeks blog about downtime said they found downtime natural because in the real world there’s stuff you do at home and stuff you do at work. I said to me those are the same stuff. I see no difference.

There’s an autistic cliche that we fear change, which comes from this thing where we always eat the same food and wear the same clothes but that’s not because we fear change so much as the effort of decisions. Given that I can literally eat almost anything for lunch, up to and including small stones, grass, paper, concepts, I don’t want to face having to narrow it down. Similarly people think autists like categories because they fear disorder or continuities and while we do have very black and white brains sometimes, again this is often a defence mechanism against the opposite of categories. If I can eat literally anything, please let me bundle things into boxes so I don’t have to interrogate the infinite complexity. But likewise if you are constantly in infinite complexity, if you see home and work as the same, as shopping and dancing as the same, as combat and chatting as the same, then it is enormously debilitating to have to slam on the brakes and shift systems.

Hence: no subsystems for me. Universal mechanics all the ways I don’t like mini games much either. Although yes of course both these things have soft edges; any rule could be considered a mini game or a subsystem. Of course I’ve considered that. That’s how my brain works, as I’ve just covered. I can see every possible grey area and edge case. It’s exhausting. I’m so tired, all the time, trying to think in neurotypical. And when I say it’s hard, and that it’s not obvious, please: believe me.

For those who came in late:

In 1981, Tom Moldvay wrote one of the many absolutely bonkers supplements for what was then BECMI D&D (Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Immortal) aka the Rules Cyclopaedia ruleset. Castle Amber is a serial-numbers-filed-off riff on the Averoigne stories by Clark Ashton Smith, which in turn owe a bit to the Fall of the House of Usher and other such gothic works. The house and grounds are enormously large and impossibly insane, as with a lot of D&D adventures, and because Averoigne works on sort of different genre tropes to standard D&D, the adventure has a conceit that transports you into the house (not unlike the mists in Ravenloft). There is no easy or direct way to go back to town and re-equip.

Moldvay was not the first to run into this strange issue. Nowadays, all of this is de rigeur: one knows that there is Town, there is Wilderness, and there is Dungeon, and one goes from the first, through the second, to the latter, and back again. In many computer games, travel back to town is instantaneous, which led to the coining of the term “death cab”. (Which isn’t where the band Death Cab For Cutie got their name from). To “death cab” is to kill yourself because it is faster to respawn in town after death than it is to walk back. The original version of the board game Descent had a death cab exploit, so it’s not just computer games.

Obviously we should talk about why the whole problem exists in the first place, but what remains memorable about Castle Amber is the solution. With no way for the party to go back to town, Moldvay created the first Save Game In-World Artefact. When players camp down for the night, a gigantic pink bubble floats towards them, wherever they are in the mansion, envelops the party and then stops time around them for 8 hours, so they can rest and get their spells back. Like most of D&D, it’s goofy as hell, but like most of D&D it was never really supposed to make sense, because D&D was designed to be a game, not a simulated interactive adventure or a storytelling machine.

And it is really the idea of a game where these things come from. The nature of a game, one of its core principles, is games end. Not only that, they loop. Chess lasts until the king is lost and then it is reset; bridge is played hand after hand after hand. The cards run down then get refilled. Much like experience points and may other conceits we’ve just accepted in roleplaying games, there’s no reason for stories to work this way. This is one reason I’ve never really liked “downtime” mechanics in modern RPGs. It is, in effect, the Save Bubble writ large. It just has more genre architecture to support it. It’s not that I dislike genre architecture, it’s just that this isn’t really copying any particular genre trope. It is a very gamist mechanism. It manages tension, sure, but it seems so exist mostly because of video games: to provide stuff to do in the load screen area besides just re-equipping.

Not that there’s anything wrong with this, or with liking it. The whole nature of rpgs is they are three activities in a trench coat (playing a game, experiencing a simulated existing and creating a story). It’s just always good to spot which elements you’re using and why. It feels artificial to me to have downtime because it doesn’t seem to have a narrative referent and it pulls me out of the simulation but I still use plenty of game elements in my rpgs without noticing a conflict. Indeed, one reason it’s so hard to talk about this stuff is often we don’t see the things we are happy to overlook. No rpg has ever felt the need to model toilet breaks, because we all get from birth that not everything goes into a game, a simulation or a story. We have never thought to question this! So often when you say to someone “why does x exist” (or not exist) they don’t have an answer. Likewise they can’t always tell you why something bugs them because of course it does – it’s like modelling toilet breaks, it just doesn’t “fit”.

I’m sure people feel this way about the save cycle. Whether it is going back to town or having your eight hours rest, some things seem natural. Which is why good design and creativity can be found by poking at them and demanding they explain themselves. As I see it, there is no justification for any of it in Ttrpgs because it’s only there in the first place because of wargames following board game logic. Wargames, like all board games, start and finish, and you can’t change your mind about things during play, just as you can’t decide you always had two queens in chess or just ask for new cards halfway through a round of bridge. The dungeon crawl followed this model. There’s often this idea that Gygax and Arneson set out to model the magic of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth but they did nothing of the sort: they designed a game where you crawled through encounters until you ran out of proton pellets and had to reset, and then they looked around for something to justify that. (In a similar way, the setting has a frontier feel because a frontier justifies the dungeon-town cycle.)

You don’t need this mechanic though. All you have to do to remove long rests and save bubbles is not design your system to be about depleting resources. The latter is what causes the former. You may say “but humans sleep”. They do yes but we’ve got so used to the death cab we seem to sometimes forget how difficult it is in real life to solve the issue of “we’re in enemy territory, but we need to resuppy”. Napoleon would despise modern gaming – he spent so much time and brain power desperately trying to solve the issue of resupply, and we sweep it under the table. Doesn’t exist! The moment the last orc dies, we might as well rematerialize in the tavern. Luckily, countless RPGs don’t run on resource depletion and so avoid all this. (This isn’t a new idea!)

I mention all of this because this last month I’ve been exploring the “pseudo-rpg” or “hybrid rpg” space. From Talisman to Gloomhaven, board gamers have been trying to capture as much as possible of the amazing fun of ttrpgs without having to have a GM, because GMing is both extremely taxing and relatively unrewarding. In the last ten years, there’s been an explosion of such games, mostly kicked off by Gloomhaven, and a lot of them are very successful in how they’ve attacked the problem. But they all have this ongoing issue – they have to start and end. I’m lucky enough to be playing Gloomhaven and Frosthaven digitally which means we can, at any moment, pause the game and reload it later as is, because the virtual table preserves everything. If we weren’t doing that we couldn’t stop at any point. We’d probably only be able to stop at the end of a dungeon crawl. Because traditional games have to be packed away and it’s still really really hard to have save games in board games. That’s just how it is. Which means so far all the hybrids I’ve looked at have a fair amount of dungeon-town logic built into the rules.

Again, that’s fine. If you have to have these constraints, it makes sense to use them. But it did remind me of one thing that’s very unique to ttrpgs: they can stop on a dime. The only time you can’t save is between someone saying a thing happened and someone noting the effect on the character sheet or documentation – but even this happens. There’s always the moment of “remember I need to write down that I found those arrows”.

Computer games can save too, of course. Famously so: in many games you can pause mid conversation and go back and try a dozen different gambits, reliving moments infinitely often. Some folks do this so much it has earned the term “save scumming” which is a joking term to some and deadly serious to others. Interestingly, this is something ttrpgs can’t do because our save system – our brains – is able to auto save at any moment, but it loses fidelity fast and it gets cranky if you keep reloading. (Indeed, much debate at the table can arise about memory fidelity. You didn’t actually cast the spell, as the sacred texts go). One of my great unmade game ideas is to find a way to turn “forgetting what we did last session” into a mechanic for a game, but anyway.

But this is always the point: that we interrogate these things, and see the strengths and weaknesses, the limitations and the opportunities. We should never just assume the town-wild-dungeon is the way things have to be, nor should we accept mechanics that follow that form when we don’t need them. We live in a media-drenched age but instead of that making us media-literate it has made us TV Trope zombies. Are these fast zombies or slow zombies we ask, forgetting that we wouldn’t have that question if 28 Days Later had simply followed the form. And where we do question things we often only do so like Tom Moldvay’s Save Bubble: a kludge to paper over a problem, instead of going back and removing the problem we built for ourselves.

Or worse: we keep the band-aids when we don’t have the problem any more. Every now and then I’ll see games that don’t run on resource depletion and don’t need to be packed down and set up but still insist on the town-woods-dungeon dynamic, or even on long rests or death cabs. If we’re not careful a bad kludge papering over a self-inflicted wound becomes a genre standard. Just like clerics did. But that’s another story…