I don’t like MOSAIC strict. This is not the fault of MOSAIC strict. MOSAIC strict, near as I can tell, was designed for no real purpose except whimsy. Somehow it has been used to build modular game mechanics, but is it designed to do that? We may never know. Does it do that well? Not really.

I prefer to be a more of a light a candle than curse the darkness guy, so I don’t want to go into why I don’t like it but I do have to justify this whole post so here we go:

• Modular, this one is weird. A game cannot SAY that it is a complete game, but it can BE a complete game. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. I also don’t know why not allowing complete games is useful. Just fucking let games be complete. Who does that hurt?
• Optional. This I can see is trying to get to a decent idea – we don’t want to make entries that require other entries. Sure. But I think we can have a stab at better language.
• Short. Length seems very arbitrary. But as I say, it was just a bunch of letters designed to see what they do, so everything is arbitrary.
• Attested. Yes, this makes sense. Helps with googling. Keeping this one.
• Independent. I actually want things to interact with each other! That lets us build. So Independent feels like a dead end.
• Coreless. Appears to mostly exist to make the acronym work.

So why FRESCO? What is its purpose? The idea of FRESCO is to encourage the sharing of complete free-standing mechanics across the RPG design scene so that people don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel and can credit other designers in a simple way. Imagine if instead of everyone using PBTA or D&D, instead they had a shared library of stuff with a similar vibe but more variety. A FRESCO mechanic is one that has been road-tested and is well known much like things in PBTA, but then anyone can use in their games.

NOTE: yes of course everyone can already use everyone else’s game mechanics because they can’t be copyrighted, but they are often locked away in games you can’t read or are harder to see how to separate out from other things. FRESCO isn’t saying you can’t already do these things. It’s trying to make things easier. (Heck maybe MOSAIC makes things easier for you too. I’m not necessarily saying one should exist and the other shouldn’t. Great art scenes benefit from multiple systems, doubly so when they create feuds!)

F is for Free All FRESCO works must be free. You cannot produce a body of shared and shareable work if it is behind paywalls. However you can take rules that were presented as FRESCO, stick them in a book and sell that. You just can’t label that book as FRESCO, because of R.

R is for Registered All FRESCO products have to say they are FRESCO. You absolutely can go back and tag your old stuff as FRESCO though. Or indeed write out the rules of something you love, into a FRESCO format so it becomes FRESCO, but either way, it must be labeled. If it doesn’t say it, it isn’t FRESCO.

E is for Explicit MOSAIC says you can’t make assumptions, but I’d prefer to say you must state the assumptions you are making. You can say “this is a way to do stats, assuming you want stats”. You should also be clear on EVERY assumption if you can. MOSAIC says “assume there’s freeform play” but what is that? Figure out exactly what you’re doing and what you’re assuming and say so.

S is for Self-Contained A better version of Independent. Your mechanics must be complete within themselves. They might need input variables (eg this assumes you have some kind of stats that measure physical speed) and they produce some kind of output variable (eg this produces an order of play), but everything within that is a black box that operates on its own. Anyone can then refer to the element to get the result they want. Someone can improve the element, so it produces the same thing differently, but I don’t need to know if they did, if I don’t care. I can just say “insert thing that produces order of play here” and you can go find a FRESCO that does that (or make up your own).

C is for Creative Commons You cannot copyright anything that is FRESCO. Specifically, it must be released under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0). Other people can share it around but they owe you a credit. Respect authorship! FRESCO is designed to build a shared language but not fuck people over.

O is for Outstretching It’s not just that we want to stop having to reinvent the wheel, we want to build on each other. A FRESCO element is self-contained but it is totally okay to improve them, alter them, develop them and stack them. You can make a game entirely out of FRESCO elements, and that could also be FRESCO, if you think your way of stacking them is awesome. Therefore the design of FRESCO elements can stretch out with suggestions for input and output, and what it might work best with, in an EXPLICIT way. A FRESCO element could say “this works great with games/FRESCOs that have X in them, not so good with Ys” because combination is the heart of game design.

+Flexible is part of the name because it sounds good but also because the point of any system should be to grow and improve. If you have a piece that is almost FRESCO but breaks a few rules, label that FRESCO Flexible, or FRESCO+. FRESCO strict, FRESCO-, FRESCO pure whatever you call it, is encouraged. But we trust you that if you need to colour outside the lines but also hat-tip the FRESCO collective, you have a good reason to do so. Better to bring together than get het up on specifics.

Something made that is FRESCO strict can be called “a fresco”. It can be as large or as small as you want. Calling it a fresco is a way of indicating it is something you want others to use if they need it. It’s possible that something could be MOSAIC strict and FRESCO. FRESCO doesn’t care.

As with all good manifestos, I will take no questions. Go make shit.

Obviously when you have a hammer, you find nails but I feel privileged to have studied modern and contemporary art. Knowing your art history helps you be a better artist, and nothing is so interesting as painting in the 19th and 20th centuries. Because it is such an ancient and storied art, there is so much within the art form that has questioned art itself. Architecutre maybe the father of arts, but painting is the mother. And like the ancient mother gods she is chaos, boiling and angry.

The 19th century saw painting begin to change from the absolute demands of perfectly capturing light and shade and experimenting with impressionism, of painting what it felt like. Soon enough, the doors came off and chaos came stalking. Turner painted “Rain, Steam and Speed” in 1844 which isn’t “of” anything but is exactly what it says somehow. By the end of that century, art was starting to tear itself apart, and society was doing the same, and each reflected the other. Too much change was happening too fast. And so the artists felt like there old rules had to be challenged. Expressionism was about what you felt inside. Cubism was about making shapes and lines in a pleasing way, which then gave way to the abstractionists. The Fauves were called that because they considered themselves wild animals, free from all rules. Then came Dada which was a movement that defined itself by refusing to be a movement. I’m summarising this very badly but I need to set the stage, as briefly but as well as I can, for what came next.

Picasso wanted to throw away everything but the idea, painting for the sake of painting. He made several studies of a bull trying to fnd the very minimal shape that could evoke a bull in the mind. Painting almost without painting. The same sort of idea would produce the Readymade movement, which was an assault on the art gallery. If putting something in an art gallery made it valuable and important, then the Readymades would satirise that by choosing objects and imparting no change to them except the referent. Duchamp was probably not the actual originator of Fountain, but his fame and culture made it part of his body of work. Meanwhile Pollock was trying to remove the canvas from art, frustrated by that limitation. Painting demanded so much regulation and rule: a flat surface, an orientation, colour, light, line, and finally a viewer but also a viewer in place, in situ, in an art gallery, and outside the painting itself.

One of Duchamp’s last works was a piece that haunts me called Etant Donne, which is trying to assault the idea of the picture plane, of the problem that the artist can only attack a canvas and then the observer must stand back. Etant Donne is hard to translate but it sort of means “As it is” or “As it comes”. It was one of the first of what we now called interactive arts or installation works. We now live in a world where installations are almost the most common art we encounter, but like everything it is worth understanding what it was like before then.

Etant Donne is set outside the art gallery. Going beyond the paintings, one encounters a small door, into another room. There there is nothng but two more doors which clearly will not open. The eye is drawn however, to two peep holes in the doors. Struck with nothing to look at, the viewer bends down and peers through the holes. He is then struck by a pornographic scene: a standard early 19th century landscape contains a young woman, her head unseen, displaying herself sexually. One becomes a voyeur and pervert instantly, interrupting something without a choice (although of course it is an extremely masculine/male piece therein). And yet of course it was your choice to look through the peephole. Duchamp wanted you to become something of the artist yourself. To make the choice.

But to get you to make that choice, the room was specifically designed to entice you to look. It wasn’t really a free choice. And the art of the installation has become this constant battle. The viewer can never have the same experience as the artist, or indeed can be controlled compeletely. Art is a conversation. The viewer brings everything to it that they are and walks away having changed themselves (and in some recent works, changing the art too.) The installation gives much more freedom than the picture plane: the audience can walk around it and see it from every angle. Yet many pieces work more like Etant Donne and control your line of approach, making you take on views that mess with your eyes and your thoughts. You are free, and yet you absolutely are not. The moment you walk into an installation piece, you are at the mercy of the artist. That was part of the point of Etant Donne: to give you control but also to make you the art, to bring you inside the picture plane.

Of course, this all comes back to games, because games are, like all art, a willing surrender of consent, and a conversation. By agreeing to follow the rules we become part of the picture plane. Roger Ebert argued (and it was a good argument) that the interactivity of games stopped them from being art because they became a tool to be used, and the “viewer” ends up being not captive enough to the artist. He has a point, even if I think it isn’t quite so clear cut. I think back to Etant Donne where you are the participant — but not.

And I think there’s a blurring issue particularly when it comes to RPGs. Because an RPG is two things at once: it is both the art work and a rulebook. That’s not how any other game works. Have you sat down and read the rules for say cricket or baseball? They’re dull. They’re a little booklet that reads something like a wargame manual about how long things have to be and how far to put them. If you gave someone these rules, you would not be giving them any idea what baseball is. We instinctively understand this: there is chess as a concept. But chess as a concept is not the rules of chess, nor is it a game of chess. It is not the chess board and pieces. It is not a chess tournament. Chess is a thing that exists outside of the pieces and the rules.

We know this. When we pull the rulebook out of our fresh copy of Twilight Imperium we do not think “this is the game of Twilight Imperium”. But roleplaying games have no choice. John Wick (the game designer) once summarised that RPGs are the only medium where the artist is also the audience. I’ll go further: RPGs are the only medium where the instructions on how to engage with the art is also the art itself.

You might argue that the art is in fact the session that arises, and it certainly is, but you can compare that to the experience once has walking into Etant Donne. That is a “session” of play, an experience of the art. The instructions of Etant Donne, the structure that causes the experience, that is the art work. Likewise, I argue, the rulebook is the artwork. It, like Etant Donne, is a device to create individual experiences. And unlike other games it has only one piece: just a paper form to encode your movement as you go through the process, and that is delivered by the rulebook also — it contains instructions to copy that and disseminate it.

(Yes, most computer games have tutorials or have hidden tutorials, but that’s not the rules manual, that’s putting the rules manual inside the art. Rpgs are the opposite: the art is inside the rules manual.)

I often tell my roleplaying students that an RPG is really a sales catalogue for a holiday. You are seducing people into coming aboard an experience, by explaining all the cool places you can go, while also explaining how to get there. You try to minimise how hard it will be to have those experiences and highlight how exciting the experiences will be. But it’s more than that: you’re also creating the sense of those experiences as you go. You’re already on holiday the moment you crack the book.

Much is said about how too many RPGs are read not played, but to an extent that is inescapable: that is the art form. The journey begins when you see the dragon on the cover. Frank Mentzer, designer of the red book DnD set made this exact point: when you see a picutre of or read about a hero fighting a dragon, you’ve already begun playing an RPG. Part of you imagined yourself as the hero, ready to fight, facing the danger. Much has also been said that RPGs should not emulate media but they can’t really help that either because they are media. They contain images and fiction and text designed to evoke, as well as explain the rules in technical language. You don’t have to ever play an RPG to be changed by it; the fictional ideas it evokes work on you like any other art form, and just reading the rules can do that too. You can then put them into practice, walk into Etant Donne and have your moment through the keyhole, but there is no point where we switch from passively reading to practical experience. You have already walked in the moment you opened to the first page.

Like the sales catalogue, then, part of the job of the rulebook is to seduce you into playing, to hack your brain until you cannot not play, until playing seems like your destiny or something you must do lest you explode. I’ve had plenty of RPGs seduce me like this, taking me from “eh, I’m not really interested” to “I must play this”. And that’s not just a sales pitch. That’s building an art work that forces me to the keyhole. That’s the art of the roleplaying game. You thought you could choose if you should play it or not, but you never had a chance; you were already part of the painting.

We were playing Partners the other day and without the rules even prompting us we evoked a trope of the genre, like a ghost was haunting us. That’s how I design: to hack your brain so you end up doing things I want you to do. All game designers do this, but as I say it’s particularly potent in RPGs because the art and the control is hiding inside a rulebook. The game of chess is inside the rules of chess. And really, there’s nothing else quite like that.

All the forms of genre fiction have attracted the ire of academics and elites, dubbed as pablum: fantasy, adventure and romance nothing but escapism, horror and suspense just penny dreadfuls more like a ghost train than literature, erotica just pornography. There is one that has attracted the least however and shaken it off every time, that remains almost inexplicably high brow despite its endless repeats, inescapable formula and unending popularity: the murder mystery. Perhaps it is because in it is the most intimate of connections between writer and reader, where the author makes a sincere promise not to cheat but also promises to cheat as much as possible. Exactly like the puzzle setter, the goal is not to mystify but to guide, step by step, to the solution and that requires delicate care of and affection towards the reader. That makes the bond stronger, the voice clearer and the craft more obvious – and the reader more forgiving of sins, more ready to exalt triumphs. The escapist can lose us at any moment, because our suspension of belief is so fragile; we stand, arms crossed, cynicism bared and unbelief brandished, ready to doubt your happy endings. But when we do a crossword we are a team, with trust, because we know that the puzzler must want us to solve the riddle, they need us to meet them half way.

It is said that animation and puppetry and the theatre work so well because they don’t completely trick our eyes; we willingly forget that we are in seats in front of a stage and could break the illusion at any time, and that conscious seduction, that self surrender is more intoxicating than the verisimilitude of the cinema. Just so is the mystery: we arrive on the doorstep of the house or murder, shivering and cold, demanding not to be seduced and lied to and misdirected and all our protestations are false. Come in, says the spider to the fly. I shall tell you no lies, they lie. I know you won’t, we lie back.

And the dance begins.

Of course, all stories are lies, yes. The real world doesn’t have beginnings and ends, no characters or plots; even cause and effect is rare. But murder mysteries are much more so a lie. Similarly, all games are lie: we force ourselves to accept arbitrary rules and restrictions, deliberately making it hard on ourselves, and entering into this situation with the full pretense that we want to destroy our best friends and win absolutely nothing of consequence. But roleplaying games are much more so a lie. In the traditional mould, as much as the GM must oppose and attack the characters, he does not want to crush them utterly, nor do they truly want zero opposition. The dragon should die, every time, but not without some good rolls, and the dragon must be there. If the dungeon was just empty and the treasure lying on the floor, where would be the fun? So we all pretend that the GM was trying to stop us from getting the treasure and we might really have died.

I suspect that deep down, the reason we’ve had forty years of the same arguments about dice fudging, reading the adventure, roleplaying vs rollplaying and narrativism vs gamism is that all of those discussions are about the exact same thing: how strong the lie is, and how much we pretend it is real. If we fudge the dice we might end up giving the game away; but of course if we don’t we might be suggesting this isn’t about shared storytelling at all. Roleplaying games are an absolute artifice: we pretend to be playing a tactical skirmish miniatures game in order to tell a story, but we actually end up with a weak version of both so that we keep the pretense up. If the story gets too much like a story, then we’d stop believing it is really us in the driving seat and that we might really truly die; but if it gets too much like a game we get a little itchy because then it might feel like all these dice mechanics don’t mean anything and we’re just kidding ourselves. So much work to stop us seeing the man behind the curtain – who is us.

In general, the murder mystery in RPGs has always failed, because it puts pressure on exactly this issue. The murder mystery in fiction requires a puzzle setter and a puzzle solver. Transferring that to RPGs means you have really only three options. Firstly, the GM becomes the puzzle setter, and the players must winkle out the solution. This fraught with peril because unlike fiction, players have far more agency and might solve things very quickly indeed. The GM then risks breaking the precious kayfabe described above if they change their mind when the players get too close. Second, the GM makes it whomever the players suspect, whether this happens behind the scenes, inside the GM’s head, or explicitly through mechanics. This works but destroys all the appeal of the murder mystery, because there can be no puzzle, and thus no suspense. The closest thing can be creating open ended suggestiveness, that you can hand off to other players to complete.

The third option is sort of a jumble of the two, using minigames and such to add more mechanical suspense. As different as it is to most games, this is what Partners does as well. Instead of the offers coming from players guessing/suggesting, it comes from dice or cards or tic tac toe, lining up things until the mechanics make the final reveal. This lacks a puzzle, but it does at least have suspense. It’s amazing in Partners when we don’t know who did it until that last card falls, and when a card reveals something none of us had guessed about the protagonists. That is the reason we play shared storytelling games as a whole: to build stories that could not be built with just one person, or even with just a few: good mechanics should add another voice that also throws out ideas and lets us combine all three voices into something that could never have been built alone. That is always my goal in design, really: to ensure that there are lots of voices, able to build together and surprise each other. The suspense comes from not knowing where the story will end up.

I think in general, most RPGs don’t do well with suspense, because they try to create it inside the game. Will the dragon kill you? Will you get the treasure? Those aren’t suspenseful questions. It is like asking “will you solve the crossword puzzle?”. Chances are you will. The suspense is elsewhere, it lies in “what does this clue mean, and how do I unlock its answer.” Too many RPGs want us to feel the suspense of do we kill the dragon when there are so many better suspenses to be had in different ways. In Prime Time Adventures and Pendragon we roll to see if we give in to our darker natures or not. In Smallville we don’t know if we will win in an argument with our friend or lose ourselves in the process. In Partners, you don’t know how the cards will fall and what secrets they will reveal. You’ll generate a best friend and then draw a dark ambition and all of a sudden the best friend has become something new, someone hiding in the shadows, wanting to be more. The suspense is in the story reveals of information: in character, not in plot.

As I keep harping on about, I’m kind of done with traditional roleplaying structures precisely because there is no suspense whatsoever in will we kill the dragon or will I roll a 20. But there is so so very very much suspense in the question of if I start telling a story and you finish it (or the dice do one or the other), neither of us knows what the story will be. That’s actually where I really started my love of RPGs too: I didn’t play nearly as much as I rolled up character after character, desperate to create things my brain could not create on its own. Desperate for the suspense of the reveal, the knowledge at the end of the random table.

Here, too, is an intimate relationship. When I hand off the random tables, I must take absolute care with my audience. I must trust they will be able to fill in the gaps and explain the inexplicable. They trust that I will give them just enough ideas that they do not struggle, but not so much I talk over them. It isn’t a puzzle, but it is an exercise. A game to play with friends. And like a crossword, it is infinitely repeatable. But unlike a crossword, there is no pretense. I’ve given you a puzzle yes, and I want you to solve it, but I’ve stopped pretending that I’m trying to kill you with a dragon. And I like that too. I’m tired of how much RPGs pretend, and shuffle about pretending oh so much that we all might die or the story might not end, that evil might triumph and good fail. Such roleplaying is, perhaps, better left to the boudoir, or to children who still believe the monster is really just about to get them.

What I’m doing is in the storygame/rpg space, for want of a better marketing niche, but I think it’s a much better mechanic overall. And I don’t think I’m nearly as alone here as you might at first believe. While the standard rpg mode persists, more and more solo and oracle games are appearing, and they want it my way. They know they don’t need to pretend the GM is anything but a storyteller, throwing out offers, and that games work better that way. I think deep down a lot of players are very tired of pretending, and would rather some actual suspense. And the way to that is through actual shared storytelling mechanics, not to the miniature wargaming of D&D.

It’s time, perhaps, to rethink this whole thing, cast off the Floor Wars, and do this properly.

In the first act of Hamilton, Eliza Schuyler takes in the bustle of New York in a new age and sings “look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now”. In the second act she looks at the death of the war of independence and how few survived and sings “look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now.”

At the climax of Frozen 2, Elsa sings “show yourself”, asking her enemy to stop hiding but by the end of the song she is singing “show your self” urging her to reveal her own nature, because she has discovered the thing she was hunting was herself.

You get the idea: we’re talking about recontextualisation.

My two favourite kinds of stories are mysteries and heists and they have one major thing in common: recontextualisation.

There’s also recontextualisation in magic, but it works the opposite way. Here’s an empty hat, now there’s a rabbit in it. You don’t get to understand how the hat appeared empty but wasn’t. In fact the whole point is you don’t get to recontextualise. You’ve been fooled instead.

Recontextualisations in films and TV shows can be much the same. Sometimes a movie twist ending that reverses everything you’ve just seen can annoy the hell out of you because it’s like a magic trick. You weren’t given enough information. You were lied to and deceived and now it feels like the writer has gone “hahah, you’re an idiot, I tricked you”. But if you do it right, then the reveal does the opposite: because you’re almost on top of it yourself, and because the author leads you to it so perfectly you feel like you’ve learned more. The new meaning makes the solution satisfying and also makes the story richer and deeper. Things you didn’t quite understand suddenly come into focus. Things that tickled the back of your brain suddenly make sense.

You get to feel, if the author does it right, like the detective. Like the revelation almost came from within. And the last little bit of surprise is welcome because you suddenly realise you were given all the information to begin with. You’re not being tricked, you’re solving a puzzle. Once you had a mystery, now you have the answer. And you’re dazzled at how at first you were fooled, how cleverly you were fooled. You applaud, but not like the confused audience of the magician who has no idea where the bunny went, but as the puzzle solver who got there in the end and adored the journey for its difficulty and elegance.

This idea: that mysteries should be solvable, was deeply important when the genre was being formed by luminaries like Christie, Sayers, and Chesterton, and so much so that the mystery writer Ronald Knox made up ten rules mysteries had to follow to “count” as “fair”. But as well as being fair, they also must be difficult. Otherwise, there would be no point. This is a very gamer concept — as humans, the only thing worse than a puzzle we can’t solve is a trivial one we can solve too easily.

Some dismiss the murder genre and the heist genre as nothing but puzzles but to me, the puzzle is the point, and the point is sharp indeed. Because inside this is not just a chance to feel smart, but for the mystery, to find justice against a dark deed. And for the heist, to find a different kind of justice — and another emotion as well.

When I was finishing up Relics, I realised that although the text of the work is about morality without religion and the desperate loneliness between us, there was something deeper to the work. In the end, Relics is about faith in humanity. Faith in each other. That we are better than just unthinking monsters, and we mean a great deal to each other, and that the cure for what ails our world is to believe in each other, deeply and strongly. The last words of Relics are “We believe in you.”. And that’s the thesis. I really do believe in us. I think we can be better angels. And I want you to read Relics and feel that, and take that sense away with you.

Partners isn’t just about my revelation about how terrible the police actually are and how powerful copaganda is. It’s also not just about how two different people end up echoing the things they love in each other. Deep down, it’s about the thing I fear most: the intimacy of a partnership. How when you really work with someone else you have to trust them. Two player RPGs are terrifying to me, just like having a two-person conversation is. The rawness of that, the sense of being known by that…that’s lying at the heart of that RPG.

And the Score is about hope.

When Cassian Andor is put in the terrifying Imperial prison, the script and camera is at pains to tell us that there is no hope. This place is escape-proof. The very floor itself is death to touch unless someone allows you to do so. No bars. No windows. Very few guards, but all of them violent. And a constant regime of fear and competition to keep people docile and disunited. Just enough food to keep you alive. Just enough work to keep you exhausted.

And then, all of that falls apart when they escape.

Every strength becomes a weakness. The electrified floors are vulnerable to water. The few guards makes them easy targets. The brutal weapons gives the inmates the tools to fight back. The centralised controls makes it easy to take over the entire complex. The work has made them strong. The competition has kept them focussed.

Despair turns into hope.

The start of every good heist film, I think, explains how hard the job is, and I was really keen to include this in The Score. Oceans 11 does this really well. Leverage does this perfectly. The job seems impossible. And then bit by bit, they show you how to pull off the impossible. To make you believe that you can steal the unstealable. Escape the unescapable. Rewrite the rules you’ve been told. Turn strengths into weaknesses. Tear down the gods and pull down the pillars of heaven and make off with freedom and glory.

The last word of Tony Gilroy’s Rogue One is “Hope”, and it’s no accident its the underlying theme in Andor: hope set against terrible despair and terrifying odds. Not every heist film is about those kinds of odds and that kind of impossibility but the recontextualisation in heist films is about this same fundamental reveal: that what you thought could not be done CAN BE DONE.

And just as you leave the murder mystery feeling like the puzzle can be solved because you are smart, you leave a heist story feeling the powerful can be torn down because the impossible is possible. Plenty of stories, yes, are about overcoming impossible odds, but few of them take so much time to explain the odds in exacting detail, and whereas most stories require Strength of the Heart or One Man Who Does Not Yield to win through, the heist shows you how to win with your clever clever brain. And like the rush of mystery discovery, it not only shows you how to beat evil, it helps you see that your brain lies to you. That the things you think are impossible can be done. That the very tools that keep you down are the tools you can use to set yourself free.

The recontextualisation is metaphorically, at least, both personal and political. Hopefully, in some heist stories, it will be textually political as well. We steal from the rich and powerful because we must. Because they take everything from us. We live in a world where we feel terribly powerless against vast god-like figures who seem so unassailable; systems we feel can never be broken; time and tide that lead only to disaster; monsters who seem ever closer to dragging us further into suffering, fascism and despair. These are war times. These are oppression times. This is the dark dystopia we all feared would come.

The Score is about hope.

Take it, and light the darkness.

1

I haven’t written one of these since 2016. Good lord. But hey, why not. I enjoyed the run and it made me think about what made it good. Note: there are some light spoilers here for series one. Nothing major.

1 Always Leave Them Crying For More

The Good Place was not the first sitcom of the binge-TV age but it is arguably the first to be most adjusted to the format. Gone are the days of must-see TV because now it comes direct to you in large binge-able chunks and to encourage you to keep on binging, the Good Place ends almost every single episode with a gigantic cliffhanger. Or if not this, then a clear and obvious hint to some new and exciting step of the journey coming next. It was like Lost, only not annoying.

Too often in RPGs we finish at what feels like a nice finishing point. Now that makes sense because we aren’t binging RPGs, and we can forget stuff. But it’s actually easier to remember things when you stop in the middle of the action with things still in mid-air, or with things just about to being in a new scene. Because this creates a sense of urgency and you carry that urgency with you when you leave. Don’t just say “Coming up next week” and offer hints, wait until the players have made a plan, walk into the tavern, and announce that the big bad is sitting next to the wizard that hired them and THEN end your session.

2. World Building is For Suckers

The world building of The Good Place isn’t particularly robust, but like as-aforementioned Lost, what is more important is it was done on the fly, only without being annoying. Although each series was written as a block, nothing was really nailed down when the first series began, and things were added and developed as needed. And when they seemed fun, they stuck around.

I like worldbuilding in RPGs and I like pre-writing plots, but both of these things are overrated in terms of their necessity and both of these things are overvalued when it comes to fidelity. A good GM has a skeleton of plot that he adjusts as needed; the same can be true of your world building. Have a rough idea of what you need for act one, and let how that plays out tell you about act two. And don’t worry too much about cohesion because..

3. You Can Always Just Reboot It

Okay, so you can’t quite erase memories and invent entirely new universes from scratch. You are a Janet of sorts but your worlds have consequences and your NPCs aren’t paid actors and if you wipe out the world and rebuild it then people are going to die. On the other hand, your world is very much like the neighbourhoods of the Bad Place, in that they are fictional, they are full of actors who don’t matter and the whole thing is really about the real humans at the core of it. And like a Janet you have a fair amount of ability to reboot things.

If you like, you can cut to weird dream sequences about trolley problems. Your players CAN just wind things back and blank people’s memories and start the scene over again with people knowing what they should know (or forgetting what they were supposed to forget). If you break a few rules of logic or the lake is full of popcorn you can just reboot the scene and fast forward back to where we left off. It can get crazy up in there for a while, and that’s part of the fun, it’s how we explore things and try out characters. And like the minds of the humans, we almost kind of remember those other versions and they can inform the “real” ones. So yes, talk about which of your D&D characters would be which desperate housewives and act out that scene in game. Randomly switch one week to running the whole campaign with Skyrealms of Jorune and everyone wearing a cowboy hat. It can always be rebooted. And when it is, you’ll know your characters better for it.

4 It’s the Characters, Stupid

You can get away with all this because of the biggest secret in all writing: nobody really cares that much about world building. They don’t even care that much about plot. Mostly, people read books for the emotions and the feels and above all, the characters. And with TV and RPGs (but I repeat myself), this goes triple. TV shows and RPG groups are proxy-families that we love because they are familiar and all we want to do is come back to them over and over again. It doesn’t matter if one time we’re all Janets or suddenly we all live in Australia for poorly explained reasons or now we’re back in hell: we want our heroes and we don’t care one tiny bit how we get them. Indeed, The Good Place is at its weakest when there are three new mortals in the mix. Nobody cares because they’re not the mortals we’ve become addicted to.

It’s an old saw with RPGs but it really is all about the characters. Good players use their characters to tell stories but for the most part, all any player wants to do is use the toys they’re given. And NPCs and settings aren’t really toys to play with much unless you do a LOT of player narration. Rather, the toys players get are the powers on their character sheet and the personality blurb they’ve settled on. That’s what they think about between sessions, that’s what they are itching to get back to. If you’re very lucky they want to see the other characters as well and a few popular NPCs. They’re not there for the plot or the world. Sorry. But that means you can make that shit as wobbly as you want. And there is one thing they ARE there for that GMs can be best at and that’s:

5. Theme is King So Put It On a Throne

What makes The Good Place so special is apart from being weird as balls and often unexpected, it is a show with a very strong theme. It’s not just about moral philosophy, but about exploring the fundamental questions therein. What is goodness, and why are people good and bad at being good, and how might we change them for the better? And it doesn’t just lean into that in the plot or world building, see, because nobody cares about that. It leans into that with theme. Chidi is what we call a theme-insert, the character who runs entirely on the theme, who has the super power of explaining the theme. Meanwhile he’s also an example of how even smart people can’t untangle moral philosophy. The other three characters are embodiments of the three principles of moral philosophy: Jason is consequentialism, Tehani is virtue ethics and Eleanor is deontology, weirdly enough.

This isn’t impossible in RPGs. You can ask players to do it directly but with strong theme communication in your games they’ll do it anyway. I was in a game of Brave New World, a supers game where superheroes are forced to work with the an oppressive fascist US government, and we just ended up making two foreigners and two Americans, two old people who remembered the past and two young people who didn’t know what had been lost. In my Buffy game about Watchers at Oxford we got two rich kids and two poor kids; two British kids and two non-British kids; two people with backgrounds in the occult and two people who had the occult thrust upon them. This just naturally happened because players like to make characters that interact with the themes of your world if you make those themes strong – and good RPGs and good worlds do that for you. Put your themes forward and players will follow suit and bring them even further into the light. Not sure what your themes are? Look at who they make, and you’ll know.

And then all you have to do is make up a neighbourhood for them to explore, fill it full of made up people and see if they can learn to be better people along the way, while you make up the world as you go and reboot it when needed and keep on hinting at the next terrible and/or awesome thing to come. That catches their energy – then they do the rest. And in the end, you fall in love with them and you become the better person along the way.

Aka, where will Steve be at PAX AUS this year, part 4 in an ongoing series!

4th, 5th and 6th of October I won’t be at PAX I’ll be running Relics at Phenomenon in Canberra

THURSDAY THE 10TH of OCTOBER from 4pm I’ll be at DevCon at the Boyd Community Hub in South Bank! This is the pre-eminent industry event in Australia and I recommend it most highly!

All Weekend

Relics Sessions will be running over the following sessions (ie continuously) in the RPG Area (table number to come)
11am-1pm, 1-3pm, 3-5pm, 5-7pm, 7-9pm, 9-11pm. (only the first three sessions on Sunday)
Friday

10am – 2pm I’ll be running demos of my new party game SNATCHPHRASE! at the Collaboratory area

12:30pm – 4pm Me or Teja will be working the TGDA Booth, promoting Relics! (Tabletop booths)

6:30pm – 7:30pm I’ll be joining Alex, Ben, Jill and Irma as we MAKE A GAME IN AN HOUR! Part three of an increasingly silly tradition! That’s in the Ibis Theatre

Saturday

11am – 12pm I’m moderating a panel on the Return of the 3D Platformer in the Ibis Theatre

12:30pm – 4pm I’m back on the TGDA Booth promoting Relics and perhaps selling Baby Dragon Bedtime

Saturday evening there’s often award ceremonies going on so and other things but nothing’s been announced so honestly who the hell knows and why can’t people be organised and tell me stuff? I digress. I might just go out and do an escape room with my buddies.

Sunday

10am-2pm I am once again running SNATCHPHRASE! at the Collaboratory. After 1pm it may be my lovely assistant Nick

1:30pm – 2:30pm I’m moderating a panel of unruly young RPG writers talking about Cyberpunk roleplaying and why it’s new and rad and hip with the kids.  That’s in the Kookaburra Theatre.

At 3:00pm-5:00pm and maybe a bit beyond I’ll be teaching the lovely folk in the Diversity Lounge how to make their own board game!

and then I run away and catch a late flight! Kapwing! He’s gone! Leaving only a single silver die in his wake…

This weekend we’ll be at GAMMACON at the EPIC stadium in Canberra! We’ll be in section C of the left side of the auditorium, with plenty of Relics stuff to sell and free games to give away as always! PLUS! I am running two seminars:

From Fun to Funded: How to Turn a Game Idea Into a Successful Kickstarter
11am Sunday in the “Glass Paperweight” Room

How To Make Your Own Roleplaying Game: A Workshop
2:30pm Sunday in the “Speakwrite” Room

Theses will be informal and focus on question and answer. And if we have time in the latter, maybe even some group exercises to make our own game right there!

Come and say hi! Free games!

Games are inherently antagonistic. Even co-operative ones or solo ones. There are things we want to do, like put the cards in order from Ace to King. There are things preventing us from doing so: the rules.

In most roleplaying games, where there is a GM or GMs, the antagonism is between GM and player(s). As much as we pretend it isn’t, that they are working together, the core standard model requires there to be some antagonism. Ultimately, what players want is to use their characters’ abilities to not just tell a good story but to command situations, to interact with the fictional reality using their fictional instrument (their character) and the constraints placed upon them, and interact in such a way that they get what their character desires, or what they then player want.

The rules play a part in this, of course, but for a lot of RPGs, there’s grey areas. Because RPGs simulate some sort of reality, fictional or otherwise, it involves images in people’s heads. Players and GMs attempt to imagine the same thing but usually (usually, don’t heat up my inbox with all your famous exceptions) there’s questions to be answered. How far away from him am I? Would I know if I can cold-cock him, since my combat skills would allow me to read the body language and see what kind of fighter he is? Can I get to him before he pulls the trigger? Do I know how to pick this lock? The last two questions can be answered by the rules, generally. The first two are more up to the GM. Individual rules systems vary about how much they leave open and free, and how much they specify; individual groups and GMs also vary about how much they feel like locking down, and how much they’re happy to hand to the players.

But no system ever is going to let the players make the bad guys just vanish in a puff of logic when the players want. They have to use their character’s abilities and use them in situations where the full application of them is not entirely clear, because no rules set can cover every possible interpretation in a fictional reality. And the GM is the arbiter of whether those things work. Inherently, this conversation is antagonistic, because the players want everything to work. They want every +1 they can get. And the only person telling them no is the GM.

“Stretching” is the word we use for this in Relics. When something might or almost cover a situation, but doesn’t as written. Yes, you know about how to fix a car but that doesn’t mean you know where the nearest garage is. Or how to identify tire marks. But it could? I guess? Does it let you know where to shoot the car to disable it? Which car the bad guy chose to steal based on easiness? Where the nearest chopshop is? How long it takes to get new plates? Longer and longer the stretched skill gets, pulled from repair to forensics to local knowledge to grand theft auto…

The thing is, stretching is inevitable. And it’s natural. Players want to win. They also want to feel safe from failure. They don’t want to feel like they chose the wrong skill. They took repair and then the car didn’t break down at all and they need something else. That makes them feel stupid and exposed to danger that could hurt their sole playing piece and that piece’s sense of being awesome. Human beings will go a long way to avoid feeling unsafe, unready or foolish. So we stretch.

What’s the point of all this? The point is be aware of it and indeed, think about building it into rules. I don’t mean just “let skills be broad”. It’s more than that. Because broad skills and narrow skills will both get stretched. EVERYTHING will get stretched. The trick is making explicit rules about stretching.

Famously, the old West End Star Wars game had rules for this. If a player is making a big argument about why an action technically shouldn’t reeeeeally be giving them a Dark Side point because it is good, then hoo boy do they get the Dark Side point. Stretching is a sign of the Dark Side indeed. In the third edition of Over the Edge, they build this right into character generation. Everyone gets a Main Trait that defines their core skill set, and a Side Trait that gives it flair and difference. You might be a BODYGUARD who can TALK TO SPIDERS. If Bodyguard is your main trait, then it can stretch. It can be about any part of the bodyguarding business. You’re gonna be like Eliot on Leverage, baby. You can tell who is ex-CIA because those guys protect people with a very distinctive stance. And so on. But your side trait doesn’t stretch. You can’t talk to crabs. You can’t intuit how to treat a spider bite. Don’t try it on. The GM will tell you to shut the hell up.

We actually made the same rule in Relics, although not quite so perfectly and succinctly. Memories are the abilities that cost points and play time in Relics, and give control of your character to someone else. Therefore, Memories can stretch. Anything else you basically get for free or is a powerful supernatural element. So those DON’T stretch. If you paid for it, it goes a fair way. If you didn’t, shut up and pay for something new to cover the gap.

Generally, in RPGs, the rules we actually play by aren’t written in the book. They’re social rules and they’re about things like who can stretch (people who the GM likes more?) and how they can stretch (if they talk a good game?) and how the rules and setting bend to help them (horror games less than fantasy?). It’s actually worth thinking about these rubbery invisible rules and pulling them right into the forefront and shining a light on them (and maybe even making games where they are explicit). Then you can actually figure out what’s really going on and make things better and richer for everyone. Instead of say, allowing that one player who whines to stretch all he wants and ignoring the players who try not to stretch at all.

Just something to think about – and a tip for Relics GMs. If they paid for it, they can stretch it. Otherwise, tell them to pull their damn heads in. There’s a rule in the GM’s section that we put there that says you can tell your players to shut the hell up. Feel free to point to it when you need it.

As they say in business, the best way to get money from people is to provide value beforehand. If you can do stuff that creates value, people feel they owe you for that as well as your shiny new game. So as I charge money for more stuff, I’m looking for more ways to provide value and shove my face and voice into everyone’s feed. The lovely folks at Boomer Radio Network are looking for nerd and nerd adjacent stuff from Australian podcasters. Here’s my two pitches. Both would aim to be about 20-25 minutes an episode, mostly just two people discussing things, with occasional guests, coming out every two weeks or so.

Chit/Bit/Crit: As more and more people enter gaming and more and more voices are out there reviewing gaming and developing a shared consciousness and language about gaming, we desperately need more voices in gamer criticism, in the sense of the word as used in literary criticism. Commentary that places gaming in a historical, political and cultural context and examines it from that point of view. Without doing reviews. As Oscar Wilde said, the purpose of the artist is to inform the critic, the purpose of the critic is to inform the audience. Lacking a critical voice is why so many bad games are being made and absorbed.

What I lack here is any grounding in computer gaming, so my cohost would need to be across that field (Chris Lee is one I’ve talked to about this, hi Chris!). Don’t have to be a computer game designer but you should be very literate in them.

Lancing With Myself: While most of the gaming industry remains a cottage industry where every game designer must also be their own publisher, freelancing is increasingly the way of the future in other fields. Art and design know the side hustle but there’s always more folks keen to learn about it in game dev in general. I’ve been a game dev freelancer for twenty years now and a lot of people ask for my info on the process, so there is much to share. Also we’d talk about financial practicalities and self-care tools.

What I lack here is someone across the art/graphic design field, which has a very different kind of tempo and culture than other areas. You don’t need to be too experienced though as that can make a nice contrast to my long experience.

A few years ago I joked “The GM’s Section of an RPG should just be three words:

“We Trust You”

It was a joke, but like most of my jokes I was kidding on the square. So much of running an RPG is about experience and making good calls on the spot, and mostly that’s not something you can teach. Mostly, what holds people back is fear they are getting those things wrong, and they probably will get those things wrong. But it doesn’t matter. Your games will still inevitably a lot better than you think they’re going to be, and better than you imagine them to be in your head. You can’t really stuff up that much. Trust yourself. And we, the game designers, trust you.

You don’t have anything to prove or to live up to. You can’t do it WRONG. Games don’t work like that. There isn’t actually a right way to do things with them, there’s only the way the players play. And so it is an act of trust giving your game away.

All art is a kind of leap of faith: this is my truth, tell me what you think about it. But games are a tool, an artifact of engineering. Here is something that might produce fun, we say, and then we watch how you use it and how you react. And we then fix it until it is fun, not based on the idea in our head, but on the experience you created. We trust you to tell us when the tool is fun. We trust you to be our eyes and ears and our insight. Take this clay and mould it, take this puzzle and solve it, find the fun, unlock the secret. And you know best, not us designers and certainly not the game. We put our trust in YOU. You are the centre, the true north, that leads us to the game. We trust you, not the vision in our heads.

I just wrote the last four words in Relics, and they are along these lines, but even stronger. They aren’t we trust you. They’re

We believe in you.

Relics is a game about belief, in all its forms. It’s a game about what to do when you have nothing left to believe in, and the answer turns out to be, believe in things harder. Believe in God only as practice for the really hard things, like believing in yourself, and believing in other people.

Relics is about memory, and it aches with age now that it’s taking me two years to write it. Relics is about the audacity of action in a world where being passive feels like the only way to be safe, and it is my scream into the void, my audacious act of unfettered creation that deforms the universe and demands to be seen. Relics is about the problem of evil and so much of that rises up around us. And Relics is about belief, and in the end, that’s what the act of writing a roleplaying game is.

It’s not just that we trust you to tell us where the fun is, but that we believe in the stories you will tell with it. We believe in the greatness you will find in it. We believe in the power you will wring from it and the glory you will shine with it and the lessons you will teach with it. A lot of people ask “is this right? is this okay?” when they are making characters and they’ve always been amazing and inspiring to me. When I began work on Relics I was burned out on GMing but I’ve come to love it again because every time I run Relics people astound me with the ideas they bring to the table and the majestic things they create.

Relics wouldn’t be Relics without Jake’s input – he’s already taken my world and filled it with amazing characters that make it even more real and wonderful. I believe in his gifts. I believe in all of the characters you will make and the stories that you will tell, that they will not just fit Relics but exceed it, and all my dreams of it. I believe in all the characters you’ve made already and all the stories I’ve begun to see. It’s not just that I trust that they will be good. I believe that they will be real and solid to you and to me. And I believe that they will go amazing places. I believe in the hope and wonder they represent.

Here’s my game. It says: I believe in you.

Relics: A Game of Angels goes to Kickstarter April 10th. Join the mailing list and find out more here: http://tinstargames.weebly.com/relics.html