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Designer Notes: Five Years After

Posted on by dconstructions
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Winston Churchill was a racist asshole but he was also neurodivergent as hell. He spent his nights during the blitz rehearsing strategies over and over of how he would leave the building if it was bombed or taken by nazi troops. He had contingency plans for his contingency plans. He was a ruminator, and he was wracked by what could happen and how he might be responsible. When he was seven years old his father let him borrow his gold pocket watch, and a school bully threw it in the river. Winston paid his own money to have six men from the village divert the river so he could search for the watch in the mud. He did not find it and his strict, emotionally distant father made him pay for the lost watch. Sometimes ruminators are built from trying to stop their parents withholding their love. They live in the “if only”, forever.

When my grandfather was 19 years old the nazis invaded his home country of the Netherlands. Resistance immediately began. One day, after the assassination of a leading figure, the nazis marched into the middle of the town square and randomly grabbed fifty men. They put the men in the middle of the square and then they gunned them down. They knew that people were helping the resistance, so they made sure everyone knew the price of that help. My grandfather was standing near a younger boy who screamed and yelled when they took his father and then when his father fell, the boy stopped screaming, and went into a kind of catatonia. My grandfather was looking at the boy, and he never, ever forgot that look. 

My grandfather survived the occupation, just barely. Once he was rounded up by soldiers who intended to have him shipped to the work camps in Germany. One soldier left to get back up, and he and his two friends rushed at the nazi. My father grabbed the guard’s gun and hit him in the stomach hard, and he never forgot the look of pain on the man’s face as all the wind was knocked out of him. My grandfather survived, and left his homeland and had four children and eleven grandchildren and dozens of great grandchildren. He raised a dairy farm out of nothing but dirt and built a life. Sixty five years later, I visited him in hospital when he was quite sick. It was the first time I had been alone with him in my whole life. I held his hand and I saw fear in his eyes, the fear of dying. I held his hand and I comforted him as best I could.

Last week someone died while I was performing CPR on them. 

For a long time as a young boy and young man I was terrified that when the time came to save people, I would falter and not be strong. I lived in a permanent rumination of what I would do when the time came. In my autistic fashion I would listen to The Impression That I Get over and over and over, because I was so worried that when I was tested I would fail. Turns out I shouldn’t have worried. I have carried people out of danger. I have given my last bit of food to feed another. When my grandfather was afraid I held his hand despite my fear. When my friend was dying I didn’t panic. I pulled her onto the floor and I did everything I could to save her life. But the worry goes on. I live in the perpetual fear of failure. Trying to make myself into something that cannot fail. That will not fail. And that will stop the bad things from happening. If only I had concentrated, listened, paid attention, they told me as a boy, then the silly thing would not have happened. I had to pay attention. I had to stop it before it happened. I have to stop it.

This is a blog about games. Bear with me.

I don’t watch horror movies much. I have enough horror of my own. But I keep making them. My latest game I have just announced, and it is dark. As dark as it gets. It’s called Five Years After and it’s about the apocalypse, and the nature of how we self-destruct. It’s based in part on the post-apocalyptic fears of my youth: movies like The Day After and Threads and When The Wind Blows. The nature of the game is that we begin five years after a terrible apocalypse, and then we wind the clock back and back and back, to find out how the terrible events took everything from you. Bit by bit, the things that kept you safe and happy in the world before the zombies, those things are stripped away. The fun of the game, the power of the game, is discovery: the random nature of which things you lose when tells a unique story that cannot happen any other way, and reveals things to you that you did not know about your character and could not know without playing. I think it is fun and beautiful, but it is also very bleak, because there is no happy ending. You are left with one attribute that you keep, but that is often bitter sweet or darkly ironic. The world ended and so did you.

Threads by Barry Hines is something everyone should watch once.

My great colleague and co-developer Peter asked me what the game was for, then, if it was so bleak. I think it’s a fair question. I have always believed that everything we do echoes unto eternity, that small things matter and that my games and my art can and will change others. That’s why we make art, really: to take our thoughts and struggles out of ourselves with the hope that it connects with other people. I also believe that art isn’t always just a good thing, and that we should justify what we put into the world, as opposed to flippantly believing that art has no power and can’t affect anyone. I keep making grim, dark games and I think I should justify that, even if I find myself unable to make anything else. Peter thought the game’s message was that you cannot change your fate, and therefore the game was defeatist and nihilistic. The game might even be adding to the wickedness of the world, then.

I think sometimes there are people who give up, who see a wicked world and decide that it’s not their job to clean it up and they might take fatalism as an easy excuse to justify that. But I think there are also people like me who think the opposite, who think that everything is their responsibility and their fault, and if they try hard enough, if they work hard enough, then nothing bad will happen, and that everything bad that does happen must be because they didn’t work hard enough or love well enough or think things through. This has only gotten worse in a world of advertising that desperately makes you feel insufficient, and the panopticon of social media, where everyone is judging you, all of the time.

Terrible things have happened to me. Things that I cannot tell you and might never speak of. Things that defy belief in the suffering they have inflicted, and the cruelty of their shape, and the callousness of those who inflicted them or let them continue. These things took things from me and they took things from the people I love and those things will never heal. Or rather, healing will not make them back to where they were, back to good as new. And yet I persist. I grieve for what I have lost but I remain and that is worth something. What I lost in the fire, I find in the ashes. Like the phoenix I was burned but did not die; I was reborn.

And there is nothing I could have done to stop this things from happening to me, and these parts of myself being taken from me. They were not my fault.

The fascists are rising over my friends in the USA. Their gestapo is snatching people off the streets and killing them in death camps. Israel is conducting genocide. The world is full of monsters and people are dying and in a way, maybe, all my games are about all of this. Relics is about how we can believe in our own potential to be good. Partners is about trusting one another. The Score is about how security is all theatre and the most powerful forces are much, much weaker than they look.

And Five Years After is a reminder that terrible things are happening and you must be brave and you must fight hard and it will cost you. But none of this is your fault. In their panic, people will blame you and tell you you should have done more to stop it. But there is always more we could have done, and more we could do. Blaming ourselves is not going to help. They did this to us. It is their fault. And now we have to be brave, and we will survive – but it is not our fault.

I don’t know if Five Years After can help us deal with the apocalypse on our doorsteps, but maybe it can, and even if it can’t, it’s what I feel and think. It’s what I want to say. It’s what my heart aches to speak of. And I hope that someone out there finds something in it for themselves.

See More Skinner, Part Two: Discipline and Punish

Posted on by dconstructions
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I want to really get into the weeds on how players negotiate playstyles and play events, but first I want to stay on the orthogame more, because we’re in a really interesting place with that right now.

I never thought of myself as a game designer until very recently, which is odd for many reasons, not least the patterns you see in the other things I’m interested in: con artistry, education, animal behaviour and probability, the last two which I studied to very high levels at university. I actually spent a lot of time researching games and game design while I was doing my probability studies and was disappointed to find out that game theory, despite the name, has almost nothing to do with games. The definition of game in game theory is one of an abstract mathematical system where there are different choices a “player” can make, or may make with certain probabilities, and which lead to certain outcomes. Although game theory started with the idea of games, and was developed off into psychological concepts, if you pull a book about game theory off a shelf, it will be lucky to feature any games at all in it. It will be about optimization algorithms, which we do now see more and more use of in AI, and the expert systems that came before them. AI is game theory in that it makes choices, runs down those choices, and checks the outcome, and then compares the outcome to a win situation. If it doesn’t win, it then adapts the choice gates, weighting them differently.

I was disappointed, thirty years ago, because I wanted to learn game design and – unlike now! – it was not an area with any academic study. Such things just did not exist before the year 2000 or so. We relied on Homo Ludens and developmental psychology, and the few rare cultural studies like the amazing work by Gary Alan Fine which was the first person ever to go “these gamer nerds, how does their subculture work?”. But then in the 1990s computer gaming became big business and everything changed, and all of a sudden you could get a grant to study this stuff and we started figuring out what people liked in games and how to monetize that hard. It’s important to remember though that we didn’t know these things at all then and we had to learn them through making mistakes. One now-legendary game design anecdote is the story of Golden Ages in the Civilization computer games. Originally the game had Dark Ages, where production slowed down and it was harder to achieve goals and make progress. They swiftly discovered that players hated them so much they would often stop playing when they encountered them. So the designers made Dark Ages play regular play and made what had been regular play Golden Ages. In effect, nothing had changed, but psychologically the game was completely different. This became known as the phenomenon of Loss Aversion.

Nash Equilibrium is a game theory term that has almost no relevance to game design theory, but it’s fun to say.

Most of the study of game design has been in psychology, and understanding human behaviour. But interestingly, so far, not a huge amount of that has actually trickled down into the orthogame space. By this I mean that the design of the orthogame tends to still operate as if we are making chess, and thus operating in a game theory space. A game is designed to be, still, a mathematical and tactical and strategic operation, where the participants make choices with the goal of producing the optimal outcome. Games typically have dramatic win and loss conditions and score tracks around the outside that provide constant feedback, measuring how well you made those choices. This is considered good design – as I said last week, nobody would play a game where your choices didn’t matter.

But here’s the thing: games, we are discovering, are inherently learning environments. They teach you how to play them and how to learn more about them, and they teach you how to master them, and then they also teach you about yourself and the world and the things they represent. Games in fact have some of the best possible tools for learning because of that direct, actionable feedback, and the ability to repeat the same circumstances over and over again, and to experiment and explore different options. Games we now think overlap with educational processes, in that you can’t play a game without learning more than just how to play that game, and games and game elements may be the best way to teach many things. In fact, I’m thinking about writing a book about how games are actually a kind of social learning ritual, more in common with ceremony than warfare. Given those things, it’s worth knowing that education has been going through something of a revolution in the last few decades and is also still a very young science. We’re starting to explore this new idea that making mistakes and being corrected isn’t actually as useful as we thought. Which is to say people respond better to learning that isn’t based on saying “no, that’s wrong” as a fundamental principle.

At first glance that sounds insane – are we going to start saying something like “one plus one equals three, yes, good job, but let’s try and imagine a better answer.”? It’s not that. It’s more thinking that as much as possible we want to give the participant in learning the most chance of succeeding at something before testing if they succeeded, because the more they fail the slower they learn. Mistakes and failure aren’t learning opportunities at all, but rather impediments to learning. Navigating this is the new frontier of education, because even while we’re not entirely sure how to teach this way, we know that our current education system leaves kids good at taking tests but lacking in imagination and often crippled with a need to be correct. I sometimes use the metaphor of expanding what the light can see: you’re not wrong if you hear something in the bushes and guess what it is, but you’re guessing until we expand the light.

I work in animal training and we are doing the same thing there. To return to Skinner, he helped us divide the learning in operant conditioning into four kinds:

  • Positive Punishment – you want the rat to not go on the platform, so you shock the rat when it goes on the platform. The word “positive” here means an element was ADDED to the rat’s environment. Contrast that with:
  • Negative Punishment – you want the rat to not go on the platform, so the food supply stops when it goes on the platform. It is negative because something good was SUBTRACTED.
  • Positive Reinforcement – you want the rat to go on the platform, so it gets extra good food when it does go on the platform.
  • Negative Reinforcement – you want the rat to go on the platform, so the electric shock STOPS (is subtracted) when it goes on the platform.

Note how the terms positive and negative here don’t refer to the consequence: the middle two use only something nice, and the first and last use only something nasty. Of course, there is a fine line here. For a young child, losing access to a toy can feel like a terrible terrible thing but it is a world away (at least experimentally) from giving the child a smack. And here we return to loss aversion: it felt bad when the Dark Ages kicked in, and it feels great when the Golden Age kicked in. This isn’t operant conditioning (because these weren’t causal) but it shows the paragidm above, while also showing how psychology can shade how we see these things. In effect the Dark Ages felt like aversive – something came along and made things worse – and the Golden Age felt rewarding – something came along and made it better.

So the question then becomes: are we taking this knowledge into designing orthogames? And should we?

Let’s take a look at chess. Chess has positive punishment all the time: if you make a poor move, you experience loss. You had a queen, and you lose it. (Some find Go much more relaxing because when you realise you’ve lost territory you can dance away somewhere else and try to come back to that space a different way. It can still feel very punishing, but it’s less direct.) Modern games have, generally, moved away from the chess model though, and try to instead just reward the leader for good play. They are learning this idea of nice for others rather than nasty for you. It can still feel a bit rough to miss out on a bonus card or a combo, but it doesn’t (for most people) sting like losing a queen. Don’t get me wrong, if you have ten points and your opponent has fifty, you are definitely likely to rage quit, but it does (we think) feel different from “this player keeps moving to attack my pieces”.

A lot of game writers say that the “euro” style games tend to have less “head to head” conflict than American and take that games, and that’s true but also not the whole picture. Because getting cut off, penalised or torn down or knocked off your spot is still an attack and still a loss. So euros often actually feel a lot more cutthroat and “mean” than they look (and that some say). Having the Robber on your hex in Settlers of Catan is in theory only denying you resources (you aren’t losing things from your hand but not gaining them) but it feels like an attack and it feels very personal! Something can become an attack by comparison. If everyone else gets cheese, the act of “not getting cheese” becomes a nasty thing, rather than “not getting a nice thing”. Games like Tokaido are said to be “cosy” because you’re just walking along a road and the worst someone can do to you is get a prize before you do, but the game actually feels like musical chairs: everyone gets a good thing and the loser gets shut out. This makes Tokaido one of the harshest games I know as a result!

It’s like a knife-fight in a phone booth.

All of which is to say: yes, we’re trying to look at the orthogame and say “can we remove the nasty stuff” but we still end up in punishment territory a lot of the time, because games are either competitive or they are pass/fail. Not winning reflects and becomes losing. As hard as we try to make everything a Golden Age rather than a Dark Age, it’s hard to make orthogames actually feel nice. That might be because the orthogame is set up to be a ritualised test. In other words, our idea of a game is that it should be inherently educational not experiential: you are here to learn to play well, and if you fail to play well, you will be marked down. And that may not be something we want to change! We might not want to do a crossword that lets us put any words in the box. But I think as education begins to ask “what does education without being wrong look like?” we might wonder the same about games. We don’t know what that looks like. It may be impossible, as in, games stop being games if they aren’t about correction. It may be rethinking games entirely. It may be that this is what play is. It may be why we like play so much, and it may be why we should do much more play and why games are actually a poor substitute! (Look, for example, at how many computer “games” now are just colouring in exercises, or dolly-dress up).

I am not the only one who has argued that games are the primary medium of the 21st century. But I’d like to expand that and make sure it doesn’t just include orthogames. I think PLAY is bigger and more important than game. This is the same as how we know that painting the stairs like musical notes makes people more likely to walk up them, and scoring them for how fast they did it does not. Games really are a poor substitute to play and I think as humans we crave play but are told the only way we’re allowed to get play is through games. We have decided that games are good, and play is bad, because if we’re not fighting or being corrected, it cannot be worthwhile. Maybe it’s time we looked at that attitude as well. Maybe the orthogame is a petticoat allowing us an excuse to be playful, and it’s not always the best one. At the very least, we might want to admit that it’s not the only part of play, and we’ll look at that in subsequent blogs.

What Is Worldbuilding For?

Posted on by dconstructions
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A long long time ago there was an RPG called “The End” which was set in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s hook was that the Rapture had happened, and all the truly good people were taken to heaven and all the truly bad people were taken to Hell, and the meek – the wishy-washy, uncommitted, cowards – inherited the earth. Since a lot of RPG nerds grow up immersed in American bible culture, some of them CREAMED THEIR JEANS over this “inversion” of the familiar Beatitude. But as I pointed out at the time, it didn’t mean anything. The setting was just another fight-for-scrap post-apoc setting. You didn’t even make up meek characters. The setting didn’t DO anything. It didn’t effect anything.

There’s an old Knights of the Dinner Table comic where the titular RPG crew have switched from fantasy to sci-fi, with the joke being that nothing has actually changed: the Hackmaster +12 sword is now just a Hackmaster lasersword, and fireballs are now flamethrowers. Very very slowly a variety of interesting, less mainstream titles (I won’t use the word indie, all RPGs are indie really) have nibbled around adding different structures but most of the time, if we’re in an avatar space we’re always going to end up having the same kind of stories. We have to! If you’ve got a band of uniquely talented individuals who need to constantly fall into plots that can be solved at least somewhat by violence, you end up telling the same kinds of stories, every single time. Huge seismic changes in the RPG hobby came from things like Call of Cthulhu, because there you had to investigate and go mad and die, and Vampire, because you actually had to talk to people in a society. Steve’s Second Law of RPGs goes that no matter how inventive your setting, I am probably going to be hired to protect a caravan or solve a mystery in my first scenario. The widow with goblins in her basement, the thieves robbing caravans, the low-level superheroes robbing the bank, these things always end up in most every RPG, which means setting means almost nothing.

You CAN do quite a bit, though, if you push on things well. You can make a standard fantasy setting and a group of PCs interesting, but to do it you have to make sure your setting elements have impact, at every level. World building isn’t just a bunch of ideas: it has to drive every single thing the players think about and do. The Shadow of the Demon Lord RPG by the great Rob Schwalb gets this. Although I want the forces to be stronger, the setting assumes you pick one of several apocalyptic scenarios that are rocking and wrecking the world the moment that play begins. The standard example is the orc rebellion. In the setting, the human empire conquered the half-giant vikings to the south, blasted them with dark magic and created a race of near immortal mindless killing machines called orcs. Except yesterday, all the magic wore off and every orc stopped being mindless. One of the orc generals stormed into the Emperor’s throne room, killed the Emperor, and took the throne. That’s a good example of a Big Thing that Effects Everything Else. Until yesterday, the empire was protected by orcs, now the orcs are in rebellion. Nobody can ignore that. You can run around the edges of it, but only for so long.

Good worldbuilding doesn’t take long. Conan the Barbarian is actually a masterclass in deep worldbuilding with the smallest touches.

There’s an old rule of narrative building that a good way to start is with your villain. The thinking goes that in a lot of stories, the villain is the one with the chief amount of agency, so you need to figure out what things they want to exploit to achieve their evil plan, and what their weaknesses are, so you can then create a plausible way that a hero with everything against them can foil it. Building the villain first gives you the mold for the hero, so they perfectly fit. I think worldbuilding for games is best done the other way: you have to know what kind of heroes (or protagonists) you want, and what you want them to do, and then build the world to suit. It’s too easy to get it wrong the other way. Either your world won’t support heroes at all, so they become so aberrant it becomes weird (like trying to fit murderhobos into cosycore), or it will have things that are in the setting that don’t mean anything because they don’t connect to what the heroes are doing. The setting will be “Oh there are sixteen planes of genies who wished the world into existence and magic is a kind of fish…but you’re going to be defending a caravan, and/or solving a mystery, and most of you are detective ninjas”.

No! Not again!

Superheroes tends to work well here because the comics have already been built around the idea of patrolling and dumb-ass villains doing stupid things that heroes can just stumble across. The setting was built around the needs of weekly comic book action. Fantasy less so, which is why it gets weird trying to map SEAL Team Six onto Lord of the Rings (which is why it was such a great moment when John Tynes said “just run it like SEAL Team Six, it works better that way”). Warhammer also has murderhoboing built into the setting: there are a class of mercenaries who wander around protecting caravans and fighting monsters, and that ecosystem is built into the setting. They have a place. The terrible option too many RPGs opt for is “the system is designed for you to be combat machines, but there’s a big sentence here that says you’re supposed to tell stories.” I flinch when I see “story first”. Fuck off with that. If you have to tell me to put story first, YOU HAVEN’T DESIGNED A GOOD ENOUGH GAME. The same goes for “don’t metagame”.

(Even worse, sometimes you’ll have games or game advice suggest that you punish players who make up murderhobos with dead relatives, as if they’ve been Naughty and have to be Shown How To Do It Right. Or they’ll suggest that only bad GMs create these kinds of players, and they are the Naughty ones.)

You do have to be a little careful though with how you build your world around your heroes or the action of the story. If it fits them too well and too snugly, it can make everything that isn’t connected to them seem less real (which means they might start killing the NPCs etc). It can also stretch believability and make things feel staged, or require players to suspend their disbelief a LOT. (“Yes there’s always a gang of the Joker’s thugs on a street corner in Gotham, waiting for him to always escape from Arkham, because that’s the rules of the story”.) Or the shape you create will be limited to only certain kinds of plots. It might do those well but it might work against you trying to do a slice of life drama or romance story in between. Players can also be pulled out of suspension of disbelief if they see too many of signs of the authorial stance (at which point they will probably conclude they want to just be authors). There’s only so many times you can Acquire Plot Points until you Trigger Act Three before setting also fades away – narrative structure was the caravan all along.

Of course, RPGs have it hard, being both a simulation of a believable, sandboxy world, where you can go anywhere and do anything, but also provide rich narrative. It’s no wonder then that we shrink the types of narratives down to suit simulations. There’s an old saying that RPGs tend to be wide, and provide tons and tons of options, so you can play them forever, or narrow, and thus really good for a brief encounter. With this rule there is often the suggestion that the former can tell any kind of story, and with the latter only one kind of story, but that’s not true, because the sandbox stories are all the same story. There’s just more stuffing around in the simulation parts. The narrative works the same way. So there are good reasons why we end up guarding caravans. The point is to be aware of this, not necessarily throw it away.

I’ve just written a book about worldbuilding and next week we launch a brand new world-creating game – The World Well – and both of them are about exploring the WHY of worldbuilding. They both start with the question: what is the world FOR? That’s what you need to know. Outside of the weird hobby where SF nerds build fake biospheres, worlds must have a purpose, and you should know what that purpose is, and you should make sure they achieve that purpose (and maybe even tell the players or at least the GM why the world is like that). It’s okay to say “there’s a bunch of clans in this setting because that makes for a good game, even though it’s not entirely realistic that this clan structure would exist in this context”. Like I said last week you should tell us why.

The World Well is built from the ground up to make a world riven with fractures, with contested factions fighting desperately over coveted power, exactly the things an RPG setting needs to give big exciting events and different points of view of the world. You may still, however, be protecting caravans. I can only do so much with groups of powered individuals fighting trouble. But at least the worlds you build will tremble as you do so. If that interests you, please go back it (and pre-order my book, too).

The Camera Always Lies, Part 3: The Tyranny of Truth-Making

Posted on by dconstructions
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Many years ago, a friend of mine was once asked by a friend in common what RPGs were. He said “well, a bunch of people sit around a table and roll funny dice, and whoever rolls a one, they’re dead.” He wasn’t wrong.

My argument in part two is really as follows: Firstly, that when we’re roleplaying, we’re doing three things at once – playing a game, creating a story and also simulating a reality where our avatar moves around and does thing. Secondly, that because we give supremacy to the last one, the other two aren’t very good.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a bit of fun in the game of most RPGs, but it’s mostly to be had in min-maxing. Then there’s the activity of “making up stuff from prompts” which is also a kind of game and a good one, but when we talk about the gaming part of RPGs we don’t usually mean that, we mean the “skirmish level wargame” thingy. And that? That’s okay. But I think it’s worth noting that computer RPGs often do that better. Gloomhaven does that better. It’s about as much of a game as a game of craps – you roll and try not to roll snake eyes. It’s not much of a game. But I also think it’s worth noting too that it can’t do it much better, or – as proved by 4e – it takes away too much from the simulation.

Similarly, we know from the long history of TTRPGs that narrative mechanics are generally only accepted grudgingly, and slowly. I know gamers to this day who complain about how in the roman RPG Fulminata, your social rank determined initiative. We have slowly come around to what Wushu invented – the idea that it doesn’t matter what the fiction says, the game is only over when the hitpoints of the story run down – but even that is very contentious. Blades in the Dark‘s Fiction First principle is angrily against such things (although maybe not – it’s not really clear what that means). We’ve realized that for the most part, virtue and flaw mechanics are dumb because it means you get more combat points to spend if you hog the spotlight with your narrative baggage. The GM has to give you another scene about your nightmares AND you get more points to spend on gun skills? Not fair.

The RPG industry famously has very little memory: the reason fantasy heartbreakers exist is because so many people start with D&D and then inevitably hit a wall of “wait, we can do better”. They even come to this realization if they’re the Critical Role guys! But the consequence is we’re almost always stuck in 1976, design-wise, still learning the same lessons, generation after generation. But I think despite this, we are creeping forward as I say. We’re getting people to move away from flaw points. To accept Drama Points or GM fiat for narrative flair. To be okay with someone getting to go first because they have Impulsive Hothead as a narrative principle, not because they have a high dexterity. But I still think we’re trapped in the tyranny of truth-making that comes from simulation.

Back in Part One, I mentioned the vibes vs plot debate, which was primarily set off by the fantastic Partick H. Willems, who shot to youtube fame with his amazing X-Men by Wes Anderson video. He kicked off that discussion with this video which starts by explaining that plot isn’t what films are made of, despite our obsession with plot. There’s a key example of this at the 32 minute mark, from the 2006 Miami Vice film . Willems explains that the scene we’re about to see has the following plot: the two leads coerce their informant to set up a meet and greet with the cartel. In the actual scene, Crocket (Colin Farrell) breaks away from the conversation and stares out over the ocean, as if imagining an escape. This is important. Regardless of Willem’s ideas about vibe movies, this is about motif, and theme, and character. The opening act of the film has an informant trying to leave Miami and save his girlfriend; when he discovers his girlfriend has been killed the informant commits suicide. Later, Crocket seduces the wife of the cartel leader and talks about running away with her, but they both fear it is too dangerous. Crocket’s partner, Tubbs has a romantic interest who is terribly injured. Crocket wants to preserve the woman he has fallen for she is a criminal and he is also lying to her about being a cop. The film is about how being cast into the battle between vice cops and drug dealers, the lead characters compromise their true desires and may be trapped.

The point of all this is that in most TTRPGs, if you were playing out the scene where Crocket and Tubbs get the informant to set up a meeting, you would focus on plot. You’d roll Negotiate and see if you did well or not, and that would determine how the scene played out. You would not have Crocket’s player roll his Need To Escape. You wouldn’t activate Lonely Stare. You wouldn’t even check a table for The Ocean Is The Stand-In For Freedom.

Mullets? In 2006? Maybe you can change the past.

There are exceptions. Again, I’m not the only person talking about this. Smallville understood this. Robin Laws got into this with Hillfolk, GUMSHOE and Hamlet’s Hitpoints. As Laws has it, there are procedural scenes, where the plot is interacted with and moved forward, and character scenes, which have characters develop and engage in conflict. Smallville, famously, was originally written with plot-moving mechanics in it, but then they course-corrected through playtesting. In that game, Superman never ever punches Lex Luthor with his fists. He rolls his JUSTICE plus his relationship to LOIS to decide if he will save the world or his girlfriend.

But this kind of thing is still rare as hen’s teeth and I’ll argue that one reason it is so is because, just like we’ve got poor game mechanics for the sake of simulation, we’ve got poor narrative mechanics for the sake of simulation. Because simulation is obsessed with “what is true”, we can’t get away from plot. Again, as I said in Part 2, this doesn’t make the standard RPG model bad. It just means there’s other things we can do.

Let me give you another example. I was playing The Score recently and we’d loaded an endangered tiger onto the boat we’d come to the island in. Then later, as we ran to escape, it turned out we’d been set up, and the drug dealers were already on the boat we were running too. They came out and held some of the crew at gunpoint. Then we turned over the last card and it activated my driving skills. I explained that when we had said we’d loaded the tigers onto the boat, the camera had just shown a boat’s interior: we were actually loading them onto the drug dealer’s boat! Which I was now driving, and smashing into our smaller one (with time for our crew to dive safely into the water). Again, this would be a difficult thing to do in your standard RPG because if you say “hey, GM, we load the tiger onto our boat”, that (usually) becomes true. You can add flashbacks, you can spend a Drama Point to make a boat show up, but usually – USUALLY – you can’t edit the past. Because that’s not what GNSMISHMASH is all about. If you can edit the past, simulation stops working. Players stop feeling like their actions have consequences. The tension in most RPGs comes from that simulation element: we did kill the goblin guard so nobody knows we’re coming. The GM cannot later say we did not kill the goblin guard. We rolled to hit and he died. We spent points on our stabbing skills and our move silently precisely SO we could kill the goblin guard. To change this would actually be unfair, because it would invalidate spending those points.

But story does not work like this. Story has no chronology. More importantly, the camera does not work like this. The camera always lies. Plot is a made-up thing experienced by the audience and only the audience. And the audience is always being lied to, because that’s how stories work; they present elements that the audience think are true things that the characters are doing as if those characters were real and time moved forward, but when we create stories, we present ideas. And so there is the issue: if we insist on serving the GNSMISHMASH of “this has become true”, we can be prevented in actually going where narrative mechanics can take us.

THAT SAID not everyone wants to go away into narrative mechanics. It can feel invalidating, like the example above. It can feel “weird”. For example, some players don’t like Brindlewood Bay‘s mechanic where the players just decide who is guilty of the crimes, even thought authors do this mid-book all the time: it can feel like the characters are just framing someone. In the GUMSHOE system seen in Trail of Cthulhu, you never fail investigation tests, because it’s pretty rare in CSI that the labs get lost or they just can’t figure out how the blood splatter fell, but when we ran that game the lack of the role made it feel like we weren’t “doing” anything in the scene. The simulation felt empty because there was nothing for our character to push against. We were also able to understand that when we “failed” at something in other games, it didn’t mean the characters were incompetent, it just meant the plot wasn’t in that position, or that scene wasn’t really a good one in the plot – we were already converting things to have more narrative meaning. And that is the beauty and the flaw of the GNSMISHMASH – because it is three goals glued together, it can lead to groups being terrible mismatched, but it also lets us shuffle these hobbies back and forth across each other, in a way where the friction makes things fun or funny, rather than hurting the game. Where the tension between the three goals becomes the spring in the trampoline of fun. The whole fun comes from the fact that the audience and the author are the same person, and if we go too far into author, we stop being audience.

But as an autistic person, I really struggle playing TTRPGs because I never know if I’m supposed to be writing a story or acting as a character or maximizing as a player, and the GM often refuses to tell me. And one of the reasons I burned myself out as a GM was because I shifted from running pre-written adventures (where there always was a simulation happening, a set truth for me to present) to doing more improv stuff, where the ability to both make anything I wanted be true AND present things however I wanted ended up with me just not knowing what to say. It’s great to have the combo. But I need clarity. And just as I really like how 4E opened up a whole new game of skirmish fun, I want to push this envelope into narrative much much further. I do want to roll for The Ocean Is a Metaphor for Freedom. And given how much people want to put RPGs on the stage, I think the world does too. Let’s see where we can go! But along the way yes, we might have to let go of “truth making” all the time. Funnily enough, what we find in The Score is people love to see it go. Because constantly worrying about what’s true makes them play defensively and get anxious all the time. We tend to say that creativity is the hard part of RPGs, but I think for most people, it’s actually way easier than figuring out what feat you should take.

STEP INTO YOUR POWWWEEERRR

And since the Actual Play movement is more and more focusing on story, it’s time to rethink what RPGs actually are. We didn’t call The Score an RPG because that name has too much baggage – not just all the math and the chunky books and such, but that fear of having to choose feats. And if D&D insists on squatting on that idea and ruining it for everyone, I’m going over here to do something else, like the RPG I just finished which does what is impossible with truth-making approaches: it runs in reverse.

(Although I’m not entirely giving up the GNSMISHMASH of course – I’m actually working on a traditional RPG right now as well.)

Age Is Just A Number…

Posted on by dconstructions
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One of the innovations of the early internet was “long games”: games made up of comment chains on forums where the only way to lose was not to reply or for the game to end. One popular long game was trying to post a statement that the subsequent poster could not find objectionable in some way. One of the best moves in that game was:

“I don’t think innocent babies should be left to die in the street”

Followed by

“Oh really? So you want to take a dying baby and remove its opportunity to see a beautiful street before it dies?”

The lovely subtext of this long game was of course that communication based one one-upping someone is no communication at all. Social media thrives so much on correcting the op that we’ve not only forgotten that this kind of communication is worthless, we’ve started to think it’s the only kind that’s worthy. Takes must be hot, dunks must be savage and faux iconoclasm the greatest virtue. Another practice of the early internet was to scorn the “me-toos” because they added a post but no content. As I said at the time, this was an insane and horrific idea because nothing is so important in a conversation as the (typically nonverbal) affirmation of our interlocutors. 

Agreeing with someone might be a radical act of insurgence, in a world where disagreement is a commodity. Cosy, low-conflict games are appealing perhaps because they step away from this world. We’re tired of marketing constantly asking us to choose between Coke and Pepsi, or feeling envious of instagrams. We’d rather just get along and be understood, and the demand for conflict is so overwhelming now we are fleeing from it.

Indeed, gamification is so often seen as nothing but the things that made people want to play World of Warcraft so much that it continues to backfire when applied to things like health programs. It turns out that using the same mechanisms that get people to addicted to poker machines, calling it “a game” and slapping it on things was bad for the things and not much to do with gaming either.

In a similar way, I think a lot of people are drawn to the new trend of cosy games because social media and hustle culture seem so keen to measure us all the time. Numbers must go up is the catch-cry of capitalism and social media, which reports at every second how much you are liked, in precise numbers. It seems to be everywhere too – computer game high scores gamified into everything we do. My friend has a car she hates because it rates every drive she takes by how efficiently she drove. I mentioned this to another friend though and she remarked that for her, she’d love to get extra information, like another beautiful insight into the world around her. My friend very wisely pointed out that information, even when it is a rank or a measure, does not have to be a judgement. Age is just a number and so is a score out of ten. Even if that number is important, even if we need it to be high or low for a purpose, it doesn’t have to become a value, or a virture.

Last entry I talked about how the orthogame is inherently a critique-machine. Even cooperatively, a game is designed to evaluate your efforts and report back. It is natural for humans to take that as a challenge and a judgement. As much as we would like to say that what matters is how much fun we had or the friends we made along the way, the points are not awarded for that at all. Competition and measurement are not emotionally neutral: NASA tests have shown that board games are a bad thing to take on long term space missions because they inevitably cause resentment and division. Games are constantly likened to war and conflict and success in them used as proof of greatness and virtue.

However we can, as my friend observed about the car measure, get over attached to things too. We can see in the long game discussed above that the contrariness was contrived and the antagonism existed only to create comic interactions. Competition and competitiveness and scoring are just mechanics. They aren’t necessarily, even in an orthogame, why we are playing. We must act as if we want points in order to get the most out of the game, but we can do so without getting too attached to them. 

The same of course is true of rules: we can get over attached to them and think following them is the point, but that doesn’t mean we want to get rid of them entirely. Sometimes rules are part of the fun in themselves – another famous long game trend of the early internet were several based on Mornington Crescent, a game that is about rules that cannot be won. How much rules actually matter though and how much we value them can vary between people. I remember once playing Elder Sign, a cooperative game, and we lost on the final roll. A friend said he was going to fudge that, obviously, because as he put it, we are here to have fun, not “get screwed over by the rules”. I was totally able to have fun and lose on one roll, because I was aware of that contract going in, but it didn’t ruin my fun to take on his values of play over rules. I also remember learning to play solitaire as a child and excitingly telling my father that I had won by only cheating slightly once and he sucking the wind out of me entirely by telling me it didn’t count. The point is that to a large extent how much we care about rules and how much we care about competition are extrinsic things we bring to the table, not intrinsic to rules and competition themselves.

Naturally a lot of people were a bit confused by my last entry about games being too competitive because to them competition was both the accepted standard and a thing that didn’t really concern them very much – they did not attach a strong value to it. It was no big deal. Some were so invested in the idea of the former, though, that they were surprised I would even call it out as an issue. I can understand that: much like rules, if you don’t see competition as a lever you can pull on, you might never examine its presence at all. That does bother me a little when it comes to designers, but then again I’m always the person who pulls on EVERYTHING because it’s probably a lever. Some have accused me of destroying bookshelves as a result, if you follow the metaphor. 

Some even suggested that I was wasting my time playing games if I was going to insist they not have competition. Again, I can understand that somewhat. One can drive oneself mad and be permanently unhappy if you spend your whole life demanding every single cat be a dog. (Although this is also a great way to explore what you might be assuming or forgetting are pre-established assumptions. I once had the privilege of watching someone see a play for the first time and be outraged that he was expected to just accept that if a person walked off stage and changed hats they were a different guy. I also once had a friend who had never encountered anything to do with superheroes until they saw the Dr Who episode about superheroes which talks about the trope of “not killing” and watching them deal with how stupid that idea is was the greatest thing ever. Untainted eyes are wonderful and help us better understand everything, especially how things appear to outsiders, which we so easily forget.) You can also drive yourself crazy insisting that the things you think are important are so to everyone – sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and competition is just a means to an end, a mechanic that doesn’t matter because of course we are just playing for fun. Losses don’t make us feel stupid, attacks don’t make us feel mean. To me it seems really strange that so far, every game about cats and dogs that’s come out has been competitive, not cooperative, but it clearly doesn’t strike anyone else as odd whatsoever.

the age old struggle

But I also think that assuming anyone wanting to think outside the box should just get a new box is a thought-terminating cliche. So too, is the idea that all game mechanics are neutral and don’t bleed into us because “it’s just a game”. It is true that we add things to them, and we can get hung up on them being things they are not. It is true that competition is just another mechanic. But it is also true that every mechanic is not just anything, and just because we realise that competition is a mechanic, not the goal doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look at what the goals are and how competition moves us towards or away from that. It is also true that mechanics can and have immense power, even if they have more on some folks more than others. We also have to be very careful of saying “well all games are like that” – because they are not – or that gamers should just get over it and like a game regardless of its mechanics. The whole wonderful thing about living in the post golden age of games is we should have learnt by now that even the orthogame is full of variety and possibility and levels of subtlety and intensity that appeal to different people in different ways. I don’t really “get” why some people find timed games stressful, but I respect it. You might not get why I don’t really like competition, but you have to recognise it is a thing, inside the world of games. 

Also, you know what else is like rules and like competition, things that are very useful but we attach way too much value to but don’t actually mean as much as we think sometimes? Categories. A lot of people tend to act like categories are an absolute truth handed down by God, which is why they got so mad when Pluto stopped being a planet, as if that means anything. I remember someone saying that they should have waited until Percival Lowell’s widow died before changing it, as if a category change is a demotion or at all worth anything. Categories exist for the same reason rules and competition exist: as a tool to get where we are going, and the goal is the thing that matters. So when you say to me “well, games just are competitive, move on”, I’m going to say you’re putting way too much truth value on a category. Or more briefly: “says who?”.

I can respect that you put a lot of value on categories, but a category is just an exercise in understanding, and not one I value highly. I really believe games, even orthogames, can be anything we want them to be, without falling into a meaningless soup of nothingness and dadaism, and it’s our job as artists to break the rules. Even when our art form is making rules.

Every Game Is Beautiful, and Nobody is Playing

Posted on by dconstructions
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There was an old joke in the 1980s when the conversation turned to overpopulation. It went “everyone thinks there’s too many people, but nobody wants to leave.” In a similar way there are too many tabletop games but nobody wants to stop designing.

This week the great Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower became another critical voice adding to this call and he hit the same notes most of us have: the problem is not really how many games there are but that there’s too much consumption and conspicuous consumption. As I said a few months back, we can start by buying less and playing more. We can use libraries and build groups; focus on experiences not things. But I don’t think we should end the discussion there – especially when companies and publication and marketing aren’t part of that solution.

Also, let’s be clear: this is a problem for everyone: for companies, for designers, for players. The average time a player gets to play a board game is plummeting. It was under two four years ago and for some hobby gamers its probably going to go below one. People are buying far far more than they can ever play. Then they go to gaming groups where, in my experience, they form a queue, waiting for the rotation when they will be chosen to get one of their games on the table, one time. Then the fancy car has to go back in the garage, hardly driven, onto a shelf of shame that tells the world they have failed. To paraphrase RS Benedict: every game is beautiful, and nobody is playing.

But nobody wants to stop. So I have a different question: if this is the new normal, how do we make it work?

Let’s set up some background and talk for a moment about Robert Cialdini’s six pillars of persuasion. Like a lot of pop psych books of the 70s I’m sure much could be done to debunk Cialdinis work but the CIA found it useful enough so let’s assume for now it’s got some usefulness. Cialdini basically identified six reasons why people will agree with or be persuaded of something, besides just the quality of the thing itself. Here they are:

  • Reciprocation. If someone does something for us we are likely to do want to do something nice for them in return.
  • Liking. Do people that I like like this thing? Is it a thing that is like other things I like?
  • Authority. Has some authority decided this thing is worthy or high quality?
  • Scarcity. Is this a thing that I might miss out on? Or am I vulnerable to some effect of not having it?
  • Commitment. Is this a thing I am already into? Is it my brand or identity?
  • Consensus. Is everyone else doing the thing?

I am of the opinion that there is nothing inherently wrong with making people aware of your product. In fact, I think it can be a thing of great moral good! But that said, marketing has always been driven by anxiety. As Don Draper says, you create an itch in your market and then offer the product as the balm. The itch tends to come in three flavours: it solves a problem you have, you’re vulnerable to something without it, or all the cools kids are doing it. Cialdinis list are the most common ways the itch can be created. An authority will tell you that it’s cool, or good, or dangerous to be without. They will associate the product with values and ideas and celebrities you already like, so the message is intensified. They’ll create limited time offers and price “drops” to create scarcity and false reciprocity. And once you’re on board they’ll give you reasons to buy in with commitment and you’ll organically bring in your friends.

And all of that is a monstrous evil that makes me sick to my stomach but but but the six pillars remain in play even if we get rid of marketing. We do and should look to authorities, our friends, standards, comparisons and repeatability as metrics for if we should investigate and hence own/do a thing. That makes sense! And as soon as there are more things than we have time to evaluate we turn to the voices of the reviewer and the critic (which aren’t the same thing). Even, indeed, to the influencer. These things are necessary and important elements of pretty much any aspect of art and culture. So is consensus and liking too. Sorry, mum and dad, but if all my friends jumped off a bridge I might suspect they had a good reason to do so. My friends are wicked smart and have good taste.

My point is these are systems we tend to use no matter what. They have been inflamed by marketing, and they may just be habit, but they make sense. So what happens when those things break down? The truth is a lot of this is happening everywhere – more and more people want to buy experiences, not things because the entire western world is in a grip of stuff-malaise. We all have too much stuff, and we even need to pay people like Marie Kondo to get rid of it for us. So we can look around us and see how other entertainment forms are dealing with this. And the truth is they too are struggling.

The dangers are clear from that. In the 1950s and 60s rock music got big but it also had a lot of churn. Individual artists could become big but often it was the producers who made the real money, switching from hot new client to hot new client. Ultimately though, they depended on huge tentpole stars like Elvis and The Beatles to make reliable money. When those vanished and the industry diversified in the 70s, nobody knew what to do. When the Bee Gees were the last big stars left, they were played so much on radio that this triggered the DISCO SUCKS movement. But the radio was running on the old rules: play what was visibly popular. Music was fragmenting into scenes that were invisible to a larger audience and difficult to turn a profit from. The industry eventually found the solution by making themselves into a kind of automated factory – companies like Stock, Aitken and Waterman made themselves in a factory. They found young artists, wrote them their songs, gave them their look and then moved onto the next artist when the fad was over. Only a precious few like Kylie Minogue or Madonna managed to gain some kind of self-mastery over this process, by doing it to themselves. Now, of course, Taylor Swift made sure she did it herself from the beginning; her success is as much because of her sheer business acumen as her song writing and voice. She is Vertical Integration made flesh.

Stock, Aitken and Waterman in their heyday. What a bunch of douchebags.

Of course, music scenes retaliated to this through punk, garage, grunge and indie movements, trying to recreate authenticity. Over time, though, the goal of the indie was to become mainstream. And that model now is also gone. The indie has grown tinier and tinier until it is a cottage industry, and the giants have become gargantuan. Spotify, the factory at the top makes billions; indie artists that might have cut an album in the 1980s and made a few grand can now reach the entire planet to make a few cents. The same thing is currently happening to movies. Martin Scorsese has talked about how movies now are made for 5 million or 500 million, and nothing in between. Anthony Mackie has explained how there are no movie stars any more, only franchises and characters; and the only movies that can be made are for “16 year olds or China”. Again, the indies are shrinking and the giants are behemoths, and the giants are machines. (Here’s a link to A.O. Scott talking about the same thing in the NYT but it’s paywalled.)

Will this happen to board games? In a small way, these trends are there, with big companies like Awaken Realms running two gigantic kickstarters a year and smaller games now struggling to be seen on crowdfunding. Likewise brands and franchises are way more important than ever. But it’s not quite the same just yet, because board games have less money behind them and are less transferrable. A better comparison is to television, perhaps: not only do both of them go directly into our lounge rooms, but gamers like TV audiences are fickle and easily bored and are ready to change channels. Streaming has certainly put a lot of new terrible pressures on television but the quality has only gone up along with the quantity. The only thing that is threatening TV right now is too many streaming channels locking off content, but people are willing to pay. The cost though is it is easy for great stuff to be missed. Every single TV show is reduced to a tiny rectangle in a long strip of rectangles, and few survive the first episode. If you’re very very lucky people will watch the whole series, which is now the most important measure of success, what the industry calls “completion”. TV therefore is now full of shows with mystery that NEED to be watched all the way through. Board games have done the same thing: more legacy games, more campaign games, more story games. The appeal of something like Gloomhaven is for once, you know what you are playing every Thursday night. That’s exactly what people like about television: the choice hurts. They want to just go “oh it’s Thursday, the show I like is on” – or at least a new series has dropped for me to binge.

But still, we need ways to navigate TV, and board games. Music used to use the hit parade to keep people informed of what was “hot”. Movies had big critics and reviewers (now completely broken by review bombing and youtube manosphere lunatics). And note: there hasn’t been a time before when there were so many movies that you felt even the reviwers were behind. But nowadays, this is the situation with both TV and with board games. TV critics are mostly ignored and just pointing to things as they drive by. Community sharing has evaporated. TV used to be about the water cooler moments, as they said in the 90s – people would gather at work to talk about the thing on TV last night. Every now and then a show drops bit by bit and for a brief moment the world feels a shared connection: there was some kind of beautiful moment of community I felt when a lot of my friends were watching Wandavision. This is also I think why people have reacted so strongly to Taylor Swift tours: it’s a shared experience. But quickly it faded away and TV no longer has this. It’s not a shared hobby any more. Few people are enjoying the same thing at the same time. So there’s no social proof in the medium. No authority because of the death of reviewers. And no scarcity at all. Although the new fear of deletion is real, we still think like we have been taught to: everything will be online forever. That’s why DVD sales are so low. Who needs to own things?

This means there’s no commitment either. There’s a lot of internet memes about how thing X has been completely forgotten by culture, so it must suck, but we can’t commit to a thing if it burns out in eight episodes but is simultaneously always available. I’m old enough to remember the need to circulate VHS tapes to see our favourite shows: that kind of desperate scarcity created commitment. You HAD to be a fan or you couldn’t even see the show. This is why again big companies know they can’t sell you on character X or film Y: they have to sell you on a franchise that maybe they can hit you with on every single platform. If they don’t, you’ll lose interest. Star Wars is fucking everywhere, but it has to be, or you’d forget about it.

The exact same trend has occurred in board games. We’ve gone from around 250 games coming out a year to 5000 in the space of ten years. Reviewers and critics cannot keep up. Tastemakers who were the kings two years ago are fading already. And although prizes matter, the Spiel Deh Jahres judges recently admitted that they have to play games five days a week to even get through 10% of the releases of a year. So slowly awards are failing to be useful. There goes authority. Since people aren’t playing the same games with the same groups, there’s no commitment and there’s no consensus. Since there’s so many games, it’s even becoming hard to follow your favourite designers, so Liking is drying up. And scarcity is a joke: the whole problem is owning too many games.

So here’s the problem: our six usual ways of finding out what we might like do not operate well inside this new environment of total abundance. When there’s a ton of money it turns into the minnows and whales option like movies; when there’s a different financial model it turns into a sea of rectangles like television. So far, TV hasn’t really solved this, except by going back to word of mouth. We ask each other what’s good – our friends being the only Liking and Authority that we have left. TV is trying to get us with algorithms which aren’t working well and – as social media has shown – really dangerous, so we tend to distrust them. Board games can’t use the algorithm as they are now, because we have to go out and buy a box. And while word of mouth is good, only a few of us play in-house with our families. But I certainly think that is the dream now, and where the biggest games tend to succeed. We want that TV experience in things like Gloomhaven: this will be for me and my significant other to play regularly, reliably. (In this area, I think RPGs can do really well, too.) We can see what products are good – but we don’t know how to solve the problem of finding them.

That’s what I mean by a different question. Since this keeps happening, since abundance is changing mediums so that Cialdini’s principles aren’t taking off, what comes next? Is there a way to navigate a cultural scene that works in this different way, without it turning into silos of cultists doing their own thing, or minnows and whales? If TV hasn’t solved this, it’s unlikely board games will soon. So I don’t have the answer. I just want to make sure we’re asking the right questions. The question is not “do we have too many games”. The question is: yes we do have too many games, just like we have too many TV shows, and we need to figure out how to navigate that. Let’s see what we can come up with.

Monkey See

Posted on by dconstructions
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I’m someone who learns well from examples. Sometimes I find it hard to learn without examples. For this reason I tend to like ttrpgs that have really explicit mechanics and instructions about what we’re doing and how we’re supposed to do it. A strong brief and a strong sense of the core idea is vital to getting me on board.

This is why I’ve always been a fan of games based on pre existing media, and emulation in general. It’s also why I want my games to be filled with examples – example characters, examples of play, the lovely Japanese trend of replays, and of course prewritten scenarios and adventures. Hooks and prompts are a good start but you need to show me how to write one and show me the finished product. This might be an autism thing – we’re very emulative. And with me if I spend five minutes with a person I will be copying their accent and mannerisms. So it could be just a very me thing.

How true that is – as in, to what degree this is mostly/only a Steve problem – determines whether any of the following thoughts are useful, so I’m posting this partly as a question: how much do examples guide you in how you approach an RPG?

There are lots of ways this manifests. I don’t, for example, typically like games that ask you to come up with a concept for your character before you start chargen. Thats what chargen is for! This is why I like to do it randomly. It’s also I suppose why I don’t like games or GMs that ask me to describe what I’m doing before I roll the dice – that’s what the dice is for.

More dramatically, it prevented me from getting into D&D as a kid. A lot of silly people will demand that rpgs aren’t emulating media but that’s exactly how they were designed. The magic system in D&D was taken from the Dying Earth, the setting from lord of the rings, and the combat explicitly from the Errol Flynn Robin Hood. The alignment system was furpm the Elric books. The classes were roughly from Conan and the Fahrfhd books. The idea of going off and fighting shit in caves mostly comes from Ray Harryhausen movies about Sinbad the Sailor. Very swiftly a bunch of other insane shit was added like priests from Hammer horror films, lovecraftian demons, poorly understood ideas of medieval history and a bunch of rubber dinosaurs. And then Beastmaster came along so they jammed that film in too.

Nowadays it is probably hard to understand because D&D dominates culture so hard but that produced a combination that wasn’t exactly representative of fantasy fiction at the time. If D&D hadn’t become so insanely popular until it made these things normal it would stand out more how bizarre and chaotic a lot of it was. But more importantly it depended on being inside a subculture. If you hadn’t grown up with those books and movies, it didn’t make much sense.

Enter me at age 11, who has read two and only two fantasy books: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Hobbit. I have seen a total of one fantasy film: The Neverending Story. It will be twenty years before I see Conan, thirty before I see Beastmaster (which cleared up so much). I try to understand D&D but it’s really hard. I don’t know what any of it means. I know dragons guard gold in mountains, sure, but what the fuck is an orc?

Two years later I find TMNT which is set in a universe I understand, because I have seen Die Hard and a dozen other action films. And kids cartoons which are basically the same thing. That makes sense. I’m home.

Years later I bounce off other games which are either really open or a little harder to pin down. I cannot get my head around how to play Nobilis or why anyone would want to. I didnt really get the world of darkness (I didn’t see the crow till later). I’m currently reading Unknown Armies and until it mentioned Twin Peaks I thought it was about Elmore Leonard. And it is a bit, yes. But you wouldn’t pitch it as an Elmore Leonard game. I remember trying to play cyberpunk and nobody telling me what kind of characters to make or what they were supposed to do. My first and second characters in that game were killed by “obvious traps” because “I should have known they were traps”.

I tended to find my home in history: ars magica, call of Cthulhu, blue planet become my favourites. And genre as I said: ghostbusters and Buffy are the two games I’d save from a house fire or a meteor strike, and TMNT has my boyish heart. Now I design games where you can’t do anything but follow strict genre cues. The system simply won’t let you.

And I find a lot of games really do end up back at finding the media you know to get you started. Even if they’re in a totally unique setting – especially if they are – they come back to “have you ever seen a coen brothers film? It’s like that”. When I was working on the first 40K rpg we had an in-house brief that went: “it’s the A Team fighting Cthulhu in Star Wars”. Obviously we can’t always put these things in our texts; certainly not on our branding. But if we keep doing this, we should recognise how vital it is. How it’s the core of what we’re doing and so it should be core to the rules we write. The only reason D&D appears not to need this is it invented its own genre and rewrote pop culture around that.

Maybe im wrong though. Maybe nobody else needs this but me. Maybe everyone got world of darkness fine. Or maybe they’d seen a bunch of vampire movies to give them context. And maybe it’s about time we admitted this and put it front and centre in our designs.

Let me know your thoughts. You know, like in the movies where everyone responds to a viral post.

The Atomic RPG Action

Posted on by dconstructions
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Here’s a thing I’ve been thinking about it recently. It comes up a lot when we play The Score but it also sneaks into other RPGs all the time – and I think we probably find ways to do this kind of thing more than we might imagine, but it’s not written down in any rulebooks. And pretty much the entire history of RPGs is thinking of things people are actually doing and turning them into written rules.

First, let’s do an example, and I’ll do Star Wars again because I’m old. Luke wakes up to find his new droid has wandered off into the desert. He goes looking for it, and finds signs of sandpeople. He pulls back to see if he can see them from a distance, and they – having set a trap – ambush him and knock him out. He is saved at the last moment by the appearance of a strange figure using crazy mind powers, who is luckily, a person Luke has been thinking about.

Atomic comes from the Greek a-tmos, a as in not and tmos as in cuttable. Something you can’t cut divide any further..

As a writer, here’s how you might think about this scene: you want to establish some character beats. Luke isn’t as tough as he thinks he is. Obi-Wan has mysterious powers. We can show that by having a nice moment of “plot zig zag” – Luke finds the droid is gone (oh no), Luke finds the droid (hooray), Luke sees sand people (suspense), Luke is attacked (surprise), Luke is saved (hooray). You would write this all as one scene, and the chief purpose of the scene would be to get the two characters together in an interesting way, and establish some character and world building.

Obviously there isn’t and can’t always be a parallel between non-participatory storytelling and participatory storytelling, but here’s how this might look in an RPG: Luke would make a roll to see if he can find R2D2s trail. He succeeds! Then the GM has him roll perception to notice the sand people. He succeeds! He decides he will hide. The GM decides (somehow) that the sand people are setting up a trap so gives Luke some rolls to see if he can figure this out, like say Local Knowledge and Perception. Fail, and fail. Okay, Luke, give me a dodge roll. Fail? Okay they knock you out. But … I guess an old wizard comes along and stops them from eating you? Luke’s player will spend a point on his I Know This Guy stat to say this is an old mountain hermit he’s met a few times.

And at this point someone might go – and it might be the GM, and it might be in secret, or it might not – “oh, can that be the person my character, Princess Leia, was trying to find?”. And that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. It’s a lot like retro-active continuity but done in the act of creation. It makes sense that this thing that we’ve already decided happened and that thing we’ve already decided happened are linked. Perhaps causally or through an heretofore unestablished connection. And like I say, I think we do this all the time.

So often when I’m generating random stuff from tables, I’m putting two or three things together so that they are linked like this. Which has got me pondering: is there a way to make this an explicit mechanic? In The Score I’ve been toying with the idea of drawing two cards at once, so that you can explain the failure of the first by the arrival of the second, or resolve the failure of the first with the success of the second. However particularly since the game is all about drawing cards, it tends to work better at the table if everything is atomic. And that’s when it hit me: almost everything we do in TTRPGs is atomic like this. The example above was something you might call a scene but each roll stood on its own. The GM might have prepared several ways the encounter might have gone, and seen that as a cohesive whole but each roll was “what happens now, at this point” with Luke rolling to see if he gets a yes or a no or a sort of outcome. The story branches around these atomic choices. And that’s fine…

…but if you were writing this scene, you’d write this at the very least as a one-two punch. First this, then that. Luke takes a hit, gets rescued. You’d get the two things at the same time.

There are some systems that can work like this. You could do a scene-based resolution where say, Luke’s trying to “find R2D2” and he gets a yes but, and the player decides that he gets ambushed then saved. In this case though the test is still a kind of an atomic thing – a yes no maybe of “does this happen”. And if you go out to this step, the scene with Obi-Wan is connected to Luke not being at home when the stormtroopers arrive and to Luke finding Obi-Wan and getting some of his backstory.

Alternatively you could have a tug-of-war style system (like in Dogs in the Vineyard or Cortex) where the GM is playing “planetary threats” and there’s a back and forth wagering until finally Luke wins but with a sacrifice (he takes a wound, say). This does get to the idea that we build in connections and outcomes but it does still feel like we’re trying to solve a singular situation. We have a procedural scene: Luke wants to achieve an outcome and rolls to determine if he does. And certainly we can start with that idea and bring in what I’m talking about, because “solving a problem” is a pretty standard core RPG mechanic.

But what I’d like to see is something that steps outside the atomic. Imagine a situation where every roll in an RPG is always two rolls, in the sense of we’re getting two ideas we want to link together. This isn’t the same thing as rolls that produce lots of information, like in the Genesys system, because that still feels to me sealed inside the atomic concept. Although again, that’s probably a good way to come at this problem – it might be that we’ve solved this issue already, with this idea. But I’m curious about what else we might do. Another way to think about this is systems where everyone rolls their initiative at the start of the round so you know that when you finish your action, who is coming next. Similarly the Balsera Initiative system where you decide who goes next is going to prompt into this area as well. What we want is for players to think about connections, and what just happened and what’s about to happen is a start.

But what if whenever Bob the Fighter wants to do X we get Eric the cleric to roll for whatever they are doing next? Of course you’ll say they don’t know what they’re doing next, but we often DO have some idea. Maybe Bob is trying to bust down the door and Eric the Cleric is going to blast some spells. Roll both. Then explain and describe the whole thing when you know all the things coming into the scene. In this case there’s basically four outcomes, but they’re all kind of interesting. Can Bob fail to get the door down but Eric look badass when casting spells? Maybe. If I was writing that scene, I’d have Bob hit the door, hurt himself, have a comedy beat and then a skeleton shoot out of the door a second later and getting blasted. Or maybe the door opens but Bob goes sliding in, looks up and sees a skeleton about to kill him – and then Eric saves his life. If Bob wins and Eric wins, then it’s a moment of two comrades acting in perfect synchronicity. If Bob wins and Eric fails then Bob slams open the door only for the skeleton to shoot past him and Eric’s faith to fail. If they both fail…the skeleton kicks the door open, knocks Bob down and Eric fails to get his holy symbol up.

Of course all of those situations can be achieved with atomic rolls but I hope you can see how starting with lots of information coming into something BEFORE we interpret the roll, we can get different results. And that currently, we mostly do RPGs where each player makes an atomic choice and gets a singular answer back from the system before we move on. And there’s probably a whole other series of things we could be doing that aren’t atomic like this. Games naturally teach us to take turns and keeping things atomic does mean that each player feels independent and in control. Turns, in other words, make sense. But they’re not the only way to play. We don’t take turns in tug of war – we all come in at once.

I do not have the answers here. I only have this question, this start of an idea. I’m putting it here because I want to see someone take it somewhere. Because that’s what I’m talking about – collaboration. Collaboration, like narrative, is rarely atomic. Let’s see where we can go, not just one step at a time, on our own.

What Makes a Good Roleplayer? Duty, Honour, Glory, Verve

Posted on by dconstructions
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Back in 2002 I met an amazing game designer whose name escapes me, because I only remember his online handle. He was working on a game I’ve still never really seen anything like: a game of competitive storytelling. And look if you know or remember the game, do chime in. Players took on the role of great legendary figures facing terrible crises and would compete in describing how their figure would solve such a thing, and then the facilitating player would literally mark the players for how good their story was.

Now, generally, in games of shared storytelling we’re not here to make it an issue of quality because we’re trying to encourage wild creativity, radical acceptance and strong buy in, so as to create the best shared experiences. But having set up that this was an actual competition, the game was kind of amazing. A bunch of really talented story tellers trying to outdo each other produces incredible effects. But what I also never forgot was that the game had criteria. Of course it did: it wouldn’t be fair to just leave everything up a judge to use their personal opinions. Players deserve to know how they are being judged. The four primary criteria in the game were as follows:

  • Tradition, which was about embodying who your legend/god was and their vibe
  • Honour, which was about making sure that you showed respect to how big the problem was, not punking it out like it didn’t matter
  • Glory, which was being crazy awesome in how you defeated it
  • Verve, which was a placeholder for good writing and presentation, but also engagement and intensity.

These are excellent criteria for what makes good roleplaying too.

Much has been written on what makes good improv, of course. I cannot attempt to add to that discourse; I don’t know enough and there are very good books about it. From my brief improv training, finding your voice, trusting it and listening to it, and following others with full buy in were the two things I remember being taught. There wasn’t really a way to evaluate how good the dramatic material the improv was producing though. And again, some might argue there should not be such a thing. RPGs, unlike the game described above, aren’t competitive. And yet, don’t we all want to do them better? And if so, shouldn’t we measure not just enthusiasm, honesty, engagement, collaboration…but also how good our words and stories are? And try to make those things better? If so, then criteria is going to be vital.

I have a fearsome supervillain in my supers world called Yes Andrew who encourages your darkest impulses

Of course, Tradition and Honour overlap a lot with what makes quality improv. I renamed Tradition into Duty because Tradition felt a little bit too much about mythology. The Duty is to the setting, to the character you built and the characters of those around you. You want to not just treat them as real but also that they are consistent. You want the choices the other players have made to matter and leave an impact on the world, so it is your Duty to acknowledge them and be effected by them. That is something you’ll find discussed in improv skills, yes. If someone mimes a car, you can’t just mime riding a horse inside the car. Or walking next to it at walking pace. You kill their established truth. So I’m not really making new ground there.

Honour is also similar. Although good scenes can be built around status reversals and games of hierarchy – classic improv tools – improv also is about recognizing that you can’t just imagine the machine gun to kill the imaginary serial killer. That’s not interesting. Glory I think does come up in improv as well, although I’m not sure it’s quite expressed like that. The idea is the counterpart to Honour: you can’t just imagine a machine gun but you can also imagine anything you want. The right answer is the answer within you, and like any artist the key is listening to yourself and letting it out, as big as you need to be. Some players of course always try to go too big, but a lot of others need help. I built Relics around the idea that you really can be as powerful as a God and run the universe if you want to, and I’ve been interested to see how many folks are reluctant to let loose both on the small scale of their abilities and the large scale of accepting responsibility. We actually expect RPG rules, most of the time, to tell us “no”. That’s what they’ve done for so long, on the assumption that if they didn’t, we’d just go straight to imagining the machine gun. We’re also told not to throw the campaign off. To be so into following tropes we follow the predicted pathway. And that means we have to unlearn the tendency to think small. Being allowed to do things. Which is part of that improv teaching of not feeling judged or constricted by the wrong answer.

And even Verve is part of improv as well, because part of learning improv too, because you learn about how to act, how to impart real meaning and strength behind every action and syllable, how acting is about broadcasting energy, as well as understanding how to use body language and space work to communicate the imagined reality. If you’re using your words to describe things then you do also need verve, and you need to understand that’s got nothing to do with being long-winded or over dramatic.

So I get no points for just rebranding good improv rules. Maybe half a point for expressing things in a way that don’t just feel like improv rules, because these are both good rules for writing as well. Things that your buddy who wouldn’t even think of calling RPGs improv might consider. In writing have a duty to your readers to keep things consistent and treat your art like it matters and the world as if it is real, and you have to honour the conflicts you create and not just flick a switch and solve everything. Bad things have to happen to innocent people in stories, and as much as that’s your fault, it is also your responsibility.

Which brings us, sideways, to that ongoing question of what are we doing when we roleplay? Some are absolutely not intent in making a story, except by accidental by-product; and many who create a story are doing it to live through it, not perform it. And yet, we are saying things that exist in a fictional world. We must therefore work within that sense. We can – and should! – follow the rules, and even consider them the first and most important thing. But we also know, even though it’s not really written down in any part of the rules of DnD, that if the GM says there’s a dragon in front of us, we have to act as if the dragon is there. So we are telling a story, or at least building one. We can’t get away from the fictional nature of it all. Some people prefer story-maker to story-teller. That can take the pressure off. And yet, unless this is purely solo, and even then, the story is being expressed somehow. As we think about the elements, we imagine what they might look like, sound like, feel like – that is communication, that is taking the story and giving it a sense of itself. That is telling the story. So I think it is fair to always bring these elements forward.

As I say, no real points for the new nomenclature (and it’s a very masculine, ancient Rome kind of word choice, I know). But these four things are easy to remember. THAT might be useful. If you don’t have time to read a whole copy of Improv for Roleplayers, or need a quick handy guide, you’ve got these four principles to fall back on. Duty, Honour, Glory, Verve. We could add an mnemonic device, too, like Game Violence Doesn’t Hurt.

Anyway, these four pop up in lots of my games, explicitly or implicitly. Maybe they’ll help you with how you play or how you create games or guide players to doing cool stuff. That is always the goal – and that’s true whether you’re designing RPGs, facilitating them or playing them, your job most of the time is to help everyone be incredibly cool. Maybe these four things will help.

The Why of RPG Mechanics

Posted on by dconstructions
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I’m slowly reading Unknown Armies 3rd edition. Compared to the average person I know a lot of roleplaying games but since I normally only buy games I’m going to run I never really know much about what’s currently out and popular. I’m generally very behind. Even when i did follow the scene I have never had the time or money or ability to read quickly to follow many games. I used to feel bad about not getting across my field but then I saw Reiner Knizia say that he doesn’t play any games besides his own because he is so busy making his own and I figure if it’s good enough for Doctor K it’s good enough for me.

But then you see UA3 for a low price second hand and you’re like I can take the time to read one of the most famous RPGs by one of the fields luminaries. It was worth it because you always learn a lot reading anything good or even half decent, if you’ve got your learning brain engaged. You get lots of ideas for blogs too.

One thing I spotted in this edition was there’s a bit in the GMing section where it explains something I’d never understood. In UA, when you make a character you list three things that effect your emotions: one that makes you feel rage, one that makes you feel fear and one that makes you feel noble. I was always confused by the last one. It makes sense for characters to have a thing that scares them so they run away from a fight and a thing that makes them want to run into a fight with anger, but I was like “noble? what’s that for?”. Now this might have been in previous editions but regardless here it explained that the noble one was basically a way for players to ask for things that made their characters feel, well, cool I guess, Rage and Noble in particular are “I want this to happen to me”.

Now I’m autistic so maybe that was obvious to everyone, but the name in particular just threw me. I also wasn’t 100% sure that’s what those things were for at all. And it made me think again about this thing where we don’t explain why RPG mechanics exist very often.

Another example: we were talking the other day about how given that the average stat in Apocalypse World is a 0 and you need a 7 to even partially succeed, the game can feel pretty rough at times, since 60% of the time you suffer a consequence (16% for a full success). That’s fine for a harsh post apocalyptic game where everything comes at a price. We did the same thing in Relics: (49/21), but in Relics we explain that the point of this is to drive players to add Memories, and to highlight the theme of desperation. But AW doesn’t explain that it too is a game of terrible choices, and sometimes a lot of Powered By the Apocalypse games don’t get this and copy the mechanics over to a setting not about desperation. I suggested the rules explain the intent, and somebody replied “why though?”

I understand that I think beyond most people, but it struck me as very odd that the very idea of explaining yourself would be odd. But for some reason it is the exception.

I kind of get this in mainstream boardgames. I get this in video games too, because a lot of the mechanics are already invisible. And yes, game designers lie all the time, and part of game design is mind control: we’re forcing you to do things without you knowing we are, and it won’t always work if you know everything going on behind the curtain. But most TTRPG players are keenos who want to dive ever-deeper into mechanics. It is a sound argument, in fact, that TTRPGs aren’t games at all, but toolkits that let GMs (and sometimes players) make a game. We also have a solid tradition of understanding that GMs are going to change rules to suit their table. So it just makes sense to me to explain why rules are the way they are!

Heck, sometimes I’ve seen the worst possible situation: games where the game designer says or implies DO NOT FRICKING CHANGE MY RULES THEY EXIST FOR A REASON, or the community does this, but then doesn’t actually give the reasons. Not to pick on Vincent Baker, but some of his games are quite OPAQUE in tone as well, which makes it worse when they are copied, and worse when people insist that the “correct” experience comes from “correct” play. I’m not accusing anyone of doing this, but I do think a lot of TTRPG designers have the same problem of a lot of GMs: they’re a fan of themselves. And that translates sometimes to keeping our cards hidden. We think we’re goddamn magicians who don’t want to give away the tricks.

Here’s a thing we know: adult learners learn best when they know WHY they are learning something. You might assume that people want to learn games so they can play games, but that’s a dumb assumption. Never assume your audience is motivated to give a fuck about anything, least of all your rules. So it’s in your interest to motivate them by showing them why things are the way they are! Something else we know is that people are smart and they like being treated as smart. If they don’t want to know why something is the way it is, they’ll skip that part. Talk up to your audience. Assume they’re game designers too. Assume they’re smarter than you are. That may be a reason that people don’t want to show the why of mechanics: they might feel it will come across as talking down to the audience. But that’s just a matter of tone: inviting in experts to show your working never feels like talking down.

Here’s one more thing we know: people don’t always get why things are there, and when they don’t get that, they don’t use them or they use them incorrectly. 20 years ago Unknown Armies could have explained that damn mechanic to me and helped a brother out. It also stops assumptions! Some people think “everything on a character sheet is things a player wants to happen in the game” and they design with that in mind. But guess what: NOT EVERYONE PLAYS WITH THAT IN MIND. So if you don’t make that explicit, you’re just going to make a goddamn mess. This points to a larger point: you should not just explain the why of each mechanic, but the why of the whole game. Obviously space can be limited but I think this is why it is really useful for most RPGs to go “Here’s what an RPG is”, because nobody actually agrees on that. Examples of play are also good for this. They show the base assumptions of what a game is and what the goal of and philosophy behind the game is and what the outcome should look like.

(I have a particular beef here about that last part too! I played D&D for years without understanding most of it because I hadn’t seen or read any of the fantasy stuff it was referencing. And there wasn’t really much in the game that explained what it was trying to do, and how it should look! This is why licensed games are a delight – you KNOW what the outcome is supposed to be, and you can tell when you get there. This may of course also be why games are loath to point to examples…it might give away the fact that RPGs rarely behave as advertised…)

The average GM being told that D&D should create Lord of the Rings and finding out it isn’t built to do anything of the sort

Mutants and Masterminds by the great Jeff Kenson has these little sidebars where they explained the WHY of mechanics. Why the designers made them work the way they did, and not something else. There was also sometimes a sense of how to put them into effect if that wasn’t clear. These sections were called “Under the Hood” and they were really useful, especially for a game as complex as M&M. I didn’t really have space to put these things into The Score but Relics goes to great lengths to explain to GMs why the rules are the way they are, so that GMs know what happens if they change them. They know which rules are load-bearing on the experience, or more connected to other things, and should be altered with caution, and which are less important or less connected.

Just talk to people. Explain things. This the neurospicy idea that we should not spend our whole lives speaking in code, hoping others get it. Just explain. A game designer is inherently a teacher, so you should aim to be a good one.