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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.)

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.

Review: Aristocracy

Posted on by dconstructions
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They say there are two types of RPGs: large ones full of options but aren’t really about anything and need you to give them meaning and narrow ones that are really focused on being about one thing the author wants you to play so you only tend to use them once or twice. Generic, setting-agnostic RPGs are the former but even more so. It’s hard – maybe impossible – for them to be about anything without risking their chief goals of being widely applicable and infinitely flexible. It’s hard for them to even be interesting since they’re designed to be so neutral and even formulaic at times. A handy tool to do anything you want has trouble standing out – and outside of the granddaddy GURPS, has trouble selling too. Aristocracy, by Kylan Day, promises “broadsheets” that will provide setting hooks, although none have been announced yet. Also not yet visible is why the game is called Aristocracy. Maybe the plan is to be at the top of a list of RPGs, but then you’d want to be Aardvarks At Home: A Cutecore PAstoral Game of Insecure Insectivores. But I digress.

Actually, no, while I’m here, setting agnostic would mean we don’t know if we have a setting or not. It should be setting absent. But anyway.

Aristocracy works hard to stand out at least visually. For a first game, the layout is slick and attention grabbing with a good use of colour, which helps somewhat with all the page flipping needed. The art is dynamic, colourful and occasionally dazzling but again suffers from being a wide range of styles and genres like the game. To truly catch any attention, however, a universal RPG needs a strong core mechanic that’s simple but powerful. Aristocracy delivers here. Almost everything in the game is a skill roll, and skills are either untrained (d6), trained (d8) or  focussed (d12). A 6 or a 7 is a success, an 8+ is a crit. You always roll five dice, so if you have no points in something it’s just 5d6 (which gives you a 60% chance of success, if you want the maths). You’ve got three main ways of messing with your dice – rerolling as many as you want, nudging a die up by one (but not off a 1, which is a botch), or upgrading a dice up a level from a botch to failure to success to a crit. You can also downgrade the other way. This allows for powers to provide three levels of dice control, but I do wonder if it’s hard to tell the difference. A reroll could at times be way more beneficial than an upshift, mathematically, and they all kind of feel the same? It would have been simpler to just give out one or bumps, say. Especially when we learn that some powers give bumps, some rerolls and some shifts, and there is no rhyme or reason which happens when. Worse, there’s no symmetry: good attribute give re-rolls, weak attributes give downshifts. Also, as clever as the dice pool system is, it’s not intuitive.Is 1/0/4 better than 0/3/2? By how much? What about 2/1/2 vs 1/4/0?

Speaking of attributes they are (sitting beside fifteen fairly standard skills) Brawn, Intelligence, Reflexes, Style, Perception are joined by Influence. This gives us a new kind of duality – we got dummy thic and twink as usual in Brawn/Reflexes, Book Smart and Street Smart in Intelligence/Perception and now we also add a Vader/Tarkin split in who got the swagger versus who pays the bills. It’s perhaps only moments of individuality like this that can set a universal RPG apart somewhat, and its a sign of the dedication behind Aristocracy that it has these touches of flair.

 Another touch of flair is the mechanic where one character each session is the Lynchpin, which means the story is all about them. This is typically combined with the powers that let you alter the story or scene in your favour; by keeping this big showy things to just one person you ensure that the hacker bricking the nemesis’ laptop doesn’t happen at the same time the seductress declares they are secretly in love with them. It doesn’t play a huge part in the game as a whole but it helps communicate an important piece of information to the players (this bit is about Doug’s character) in a sly, unintrusive fashion. I wish it did do a bit more, however – it would be nice to see this have more mechanical weight to bring home what the game is about. 

Skills and Attributes are also modified by Abilities, which are the Kewl Powers of the game and like the other two things, are doled out by choosing an Origin, a Species and two Careers, but before we get to those we have to learn about tracks.

Everything is tracks nowadays – what used to be clocks, and before that what we called hit points.In this case, there are bad tracks aka Danger Tracks, counting losses in health, wealth or willpower and good ones aka Progress Tracks which are like “did I find the lost tomb I’m looking for” or “are me and Mateo bros yet”. If you do an action that adds to a track, then at the end of the action you roll a d12 –  roll equal or under the number of ticks on the track and you take pain equal to how many ticks you have, and then drop it back down a ways. Otherwise you keep ticking things off. This creates a very interesting dynamic where if you keep doing dangerous things it might cause you a small injury but it will absolutely assuredly cripple you if it doesn’t do that. Likewise you are generally like to pour damage onto someone until they explode…but there’s some good odds that before then, they’ll take a major injury and get reset back. That’s interesting. I guess it could get weird if you take a whole bunch of tiny near-misses and then when you get one more punch you all of a sudden collapse like a deflating wind dancer, but any loss in “realism” is balanced by being dramatically and numerically interesting. 

Since everything is about successes along a track – and I mean EVERYTHING – success level always matters as a measure of volume. It’s not “oh four successes so you did quite well quite well”, because everything is a twelve-space track, so four is always a concrete number 30% better than three. And that makes all those Rerolls and Bumps and Upshifts potentially quite important. Every roll can be a negotiation with stats and math, and this makes “combat” full of choice and exciting. 

I say “combat” with the inverted commas because combat is any activity that’s trying to make a Danger Track go up. or a Progress Track go down. Likewise, a Weapon is something that does the former and a Tool is something that does the latter, and here is where we get into one of the major problems with Aristocracy: jargon. Weapons are Weapons in italics for unclear reasons and an attack that uses a weapon means an actin is WEAPONISED (which I think is in all-caps because it’s a trait?). That’s fairly straight forward but everything has a tag like this and things start snowballing out of control.

For example, let’s say your group wants to hire a pilot to fly you into a volcano, but the pilot is being a jerk so your character decides they want to leave the group, go off screen and come back with a suitcase full of money and just buy the whole fricking airline. That’s either a Dangerous Combat Action which adds I guess to a Get To The Volcano Travel track, with any Danger being added to the Wealth track, unless it isn’t Dangerous at all, or maybe there isn’t a track. Alternatively, since it’s off screen, perhaps its a Downtime Action which only occurs during Downtime. In either case it might require an Extended check, because you may be doing several things. But it may not require Extended Downtime, it depends how many Downtime Actions it requires. A Downtime Action is usually just one skill roll, but what you can actually do depends on if it is a Short, Standard or Extended Downtime, and that’s a GM call. An Extended check can still happen in Standard Downtime. Now this is me trying to acquire Progress so I’m attacking my Resources Track, and I’m using a Tool to do so (I’ve got a Tool called Mommy’s Credit Card). And if you use a Tool to attack a a Progress track you do double damage, but because I’m trying to get a Big Pay Day, the Extended test acts like it has UNNATURAL ARMOUR. Okay, so let me just check what the ARMOUR ability is…(flip flip flip) and if it is UNNATURAL …okay it means all damage is reduced by 3. Is this before or after I double the damage? (flip flip flip) Not sure. Doesn’t say. And if I succeed, I get a Hoard. (flip flip flip, check index, flip flip flip, oh here it is) A Hoard is a kind of Loot that is ONE USE and can wipe out Wealth Damage or allow you to Acquire Equipment that is Rare at reduced costs. (Flip flip flip) Okay so Rare items can only normally be achieved with a Side Quest, which it turns out is just a regular Acquire Equipment roll, except it is now Extended, and can have multiple characters roll on it, so now we set up a new Progress Track towards Buying The Entire Goddamn Airline, but the Hoard “reduces the cost”, but like, how? Does the reduced cost mean it just wipes out Wealth Damage which is what it already said it did anyway? Or does it just let us roll on the track to begin with? Or does it count as a Tool? Or does it let us do it at as a non-extended task? Is the Side Quest now still Armoured, given my Hoard? Is a small fleet of planes even Rare to being with? Ask the GM. No, look at his eyes. He’s frightened. Luckily he can turn to the equipment chapter (flip flip flip) where the modern day section might indicate what makes something Rare. No dice. It doesn’t list air vehicles at all. Hang on, what if instead of getting the money first I just do a Side Quest to get the airline? Airlines aren’t listed as Rare. Let’s say one helicopter. Still no air vehicles, but we could use a Van and grant it Alternate Movement? Does that change its rarity (flip flip flip)? 

It’s nice that all of this is genericised so I can reskin any item at all into a Tool that grants Progress, or even has Precision that cuts through Armour. That’s actually kind of fun, to imagine like okay, Precision removes Armour and big Pay Days are Armoured, so this person has some power that means his Side Quest heists are easy even when the Pay Days are big – so that Precise Tool might be “A Guy on the Inside”.. If I add three levels of Range to a Brutal Willpower attack, I can make anyone I can see anywhere surrender, even if they cannot see me, a power I call “Hey You Down There, Shut Up”. But if I’m reading through all the cool powers I get as a Fixer and I find out I can choose Resistance (Health) or Inspiration (Hazards) I wish it would just tell me what those things actually are. Resistance in this case means you can change any kind of damage into the brackets type, so my Fixer can turn financial damage into getting beat up. Or willpower damage into getting beat up. That’s actually a fun noir power – nobody can intimidate you, damage your finances or even run down your good name, it always just ends up being a boot to the face. Okay, so what’s Inspiration? Inspiration means I can grant allies a bump, but only during Hazards. What’s a hazard again? (Flip flip flip)

Don’t get me wrong, I think if you have intimate knowledge of this system, you can remember a lot of this. I think the designer could solve the airline problem in a second. But he doesn’t come with the book. 

The other benefit of everything being generic is that you can keep some lists short. You don’t need two abilities, one for financial issues and one for physical issues: if it’s hard to wear down it’s armour, if you can get through defences,it’s Piercing.But  If my raconteur gains Brutal in social situations, then all of a sudden this helpful jargon becomes vague again. Can I add it to attacks? Can I attack Travel tracks with that, even if it’s just me an my mechanic having a chat? Is it a tool or a weapon? Can it be both? And I have to remember that Brutal means more damage, instead of just reading in the stat definition – it doesn’t just say in the power “In X situations, add Y to Z”. And it’s not unified – some power ups give bumps, others rerolls, others flat bonuses. And some things on this list very specific, like Invisible, instead of some kind of Hard to Target power that slowly gets better. There’s also the ability to Portal into other dimensions which isn’t called something more abstract like Long Distance Travel (which should allow Travel tracks to…I guess cover more distance? Add Brutal?). Why is the first level of Invulnerable just being resistant to damage instead of actual invulnerability? Somethings use the jargon, some don’t, and some mix and match. 

And worse: sometimes things have the wrong names, aren’t called what you think they are or aren’t explained where you think they should be. A skill will be called an occupation, characteristics will get Expert instead of Enhanced or vice versa, new skills pop up without definition, and so on. 

I’m not looking for these problems. Making my first character, I decided to create a sci-fi concept which was “what if the alien from Alien was built to attack financial tracks instead of health tracks – the perfect thieving oranism.” My genetic perfection meant I always had an Accurate Tool appropriate to a task (any task? What’s a task?) but it can also be a Weapon, whereupon it counts as Brutal and Deadly. This means that if I’m using a Tool to move a thieving progress along, I have Accurate to those attacks (except it’s not an attack?) meaning I can reroll my dice, and the Tool allows me to do double “damage” to my progress. But if I attack someone’s Wealth, I do quadruple damage (because Brutal is x2, plus x2 for the Weapon) and my crits do extra damage (because of Deadly). But here is the question: when am I attacking someone’s wealth vs progressing thievery towards a goal? Or can I use it on any task related to this general area? Also, does my Poor Eyesight affect the roll, if we never said it was work that needed my eyes? I have no idea. I feel like I might be arguing with my GM a lot about both questions. I feel like my GM would be really sick of this. 

So we have a system that is hard to learn, hard to remember and hard to translate into meaning, scattered across the book in pieces, and all of which are drowning in jargon you need to look up elsewhere, which is sometimes inconsistent, unspecified or unclear, and that wants to be absolutely purely abstract but also constantly relies on “the description” added by the player or the GM to know when and where and how it works..On the other hand, the intent to keep things unified is achieved. When I rolled that one of my Careers was a Summoner, I groaned because hoo boy I did not want to learn more of these rules, but the assistants rules were no longer than anybody else’s – they’re just a kind of tool. Theoretically, in this system, a spyglass and a scouting robot would work exactly the same way, and that’s fine. It was actually more complicated figuring out what a Winning Smile does – I gain Rapid Piercing Weapon to make WIllpower attacks, which means my smile ignores WIllpower Armour and that defensive actions are downshiffed against them. I can imagine what Willpower Armour might look like – the person might not like me to begin with or be on the lookout for a scam. On the other hand, they could have Willpower Absorb, or WIllpower Invulnerable, or Willpower Resistance, in which case, my Piercing is useless. Will the GM choose to give my enemies Willpower Resistance? I think he will. 

And what, exactly, are defensive actions? I do not know. It is never defined. Combat is “always a contested roll” which seems to suggest that you are both attacking at once. Or both defending. And how do you defend against a smile? What Skill do I roll for that? 

That was fifteen hundred words of negativity, which is a lot. But I want to be clear why I’m struggling with the game, because it has a lot of power and passion behind it, and a lot of good writing. But every time I find something I like, I find the good Lord taketh away the next moment. The three kinds of Templates you snap together to make a character – Origin, Species and Careers – are full of really evocative entries that you just don’t see elsewhere. Careers include things like Merchant Princes, World Breakers, Sorcerers and Shadows…but then things get confused when we also have Chirugeon sitting next to Hacker on the same list. Yes, it says not to use Hackers in medieval games, but that information isn’t on the table I chose it from. Species includes “Protagonist” alongside obvious cyberpunk things like Drone, Rebuild, Geneforged and Uplift – if we’re all playing modern day cops, do we all just pick Protagonist? Origin includes Socialite but no clear reason why it’s different to Fixer, or how Criminal is different to Scoundrel. Yes you can grow up On the Streets or Rich and still end up a Scoundrel, but who is born a Pilot? Why is that an Origin? 

Combat also has some great stuff. Whenever you add to someone’s Damage track you roll to confirm that advance. If someone has taken three points of damage out of twelve, you need to roll a 1 2 3 to turn that into a minor effect. If someone has taken 10 points of damage you’ll convert that to a critical effect 84% of the time. So as mentioned you will rarely deal minor attacks and almost always convert to bone crunching owies. And it’s great that chapter four is full of whole bunches of options for these kinds of effects for players to choose from. Except it probably is going to slow down play to pass the book around every time a hit is confirmed. And some of them have tags that aren’t explained, and some require GM calls (I can do a coup de gras only if the target is prone but no effect causes prone as written. How do I make someone prone? Can I just say they are prone? Is it harder to hit them if I want to do that? How would I or the GM make this rule up on the fly?). 

Some of the tracks are great, especially when you realize there are lots of powers that you can activate by throwing damage on those. Got the Enemeis track? Then you can get Bumps or rerolls by leaving a trail of breadcrumbs or just pissing people off. But it’s sort of misnamed because Health and Wealth and Willpower are positive things, and I guess this is a Lack of Enemies that is being whittled away? Maybe it should be called People’s Tolerance for Your Bullshit. Secrets is another great one. I desperately need to make a character who gets buckets of powerups by running their mouth off when they shouldn’t, but has some amazing healing power to stop it coming back to hurt them (Restoration (Secrets)).. And I love that this can happen just by rolling 1s on your die rolls, when doing a Dangerous action – as in you don’t know when you’ll slip up and make a mistake. Now, which actions are Dangerous? I can’t remember. (Flip flip flip)

I think it’s exciting to have all these wonderful narrative realms to attack, damage and confirm wounds upon. It does mean you have to speak of everything in the abstract instead of the specific but it allows you to model anything you want with the same rules. And it’s exciting to have a system that has all that flexibility about what might be an attack, damage and health but comes complete with crunchy modifiers like Brutal, Accurate and Deadly. I do think games like GYRO and Cortex and Fate do some of the same kind of things with more elegance and approachability and are much easier to read – but I don’t think I’ve seen anything do it with this much interesting mechanical structure. It reminds me, more than anything, of DnD 4e, where everything could be reskinned as an attack somehow. But it doesn’t actually have the satisfaction of interesting tactical combat. 

But as I say, making this interesting abstract shopping list of powers apply to everything is conceptually fun and open to great builds. Having defined powers like Burst, Rapid, and Piercing means I can make every piece of equipment and every super power feel different in different ways – and I can apply that to every thing, every where. It’s like being a gunbunny in Shadowrun except the mods work for your charisma too, or your rugged individualism or your ability to walk a long way in the rainI can give my evil banker Burst financial attacks because he can attack lots of people at once. I can give an incisive reporter Piercing attacks against Secrets. I can protect myself against the wiles of saucy enemy agents by strapping on a device that gives me Armour and Defensive against romance attacks, while my nemesis, Captain Dick Longfellow, has supernaturally enhanced Style, and a Natural Weapon that is Deadly against Morality trackers. And now, finally, I can remember what all of that means – but I will forget, and have to look the damn things up again. Or get into an argument with the GM about how if I fire enough arrows it counts as a Burst not a Rapid attack, and all the king’s guards were absolutely close enough for it to count because Burst doesn’t define HOW near to each other enemies have to be.

Some of this is because of the nature of this book: a universal roleplaying game is not really a game at all, but a toolkit from which to construct an RPG, from which one then constructs a game. This is a resource of lots of rules to use to construct those RPGs. I think what would help the game would be a narrower focus. The design could pick exactly the right list of Origins, Species, Careers, plus tracks and Abilities that work for that setting, and simultarneously strip away much of the generalities, ambiguities and diversions. It would figure out exactly which tracks matter and how much crunch those tracks need and save space by cutting out every possible modulation and variation, and then maybe allowing them not to constantly be referred to with jargon. If it finally picked a cyberpunk setting, we could rob people for money instead of wealth units. And maybe see some more pregenerated characters so the skill system makes sense, or making our own can be smoother. These are in the works, so we will see where the game is in six months.

Until such products come along, I cannot recommend Aristocracy. It is certainly not more than the sum of its parts. However, it is a collection of some clever parts. The dice system is interesting, allowing lots of fiddling without ever rolling more than five dice. The idea of tempering every possible confrontation through the same mechanics and building modifying tags that work for any kind of battlefield is clever, and shows a confident design hand. The use of language in delineating the templates is deft and vivacious. At times, the reach has been audacious, even if some of the execution roughhewn. So while I don’t like the game as it is, I find myself hungry for the next thing to come. That’s worth something. 

How much you like this game depends on how much work you are prepared to do getting across all that style, terminology and complexity, and then tailoring it to the setting and game you want to play, and the game is not super helpful at guiding you through either of those steps. But maybe you like things a little rough. That’s between you and Captain Longfellow.